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Comment by jaabe | Hacker News Reader

I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion, but I’m actually fine with more equality in copyright legislation. These “disastrous” copyright laws already apply to you and me, and if you think they don’t, then just try hosting a top 1 music video on your personal domain.

Where the laws don’t apply is if your service is to host user content and you have the size to circumvent justice. YouTube makes a lot of money off legal content, how much is unknown because they literally won’t tell you how much they earn from your content, but they also earn money from illegal content. They avoid responsibility by being large, and these copyright laws is going to combat exactly that.

It’s not perfect, but how else do you suggest that we make the laws that apply to you and me also apply to big tech companies?

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> how else do you suggest that we make the laws that apply to you and me also apply to big tech companies?

The solution to “some of us might be subject to shitty rules” is “make everyone subject to shitty rules”? Also, why do you think large companies won’t be better positioned to comply with these rules? They can more-easily license what they need and lobby the regulators whose powers are being increased under these rules.

I don’t think YouTube is against this law either. It limits their competition by raising the barrier of entry for the next YouTube. The main problem with this type of legislation is they hurt competition because only the large, established corporations can afford the legal and technical investments required for compliance. YouTube isn’t phased by this, they’ll barely notice but they’re happy knowing a tiny startup from a garage won’t be able to compete.

Except the law includes exceptions and much less rigorous rules for startups and small-medium companies. It’s directly targeting YouTube, Facebook and the like, in an attempt to make them pay authors and creators.

Unless you’re against copyrights in general, I have a really hard time seeing why you’d be against this law.

It simply pushes the responsibility from you, the YouTube uploader, to YouTube itself. Maybe that will lead to YouTube preventing you from uploading videos, maybe YouTube will block Europe, but I honestly doubt it because of money, and in either case, the EU represents the people of Europe, YouTube represents a few shareholders, I know whom I personally prefer taking a lead on copyrights.

I get the people who are opposed to copyrights in general, but I’m just not.

If you host a video that you don’t own you facilitate copyright theft.

Expect a takedown notice and it goes away.

These big companies let people upload their own videos.

Now they are liable for what their users share.

Expect them to disable letting users share videos.

So youtube would stop allowing uploading? That would shut down youtube quickly

It would put them in a Netflix position essentially and force them into being a publisher in the bad old days - demanding extensive paperwork and signing over rights to avoid liability.

So the EU will get corporate-tube at best - assuming they don't just get the China treatment. They thought they were too big to pull out too.

This a false analogy. If a company places copyrighted material on their servers they would be equally culpable. Many companies have been sued / shutdown over this just as an individual would. This issue is about a third party (a user), not the company itself, placing copyrighted material on the companies servers.

Anything that's uploadable is copyrighted by someone. How do you prove the uploader owns the copyright?

There's no big database of all copyrighted works and if it existed it would be the biggest violator of them all.

It is technically impossible to verify the owner of a copyright using anything other than the courts.

> Where the laws don’t apply is if your service is to host user content and you have the size to circumvent justice.

I haven't looked into it too closely, but isn't it the case that they do apply if a platform doesn't have the size, but is more than three years old?

>These “disastrous” copyright laws already apply to you and me, and if you think they don’t, then just try hosting a top 1 music video on your personal domain.

Yes, and I don't want them to.

I actually agree with this. From what I've read this new legislation pretty much just puts into writing what was already effectively the case for most people.

Thank you. For too long have these large advertising companies been allowed to disregard copyrights. Google and Facebook will have to pay for using others’ content.

I would have liked to see a higher threshold so that small and medium sized companies weren’t affected. But it’s refreshing that we finally put an end to the blatant abuse by the ad industry.

>Google and Facebook will have to pay for using others’ content.

I think they’ll just automatically flag the copyrighted video (sometimes incorrectly) and prevent YOU from sharing it. They won’t suddenly pay the copyright holder when someone else uploads a copyrighted work.

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