This would absolutely apply to sites like HN or Reddit. Of course sites outsite EU jurisdiction aren't required to follow EU law, but may eventually find themselves ordered blocked by European ISPs if they don't.
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As for clear (ahem) statements who this is actually aimed at -- here's Commissioner Oettinger, who was responsible for the first edition of this proposal:
"If we don't act now, there will be fewer and fewer news articles to link to." "Even iPhone, tablets and Facebook are offering news feeds nowadays. We want to strengthen publishers not least in relation to these new providers" Translated from German https://twitter.com/GOettingerEU/status/772785182550159360
But actually, only a few very big publishers have lobbied for this, claiming that this would "save journalism in Europe" when they care mostly about their own bottom line. Limiting how news spreads on social networks and aggregators is not in the interest of and would actually harm smaller publishers, who benefit from competing with the big brands on such sites on an equal footing.
Small, independent and innovative publishers had to get together to form their own lobby organisation to OPPOSE this law that politicians would claim is to their benefit: http://mediapublishers.eu/our-views/
First, it's no secret that the intent is to prop up the business model of struggling publishers by getting internet platforms to pay them for spreading (links to/tiny snippets of) their content.
After a "link tax" law was introduced in Germany, some publishers decided to waive it. Google reacted by removing snippets from those who didn't in Google News, making their links less likely to be clicked on. Afraid of losing traffic, these publishers then granted Google a free license.
The government of Spain looked at this result and decided to implement the idea as an inalienable right, to make sure some publishers couldn't opt out, and Google would have to pay up. In response, Google shut down Google News altogether in Spain.
This is the version that the Parliament's chief negotiator now wants the EU to implement. He believes that Google (and Facebook and Twitter, which have been added as targets) wouldn't dare shut down a service across all of Europe.
First, the Commission (~government) proposes a law. They proposed this "extra copyright for news sites" that covers even tiniest snippets of news content and thus would put a price tag on links to news. In their version, publishers could opt out of it – but it would still cause major problems. Leading IP researchers said it will "deter communication of news", "negatively affect authors" and "hinder European innovation" http://www.create.ac.uk/policy-responses/eu-copyright-reform...
Next, the Parliament and the Council (member state governments) need to approve the plans or suggest changes. The Parliament nominates one MEP to shepherd this process. In this case that's Axel Voss (from Merkel's CDU). His job is to get together with the other parties and then make a proposal that in his assessment enjoys majority support in the Parliament.
This is what this article is about. Not "one individual's proposal", but the lead negotiator's view of what a majority of the Parliament supports: Doubling down on an already bad idea by making the right inalienable.
He may be wrong about that – we'll know when the Legal Affairs Committee votes on it on June 20/21. Other MEPs will file counter-proposals, but one of them winning out would be a rare, unexpected upset. Voss may also make changes to his proposal until then, but so far he's brushed off all opposing arguments. And yes, even if his plan is approved, there's a chance the "inalienable right" addition (the threat to Creative Commons) may not survive final negotiations with the Council and Commission.
The thing is: This vote is the number one chance the public has to affect what will be in this law, and thus whether there'll be a "link tax" in Europe. We need to push our representatives to reject that idea in that vote, not double down on it.
Open source is unfortunately threatened by a different provision, which would force GitHub and other code hosts to implement "ContentID"-like filters trying to detect copyright infringement in commits: https://blog.github.com/2018-03-14-eu-proposal-upload-filter...
EU Commission info page: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/copyright
MEP Reda's overview over the reform process: https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
It may be OK in the US "fair use" system, where it's up to courts to decide what's okay – I don't know the case law well enough.
The EU, on the other hand, has a special copyright for databases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#Uni...
Here's what happened:
* Conservative commentator Ben Domenech goes on Fox News Sunday show and quotes what he read on The Daily Beast: "We saw this week reporting that a pro-Clinton super PAC had paid more than a million dollars to have supporters of her online push back against Bernie supporters" (Transcript: https://t.co/7IuO1c7j7N)
* DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schulz had appeared on an separate, earlier segment of the same show. Likely because of that, a DNC staffer writes a bullet-point transcript of the panel debate and sends it around internally with the subject "FNS [date]", subheaders like "Panel" and comments like "I didn't catch everything [in this part]" – very easy to identify as a transcript: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/8351
And yet WikiLeaks spun it on Twitter as if it were a smoking gun:
"DNC knew of Clinton 'paid troll factory' fighting Sanders supporters #FeelTheBern" https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/757077620928512000
So they misrepresented a transcript where some random person quotes some other news source as a statement by the DNC itself, a statement of veracity or admission of internal knowledge. Got over 5000 retweets, never retracted/corrected.
After what they did in this election, WikiLeaks can no longer claim to be just a neutral platform for leaked secrets – just like everyone else, they spin facts to fit certain narratives they want to promote for whatever editorial reasons.
* Aggregators like Google News
* Social networks like FB, Twitter and anyone else who shows teaser snippets when users share links (e.g. all Embed.ly users)
* Curation services like Pinterest
* Apps that combine multiple news sources like Flipboard or Apple News
* “Read later” services like Instapaper
Source/details: https://juliareda.eu/2016/08/copyright-reform-another-acta/ (Disclaimer: I work for MEP Reda)
This might change, or at least gain some new exceptions ("roaming" for your Netflix account will come for sure; the other measures this campaign demands are up in the air at this point). These improvements of course would not apply if the UK leaves.
I'll expand, at the risk of indulging in jargon:
1. Pass EU law that applies the country of origin principle as seen in the Cable and Satellite Directive to online "broadcasts" as well, establishing legal grounds for services to make passive (non-advertised) sales to customers from countries they have not acquired distribution rights for.
2. The European Commission clarifies that contractual clauses requiring inner-EU geoblocking are null because they do not constitute justified exceptions from the anti-discrimination/antitrust provisions Article 20 of the Services Directive and/or Article 101 TFEU.
3. Parliament & Council pass the Portability Regulation before them today without adding undue restrictions, enabling European to take their paid content subscriptions with them across borders for temporary stays.
The result of these 3 easily doable actions would be to massively reduce geoblocking within the EU by removing the most common obligations to geoblock: Contractual clauses by rightholders and legal uncertainty/risk that causes overblocking/geoblocking-by-default.
Rightholders could continue to bind distributors/services to the release window system (cinemas first, then DVD, then VoD), to restrict which countries they may actively target/advertise to, and of course retain full autonomy over dubbing/subtitling and other localization. Services could continue to geoblock to comply with other local laws (e.g. gambling, child protection).
Remember that US-only services could continue to geoblock all Europeans even if geoblocking was eliminated in the EU. In practice it might give these German Danes access to, I dunno, twice the US content they can watch today, and maybe 5 or 10 times more Danish content. Plus 100 times more Estonian, Portuguese, Maltese, and so on.
I can't follow the argument that this would lead to less cultural diversity, not more.
It is in fact the business practice of geoblocking and the legal framework of 28 different copyright territories & laws that:
* Most serves the big players distributing the most popular content, who are able to cut 28 licensing deals. For non-blockbuster productions, it mostly results in turning away customers/audiences.
* Keeps European VoD startups small. What's the only VoD service available in all EU countries? Netflix. Only 5% of VoD services you can subscribe to in the UK are from other EU countries -- 95% are either national (= forever small) or from overseas. We are artificially making it harder for EU startups to compete internationally.
Plus: It is the EU's stated mission to remove barriers to a common market and to eliminate discrimination of Europeans in Europe by country of origin. Curtailing geoblocking advances both.
Action on geoblocking is not arbitrary burdensome regulation. It's exactly fulfilling the purpose of the EU, it would be popular among the public -- and it would enable/help startups.
Argument #2: Estonians pay Estonian TV license fees, Austrians Austrian fees. In a common market and a political union, why do we block eachothers' public-value, publicy funded content from eachother?
At least implicitly, their estimation is that accepting your money would damage their ability to exclusively license content 28 times in the EU, and that eroding that system would do more harm to the bottom line than the extra money they might make.
In practice, the vast majority of content is of course not successfully licensed 28 times, so they end up turning away/not even aiming for the majority of their potential customers for the majority of their works.
Whether the current model is really best for rightholders' (maybe just publishers') bottom lines is up for debate -- in their calculation, they are probably biased towards prolonging the established business models that come from the times of terrestrial TV broadcasting/physical media sales.
What is clear, from an EU point of view, is that the geoblocking that is required to enforce this model artificially limits the audience of a lot of European cultural products, forces people to seek out copyright-infringing channels, reinforces digital borders between EU member states, harms lingustic minorities etc -- and is just in fundamental conflict with both the idea of the common EU market and the internet as a global medium.
(Disclosure: I made the campaign site.)
Unfortunately, copyright is not unified in the EU. VOD companies need to clear the licenses of every single bit of copyrighted content 28 times to be able to legally offer something on the "unified market" online.
The European Commission has announced they want to improve the "digital single market" and are reviewing copyright, but unfortunately the copyright industry is completely blocking any meaningful harmonisation. The publishing and film industries are literally arguing having 1 EU copyright would instantly kill the EU creative economy and cultural diversity as a whole, so politicians dare not make a move – and the anachronism of digital borders will persist.