>However, those backing these provisions say the arguments above are the result of scaremongering by big US tech companies, eager to keep control of the web’s biggest platforms.
This is the most hilarious quote in the article. The only thing this will do is entrench massive players like Google and Facebook who already have these systems in place. I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone could support this law while having any understanding of how the internet works. Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use? Just look at the abuses that already happen with the existing systems and now we have to spread this across the entire web, absolutely insane.
A truly sad day for the future of a free internet in Europe.
The stronger they push ridiculous laws like this the more it will force perfectly legitimate business to go underground. We will end up with all the problems of prohibition all over again.
> is intended to give publishers and papers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories
So Google should pay you when they send you more traffic? More traffic = more money. Most companies would be overjoyed if someone sends them free business. Google and countless others even provide tools like Adwords so you can monetize your site if you can't figure out how to do it yourself.
I wonder how long until companies outside of Europe decide it's easier just to block all traffic from Europe in protest.
This is a weakening of safe harbor provisions. This law makes it extremely difficult to have a platform with any kind of user generated content. As long as a company is taking reasonable measures to combat piracy, hate speech, etc, they need to be granted indemnity from the actions of rogue users.
> I wonder how long until companies outside of Europe decide it's easier just to block all traffic from Europe in protest.
Exactly this. I already hit error 451 when trying to read some local news in US when browsing from Europe (I don't remember name of the page now). This happened after GPDR came into effect.
I can totally relate with companies who don't want to deal with legal mess related with GPDR and other nonsense from EU an prefer to just show the user error 451 page.
I'm pretty sure VPN providers and huge companies like Google will benefit from this legislation.
European here. I can't view some major newspapers in the US such as the LA Times. Smallers ones like the Virginia Gazette and Daily Press are also verboten for me.
Many US newspapers now redirect to tronc.com for a standard disclaimer.
Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
Fuck it, block Europe entirely. See how quickly the politicians there crawl back on their knees when they cant use Facebook to see their grandkids pictures.
Honestly I think the point they are trying to make is that they don’t need US-based behemots to control internet in Europe. Take Russia for example - they have vkontakte (if i spell it correctly) and politicians are all fine watching grandkids there; some probably dont even know what “facebook” is, as even POR doesnt speak English and constantly uses translators.
Whats happening in real i think is that EU realized it will never be able to chop Google or Facebook in pieces so they make it harder for these companies to exist on local market. At the end of the day free market still rules in Europe - if Facebook disappears their hole will be quickly filled in with 20 other social networks “made in European Union”.
Won't these “made in European Union” social networks have exactly the same problems as the Americans in complying with the regulations? In Russia and China, I believe they just openly discriminate against foreign companies.
You are aware that it's pretty much only American companies that are bitching about GPDR, right?
EU laws already cover EU companies as a matter of domicile.
GPDR only applies the rules of service delivery already present in EU.
EU service delivery rules say that a service is delivery point is considered the place where the service consumer is, not where the provider is domiciled.
We don't know how enforcement will look just yet, but at the end of the day, court-related decisions are made by humans and its hard to argue that Facebook version made in France will be less or equally looked upon in European court than Facebook made in Silicon Valley, U.S.A.
I'm not so sure. Take a look at Google and YouTube:
YouTube regularly blocks fair-use videos (remixes, criticism, etc) because the automated filter finds something that matches and can't recognize context.
Google regularly gets DMCA takedown requests for search results that go to official websites and YouTube ads/trailers.
My Facebook feed is covered with old acquaintances sharing news links and other such content.
It seems like it would be really easy for Facebook to run afoul of this, just due to others' incompetence.
what kind of perfectly legitimate business going underground do you foresee? I mean with prohibition the thing that went underground was addictive. I guess the argument has been made that facebook is addictive but I don't see them going underground - and frankly I don't see the next facebook competitor going 'underground' either (I just don't foresee one springing up)
Why should Google be able to profit off of others content without compensating them? Compulsory licenses are standard in the music industry, and in theory the same could work well for journalism. But the devil is in the details.
By that logic, should the phonebook have to pay people to include them? Should the travel pamphlet pay the restaurants it sends people to? Using snippets of the content to send people to the source is essential for online dialogue, not just for Google. Should we all have to pay for referring to an article in a forum?
Mark my words: if this were enforced, people and most companies would simply stop linking these sites. What I think will happen instead is that many websites would not want this kind of situation, so we will add a new clause to the robots.txt permitting linking and small snippets, and most websites would enable it rather than lose the link and search traffic. Then we'd be back where we started.
By the way, what happens when an European newspaper is hosted in US? What laws apply?
If a website doesn't want its content to be summarized by Google couldn't they just block it in their robots.txt? From what I've seen that results in Google listing the page's title but with no description.
Maybe search engines could adopt some sort of standard that would allow pages to provide their desired description using meta tags if they don't want an automated summary. I could see a problem with pages using dishonest summaries, but perhaps that could be addressed by penalizing the page rank if the provided summary is too different than the summary that Google would have generated.
As do the pages. All this has been tested before in Germany with the Leistungsschutzrecht. Even before it was struck down by the courts it was more or less not active anymore. Google just stopped sending traffic to the pages of the German publishers. It took only a few days until Axel Springer & Co. came crawling back and made a deal with Google that they are allowed to link without compensation.
> Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use?
They believe what their wealthy donors tell them to believe. It won't affect the well connected politicians in any measurable way, they'll still be wealthy. Meanwhile, independent organizations will suffer while the big players get all the sweet licensing deals. Regulations are ALWAYS about punishing the smaller firms to make the barrier to market entry prohibitively expensive.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
> There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.
I guess it’s true that some people in positions of power view themselves as rules over others, but I always thought that most people here in the western world held the view that the government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Is this not the case?
There is plenty of things the government can spend their time on that is actually beneficial to its people, including:
- Regulating industry where necessary to protect employees and the public from harm; physical, economical, psychological, privacy, or otherwise.
- Negotiate with other countries so that mutually beneficial agreements are reached with regards to import and export of goods, as well as immigration, emigration and travel relating to the exchange of labor forces.
- Creating and enforcing laws for how the public is allowed to act so as not to cause harm. Things like laws that prohibiting DUI etc.
- Coming up with ways to protect and help people that get sick or have permanent illnesses or handicaps, to ensure that everyone can have quality of life.
That is what government should be about, not about control for the sake of control itself.
> but I always thought that most people here in the western world held the view that the government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Is this not the case?
You can say that it exists to serve people but then you have to say which people exactly :) Because I think the willingness of the government to serve people is directly proportional to the depth of the pockets of the people in question.
But if this process like most things has diminishing returns, then wouldn't after a while government use up all the "easy wins", leaving only things to do that have a mix of good benefits and bad side effects. And once the best of these things were done, the remaining options would be more and more "bad side effects" and less and less "good benefits".
Such an unrelated libertarian quote that gets blindly posted and blindly upvoted. The EU is having a problem with the US companies running the show over their internet space. They don't intend to lock ordinary people up with this law. So you think it' be better for the companies to hold unlimited power and control people? That'd be much worse than moderate and sensible government regulations.
Does the EU have a problem with wealthy donors? I've heard this criticism levelled against US politicians and it's justified, but in this case I think it might just be sheer ignorance on the part of the EU legislators.
Not in the same way as in the US, and I don't think campaign contributions are a thing, at least not at the same level as in the US.
But there are many, many lobbyists active in the EU, and some of them have a surprising amount of influence over politicians. There has even been a case where two different parties, independently from each other, introduced the exact same bill, which had been written by a lobbyist.
The art of lobbying doesn't have anything to do with contributions. They will typically donate equally to all viable candidates and sitting politicians to avoid becoming anyone's enemy.
The leverage they use is their relationships with other politicians to engage in vote trading.
They are still (ostensibly) the subject matter experts so politicians defer to them. This in itself isn’t a problem: they should defer to experts on complex matters. And often these experts are organised in industry interest groups. The problem arises when opposing view-points are downplayed.
In the current case this is done because the industry interest groups backing the legislation are predominantly European content rights owners. Whereas the interest groups opposing the legislation appear mostly organised by non-EU groups, and therefore thus are less of a concern for EU legislators, and potentially don’t have the same kind of immediate access to them.
The politicians are still very well connected with the industry. For example there was somebody who retired from the EU Commission a while ago and immediately went to the board of a company or something. The same shit as in the US just a bit less extreme.
That is certainly how they are often used in the America and the West today, but always seems a gross exaggeration. For example, regulations against child labor.
Note that Article 2 point 4(b) appears to entirely excludes from Article 13 rules organizations that are "small" or "micro," which, unless I am mistaken, means organizations that have less than 50 employees and €10m turnover or balance sheet value.
I imagine that Google Europe and Facebook Europe will just slice themselves up into a swarm of subsidiaries that each have less than 50 employees and less than €10m turnover.
Don't they already have a corporation in Ireland with almost no employees and no profits due to selling licensed software made by the parent company at cost?
They employ many thousands of people in Ireland. So many that they've driven up property prices and rents beyond what the natives can afford in Dublin. Many employees are immigrants, for language reasons (Customer support, etc,) and programmers from East Europe. They typically service Europe, Mid-East, African markets from Ireland and sometimes elsewhere too.Brian at Netsso, worried about link tax, etc.
> Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use?
Some do, some don't. But in some ways that's not the motivation behind these laws.
There's a growing power struggle between Silicon Valley tech companies and government. Governments are losing control and they are lashing out. We're going to see a lot more of it in the future as governments lose more and more control.
Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use?
I was doing a web development gig in a southern US state back in 1998, and the manager was completely of the mindset that you had to ask permission to link somewhere. For some people who don't get it, this is their natural mindset.
For other people, the whole point is to work against free speech and fair use, in order to control the public.
> The only thing this will do is entrench massive players like Google and Facebook who already have these systems in place.
Not exactly. Small and micro platforms are excluded from directive’s scope.
From legislation: In particular, small and micro enterprises as defined in Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, should be expected to be subject to less burdensome obligations than larger service providers. Therefore, taking into account the state of the art and the availability of technologies and their costs, in specific cases it may not be proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders
As to what small is, Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC Article 2.2 states:
Within the SME category, a small enterprise is defined as an enterprise which employs fewer than 50 persons and whose annual turnover and/or annual balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 10 million
And how is an SME with 10 million annual turnover (that's not profit, that's revenue before all the expenses are taken out) ever going to build a competing platform to e.g. Google or Facebook?
All this does is to put a token nod in place that we don't want to kill the SMEs outright but once they grow enough to be "dangerous", they better start paying or else. And if they can't, tough luck ...
> All this does is to put a token nod in place that we don't want to kill the SMEs outright but once they grow enough to be "dangerous", they better start paying or else. And if they can't, tough luck ...
No, this means that when you get over 10 mil euro, then you have enough money to pay for third party solution to content filtering. This costs couple of thousands a month and you are covered. You don't need to create your own ContentID platform to comply with the law.
People communicating very freely has presented many challenges to those same politicians.
Forcing liability makes a choke point, and better control.
At least China is completely overt about these things. That is not a statement of support, quite the opposite. It is a statement as to how weasely politicians are about these things. They want a lot more control, and people want a greater check on authority.
I can't help but notice strong self interest factors in play here.
I see part of your argument, but the internet in the US is by no means full of free speech and fair use. The government has their hands on every major service provider and ISP and has used their power to compel companies to give information or censor data.
What's happening here is the EU is seeing every other major power lock down their internet, so why would they leave theirs open which would also allow foreign meddling?
Additionally the tech megacorps are trying to claim that they are open platforms and so shouldn't be responsible for user posted data while censoring and removing user posted data when it suits their economic means.
I'm a proponent of free speech, but the internet stopped being a bastion of free speech year ago. It's crazy to think that the EU was going to sit their and let companies do what they please, when those same companies we're already preventing users/EU citizens from doing so
Ah the old, let's imply your racist/afraid so you let american companies do as they please argument.
It's easy to be trite, but it doesn't change the fact that foreign companies and governments were taking advantage of the EU while simultaneously having a different set of rules at home for EU companies. I think the EU overreacted her, hut it's hardly surprising that they had some sort of response
The whole thread should be about the EU response and how negative it will be for most EU citizens but have less of an impact on the intended targets, aka large corporations who can afford to be compliant.
I think arguing over who has the most censored internet or the worst corporations is probably starting to veer off topic.
I think the point here is to understand why such a response occurred. So it's very much on topic. Nobody is denying that this is generally a bad thing for the commoners. But when you put it into perspective, what the US and China have been doing are also very bad. So this is nothing out of the ordinary really.
I agree. I don't even think that this is a good response by the EU. I was mostly commenting on how you shouldn't be surprised that they had _a_ response when other powers are locking down their internet and foreign companies we're running rough shod over EU laws and directives.
I think its all stemming from the same response as a portion of people who voted for Trump, or why the GPDR was enacted. The status quo was being abused by the major players and now they are going to do _something_ to shake up the system. Whether their approach is the right thing to do is up for debate
Maybe "Napalm Girl" v Facebook, as an example how chilling effects and cultural differences can lead to an outcome which is perceived as censorship in Europe?
Simple: Are you able to find any ISIS-supporting website out in the open? What is the fundamental difference between this and the Chinese internet censorship for the sake of national security? I see only total hypocrisy and double standards here. Just admit that every country has their own set of laws regulating the internet and that the US is no different. Or are people so institutionalized that they don't even realize the countless censoring going on around the place?
Classifying government documents is not censorship, since it's not government suppressing anyone's speech. It's strictly a transparency issue.
All of your other examples involve private censorship (which can be rephrased as "people and companies exercising their property rights and freedom of association"), not government censorship.
If you know about it, it's a felony to talk about it. That particular one was a huge omission that might have shifted national debate in a different direction, esp who U.S. would target in a war or sanction. I still remember the advertisements on the radio talking about how great Saudi Arabia is and how good buddies we are. Be a different picture if U.S. media said they were a huge sponsor of violent religion and terrorism with that part of 9/11 report highlighted for all to see.
Definitely an example of mandated censorship, corruption, and maybe some kind of conspiracy. Maybe protecting politicians' and Saudi's interests at everyone else's expense. Even if it kills a bunch of us. If that's how they use the power, they don't deserve to have it.
I'm so tired of the narrative that these highly-educated people vote on matters that they have no understanding of.
They know exactly what they're voting for, and say whatever is necessary to convince everyone that they're working to protect their constituents.
At least in the US, the vast majority of our politicians have graduated from prestigious law schools and passed the notoriously difficult BAR exam. Unless politicians on the other side of the pond are somehow primarily composed of MUCH dumber people, they're probably similarly intelligent.
They know what they're voting for, and they pretend to be totally ignorant to the "scary new world" of tech so they get a free pass on voting in dumb shit laws like this.
> The only thing this will do is entrench massive players like Google and Facebook
Incorrect.
It will also speed up development of a new web which is impossible to regulate. So I rejoice. When they block entire services for days, I cry in joy. A 10 days blackout is what we need...
or a tiny js file that anyone can add to header, that upon document loaded replaces ALL images, videos, text in quotes and anchors with black stripes with red "451 unavailable for legal reasons" spans. Upon clicking this should open in a new tab a website with information on what is this about and what can be done about it.
> I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone could support this law while having any understanding of how the internet works.
These are the same politicians that brought us the law that forces every website to ask EU visitors permission to store cookies with a big fat modal dialog, so I don't think you need to worry that people who any understanding of how the internet works supported this law. Imagine all the time wasted on those modal dialogs and add up the total cost in human lives. I bet none of them have any clue that the functionality to block cookies is built right into your web browser.
The funny part is that they're doing this copyright law out of jealousy of Silicon valley and they don't realise that these types of regulations and attitudes are the very reason why Silicon valley is not located in the EU, and why the next Silicon valley won't be either, and that this law will make it harder for new companies to compete with Youtube and Facebook.
> These are the same politicians that brought us the law that forces every website to ask EU visitors permission to store cookies with a big fat modal dialog
And to preempt the pointless but inevitable thread to follow: it also wouldn't need the dialog if it were based in the EU.
How do I know? I don't. Maybe it does track users. But the website was used as a counter example to "forces every website", and a hypothetical news.ycombinator.eu which doesn't track users or keep any PII on them (conceivable by any reasonable person) is acceptable as a counter argument.
The point stands. GDPR doesn't force anything. It just prevents you from tracking people silently.
> And to preempt the pointless but inevitable thread to follow: it also wouldn't need the dialog if it were based in the EU.
Exactly. The only thing that every EU-based website should have is a data protection statement. The one on my blog is short and stout:
> No system under my control records any personal data of users of this website.
I also have an imprint because German law requires it. The regulation is clearly aimed at businesses, for private websites it just makes doxxing easy since I'm required to put my post address on there. (I considered getting a PO box, but going to the post office to empty it is pretty tedious.)
Imagine all the time wasted on those modal dialogs and add up the total cost in human lives.
GMAFB, nobody is dying because they're being asked to consent or refuse cookie tracking. If you are worried about that then why haven't I see you complaining about the modal dialogs and umpteen other other impositions inflicted upon users by marketing departments?
There are nearly 4 billion internet users. 1 billion seconds is 31.7 years. Clicking on those useless dialogs easily adds up to a whole human lifetime every day.
I think jules means to consider how many millions of dollars and euros and hours and hours were spent developing the modals for thousands of different websites and how that money might have been better spent.
My main objection to it is that it doesn't at all solve the problem. Everyone clicks "accept", people still don't know what cookies (etc.) are, it was yet another silly regulation that harms small players and entrenches megacorps, and overall makes the internet less fun and more corporate junk.
Real regulations about this stuff require real technical expertise, and it's going to be at least a generation before that expertise exists in the political class. The alternative is to let the tech lobby write the regulations, but booooooooo.
Sorry, that argument begs the question. I am well aware of what cookies are and think about the content of what I'm agreeing to, and often decline invitations from sites I don't trust. You're assuming that's what is convenient for one party in the transaction must be optimal for all parties, which is irrational.
In fairness, you're a Hacker News reader. I don't think we should be making regulations and defending them with "sure only experts really know what these things are, but that's fine". Regulations shouldn't rely on people being experts, they should keep people secure even when they're not experts. Regulations more in this vein are things like building regulations, electrical standards, hospital regulations, etc. I know basically nothing about this stuff, and if I get shocked because of bad wiring no electrician anywhere will say, "well you should've been an expert electrician, your fault buddy". But that's exactly what happens in the non-security dev community right now. "Well you should've been an expert in public key cryptography, your fault buddy". It's just not realistic.
> They do, and free speech and fair use are important issues to them.
The German law that is related to what US citizens call "copyright law" (Urheberrechtsgesetz) (note that I use this careful formulation, since Urheberrecht and copyright are based on different ideas) has no concept of "fair use".
Also, traditionally, in Germany, there is culturally a different understanding of what US citizens call "free speech" (freie Meinungsäußerung).
"Freie Meinungsäußerung", for example, does not include defamation criticism or libel.
So free speech in the US sense is no important issue for these politicians, because this concept is simply not ingrained in German culture.
To all the US free speech advocates: why is posting a copyrighted file in the internet not considered free speech and thus copyright law is to be abolished?
IANAL, but the legal answer for why free speech and copyright aren't mutually exclusive is that copyright is an explicitly listed power of congress in the constitution:
The Congress shall have Power To... ...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
and
Congress shall make no law... ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
So it's implied (by the constitution not being tautological) that there's a balance between the right of the people (free speech) and an power of congress (to implement copyright). Note also that that defamation/libel are not protected by the first amendment, but the theshold for proving it is high - information has to be known to be false to the speaker, and inflict an actual injury. For public figures and politicians, the speaker has to have "actual malice". These are not often proven. For example, "sell more newspapers" would not rise to the level of "actual malice".
Note that the power grant to Congress to establish copyright was in the original Constitution, while freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment, which - as the name says - is an amendment, which, by definition, changes the existing powers.
The legal argument for that, rather, is that all rights are implicitly limited, and that, depending on how important the right in question is, how small the limitation is in scope, and how important the social objective that the limitation is intended to enable, it can be constitutional - with courts being the arbiters of what's important and what's small. The fact that the colonies had slander and libel laws on the book even as they passed the Constitution is often cited as a justification for this point of view.
I think it's a case of parallel construction. The original First Amendment was not a problem to libel and slander because it simply didn't apply to the states at all, only the federal government, same as all others until they were incorporated via 14A. It does, however, clearly conflict with copyright, and there's nothing in the text of the Constitution that resolves that conflict one way or the other, or even sets clear guidelines on how you'd do so. So what we have in practice is mostly judicial precedent - and most of it is constructed out of necessity to make things work (i.e. "we've always done it this way", or "bad things happen if we don't do it this way"). So you have a patchwork of concepts like fair use, creative expression etc.
The most convincing argument that I have heard is that freedom of speech is about freedom to express ideas, not freedom to use specific words to express those ideas. Since copyright only applies to the latter, it's not an infringement. I'm not sure I fully buy it, but it does highlight an important distinction. Stuff like fair use stems from that, to enable you to express an idea that's criticism of someone else's words.
The meaning of free speech has changed dramatically over the past century. This is why things can seem so contradictory.
Like so much of Anglo-American law, Free Speech and Freedom of the Press is an application of the fundamental concept of Due Process of law. One facet of Due Process says that the government cannot single out individuals, groups, or specific types of behaviors unless there's a compelling reason and the targeting is necessary. All laws should be generally applicable and targeted to addressing identifiable harms, on the one hand, or achieving some broader policy objective on the other.
A.V. Dicey's 19th-century treatise on the British Constitution said that there was no need for an independent doctrine of Free Speech or Freedom of the Press because British law never had (at least, not in the then-recent history) and never would attempt to suppress speech as speech, or to single out newspapers as such. Libel, defamation, copyright and other so-called limitations on Free Speech aren't limitations at all because Free Speech isn't about freedom from the consequences of speech or prohibiting the government from remedying ill effects of speech or restricting them from activities that may incidentally limit speech. Those so-called limitations apply equally to everybody, so how could they operate to suppress particular ideas, opinions, or methods of communication? Likewise, Copyright doesn't favor anyone or any idea in particular, so it's not injurious to Free Speech, either.
So why did the Americans feel the need to singularly identify Free Speech and Freedom of the Press? Because continental Europe, and France in particular, had a history of laws that specifically and more strictly regulated the press, and regulated or prohibited particular opinions and ideas. Singling out Free Speech and Freedom of the Press was a way to explicitly reject the continental European approach. Remember, many colonists expressed the view that the enumeration of these and other rights in the Federal and State constitutions was, technically speaking, unnecessary because they were, strictly speaking, already protected by traditional legal doctrines and by the structures of government. The Bill of Rights was a boots & suspenders approach to constitutional law making.
None of this is to say that Parliament didn't pass laws that had the effect of limiting free speech. But how they did so mattered. Note that Free Speech and Freedom of the Press rights were also expressly put into many State constitutions. For well over a hundred years States regularly passed laws that heavily suppressed speech, but they were almost always upheld by State courts because the laws were expressed in terms of general applicability. In modern terminology they were "facially neutral", and there didn't exist a theory of judicial power that permitted courts to look beyond the face of the laws. (At least, not a theory that was widely held or that was thought useful to apply to speech issues.) And courts were far more credulous of State arguments that their laws were trying to prevent violence and mobs.
It wouldn't be until the 20th century that legal interpretations began to shift. Justices Brandeis and then Holmes propounded a novel (even radical) theory of Free Speech which demanded stricter scrutiny of laws and their effect on speech. It's adoption and application by SCOTUS has unfolded over the past nearly 100 years. This process continues today; scrutiny of laws effecting speech has become stricter and stricter every decade, even every year it seems. Moreover, what constitutes speech has expanded dramatically.
Make no mistake: Free Speech as understood in America today, and as defined by modern jurisprudence, is absolutely not an originalist interpretation of the constitution. If you like your modern Free Speech rights (as I do), don't thank the Founders; thank Brandeis and Holmes and their judicial activism.
I'm curious about "boots & suspenders", searching for that gives a lot of porn results! Is this really an idiom in the US, or should it be "belt & braces"? (braces are what you call suspenders, what we call suspenders is the waist garment that secures stockings for the ladies)
As much as this may annoy Angela Merkel, Germany and the EU are not the same thing. We're talking about EU legislation, and translating and relating that to German, French, British, Italian, Romanian, etc. law will always result in awkward translations that are not quite spot on. We are not lawyers, this isn't a court, and we can afford a bit of imprecision to get the point across with finitely many words, can't we?
Germany has "Urheberrecht" and "Verwertungsrecht", neither of which is exactly copyright, even though that's the most practical translation of either. German law may not have fair use, but it does have §51 UrHG "Zitate", which serves the same purpose, at least in the context of reporting on news articles.
> So free speech in the US sense is no important issue for these politicians
The Eurocrats do not want free speech to establish itself in the EU. That's very important to them.
German law is relevant here because this is a translation of a law that is already on the books in Germany and Spain onto the EU level. The legal restriction of linking without license and using very short text snippets has been part of German law since 2013, and in fact was an initiative by the same political parties that introduced this. It has been through the German courts numerous times and the courts cannot agree on a reasonable interpretation because of how the law is written. So in a sense this is Germany and Spain exporting their local legislation to the EU level. The way the law works in Germany is very much relevant as it informed this proposal. The core concept of Leistungsschutz is to create a new form of copyright, that applies specifically to short snippets that were legal to use under the "normal" Urheberrecht laws.
> Germany has "Urheberrecht" and "Verwertungsrecht", neither of which is exactly copyright, even though that's the most practical translation of either. German law may not have fair use, but it does have §51 UrHG "Zitate", which serves the same purpose, at least in the context of reporting on news articles.
There is indeed an exception for quotes (Zitate) and parodies (for the latter cf. https://www.ferner-alsdorf.de/urheberrecht__urheberrecht-zur... since it is not written down explicitly in the law). But, for example, memes fall into neither category and are thus typically illegal under German law, but legal under US copyright because of fair use.
We do have free speech in the EU, claming otherwise would indicate that the European countries are no democracies. While the extent of free speech might vary from country to country, denying it is there goes way to far.
Sure, there are limitations to it, e.g. denying the Holocaust or using Nazi symbols in Germany, and with regards to defamation. But otherwise just about any opinion can be voiced freely. Thid doesn't mean that thios particular EU law is any good, it just screams big media corporation lobbyism all over it. And yes, this implies some future potential limitations to free speech,l either by technically limiting the reech of smaller players (regardless of what the law states) and by giving governmants a tool to keep things of the internet. Especially the last part is troubling.
What you are describing is a merged set of other named rights, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association, etc. The US (as far as I am aware) is the only country in the world with the Right to Free Speech. Free being the keyword here, "unconstrained".
Free Speech doesn't mean having the right to say bad things about the government. It means having the right to say anything you want.
You don't have the right to say anything you want in the US either. Free speech is full of exceptions in US law as well, starting with the most obvious example of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" [1] (though the original decision the phrase refers to had nothing to do with someone shouting "fire"...) In other words: speech that would be likely to incite imminent lawless action.
The U.S. has many exceptions to free speech. Libel, slander, "fighting words" (see Chaplinsky v. N.H.), "imminent lawless action"(Brandenburg v. Ohio), obscenity (Miller v. California), etc. These have all been interpreted in varying ways throughout history, with the general trend being towards more protected speech (compare Brandenburg/"imminent lawless action" to Schenck v. U.S./"clear and present danger"). Additionally, the government can restrict speech further when acting in a special capacity, such as the FCC's regulation of the speech on the airwaves and public schools' regulation of free speech in classrooms.
It's delusional to think that the U.S. has unrestricted free speech, or to think that "free" implies completely "unconstrained".
>Free Speech doesn't mean having the right to say bad things about the government. It means having the right to say anything you want.
This is a strawman. No EU country restricts free speech to speech criticizing the government.
Well, at least in Germany you can say all kinds of negative Things aboiut the government you want as long as you are not personally insulting anybody. In France as well as far as I know. Wether it is part of freedom of Speech or Freedom of Expression, well I'm no constitutional lawyer.
Maybe it's time technologists stopped assuming they're the cleverest persons in the room and rectified their ignorance of law and economics before assuming they're in the right about everything. I'm not a fan of onerous copyright legislation but simply asserting that 'information wants to be free' is stating an opinion, not some scientific law. Hackers and developers are just as subject to the Dunning-Kreuger effect as anyone else.
I have offered many such arguments if you would like to peruse my comment history. I've been debating these issued for about 25 years now, and have several friends who work at the EFF.
Having one hour to remove offending content, draconian fines and no, absolutely no exceptions for small content providers would, I think, end the internet as we know it in Europe. I see no way to host any kind of content under such jurisdiction and surely all non European content providers would just block the EU rather then take on a task that even giants like facebook and google can barely manage.
Wow, this gets crazier and crazier. So either any content provider should be able to determine within one hour whether every comment is "terrorist" or not (with guidelines as clear as "information which is used to incite and glorify the commission of terrorist offences") and remove it, or, more likely, they'd auto-remove every comment that anybody marked as "terrorist" and let people complain about it later. Coupled with law enforcement interface (which would probably mean notifying the law enforcement about somebody posting "terrorist content" - that's only make sense?) this paints a very scary picture for the future of online free speech in EU.
Obviously that's impossible and it'll be easier to just not have comments, which is exactly what websites will do, and exactly what the EU wants. The EU is sick and tired of people sharing their opinions and pointing out how stupid and draconian and bereaucratic the EU can be, so they did this to shut it all down under the guise of protecting copyright or somesuch.
Is it perhaps possible that this comment is about the EU specifically because the EU specifically is the subject of this particular conversation? After all, this is about a law the EU specifically is choosing to pursue, rather than some broader worldwide trend.
Commenting narrowly on just the EU implies nothing, in any way, shape, form, or manner, about other entities.
From what I read on this specific proposal, it's not entirely draconian and has some benefits to the user, since the process also implements transparency requirements and complaint mechanisms.
As far as the one-hour-rule goes; if I get an email about taking down content at 01:00AM, then I will naturally be unable to respond for atleast another 5 hours, German courts atleast agree that for such things, it counts when you are first aware of the illegal/infringing content, even if it's weeks after (though you already have an obligation to operate a contact through which you can be quickly reached when you operate in germany atleast, IIRC this proposal will introduce that EU-wide which is good IMO).
> German courts at least agree that for such things
This implies that you are going to have to go to court because you got an email at 1am and didn't reply right away...in order to fight off potentially serious fines. Whether it's accurate or not it's still very expensive to prove it's inaccuracy (in time alone, not including financially and stress).
This has very serious consequences for small and even medium businesses.
How often you hear about people being prosecuted for falsely flagging content as offensive online? How often you hear about prosecutions about false copyright infringement notifications? The latter happens only very rarely in cases of blatant abuse, usually coupled with massive fraud and other crimes (never happens to automatic systems big IP holders use, they just write it off as innocent error in 100% of the cases), the former happens never.
That happens under the DMCA, prosecution under existing EU law and the new art11 and art13 wouldn't change much. Notice&Takedown does allow me to review any requests unlike the DMCA and Art13 requires human review in case of disputes. To my knowledge I can ignore entities that send me lots of useless Notices about third party content without legal consequence, I could even get a restraining order.
> the other party will be found guilty of disrupting your business
This all sounds quite lucrative for the lawyers and notaries. It remains disruptive, unsettling and expensive, not to mention unnecessary, for everyone else. Depending on which of the EU’s 28 member states’ courts one finds oneself dragged into, what you’re proposing could be years of distraction.
>It remains disruptive, unsettling and expensive, not to mention unnecessary
Nobody will do this, no sane legal department signs this off or approves of such behavior. Doing otherwise is a great way to incinerate their legal licenses. There are fines for behavior like that.
The best outcome for the suing party of such a scenario is a 5 minute court room appearance in which the judge slaps you with a restraining order and closes the case.
This has literally never been an escalating problem in european courtrooms to my experience because judges don't like that behavior and laws exist to prevent it.
In theory, there are. In practice, the abuse of both copyright and offensive content notifications is rampant and almost never punished. You have to get to real hardcore crime on massive scale before judicial system starts noticing, and even then it can take years and a lot of effort to get it to do anything. In most cases, such abuse is completely unpunished or gets slap on the wrist.
Because the only system that sites implement is the DMCA, which is largely compatible with Notice&Takedown in the EU but N&T has much softer requirements and Art13 now requires human review and a founded response from the copyright holder.
> the other party will be found guilty of disrupting your business by having you get into court for complaints without legal grounds.
Dubious. The other lawyer will claim they believed you had read the complaint and therefore that they were acting in good faith, and will see no punishment at all.
Burden of proof goes the other way here. This is why (one of the reasons) bogus DMCA complaints are never prosecuted. You need to prove that they believed you hadn't read the complaint and knowingly went after you anyway. We only persecute people for using the legal system maliciously, not accidentally incorrectly.
Assuming you can even find another party. What would stop anyone from creating a bunch of accounts under TOR and reporting thousands of links per hour? Good luck dealing with that.
Then I'll just ignore reports from Tor-based email domains? I don't think my email provider even accepts .onion for emails.
Or I just ban Tor users from creating reports, I'm not forced to enable abuse, if they have an actual complaint they can use their real internet connection. End of story.
If there is only one possible outcome, then that outcome should be clearly encoded in the law. The whole purpose of the court system is to provide interpretation when a law is vague - intentionally or not.
Remember that the law in europe tends to not function like the american law, including how courts work. The law is almost always vague and courts will have to interpret it.
Right - and that's what would drive US based companies just to shut down access to EU versus trying to comply. The uncertainty may not be worth it for small companies just trying to gauge demand.
They don't have to, they can simply wait a sufficient amount of time, usually a workday before they can enact further measures such as a C&D, which usually requires atleast 3 days before it can be considered received, after which you can take it to court.
If you are on holiday at that time, the court will in almost all cases instruct the other party to wait until you return at which point you can respond to the C&D.
No I'm not. No sane lawyer will even recommend dragging you to court for that because the judge will like fine the suer and find the sued party not guilty. No legal department I know would stand behind such a decision, it would be absolutely stupid to drag anyone to court. And most likely the Judge would even have the suing party pay for your expenses and damages incurred by such charges.
They don't need to drag you to court. They fine you using the new EU law, then you refuse to pay and you essentially decide to go to court instead of paying. Even if the company decides to drop the complaint in response either way you have to put a significant amount of effort to get to that point. Merely because you got an email at night.
This could happen 100x (or even thousands) for any mid-sized content platform. Most of these things are automated these days.
Besides there's no guarantee the parties will automatically act rationally and drop the claims of infringement before threatening court, merely because you claim you were sleeping. And you specifically said a judge won't pursue it, but even that is a maybe.
As mentioned multiple times, if they did this the judge would simply deny the entire fine and suit and they'd have to pay you damages and they'd likely receive a cease&desist order from the court.
You must inform parties of violations and allow for adequate time to react to them. Sending an email is already a nono for legal notices as there is no guarantee that the other party even received the mail properly.
The only way to properly and legally verifiably send them is to have a write-in mail which the receiver must sign with their signature before receiving. For everything else you might as well send money in an envelope ahead of time.
This is not a mere fact this is established procedure.
>Besides there's no guarantee the parties will automatically act rationally and drop the claims of infringement before threatening court, merely because you claim you were sleeping.
That's not what I've been saying, I've been saying that the infringement still needs to be dealt with but you can obviously not react when you are asleep.
Are you talking about this from experience?
or just plain (outside-EU) theory?
In practice though, most of EU gov-burocracy, incl. courts, prosecutors, statisticians, taxation, food-control, cultural/educational, whoever, esp. in recently-joined former-this-or-that countries, exist mostly in order to make work to each other = i.e. support/keep the whole system. Sadly, that is the reality.
And yes, they may charge u of (inexisting) offense (and even without sending u email), if that has any chance of putting oil in the cogwheels for some years. No matter what, the state does not lose.. it just somebody's nerves and taxpayers money wasted, but who cares.
A C&D in Germany is the usual way to resolve disputes, in which case you get a letter + bill + C&D form to sign, you can either comply and sign the C&D and pay the fine or ignore it or just sign the C&D but not pay the bill, in which case the other party can drop it, send more letters or take it to court.
If you take it to court and the court finds the complaint invalid then they can (and usually do) force the party that sent the C&D to pay your expenses and damages (ie, lost business due to you having to turn up to court) and usually a restraining order with hefty fines on it.
Atleast in germany it is expected that disputes are resolved via C&D and letter correspondence, court is a last resort.
To my knowledge, the court system in other countries varies but is not that different...
You might still get a letter from some law office to tell you about the violation and a hefty bill for providing this service. I suggest familiarizing yourself with the concept of "abmahnung" in Germany. Quite a racket.
I'm quite familiar with this concept considering I have gotten a total of 2 Abmahnungen, one of which I paid because I did violate a rule and the other dropped after I threatened to take it to court. You'd be surprised how few of the senders are willing to actually go to court if the outcome is not 100% clear because any case could result in a ruling against them and shut down their business.
are you seriously arguing for having to interact with the justice system for not responding to an email within an hour as anything but totally wrong? jesus christ, where am i?
They will never stop asking for more power to police the use of their imaginary property. They'd push for mandatory deletion of copies inside people's brains if that was possible.
No, it was owner content. Of course, for some sites, like my personal Geocities page, the owner frequently was the sole user too, but the concepts of "one entity who owns the site builds the content" and "third parties visiting the site build the content" are different.
Well, I was referring to the definition of the web 2.0. Wikipedia says:
Web 2.0, [...] refers to World Wide Web websites that emphasize user-generated content [...][1]
So while in the beginning most users were also authors, there was a time between when there were a lot of websites which served content, but didn't let users add theirs. At that time guestbooks were to only place you could add content to someone elses website. To some degree message boards where the start of the Web 2.0.
This is not the motivation of players pushing for this law. They don't care about small players and instead want to push revenue for their content. There is no other elaborate explanation about a "modern copyright".
The law is specifically for big media publishers with huge legal support to increase bycatch IP enforcement in a broad manner.
It will improve absolutely nothing and is in general a bad law that has a huge potential to seriously hurt innovative content creators.
And I don't think that sticking it to fly-by-night operations is a socially desired outcome. That is heavily in opinion-land and I simply disagree.
Sure small players shouldn’t be exempt from the law, but surely it’s ridiculous to expect every website with user uploaded content to have an on-call team of content managers to comply with takedowns. This hurts small players much more than big players, because now it’s not possible to be a small player in this area. It’s not exemptions which are important, it’s understanding why this makes the entire approach flawed to begin with
I'm not sure it's entirely impossible to be a small player.
Let's say, a small player allows their users to make a copyright statement with the "proof of original content" (not necessarily 100% valid, just something like "I, Max Mustermann, confirm that this work is my original content produced on 13.09 in Berlin..."), possibly, automatically. This statement will identify copyright holder of the content and mark it valid, since copyright holder himself uploaded the content. This may (but not necessarily will) mean that other filters/copyright checks may not be executed, because the platform allows the participation only of original content creators.
One more option (assuming that the national law will take amendment 149 into account) is to implement a filter as an API call to the server designated by the right holder and expect the claim/"no infringement" response with some reasonable timeout (1 sec) and detailed response in extended time frame (10 min). It's a cheap "now it's your problem" solution, that might actually be allowed.
Potential copyright infringement isn't remotely comparable with pollution and worker safety laws. Speech doesn't compare at all with industrial manufacturing either.
...the EFF argue that the idea of what constitutes a link is not fully defined. I'm not sure what they're talking about. Recitals 31-36 set out the concepts in article 11, fairly clearly. They make it clear that what is being protected is substantial or harmful copying of significant portions of the text. They also make it clear what organisations this will affect - press organisations - with a fairly clear description of what a press organisation might constitute. (FWIW, memes are not covered, and anyone you hear talking about "banning memes" is getting their news from very poor sources.)
You can read the recitals this commenter is describing here, including the latest amendments that were voted in the Parliamentary plenary. As you'd imagine, I disagree with his interpretation.
Firstly, these are just recitals. They're not a binding part of the Directive, they just lay out the justifications for the law.
If you do read the listed recitals, they mention links once, and don't define the term at all. When they do, the context is that "the act of hyperlinking" is not protected (ie the new ancillary right does not explicitly cover the act of hyperlinking).
This is an attempt to refute an argument that no-one is making (though the language echoes a previous fight that rightsholders are still pursuing, which is links to infringing content should be punished as strongly as hosting content itself. That's what the "communication to the public" is about, and has been ongoing, but that's another story.)
The concern over Article 11 isn't that it would criminalise linking to a news item; it's that if you use any text of an article, including its title, you can be sued or made to sign a license. Such snippets of text are usually used when linking to a news article, especially when you're doing it automatically, so that's where the threat to linking to stories.
A couple of other things to note in these amendments. One of the earlier arguments as to why Article 11 isn't so bad we heard is that there are already exemptions in copyright for quotation and critical review. We argued that under EU law, these exemptions are entirely optional at the national level, and news publishers will lobby to limit the effect of them on this new IP right. If you look at the amendment for Recital 34, this is now being explicitly set up to happen: the Recital now says that member states can apply these exceptions, instead of should.
Just because the recitals aren't law, doesn't mean you can't use them to better understand the motives and justifications of the drafters.
As others have noted, the "banning memes" line is about Article 13. An amendment proposed by a Parliamentary committee to create a "fair use"-style exception for user-generated content, specifically to protect remixes and memes, was struck down in today's vote.
Basically, this directive remains an IP maximalists' dream. A bunch of new IP rights, some of which only apply online, with clear signals that they should be interpreted as broadly as possible.
> it's that if you use any text of an article, including its title, you can be sued or made to sign a license.
This seems a great place to use automated translation technology, but into the same language. Link to the news article, but rewrite it using a similar meaning, with different words.
(I am an EU citizen and I think this is major overreach by the legislator who thinks they are saving the newspapers, but have no clue as to what effect they will have on the current system, but it still will not save the papers.)
News articles are written with the understanding that the reader could stop reading at any time so information is put as early as possible. This applies especially to the title which is used as the very first filter for user interest. Requiring rewriting titles is a bad idea as you are never in an automated fashion going to make a better title.
As an example note that this very website heavily prefers the original title for the link text, only changing it when substantial updates are made or the original title is heavily biased.
> Requiring rewriting titles is a bad idea as you are never in an automated fashion going to make a better title.
Depends on how you define "better".
I would argue that a rewritten title you can read is "better" than an un-rewritten title you can't read because the site couldn't "link" it without risking a lawsuit or signing an agreement.
That is like claiming you can re-publish someone else's book if you translate it to Spanish or just replace all of the words with synonyms: you are creating a derivative work and are still using the original.
Would that really be the same as translating someone’s book? I’d argue that if I can’t do this then I can’t link at all (without paying a license) and that breaks the web. Which I realise is the argument against the legislstion, but I don’t think is the intent, albeit that the intent is shortsighted.
> the language echoes a previous fight that rightsholders are still pursuing, which is links to infringing content should be punished as strongly as hosting content itself.
There was a story in a similar direction a few years back: A state court in Hamburg decided that when you set a link to some other website, you have to check whether that website contains any illegal content.
The fine journalists at Heise wanted to link to the verdict, and because they are law-abiding citizens, they inquired with the court if they can guarantee that all content on the court website was legal. The request was denied.
> I work on this for EFF
> Firstly, these are just recitals. They're not a binding part of the Directive, they just lay out the justifications for the law.
Have you ever been in a courtroom in EU? Explanations for the laws are guides to judges to rule on the laws. Judges cannot go against the explanation and apply just the technical bit, their decisions will be overturned 100%.
Sure... This directive is hardly perfect, but it's also only the first step in the process.
When it comes to can vs should, you should know that both are optional. And copyright groups do try to limit the multiple exemptions from copyright every single day.
> The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers.
The latest version of Google News has already solved this: it only shows the title and the image, not a single sentence from the article itself, – which was the main concern in Spain and Germany when the relevant laws were introduced.
Facebook and Twitter shouldn't face any issues as well, because they only display the value of the og:description meta tag, set by the publishers themselves.
Google got a free license in Germany while Yahoo did not. Even if they ban the free license (which is a whole nother set of even bigger problems) Google can just not list them at all. It's not like they care about Google News all that much.
I agree that this is probably going to backfire spectacularly but if we give the proponents the benefit of the doubt it could be argued that while the big G might not care about Google News, users may. If these news aggregator shutdown they will look for alternatives which might create an opportunity for people to develop news aggregator that share the revenue more fairly with the newspapers. I doubt this is going to happen but I suppose it might sound right for people who are not deeply familiar with the way the internet works.
> If these news aggregator shutdown they will look for alternatives which might create an opportunity for people to develop news aggregator that share the revenue more fairly with the newspapers.
The problem is, what revenue? News aggregation is not a huge profit center to begin with. Then you take that already-small amount of money and split it between thousands of independent news organizations, each of which requires its own transaction costs, and the transaction costs sink the whole enterprise.
Well, radio stations don't earn a lot either, but still have to pay licence fees for the music they play. Perhaps some sort of flat fee paid based on some statistics how much content has been shared from which source would make sense. It will not be a huge money, but it's still better than no money at all. Aggregators/ search engines need the content produced at the volume, otherwise they'll be out of business too at some point, so it can be mutually benefitial.
80% of radio stations in the U.S. are owned by one company (iHeartMedia, formerly ClearChannel), and despite this monopoly negotiating power, the company is still operating out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a $20B debt load.
> 80% of radio stations in the U.S. are owned by one company(iHeartMedia, formerly ClearChannel)
They own the most, but it's not 80% (perhaps they cover 80% of listening markets). They own about 850 stations[1] out of roughly 10,000 commercial stations[2]. However, your point does stand as the second largest owner, Cumulus Media at 455 stations also filed for bankruptcy[3].
I think they must've divested some either in the bankruptcy or a previous restructuring, because the figure I saw was about 1250 stations. I'd bet that the 10,000 total stations also includes a bunch of mom & pop or college radio operations as well; maybe the statistic was for 80% of audience share rather than number of stations.
If I remember correctly, they built most of that debt load buying up all those stations.
Rado stations aren't money losers. Loading up leverage to 12x cash flow on junk debt to buy stations, on the other hand...
The last time I read about these regulations, it sounded like they would explicitly forbid this sort of arrangement between publishers and aggregators (i.e., news sites aren't allowed to agree to those terms). I don't have time to check right now, but that may be the case.
> it sounded like they would explicitly forbid this sort of arrangement between publishers and aggregators
and than, should they force google to pay instead of cutting these publishers off?
in no way would that be legal.
you can't force somebody to pay something, by forcing them to obey.
> well google in the end can just shutdown google news.
That's the expected (and fair) outcome. To be fair, why should a multinational be entitled to profit from unauthirized access and distribution of third-party content while the content creators are left with the bill of creating it?
News organizations provide a service (news reporting). News aggregators provide a service (news aggregation). Why shouldn't they both get paid?
Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it? Shouldn't they be paying the celebrities they gossip about for doing all the "noteworthy" things they do and giving them something to drive readership with?
The obvious flaw is that it's a symbiotic relationship. News organizations want traffic from Google in the way that celebrities and companies and politicians want news coverage (in the "no such thing as bad press" sense). They see Google's market cap and think they're making all this money, but the money isn't from news aggregation. That's peanuts. And if you're making a dime and they're making a nickel and you demand a dollar more, you don't get a dollar more, you get a dime less.
> News organizations provide a service (news reporting). News aggregators provide a service (news aggregation). Why shouldn't they both get paid?
That's a good question, and it seems to me that's the whole point of this legislation.
Currently there is a mega-multinational company which posts record profits for services that consist of scraping and unauthorized distribution of third-party content, and in a manner that even eliminates any traffic from the content creator's site.
So in the current state of affairs only the scraper gets paid, and the content creators are left with the bill.
How is that fair?
> Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it?
For some reason you've invented this silly idea that researching and developing a newspiece is, somehow, the same as scraping websites.
I'm sure that we can agree that journalism and web scraping have nothing in common, just like xeroxing a book is not the same thing as writing a novel.
> So in the current state of affairs only the scraper gets paid, and the content creators are left with the bill.
Googlebot respects robots.txt. Anyone who doesn't want to be indexed, isn't. For some reason they still seem to want to be.
> I'm sure that we can agree that journalism and web scraping have nothing in common, just like xeroxing a book is not the same thing as writing a novel.
What do you mean? It's basically the same thing. When a reporter interviews some guy, they put his words in their story -- without compensation. How is that fair?
Last time I checked the news companies put their articles online for anyone to read. I don't see how Google isn't authorized to access the content. I'm pretty sure they follow robots.txt. If the news companies can't make money from people reading their articles, maybe they should just stop putting them online.
How? Without thinking too deep about it (so curious) wouldn’t a micropayment economy look exactly like the likes/views/engagement economy, only, perhaps distributed?
What I mean, the change of currency doesn magically solve the problem on how to detect and promote actual value and then organize people into funding that instead of the next shit determined by an algorithm to catch your attention
You can make pennies per article with adsense ads at no direct cost to your audience and people use ad blocker rampantly. You can also use PayPal to give as little as a dollar. I have sites with PayPal tip jars. When people tip, they rarely leave only one dollar. Those that tip usually are more generous than that.
I'm quite convinced that people wanting micropayments to be solved are pretty much like friends who say they would give you money if they won the lottery. In other words, these are people who just don't want to do anything for you, but don't want to admit to that. So they latch onto some implausible scenario and enthusiastically swear up and down that should lightening strike, they will absolutely do X, knowing the odds are very long against that happening.
But why would you spend effort on quality content, the same public getting manipulated into consuming crap in exchange for their time would just as happily waste their “micro money” on the same crap
Who is the little guy, and why are we optimizing for him, instead of making the world better for everyone?
I mean, I think the link tax is backwards, but a vague emotional appeal to the health of... a mom and pop internet news site...(?) is not the argument I'd use.
Internet is supposed to be THE free platform a mom and pop internet news site can prosper. You are, at this very moment, here in HN, in a mom and pop internet news site.
Nothing fundamentally has changed about HN as Y Combinator has become more successful over time. Your premise pretends that both HN's long-term and initial success rests on the present riches of Y Combinator - that's false.
HN runs on one server and is moderated by just a couple of people typically. It is in fact the definition of a mom & pop operation. It does not have a zillion dollar budget, either for operations or promoting itself. It doesn't need it, the value proposition is the content, community and standards.
I can semi-trivially set up an HN clone for any given industry or concept. It'll be up to me to promote it and garner attention to it, however the point is that it's extremely inexpensive and easy (few regulations, hurdles, compliance issues, etc) to open up that type of expression platform. That's what the parent is referring to.
It's not about who the mom is, or whether she is a billionaire. HN is read mostly by tech workers, which is probably not more than 5% of US population and probably less than 1% of internet users. These numbers are out of my ass, but is there any indication that HN is mainstream media? HN is a niche media like my sister's blog.
I think 1% of the USA is generous. We're talking about mostly programmers and software engineers here. I doubt the level 2 tech support at Comcast is reading HN, much less any significant percentage all IT workers.
FWIW I'm closer to the L2 Comcast tech than programmer and I was introduced to HN by my dad, a DBA. I thought HN was for the intellectually curoius, not just the coders and programmers of the Valley?
I was homeless for nearly 6 years and an active participant. I'm also not a programmer, though I have a Certificate in GIS and, these, days, make part of my money as a "webmaster."
There are a lot of IT people here. This, unfortunately, sometimes convinces some individuals that that's all there is here, which is an inaccurate assumption.
> Internet is supposed to be THE free platform a mom and pop internet news site can prosper.
The internet has the attention economy, which follows a power law of popularity, with a long tail of unpopular content that has <50 readers. I would not consider that 'prosperous'.
Optimize for the little guy so there can be growth. "Better for everyone" is stasis because "everyone" includes all the people that already have disproportional slices of pie.
To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.
In this scenario, I'm not sure if society should encourage little mom and pop scrapers to spawn while leaving the people who actually created the content with any way to protect their work.
The problem is that people don't want what (most of) the newspaper publishers are offering, they want smaller, broader, differently curated summaries of that.
"Publishers" (newspapers) are 99% simply reprinting news they get from "the wire" (Reuters for example, or Bloomberg, or ...), or a few wire services. One way to look at Facebook and Google News is that they are better versions of these wires, available for end users of the content instead of just paying subscribers (Reuters' wire is a subscription service)
The way it works is this: let's say I feel the need to put out a press release. I have an employee write the news (heavily favoring me) and "put out the press release", meaning I submit the article to a news agency [1], including image and text online, paying 35$ for the privilege of having it appear on the feeds newspapers use to put out news. This is why even the BBC is full of "researchers working for IBM have saved the world again".
There are a number of issues. Of course 99% of the news is not exactly neutral or even a little bit researched, because it's just press releases. 1% is, but is produced by reporters working for the news agencies (only huge places like BBC still have their own reporters). And Google is a lot better than even the BBC (which is very high quality) at finding and presenting press releases to the public. Hell, it's actually better at deciding the trustworthiness of them than news desks (mostly because they, for profit reasons, refuse to give humans even half an hour to check things). Furthermore, those algorithms run so cheaply that they actually provide a personalized version of the news of the day based on both your interests and the news. I assume Jeff Bezos has the same service by a newspapers, but I imagine few others do.
So the underlying issue newspapers are having is "Google automated and Facebook crowdsources what we do, and their automated algorithms are much more successful than our humans, please outlaw them".
> To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.
Yeah there is no value at all in having a searchable index, content summaries, and it's unfair that people get paid for that. Furthermore newspapers just use humans to do what Google news does with algorithms. Never mind that that's what people want.
And as pointed out, people see more value in the aggregated, summarized and algorithmically curated versions of the same data.
Did you ever use the phonebook ? Did it have ads or not ? Should we outlaw the phonebook too ? Did you ever use an encyclopedia or a dictionary ? Did you pay for it ?
I read the articles as well, and this commenter is right that, on their face, they don't seem like they would apply to a site like Google News. That said, everyone, including Google, seems to think they do. And as far as I am aware, nobody at the EC has said anything to the contrary, even though it would be easy to do so. So it seems most likely to me that the naive reading of the text is incorrect, and that both this reddit commenter and myself are missing something.
Both are missing the point of how this kind of "law" works.
The wording is less relevant than the application of it. You can argue that something is outside of scope, according to the wording, and be correct while at the same time I can argue that the same is covered on how is expected to be applied.
Given my understanding of the copyright lobbying-state officials work in the EU, Google News will be covered. Why? Because news organizations having being crying for long and have strong political connections.
To understand article 11, I think you should look at the reason it was created: Journalists (and newspapers) are looking for a way to get paid for their articles beyond luring people to their sites with clickbait titles and tons of ads.
They want their own "article version" of Spotify, where they get a set amount for every article read. Obviously that's difficult to implement given the current way of the Internet (= Facebook sharing) and this is their attempt at getting their dream.
Is this a good idea? You could say it may improve news reporting if it was well implemented. Or it could be completely abused. Anyway, looking at it like this, explains some of the legalese in article 11.
"Parliament’s text also strengthens the negotiating rights of authors and performers, by enabling them to “claim” additional remuneration from the party exploiting their rights when the remuneration originally agreed is “disproportionately” low compared to the benefits derived."
"The text adds that these benefits should include “indirect revenues”. It would also empower authors and performers to revoke or terminate the exclusivity of an exploitation licence for their work if the party holding the exploitation rights is deemed not to be exercising this right."
The article itself reference the acts of linking and hyperlinking without any words about "significant portions of the text". I would like to see some support to the claim that "what is being protected is substantial or harmful copying of significant portions of the text".
In particular, the phrase "This protection does not extend to acts of hyperlinking which do not constitute communication to the public." It is all over the text and amendments. What is the exact legal effect of that?
News are mostly clickbait cancer anyways, if this is the final nail in their coffin (if Google/Reddit/Facebook stops serving news) so be it. Tech Giants will do just fine under this, just how Chinese tech giants are able to do their own censorship.
This is such a great outcome for Google, they could not have gotten such a good outcome if they had bribed the legislators directly. They've essentially enshrined the infrastructure Google has already as a legal requirement for the bare minimum threshold to host a web site now. Google can sit back and stop worrying about there ever being competition from Europe now.
US tech giants haven't worried about competition coming from Europe for awhile now. They worry about competition coming from either within the country or China.
The two biggest problems US tech giants have, are fines-as-taxation from the EU and France increasingly pushing for the idea of a restricted competition zone for the EU (a poor attempt at how China incubated its own tech giants by walling everything off). Germany is dramatically more globalist economically (an export giant), so most of the EU's regressive insular ideas will come from France in their style of protectionism.
A distant third problem are US regulators, which are slowly moving forward with targeting the tech giants (which now has both sides of the political machine looking at them, for different reasons). The giants no doubt feel like they can massage that situation better, as it's their home turf. They're invasive aliens as far as the EU is concerned.
They'll just block payments to those sites. You know, from the advertisers - the actual customers of the platform. No one cares what people use for free. This is about money.
It's funny how many laws meant to punish the mega-corps, as they get designed with mega-corps entirely in mind, end up hurting small/medium businesses (and future mega-crops) and further solidifying the mega-corps position in the market.
I don't think it's surprising the global economy is littered with long-standing monopoly with little competition. It's not merely economies of scale, vertical integration, and other benefits of size, but because the business environment perpetually gets harder and harder for entrepreneurs to operate in.
The growth in the size of modern state-capitalist nation-states naturally coincides with the growth in monopolistic mega corporations - at the expense of things that have made capitalism so powerful and effective (competition checking abuse of customers, rapid innovation, etc).
Accidental regulatory capture seems to be more common than nefarious intentional corruption when it comes to policy reinforcing monopolies. History is littered with examples of well-intentioned policies backfiring.
The rat pelt bounty in French Vietnam led to rat breeding. The US luxury tax led to the wealthy saving more money and mass layoffs in the luxury industry. Bank regulations in the wake of the financial crisis gave big banks a competitive advantage over small banks.
These aren't apples to apples examples, but they show how regulatory action often has unintended consequences due to the complexity of the real world.
+1, they already comply, but if I were to launch something with UGC, I should probably host it in Afghanistan and back it by a company registered on the Moon.
> Google can sit back and stop worrying
Name one company from EU who have a slight potential to be a minor threat for (YouTube / Search)
Does it matter if that company is from EU? Even a new engine centralized in the US won't be able to operate in the EU without substantial cost. That's a pretty big market/data source to miss out on.
I've seen the debate and some politician said that big platforms should be stopped. Which is why I thought that why not work on creating an environment that supports competition rise from the EU? But yeah, it shouldn't matter where new players come from, however I think a Chinese startup will laugh at GDPR and upload filters.
This is ends up being effectively a tariff, though - if fewer advertising platforms can take European customers, then that allows those platforms to raise their prices for those customers, essentially meaning that European businesses end up paying more for advertising than their competitors from elsewhere.
UKIP and the Green Party joined forces to prevent Article 13 from getting rammed through without a public discussion. It was a good first step, but here we are, 2 months hence, and it was passed with virtually no amendments to the original text.
This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works. Markus Meechum (aka Count Dankula) was at the hearings, and reported that MEPs voting on the issue could not, or refused to, explain why they supported the bill. You can see him discussing the result in the immediate aftermath here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISyiTcA6RIw
If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.
Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video. There is more content uploaded to YouTube than can possibly all be manually reviewed. Aggressive automated content filtering to comply with Article 13 would mean that these videos would straight get filtered out.
The likes of YouTube will be affected the least. They already have aggressive copyright enforcement measures in place, and they can afford to do that.
Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.
YouTube, the company, will be fine. They'll just ban any content that triggers their enforcement systems. I'm worried about YouTube, the platform, and the bastion of free exchange of information and ideas that is has been until now. A response-type video or movie review will almost certainly be false-flagged by a system like this.
Of course, I agree with you that independent platforms are going to have a rough time. They either have to manually review all content themselves, not allow any user-uploaded content, or pay a company to do this for them.
> When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remain appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided.
Well, of course the law applies to them too. But what happens in the instances that they don't comply? Laws are enforced by incentive structures, such as punishment. Who gets punished or otherwise incentivized to make PeerTube comply with the law, and what effect will that have on the functioning of PeerTube?
There are three main ways to do P2P content distribution. One is like BitTorrent, where you only host the content you yourself wanted. This has obvious privacy issues. Anyone can tell what you read/view based on what you host.
The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.
The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.
Thats so depressing that we have to have serious discussions about technical countermeasures against our oppressive EU regime. Just because of some old ignorant evil assholes. Time to leave the EU I suppose.
If the solution were technical we would need a combination of 2 and 3. Distributed hidden services. Is this even possible?
The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images. I am a big believer in freedom and privacy. I am also a big believer in protecting children. Many people understandably prefer protecting children to seemingly (to them) abstract concepts like freedom. Any technical solution needs a method to remove certain content - and as soon as such a method exists people will want to abuse it for political reasons.
The solution has to be political not technical - somehow we need a political situation where basic freedoms are respected. This can only exist as revisions to countrys' constitutions. Simple laws protecting freedom are too easy to overturn. And we can't carry on resisting re-heated versions of the same stupid law every two years.
> If the solution were technical we would need a combination of 2 and 3. Distributed hidden services. Is this even possible?
It is possible.
> The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images.
This is a fake reason which is only used as a justification for censorship technologies. In practice it's better to allow distribution so that it happens in the open and new images can be discovered sooner and traced back to the perpetrators who created them. If you shut down a distribution network every time you find it then the only ones that exist are the ones you don't know about, which means you have no source of evidence to make cases against unknown active pedophiles.
The FBI had a successful campaign where they quietly seized a distribution server and then continued operating it so they could collect evidence and make cases against those using it. Naturally the headlines were "FBI distributes child pornography" rather than "FBI arrests many child pornographers" as though preventing distribution is somehow more important than arresting the creators and rescuing the children.
That's EU after all. They will mass punish everybody, then try to ban traffic.
> “Thousands of Swedes have received threatening letters from law firms which accuse them of illegal downloading. They are asked to pay a sum of money, ranging from a couple of thousand Swedish Kronors up to several thousand, to avoid being brought to justice,” Bahnhof Communicator Carolina Lindahl notes.
> “During 2018 the extortion business has increased dramatically. The numbers have already exceeded last year’s figures even though four months still remain.”
> This year to date, 49 separate court cases have been filed requesting ISPs to disclose the personal details of the account holders behind 35,711 IP-addresses. As the chart below shows, that’s already more than the two previous years combined.
> Also, the number of targeted people exceeds that of all US and Canadian file-sharing cases in 2018, which is quite extraordinary.
No, that's not true. If the law mandated running content filtering system that costs $10M/year to run (in addition to any existing systems), then it'd be worse for YouTube, but they will survive. It would absolutely kill smaller providers dead.
Unless by participating in free, decentralized, federated platform you expose yourself to legal liability for any content present on the network and passed through your node. In which case you probably can't afford it.
> A response-type video or movie review will almost certainly be false-flagged by a system like this.
To be fair, that hypothetical problem is caused by a broken classifier and not the law. After all, youtube already blocks and removes content like you've described but no one is accusing the classifier of stiffling free speech.
What about distributed systems without central control? Will the new laws force them to introduce filtering into the software (which could e.g. be open source and forkable by anyone)? Or does this only apply to systems with a centralized repository?
You can look up the legal actions related to Usenet to see an example of US State Attorneys General banding together to attack a distributed system because a few people were posting bad stuff on it.
"What about distributed systems without central control?"
The copyright industry and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no mental model for such forms of distribution. Have you forgotten the panic that ensued fifteen years ago, when the music industry was suing middle schoolers?
(The irony is that the very same platforms these industry lobbyists are whining about only became popular because they killed P2P via the courts.)
This is wrong. Small and micro platforms are excluded from directive’s scope.
Source from legislation: In particular, small and micro enterprises as defined in Title I of the Annex to
Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, should be expected to be subject to less
burdensome obligations than larger service providers. Therefore,
taking into account the state
of the art and the availability of technologies and their costs, in specific cases it may not be
proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that
therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove
specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders.
The problem is that the gap between such platforms and Youtube is enormous, and long before they are even remotely competitive they will be required to spend vast sums of money on compliance. A secondary effect will be a reduced willingness to invest in small-to-medium sized competitors due to the regulatory costs and the risks of non-compliance, further hampering growth.
Much as I hate to admit it, the biggest reason US tech companies have been so much more successful than European tech companies is that the US imposes far fewer regulations, which allows companies to use more of their revenue on growth.
Yes, the Googles and Facebooks of the future will be affected the most.
This is consolidation of power, finally locking down the Free Internet just as we've done with every other industry. Stripping the power to change from the small.
While I agree that regulation favours big companies, potential competitors will base themselves offshore, or create distributed apps that have no jurisdiction.
'Normal' people already use distributed content: Google and Facebook's content is held in data servers all across the planet. The next stage is to distribute the governance of that content, which similarly, most users won't be aware of.
This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services. If everyone self-hosted and was accountable for their own content there would be no scope for such legislation. All HN would hold would be linked-lists of URLs, no actual comment content.
Imagine a decentralised, federated HN where each comment originated from its owner's site.
>This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services.
This type of law encourages that very centralization. Look at the provisions of GDPR, for example. Do you think a two-person startup is going to have the resources to deal with all of its provisions? Or in this case: do you think that a new video-sharing startup is going to have the resources to deal with the more stringent copyright enforcement requirements?
The EU has, in effect, made a Faustian bargain with Google, Facebook and Twitter: if you accept our regulation, we'll ensure that you have no competitors.
But what kind of startup doesn't handle personal data? All companies have that in the form of customer and supplier account information needed for billing purposes -- especially if they're not in the advertising business.
Absolutely, and that's kind of my point. Even a single person operation can comply with the GDPR, as most of the policies to do so should alreay be state-of-the-art for companies who handle personal data (in a non-malicous way). I agree there is some annoying administrative overhead, but it's definitely manageable (speaking from experience here).
It can't be everything all at once. "They process personal data" is equivalent to "they exist" and the compliance cost is non-trivial (or what is everybody complaining about?). The only remaining option is that it's destroying a significant percentage of startups and creating a moat around incumbents.
The only argument you can make at that point is that it's worth the cost, but is it? The damage to privacy of having everyone's data in the hands of conglomerates that are no longer subject to competitive pressure has got to be worse than Mom and Pop occasionally mishandling the information of their two hundred customers. Just having the centralization at all is worse than anything that could happen to any given 0.5% subset of it, because every misuse or compromise is 200 times worse even if they only happen 10% as often.
The operating part is "should already be state-of-the-art". The typical programmer already knows that personal data is sensitive and treats it that way. Maybe there are some adjustments here and there, or some oversights or things-that should-have-been-fixed-months ago. But most of what needs to be done has already been law in one form or another, so the programmer is trained to do it correctly. There are retention laws for tax data and business communication of 7 years and longer, which override the GDPR, so the startup will most likely be out of business before any deletion is required.
So what remains for the business part of the startup is to make sure the necessary contracts with all third parties are in place (the pressure-the-conglomerates-part), and to explain it to the users. This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with. The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
> What is everybody complaining about?
I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe. I guess if you don't want to be GDPR compliant due to the effort that's fair, but you should know that there are much worse things ahead for a company.
However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
> The operating part is "should already be state-of-the-art". The typical programmer already knows that personal data is sensitive and treats it that way.
The expense doesn't come from that. Even if you're doing the right thing in spirit, now you have to compare what you're doing to a complex regulatory framework. That's pure overhead that you pay even if you don't even have to change anything.
> This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with.
You're saying that this thing that harms small businesses and entrenches incumbents is like the other things that harm small businesses and entrench incumbents. But that's the problem. Each one you add is an incremental burden that moves the margin for how many startups you kill by another kilometer in the wrong direction.
> The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
That is a very aspirational privacy policy that also happens to be very strict and trivial to violate unintentionally. And what are the consequences for not following your own very strict privacy policy?
This is why most of the big companies have one that says something to the effect of "we promise to use your data for things we want to do" but then have to be carefully crafted by lawyers to simultaneously minimize liability and hold up under scrutiny.
> I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe.
It's all relative. If Germany has a significant regulatory burden but Greece is a hotbed of corruption, Germany can still do better than Greece. But not as well as it could have done with less overhead.
> However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
The pretense that complex regulations only cost you if you were previously doing something wrong is empirically false. The cost of complying with the regulation is in addition to the cost of doing the right thing and is still paid by everyone who was doing the right thing already. And it can be enough to destroy a company that was not actually mishandling data but merely had low operating margins.
I'm not arguing against any of that, including your statement that the GDPR might be the last drop to destroy a compliant-in-spirit company which has been surviving just so. I'm merely questioning the scale of the problem (based on my own experience implementing the GDPR in a low operating margin context) and their right to exist to begin with (based on my personal view on the sad necessity of data privacy regulation).
Most of the rules in GDPR apply only to personally-identifiable information that is not strictly required for business operations. The law recognizes that, when you want to ship some goods to a customer, you will have to process and store their address, and no opt-in is needed because the customer explicitly gives that information to you.
Explicit opt-ins are only required when you record personally-identifiable information surreptitiously, or share these information with other parties.
> Most of the rules in GDPR apply only to personally-identifiable information that is not strictly required for business operations.
I'm sure there are some provisions intended to help out smaller entities. But the compliance cost is the cost of understanding the legislation so you can comply with it. You still have to pay it even if it turns out not to apply at all -- because you can't know that until you go through all of it first.
“copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works”
I may be naive in saying this, but I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind. The real problem lies in the laws it relies on, namely the extremely stringent copyright laws and the weird fair use.
> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.
As weird as it sounds, you are wrong. In a short summary:
1. Fair use is a very small exception to some very broad rights.
2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.
3. If you rely on fair use rights, then you might find yourself in trouble.
What's even worse is that right holders can pick and choose who to bust, and they don't need to be consistent about it. So even if they rarely go after small groups, they can still shut down bigger ones.
I have a childhood friend who is now a copyright lawyer and I sometimes jokingly ask him whether something is copyright infringing. Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends. Both sides have arguments so ultimately it's down to the judge." It's just bad law. The only difference between then and now is that now we have the technology to actually enforce it.
I don't believe this is true. Every legitimate YouTube fair use case that I've seen go to court has gone in favor of the fair user.
The biggest name one so far is the H3H3 trial.[1] One that looks to be settled soon is Akilah Hughes suing Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), where all that Benjamin does is edit together two of Hughes videos with the only original addition being a new title. This is almost certainly going to go in favor of Sargon, yet YouTube's algorithms turned up to the nth degree would almost certainly have blocked it.[2]
If you go outside of YouTube, fair use law in the United States is very broad. Just look at what Richard Prince does with others' art. [3]
Combining two videos in this way would be unlawful in the UK, where we have the very restricted "Fair Dealing" concessions, because downloading the videos in the first place is a tort[0].
Combining them is another, sharing them is another.
We basically have no concept of personal use in our
copyright.
[0] if they were broadcast you can record but only for time-shifting, you can only watch once (alone!) and then are obliged to destroy the copy; you aren't allowed to format shift.
The lack of any remaining semblance of balance in copyright between the rights of the demos and media interests shows how badly distorted our Western democracies have become from representing the rights of people in general above the rights of the rich.
Compare that to my country, where it's perfectly legal to download whatever music or movies you like from the internet for personal use, pirate websites or not. Also a western democracy. So it's not so bad everywhere.
Though a price for this is that we pay a special tax on every storage device we purchase.
My mind jumped to Canada when I read the above comment, but really there are a number of countries that fit the mould. Most western countries have a special levy on blank media, including all EU member states except Luxembourg. I don't know which countries don't prohibit the downloading copyrighted material similarly to how they prohibit sharing that media, but Canada is one of them.
Before this law, I would've retorted that it's not the Western democracies that are broken, just the US, and it's padawan, the UK. Now, however, I have to agree. Even the US-like fearmongering and terrorism of armed forces within EU cities is getting more prevalent lately.
> The real problem lies in the laws it relies on, namely the extremely stringent copyright laws and the weird fair use.
Real problem is the negative incentive to be correct.
The rule penalise you harshly if you serve copyrighted content, but there is nothing if you decide to not serve non-copyrighted content and there is so much content on the internet, that "market pressure" simply isn't going to work. If you are a small publisher of free content, there is a huge risk for content platform to serve your content and no reward if they do.
And that's the best case scenario, where all actors have good intentions. But in the real world we know that large copyright holder are very often bulk claiming bulk content. There is no penalty, so that would be crazy for them no to do it.
The laws is also talking about terrorist content and the need to remove it within 1 hour or risk up to 4% turnover fine ! There is not going to be any manual check done within 1 hour, and anyway the risk is so great you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy.
I fail to see the "good intentions in mind" you mention. MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport. Their field of expertise is the people and public relation. I can believe they are naive with technology (like encryption or monitoring actual capabilities) but I can't accept they are candid about businesses or individual motivations. Any negative consequence of this law is there on purpose.
> MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport.
I don't think so. I think MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress. With the equivalent of a member of the US congress being a member of some national parliament.
My criterium here is how fierce the campaign is to get elected. At the very least here in the Netherlands, the campaign for the European Parliament is nearly an afterthought in the news. It ranks far below the campaign for the German parliament, let alone our national parliament.
>> MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress
What's the salary and expenses package like in a state congress?
"[..] expense payments of €4,416 per month are given to MEPs as a lump sum in addition to their regular pre-tax monthly salary of €8,611. They are not required to provide any proof of how the money is spent"
To a first approximation there is no such thing as "non-copyrighted content" except for very old content. If you're the creator you already have to license your creation to the platform.
> you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy
The directive (Article 13(2b)) requires the service providers to provide an "effective and expeditious" complaint mechanism for unjustified removals with human review, though.
> I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind
I disagree, no other utility is blamed for the actions of its users, if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider, but if I do something illegal on the internet like piracy its some how my internet providers fault?
I also don't like making excuses for policy makers who "don't understand the internet", its not the 90s, ignorance is no longer an excuse, these people know what the internet is, and they know exactly what they are doing.
if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider
The physical equivalent is more like you sending pirated dvd's through the mail to your entire neighborhood. The equivalent law would then require the post office to check all packages upon sending to verify that they contain only content which is not pirated, which for privacy reasons they do in an automated way that sometimes blocks the package with the family movie you're sending to your mom (because your daughter was wearing mickey mouse ears and the automated check thought it was a disney movie).
Oftentimes when you physicalize online legislation it becomes apparent just how invasive and silly it is.
Are you basing this on law in the EU? Because as far as I know, "fair use" is purely a US thing that doesn't even exist in the EU -- although specific countries may have laws that do somewhat similar things.
If rights-holders and/or YouTube had to pay a monetary penalty every time they screwed up (by taking down content that was fair use), perhaps it might level the playing field?
Fair use (in the US) is actually designed to provide for the ability to comment on, or criticize another work. You can’t do that effectively without showing the subject matter you are discussing.
There are absolutely well defined “fair use” exceptions which a stringent filter will block.
> Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends.
This is the only answer a lawyer will basically ever give you.
> I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind.
"He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best. The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It. Eric was standing on: For the Sake of the Children. “Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “Why do it like this?” “I think they’re meant to be good intentions,” said Rincewind. This was a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists. And, while they are of course irredeemably evil, they are not always bad. And so Rincewind stepped off We Are Equal Opportunity Employers and through a wall, which healed up behind him, and into the world."
That's an interesting point. It's true that the issue wouldn't be quite as terrible if IP laws were more reasonable to begin with. We shouldn't have to wait for literal centuries before a work becomes public domain for instance.
>> 2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.
Have you read the YouTube terms for original content uploaded by individuals? I'm not so sure doing remixes isn't allowed. If you don't want people doing that to your stuff, keep it off YouTube. I could be wrong, it's been many years since I read their ToS.
Copyright owners have successfully lobbied with the argument: "It is soooo much effort to go after each case, and these platforms make it so easy to infringe they are essentially complicit".
Just extending your thought farther, why have police then as well? Shouldn't an individual protect themselves? If I am stronger then you and you can't protect your rights does that mean I am now right by taking them away for myself? If everyone was required to protect their own rights things would get messy fast.
I do look forward to the day, and I believe it will come, where companies and individuals will be handsomely fined for any false copyright claims.
There is no copyright police. People do defend themselves - they pay the police to do so and so do businesses. EU is not instituting a copyright police- it is asking internet media to set it up and pay for it.
> This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works.
Same sad song as it ever was. Keep giving more control to the government and they'll keep ratcheting down the screws on you.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government. Centralizing authority only benefits the well connected political class.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government.
The vote that occurred today was by the EU parliament, which is entirely elected. The directive was prepared inside the JURI committee, which also exists entirely out of elected representatives.
Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive. I agree that the contents of that directive is lamentable, but the need for one is clear, even for those opposing this particular directive, provided you buy into the notion that single markets should exist at all.
> Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive.
If, for instance, the left side of your single digital market has a copyright duration of 70 years after the death of the artist, and the right side has 90 years instead, then in effect, it's 70 years even on the right side because anyone can just go to the left side, trade copies of the expired works without paying licensing fees, then come back to the right side with those copies (because it's a single market).
So in effect, the regulation of the whole market is the weakest regulation of any part of it.
I find many can't separate the idea of government and society. Government should serve society, not control it. Every societal issue is not in the purview of the government.
I agree with your sentiments, but couldn’t one argue that this is in fact an issue regarding goods/services/trade/economy? It’s not clear to me what would set this apart, just looking for more clarification.
I think it's going to work like jaywalking - it's illegal, but I've done it, and it's fine as long as it doesn't cause a bigger issue, and as long as enforcer isn't overzealous. It's true though, that it's a weapon waiting to be used for political reasons, and the perspective of that happening is no good for anybody.
Yes, the OP did also state that point as well. The comparison was just to illustrate that this law is unenforceable at large scale so people might just disregard it. The danger is, as he and yourself have both stated, you then have a situation where the law becomes a weapon to be abused rather than legislation to safeguard businesses or consumer interest.
Unfortunately, it's quite enforceable. That's the whole point of this legislation - it goes after those entities that it can be enforced against (businesses), forcing them to turn around and enforce it against the smaller fish in their domain.
You're missing the point being made. We are not saying "it cannot be enforced, period". What we are saying "you cannot police every single website on the internet." Thus what will happen is this law will be used as a weapon to target sites that publish reviews that paint a particular product in a bad light, or user contribution sites that compete with big social networks. Or even, in the worst case scenario, forums which are critical of a particular government party.*
A law like this can and likely will be selectively enforced since it will be impossible to police every single independent thought published on the internet.
* I appreciate those points may not be in breach of the new legislation per se. But there is a pretty good chance that some content on sites of those style would be in breach. So it's a little like police using a broken tail light as an excuse to stop and search a car.
You cannot police every website on the Internet, but you certainly can scrap the Internet. It is easy to forget how much regulation surrounds the physical infrastructure of the Internet and how easily the government could just shut it all down. A key property of the Internet is that there is a single public IP address space; there is no technical reason why the address space could not be divided into "client" and "server" addresses, with only "servers" being allowed to host applications, and we are already halfway there with NAT (IPv6 does not help either, as it could easily be fragmented and we already have things like ULA). It would be easy to require a special license to receive a "server IP address" and I can see the EU doing exactly that based on their recent pattern of behavior.
Europe has a long history of doing such things when confronted with new, disruptive technologies: the effort to license printing presses in various European countries is what eventually led to copyright law as we know it today.
The copyright law introduced during the invention of the printing press is nothing like the copyright law we know today.
Back then ideas were still believed to be free so the point of copyright law was just a short term reward for the author. A bit like how patents are supposed to work.
I would normally post some citations here (like a famous quote about copyright from one of the British monarchs) but on phone about to drop kids off at school so apologies there.
You don't need to police every comment. You just need to randomly poke at things, and make an example of anyone who lets something slip thru. Then individual businesses are going to be scared into policing their specific turfs. And when it's decentralized like that, it's quite possible to police every single website on the Internet (or at least on your section of it).
Why do you think so? The question isn't whether sites distributing pirated stuff exist - the question is, how many more would have existed if not for policing, and how many people would have used them that are deterred under the existing regime.
Effective policing generally doesn't mean that people can just flout the law whenever they want. That would suggest to me that particular law cannot be effectively policed. However I'm willing to concede that "effective" is a subjective term so we could both argue our points are correct.
I think this is spot-on. Laws like this are inherently unenforceable at a global scale, and therefore are selectively enforced. The enforcement agencies have limited resources and therefore will focus on politically strategic targets. This is a political weapon.
Unfortunately, the downstream effects will hurt everyone else.
No enforcement agency is required to enforce this law. Rightholders will sue non-filtering platforms over potentional lost sales due to their "wilful negligence".
And if the offending platform has any business in Germany (or another country with similar laws) this will be a gold mine for any law business issuing cease and desist letters in the name of competing plattforms.
And as long as you aren't of the wrong demographic. Laws that are selectively enforced allow racism and sexism to flourish among the police. In consistent enforcement of a law should be a valid defense of violating the law, and a very cheap one to employ.
> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.
That actually isn't legal in many countries and is e.g. why regional wikipedia sites don't show movie posters.
Sometimes I feel like the whole world is ruined by ignorant people in power. As for the Internet, it is exclusively being ruined by ignorant actors in positions of state power. All the while, armies of good people make the Internet better every day.
>> If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.
This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas. YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability. They might be able to automate, but it depends on the jurisdiction. For example, the US has fair use laws. A person may copy a segment of a copyrighted work to comment on it. There are territories in the EU where they can't. How does YouTube filter this?
If the new product was produced in the US and references material from the EU, should YouTube allow the content to go public? According this and GDPR, the EU has the ability to cross territorial boundaries. So YouTube now has to ban such a work in the US even though our legal system allows it.
Essentially, YouTube will have to create a new process where by all content must go past the censors, who are probably people and not machines. Otherwise YouTube will quickly die due to death by a thousand fines. So much for a free and open exchange of ideas.
> This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.
> YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability
I believe they already did that for some years now.
Here is an analogy - imagine we crack down on theft at the source by massive fines for receiving stolen property. Sounds good? Try to sell anything secondhand then.
Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!
Except this isn't backed up by empirical evidence, in reality flea markets and used good stores are widespread despite the existence of laws against trafficking in stolen goods. Just because you can imagine a bad outcome doesn't mean it's inevitable or even probable.
You missed the point - those laws have limits to secondary liability based on knowledge precisely because of that! At worst they just need to return stolen goods even if they paid for them. I am pointing out how draconian and stupid the law is. A law with similar strictness would destroy secondary markets.
This law requires websites to /know/ the copyright to be covered. And that is an impossible task if no false negatives are accepted. Old usenet pirates would use base64 strings to spread contents and there are countless ways to obfuscate to algorithms while remaining human recognizable. Which means to remain safe one needs to not even accept and display text input from users.
Copyright databases would be of no help here given both automatic copyright and the ease of dodging hashes. And a complete set would be massive and hillariously defeat the point by giving any implenter all of the media in the world.
Given that it is inevitable that it will have a bad outcome. Even if it is left to rot on the books it becomes a tool of tyranny via selective enforcement.
> I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.
Here's an example: What about movie review channels like Wisecrack, Film Theorist, Cinema Sins, Filmjoy etc.? While discussing movies, they naturally have to show excerpts: short clips of the movie that relate to their explanations. Those guys are absolutely "creating something". And if anything, they're driving more people to watch those movies. A five-minute analysis of a movie is usually not a valid substitute for watching the actual movie.
I imagine that many of these channels will become unavailable in the EU in the near future. Time to get a US-based VPN.
They can't and flag and take down your video until you prove it. The burden is on the uploader not the distributor. Which we know how Youtube is with that...
As many probably realize, the fact that "online videos" == Youtube for many members of the general public means that it is by far the number one source for both posting and watching videos online in a self-reinforcing loop. I think that it cannot be overstated how much the existence of platforms like that (e.g. video sharing websites, 2D art websites, music boards) drive non-professional creators to create, given the fact that for the first time, they can actually get an audience. So it is not so much that Youtube and similar platforms are necessary for content creation (which is a ridiculous claim that no one made), but that the absence of such platforms seems likely to result in the previous system where media was very rarely shared by the non-professionals.
If you are arguing that massive content consolidation platforms such as Youtube do not have a highly significant impact on content creators as a group though, then I do not know what to say to that.
You can sell your farm fresh strawberries in the backwoods of Alabama, doesn't mean you'll get any traffic that'll grow your business/platform/identity.
Not everybody, a small minority of the planet actually (the EU is a mere ~6.7% of the planet's population). The ideal solution if you're a US service like HN, is to ignore EU laws like this, as HN is governed by US law. For YouTube, it's a lot more difficult.
Put simply, if you're a US (or Australian, or Brazilian, or Japanese, etc) service: tell the EU to go fuck itself. US courts will laugh at their attempts to enforce EU law over US law.
Keep your servers in the US, if that's where you're located. If you have no need to do business in the EU, then you have almost nothing to worry about. The EU's reach largely stops at its borders unless you're operating in their jurisdiction.
For my service as a US operation, EU copyright law is meaningless. I'll continue to allow EU users to sign up, and entirely disregard EU law.
Ultimately the only way the EU can truly enforce their backwards policies against a global Internet, is to set up a Chinese firewall and hold EU persons as captives of that creeping authoritarianism.
using your analogy, youtube would be the paper maker and most importantly, the newspaper that publishes those words.
rightly, they're going after the newspaper.
it's disingenuous to suggest youtube only makes tools for video content distribution whilst omitting the fact that they are the only consumers of those tools.
Do you think that if I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Times that included plagiarised content, that they could, should and would detect that prior to publishing?
If those were the only interested parties against it in the UK then that doesn't bode well for us getting rid of it in a few years, even if we don't negotiate away our right to. Shame.
So if ISP's are required to install monitoring software, what does that mean for HTTPS, or other end-to-end encryption schemes, that prevent the ISP from doing packet inspection?
This is just a guess but I don't think ISPs are expected to do any form of DPI. The most likely question they will have to answer is "who is this IP address assigned to?" and possibly "who communicated with that IP?". Neither require any form of packet inspection that goes beyond what is needed to perform routing.
Yeah, it seems to me UKIP has good track record of things "getting rammed through without a public discussion" by now, like the 350 million for the NHS with Brexit.
Interestingly, Farage wasn’t actually a part of that, BoJo wouldn’t let him join the official Leave campaign. So you can blame UKIP for lots of things, but not the bus.
Such as what? I hear UKIP demonised a lot, but I genuinely don't know of anything they've done that is bad that wasn't simply political disagreement (wanting to leave the EU) or talking about contentious issues in a clumsy and ham-fisted way (immigration).
Sufficient stupidity applied to contentious issues is a disaster. That's how we get measles outbreaks.
Failing to present a coherent, workable programme for how we'd leave the EU and at what cost is leading us to a situation where the government is doing civil contingency planning as if we were going to be hit by a hurricane rather than a self-inflicted disastrous choice.
I'm in complete agreement, but I don't think the desire to leave is particularly contentious if it's backed by reasonable arguments (and Farage was always very keen on talking about why he didn't like the EU). The real problem comes in when we get to the point of "OK, we want to leave the EU" but immediately trigger the process without planning a strategy first. Especially with reluctant and un-aligned (May was a remainer) leadership in place.
To be fair to UKIP that was the Tories job. UKIP had ?one? MP and have never been near to government. The Tories called the referendum. They were in government. The Tories should have been ready to govern. They should have had plans in place.
Disclaimer I am a remainer and dislike UKIP as much as anyone.
I disagree, I think it's perfectly fine to want to leave the EU on principle. For example, the principle of not wanted to be ruled by unelected oligarchs who can pass laws like Article 13 which affect UK citizens.
Unelected oligarchs like the House of Lords? The UK has absolutely zero legs to stand on with regards to "unelected" or "undemocratic" arguments.
(For years I tried to be a "sensible Eurosceptic", but recent events have highlighted that the EU is a bastion of sanity compared to our current local politics)
Because having politicians work directly in the Tory part to serve the interests only of their rich donors, their partners, and themselves is so much better than being ruled by elected representatives and those chosen by those representatives (whom you call oligarchs) in Europe?
Perhaps if we hadn't been fooling around trying to destroy the project for cooperation across Europe we could have taken part in making this new legislation better?
I guess it comes down to whether you're willing to accept peace and prosperity above less power for the Tories and a few wayward laws. As we get wayward laws already in the UK (we'd get Art.13 anyway if it serves media conglomerates interests), then it comes down to whether you want to buy back greater power for the Tories at a cost of greater UK poverty, and less international cooperation.
your comment doesn't leave much room for nuance. You're just setting up a narrative of the Evil Tories who Eat Babies versus the Noble European Union and its Band of Merry Altruists. You must know that this absolutist duality is not an honest representation of reality.
You’re forgetting that Corbyn is a staunch Leaver, he opposed the EU his entire parliamentary career. That is a matter of public record. And most Leave voters were in traditional Labour areas and most Remainers were traditionally Tory voters.
See, the problem is that here we don't need principles. We need real facts and real solutions.
Many - across Europe - want to leave the EU on principle. The UK is giving the perfect example to everyone that principle is not aligned with reality in this case.
it's no mystery to me, but downvotes don't really bother me. The opportunity to engage in genuine cross-political discussion is worth the negligible cost to my ego.
He was the first one to report the decision on Twitter, and was literally livestreaming in that link I provided before the news was reported anywhere. I'm sorry that he's not on your approved list of people to report on this event.
Nazi Dog Guy is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the EU/Britain. He got in trouble for offending people. That is ridiculous that there are laws against offending people.
As bonkers as this may seem, I suspect it will fall flat on it's face the second it's put before a court.
For example, someone defends their right to use the title or quote from an article from some other news gathering organisation. Someone will need to convince a judge that it's OK for The Sunday Times, or Der Spiegel to do that, but it's not OK for Reddit or Hacker News to do that.
And eventually, someone will need to convince a court that it's OK for Charlie Booker to broadcast a Cassetteboy video mash up on the UK's Channel 4, but it's not OK for Cassetteboy to upload that same video to youtube.
It is true that the CJEU doesn't hold case law and precedent in the same high regard as other courts, but neither does it ignore them. The ECJ and CJEU serves as a check on government in the same way the courts do in most other countries. I think it is unfortunate that the EU parliament has approved this law. But I struggle to see how it will stand up in court. That said, it will take a very brave person or organisation with deep pockets and a steel will to challenge this law.
However, if this law is upheld in court, then I think we can consider the EU a failed experiment. So abhorrent is this legislation that I, an ardent "Remaniac", would rather see the EU fail and take my chances with whatever comes next, than let the EU stifle free speech and the free flow of information and ideas in this way.
> And eventually, someone will need to convince a court
I think this is exactly what they want. They don't want to automatically tax every teenage kid making memes. They just want to create a legal minefield so whenever they decide a link is not ok they will have a law that backs them up.
In a way it's good because most fair use most likely will fly under the radar just as it does today, but on the other hand it's also scary that you never really know when you are passing the threshold and might face an army of lawyers.
It's very much like patent trolls. They strike like lightning on a sunny day if you happen to build a mildly successful product that can be remotely associated with their patent.
> However, if this law is upheld in court, then I think we can consider the EU a failed experiment
What an unexpected conclusion you are jumping into. I think EU is the only capable authority in the world so far who is not afraid to challenge big corporations in favour of people. (mobile charges, customer rights, Google, Intel, Telefonica, etc..)
I completely agree that there are big problems around EU when it comes to lobbyists around Brussels. In my personal opinion they should be banned from influencing EU decisions. But, just because there is an issue with the car, does not mean that we need to burn the car completely. Better option is to help fixing the car.
Any country that legislates against free speech ans freedom of expression with such a brutal and blunt law such as this should be considered a failed experiment.
My 5c here. Maybe they just don't have much to do, so they need to justify their salaries, and they need to have some presence in the WWW to let us know that they are out there.
Hmmm. I'm not so sure. The EU parliament is usually pretty savvy on civil rights and freedom issues like this. I'm genuinely surprised that this law passed.
However, it's hard to fathom the EU parliament sometimes because it's such a broad and diverse bunch of people and interests forced into such a small political space.
If someone asked me to play devils advocate for this decision, I'd probably appeal to people's fear of foreign disinformation campaigns and the impact they're having on western democracies. I could probably cobble together a semi-compelling argument about how Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, have inadvertently handed the enemies of the west the most powerful propaganda tool in all of human history, and those enemies are using it to great effect. Or how marketing companies have convinced millions of parents worldwide to not vaccinate their children through the internet. Or how organisations like Monsanto astroturf the web and misquote or misrepresent scientific reports or news articles to make it seem like Greenpeace promote and advocate using DDT.
I'd then go on to argue that information can and must be free to share, but nefarious misinformation should not be free from punishment nor protected by law. And so, the age of anonymous and unaccountable publishing platforms must come to an end. If they don't want to be held accountable for the content they publish, then that's fine. But that just means we restrict the type of content they're allowed to publish. After all, we have advertising standards that the press and broadcasters adhere to. We have rules around when and how "traditional" media can report on politics. So the Youtubes, Twitters, Reddits, and Facebooks of the world can either fall in line with those rules, or carry on as they are but simply refrain from anything that could be perceived as advertising or political reporting... which is pretty much everything except dick picks I think.
Now, I'm pretending to defend this law. Don't assume I believe any of what I just said. I actually think this law abhorrent. And while I do have concerns about the unrestrained power and influence of the web, I don't think this law is the answer to my concerns. But if I put my mind to selling this law to people who don't know as much about the web as I do, I think this kind of argument would be effective. On some people at least. And MEP's aren't technical people. They're political people. And I think it would be pretty easy to scare them into backing this law whilst appealing to their sense of justice, fairness, and honesty.
> I'd then go on to argue that information can and must be free to share, but nefarious misinformation should not be free from punishment nor protected by law.
I'd argue that 80% of statements made by political actors are about spreading misinformation (or fake news), misinterpreted (misreading latest wikileaks reports) or deliberate lies to drive a point home (immigrants are driving the UK economy down!). For example when the US reps states "we found nuclear guns in Iraq" is it a valid statement or nefarious misinformation. Does prior experience by an actor amount for anything? Who gets to decide?
> Someone will need to convince a judge that it's OK for The Sunday Times, or Der Spiegel to do that, but it's not OK for Reddit or Hacker News to do that.
Newswires aren't free and come with a copyright agreement.
This decision is one of the many reasons why Europe will never reach the likes of Silicon Valley, no matter how much money will they sink down the "technology" hole (not that the US doesn't have its fair share of dumb legislators, because it has). This continent is a mess in terms of IT, with a few exceptions (London, Berlin, Dublin, some spots in Eastern Europe).
Exactly. I thought that the EU wanted a thriving tech sector, but it doesn't have any social media platforms with the reach that American ones do. And after this mess of legislation, the barriers to entry into the market will get far more expensive. Nothing will ever be able to clear it.
Sometimes, when companies climb the ladder to the top of the market, they kick the ladder down. This time, big copyright (and their political friends) kicked it down.
> but it doesn't have any social media platforms with the reach that American ones do.
A lot of people I know don't bother having more then one social media account. I don't know what you mean
I honestly don't understand why people keep comparing the culture of American cities and states to European ones. America is one giant country - the EU isn't. The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin.
Not every city in America is San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin, but neither one state nor one city is as technologically dysfunctional as their European counterparts.
The first poster compares markets and laws, not cultures. The EU market is in dire need of a solution with similar effects as fair use, yet this tranche of amendments does very little to shift copyright into that direction; worse, with art. 13 it goes even further in the opposite direction.
Just the last sentence is wrong. The EU isn't a mess in terms of IT, it's merely irrelevant on the global consumer market.
> The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin.
As someone who's spent a significant amount of time in each of those cities and all around both the US and Europe, I can firmly state that this is _not_ true.
The cultural differences between European cities is vastly overrated. On the other hand, the differences across the US - particularly differences between urban metropolitan areas and everywhere else - are massively understated.
What about the cultural differences between London and rural Romania or Hungary? An even larger gap exists there than between SF and rural America, due to the very wide differences in macro national culture, national history and language.
Financially that's also true. The median income in Bulgaria is a few hundred dollars per month. The extreme variance between the countries at the top of the EU and the bottom, is far beyond anything you see in the US between states. There's an eight to ten fold GDP per capita gap between Bulgaria and countries like Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden. In the US, there's close to a two fold gap between Massachusetts or New York and West Virginia or Mississippi.
"If you are in the EU, you are not allowed to use this website." Pretty much the same solution for kids under 13 years of age (which is to say, they of course still do use these sites, they simply lie about it which shifts the burden...)
Not that I agree with this copyright directive, it's horrible and I intend to find out which of my representatives supported it such that I can do something about it.
But the EU, as a whole, is the world's biggest market and it is a common market in spite of legal and cultural differences between countries. So that's pretty naive.
And if companies think the "compliance cost" is too big, that's fine, it means they are leaving money on the table for their competition to pick up. The best outcome is actually the EU getting some real alternatives to US services that are deemed to be indispensable.
So personally, as an EU citizen, for companies no longer wanting to serve EU citizens, all I can say is don't let the door hit you on your way out.
> the EU, as a whole, is the world's biggest market
Except it isn't really a single market. Each country has a unique language, culture and body of law. The cost of taking a German product to France is much higher than expanding from California to Texas and New York. (California, Texas and New York having a higher combined GDP than France and Germany [1].)
I too am an EU citizen, living in the Netherlands. I am also an American citizen and have lived there.
Although I generally prefer the Dutch set of laws to the American, Dutch laws stifle innovation. The difference in even simple things like setting up a business, hiring an employee, and ensuring compliance with local laws is insane.
Every time I go to America I get requests for random things that either don't exist in the Netherlands or are criminally expensive. Bengay cream here costs €16.20 for 57g, only available at special online shops. In America you can buy it everywhere, €5.84 for 113g. That's one example. You might criticize it for being too arcane, but there are hundreds of thousands. Each one of these things costs double the Amazon price or more for popular products: RAM, angle steel, many batteries, sanding belts, IEMs, pumps, permethrin, LEDs. That's just off the top of my head. Every time I need something it's a game: will I get lucky and pay 40% extra, or will it be only available for 200% the price? Or even worse, not available at all?
You want to sell those things above? Go ahead. A few of them are even triple (!!!) the American retail price, so you'll make bank, right? Start a business. But you won't, and nobody else will, because it's tremendously difficult to start a business here.
I can understand higher taxes make products more expensive - sure. Those taxes provide the benefits I enjoy in a country like the Netherlands. I can even deal with the cost of shipping from America. But I cannot deal with paying double or triple the cost for hundreds of thousands of various products. And laws like this just continue the movement in the wrong direction.
Netherlands has a lot of issues, but setting up a company is not one of them. And taxes are high, but as a company they are good on an EU scale (and going down) and far easier to deal with than in, say, Spain.
I have no clue what you are talking about with those products though; that's the case in many countries. In the south of Spain I pay more for a fridge or a bath than if I import them from the Netherlands. NL is an expensive country for some things. In the US you can get Bengay cream (i have no idea what that is by the way) for 5.84 but university and healthcare can bankrupt you. Give me NL every day as long as that lasts; these consumer products are not fundamentals while education and healthcare are imho.
It upsets me that this is the highest comment below my post because you completely missed my point.
I specifically said that I prefer the Dutch way in general, and that I don't mind paying higher taxes to support this. Hell, I live here, I hold a Dutch passport, and I vote for the related causes.
However, what I hate is certain aspects of the regulatory environment that choke out startups. That has nothing to do with healthcare or education but rather to do with very restrictive EU + Dutch laws.
Making it difficult to start a business makes the incumbents more powerful, and the incumbents already have high prices and limited selection here in the Netherlands.
[partially copied from a comment of mine below]
Starting a company here in the Netherlands is quite difficult. It involves compliance with every law related to your business, hiring employees, purchasing services for the business, etc etc. All of these things are more onerous, expensive and difficult here.
I've been involved with many startups on both sides of the ocean. In America (for better or worse) you get up and go. In Europe, simple things like creating a contract and paying someone are way more difficult and the barriers are much higher. Everything from the address you register your business at to protecting yourself legally is an issue.
It's difficult to explain exactly how debilitating the regulatory environment is to someone who hasn't experienced it firsthand. Startups are fragile. Many companies that are now unicorns were at some point on the brink of collapse for a good bit of their early life. Just one trigger can kill a startup, and additional regulations can be that trigger.
Sure, there are other things crippling innovation in Europe: a total lack of venture capital and fewer "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" play a big part.
I agree with you on most these things, I just think I misunderstood the ‘rant’ about the more expensive goods.
And yes, some parts of starting companies can be hard, thats what you have an accountant for who does that. Doing it yourself is madness in most/all of Europe I think. Might be easier in the US but I do think many of these think help rather that stifle (I like that you cannot hire/fire people on a whim for instance), however I agree it usually goes too far. And in that regard NL is still one of the easiest; ES, FR, DE are all far worse. Bureaucracy went a few levels beyond there.
I too had companies in a bunch countries, but not the US, and found Spain the hardest and the UK the easiest. HK in between. But after you opened a company and have the employees, I prefer the Netherlands. The tax actually seem to be willing to help you (had many company tax audits over the past 25 years in different countries and different companies and the NL ones seem to be by far the most relaxed).
But sorry for the misunderstanding (still think the product rant was a bit off on this topic as it probably is really not related), and I agree with you. But what is the solution. I would hate to see the NL/EU turn into the US (as it is now) and most of the fixes that countries try are incentives that usually make the rich richer, get companies in power etc. The end game there is bad for humanity in my opinion. But maybe you have actual solutions in mind without (those) sideeffects. In which case; ga in de politiek alsjeblieft!
Setting up a business also involves compliance with every law related to your business, hiring employees, purchasing services for the business, etc etc. All of these things are more onerous, expensive and difficult here.
I've been involved with many startups on both sides of the ocean. In America (for better or worse) you get up and go. In Europe, simple things like creating a contract and paying someone are way more difficult and the barriers are much higher. Everything from the address you register your business at to protecting yourself legally is an issue.
Come on. Have you even read my other comments? I'm NOT saying to scrap worker protection and I'm NOT saying that all minimum standards should be killed.
My point is this: The EU has a ridiculous amount of bullshit laws, like this one, that make it harder to be a startup. These laws do not benefit the consumer at all.
It's idiotic arguments like yours - where people automatically assume hurting businesses is being pro-consumer - that has got us to the current stifling regulatory climate.
Literally this one! The very law this thread is here because of!
Furthermore, it's a death by a thousand cuts scenario. It's not as if the Kill All Startups Act of 2009 is the one thing crushing European innovation, and by repealing that bill we solve all problems. Everything from transferring shares in a company to complying with GDPR to the address you register your business at to how to protect yourself legally is difficult here.
For many laws involved, I like the law but dislike parts of the implementation. For example GDPR. Given the choice between GDPR and no GDPR I'd prefer to have the GDPR. But there are a lot of issues in the implementation. There's entirely contradictory advice on the Internet from trustworthy sources on what is and isn't compliant. A number of lawyers suggest the use of arcane popups where you have to manually deselect each of hundreds of individual trackers. This strategy is used on a large number of websites now, including many popular ones. Is this compliant? Nobody knows! Even after spending many hours researching the GDPR and carefully crafting a plan based on advice from trusted lawyers you still might open yourself up to massive liability. The LOW tier of fines is _the higher of_ €20 million or 2% of your annual turnover. By making a simple one-person website I suddenly expose myself to a minimum of €20 million in liability! Now, is that fine likely if you make a good faith effort? No, but it is possible!
Here's an example of my mental calculations for starting a small website, based in the Netherlands vs. the US.
Netherlands: Hmm, I want to start a small website to sell widgets. First, I've got to form the company. Ah, shame, I'm not legally able to register the company at the address I live at. I've got to rent a shell office. Ok, time to go to a sketchy company and pay them €1200 per year to use their mailbox. I start to set up a website; I have to hire a lawyer to interpret many of the complex and interplaying laws around websites, widget selling, and small businesses in the EU and the Netherlands. After spending thousands, I'm ready to set up the site. I build my company, but it is an expensive process as many things I need cost far more than they would in America. Everything from pens to keyboards to hard drives is substantially more expensive. The site is now running, after spending a very large amount of money. I hire someone. They seem motivated and start working hard. Unfortunately, their output slows. My business is choking. I can't afford an unproductive employee. Dutch law means I can't fire the employee without their permission. I've got to take them to court or a public authority. I hire a lawyer again, and prepare the case. I show clear evidence that their firing would be justified. The employee resists, however, drawing out the proceedings. My bank balance nears zero. After a long and hard battle I win; the UWV decides that their firing is justified. As part of the "win", however, I must still compensate the employee many thousands of euros of salary, keep them employed until a set time, and pay myriad other costs. This drives me deep into bankruptcy. Because I am a small business, I am also declared personally bankrupt, and my assets are seized.
America: I want to make a small website to sell widgets. Wow, I get free grants from the government to encourage small businesses, nice! I set up the site and buy some widgets. I hire a local lawyer to ask about any relevant laws I've got to comply with. We sit down and for an hour of his time I now feel that I am sufficiently legally protected, and sleep easy. A few weeks later I get invitations to participate in the local business community. Wow, I'm invited to dinner with the governor of the state! My business expands and I hire someone to start shipping widgets. They work great for a few weeks, but then they stop working as quickly. My business struggles. After giving them some time to improve, their output is still low and I fire them. I hire another employee, and my business grows again; eventually, I retire on a yacht.
I'm sure I can find counter examples. Off the top of my head, aerosol deodorant is 1/3 in the UK vs US. Generic medicines, e.g. Aspirin, Paracetamol, or Ibuprofen are cheaper. Cheese. Basic shit.
Seems like a bit of a straw-man argument anyway. Businesses don't usually pay consumer-oriented taxes like VAT (UK), or Mehrwertsteuer (DE). So which taxes are we talking about exactly?
And importing stuff isn't too hard. If it was a truly Dutch issue, you'd set up the import business in another EU country, and then ship it to the Netherlands once it's inside the Union.
I just checked and it appears Ibuprofen/Paracetamol are roughly 1 cent per pill in reasonable quantities for both sides of the pond. My quick Googling showed Amazon had them for slightly cheaper than British supermarkets in fact. After checking Walmart vs British supermarkets for decent quality cheese (and I'm fairly selective about my cheddar) I found the prices to be roughly equivalent. Prices for edible cheddar are far higher here in the Netherlands, by the way.
I'll give you aerosol deodorant, but I think that comes down to a preference for stick deodorant in America - which costs approximately as much as British aerosol deodorant.
That's one product; I named ten, and I can provide plenty more. The fundamental problem of not having access to many products for a reasonable price is a big one, and unfortunately I think Europeans just accept it.
Look, I'm pro EU, and I'm not protesting the taxes we pay in the Netherlands. I think they go to a good cause, and I don't think high taxes make it impossible to start a business. But onerous regulations do. Shit like this just adds to the pile of things that a startup has to deal with, and eventually it's too much.
I'm not saying that higher regulations are just a Dutch issue, by the way. I think it's a general European issue. I just picked the Netherlands because I live here and have personal experience with startups here (as well as in Germany.)
I generally like the GDPR, but many details of it were moronic. I've visited hundreds of sites where you have to individually deselect each of hundreds of trackers. Is that legal? Nobody knows! The GDPR is a nightmare for startups: you've got tens of contradictory blog posts from legal experts saying different things, 28 individual country regulators involved... Even if your startup is very privacy-friendly, you still (probably - nobody knows for sure!) have to put up one of those ugly big GDPR-walls to every EU visitor, which messes up your user experience and turns people away.
I don't understand the relationship between regulations and the higher cost of bengay. It seems more likely that the higher cost of bengay is due to it being needed to ship across the world.
Is there not a Dutch version of the same compound, manufacturered closer to home?
Bengay was one small example which I picked because it was the first off my head. Assuming that a Dutch import business bought it from the shelves of Walmart for the normal price, sales tax and all, they would have to be somehow paying €260 per kilogram for shipping for the price to be what it is; shipping, or taxes, can in no way come close to explaining the price being five and a half times higher.
There are several methyl salicylate products available in the Netherlands, but they all are available for a similar i.e. extortionate price.
In a country with easier to navigate laws, you can start an import business and sell the products locally. Sure, there is a price increase due to VAT, shipping, handling and business expenses, but this is typically reasonable. For an example of a low-volume perishable food product, I'll take stroopwafels. Here in the Netherlands, where they are made, a 200 gram bag costs between €1.50 and €2.40 depending on the brand. In America, the same 200g bag costs €2.40 at Trader Joes (which is $2.79.)
That's between a 0-60% price increase - and that's for a perishable, low-volume, inexpensive food product sold in a luxury grocery store.
Unfortunately that's only 12% methyl salicylate. The people I know/knew that use Bengay regularly only use the higher strength versions at 30% methyl salicylate.
That said, I do find the UK to be substantially better than the Netherlands for buying a lot of things, despite being only about a hundred miles away. I wish there was an easy way to get products from the UK to the Netherlands - that would make a lot of things easier. There's stuff like Borderlinx but the prices are very high for such a short distance.
I'm an attorney and I've gotten lots of small business owners asking me about GDPR compliance. It's simple in theory -- just disclose your policies, let people delete their data, etc. The mechanics of compliance aren't really the issue. It's concern about enforcement and the uncertainty of it. After I explain jurisdictional issues and the fact that enforcement of GDPR against a purely US-based company is completely untested (and probably not even possible), most just reply "fuck it, we'll just not sell to anyone in Europe."
I agree with the basic concept of GDPR, but the uncertainty around it, the seemingly unclear nature of what exactly it means, and the fact that it will be enforced by each individual EU member potentially differently, all adds up. It's just not worth it.
> If the Data Subject, moves out of the EU border and say becomes an expat, or goes on holiday then their personal data processed under these circumstances is not covered by the GDPR and they are no longer a Data Subject in the context of the GDPR, unless their data is still processed by an organisation "established" in the EU.
Good luck enforcing EU laws in the United States - I'm sure our government would be thrilled to extradite US Citizens (who have never been to the EU) for GDPR violations.
Where the hell did this ridiculous talking point come from? Do you actually know what "law" even is? Of course someone in another jurisdiction can blow off law from another polity if they feel like including when dealing with that polity's citizens, and in turn said polity can try to pursue action against them. But if they do not travel their and have no asset exposure there and their own country has a reasonable level of power and protectiveness of its citizens then the likely responses tend to be limited and passive in nature, such as internet censorship orders.
I mean, this should be utterly obvious given that most Westerners are not complying either laws around the world constantly. We can and do criticize the leadership and governments of any and every country as is our right in ways that are absolutely illegal according to those countries, just for one simple example. The EU is free to get some help from China and make a Great Firewall of their own and censor the net, but if an American blows off something of theirs that is legal in the US and they come demanding the US enforce their law they will get told to pound sand. I mean, this isn't even just normal discretion, in some cases Congress has even flat out made it illegal for the US to honor foreign judgements, such as the 2010 SPEECH Act which rendered all foreign libel judgements unenforceable, unless it's a country that has a direct equivalent to the First Amendment of equal enforcement (I'm aware of zero countries in the world where this is the case) or the defendant would be liable if tried in the US, which in practice means basically any enforcement faces a near insurmountable bar.
That doesn't address things at all, as the top comment and subsequent ones immediately point out. The entire foundational point of a polity is precisely that it defines the law within its own jurisdiction. No country, not even the USA, is powerful enough to actually act as a world government right now, which means that it is completely legally fine and in some cases morally correct to blow off laws of other polities so long as one remains careful to remain out of their power. The EU can demand others do anything they like in the same way any random person on the street could but whether that actually means anything is purely a matter of power.
With respect (and to downvoters as well) I did not take dominotw’s reply as uncivil, and they has my upvote even if I disagree and wish they’d expanded with their own thoughts rather then merely linked a previous thread. It was not an adhom or personal attack of any kind, and expressing serious irritation over a very serious issue should not itself requiring flagging if it’s a real response.
I think the fear is that troll law firms will sprout up that get really good and nailing smaller companies for a minor, relatively harmless infraction.
What would they gain? The company would get a warning from an officer telling them they're not compliant and to address it. If the company fixes the issue, all good. If it doesn't, it gets fined. The troll law firm won't see any money from that fine.
That's not how GDPR is enforced. A relatively minor, harmless infraction will get at most a letter from the regulator asking for it to be fixed. More likely is that fuck all will happen, which is what currently happens in the UK.
Huh, I thought it was grounds for a hefty fine right off the bat. What about horns being trumpeted that GDPR is going to stifle innovation (smaller companies unable to muster the legal force to comply)?
They want you to comply, first and foremost. If you comply, then no fines. If you don't comply, you'll get fined, that's how I understand.
GDPR is a process, it's about pushing companies to good practices through compliance. A lot of it makes sense, for example, making sure your staff understand basic IT security practices, which is no different to health and safety.
> Now, Google appears to be changing its mind. Under a plan called Dragonfly, the company has been testing a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market.
But it's also far riskier, at leats this time they were assaulted by a law in the EU parliament. In China, the party could just decide they don't like you and get rid of your business.
Are you comparing it to age prompts? Those were way less effective than IP based geo blocks. Since GDPR, a lot of, maybe even most of the time it's not worth the effort to reload the page through a proxy. Especially for stuff linked to me by social media.
"Article 11 is intended to give publishers and newspapers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories…”
Is there anything stopping a search engine like Google choosing not to link to a newspaper? Surely they can’t be required to link to a newspaper AND then pay that newspaper to do so?
The trade-off if Google chose not to link to the newspaper would be a (slightly) less useful search engine, but the cost to the newspapers would surely be higher in the long term…or am I missing something?
About 10 years ago, newspapers got together to try and get Google to give them some money, for the content Google was indexing to populate their news search results.
Google's response was to give them better ways of de-indexing content. IE, a way to opt out. Take it or leave it. Naturally, few newspaper took leave it, preferring to get readers & no revenue than no readers and no revenue.
Since then, efforts have focused on turning that around. Give Google a take it or leave it option. Either shut down Google news or pay newspapers somehow. So far, Google have walked a couple of times, when such laws were passed locally.
I think newspapers tend to forget we don't need them either as there are many choices for news that are legit. They have for far too long used to captive audiences and that obviously is not the case. however like most industries which had captive audiences they fall back on regulations to protect their bottom line rather than improve their offerings.
On the other hand, newspapers were a lot less rubbish two decades ago when they could still afford to employ many journalists. That is what they're trying to get back to with legislation like this.
I think they went rubbish before the internet in search of profits. Remember the old meme about whenever the news covers something you know well it is bullshit but you trust it in areas you don't know about? I recall it being obviously worse in the early established days of the internet where there was enough to fact check but not mainstream enough that journalists knew about it to make their jobs easier.
Admittedly I bear a hard grudge against them from my youth and how they would scapegoat and stir up moral panics about the youth and their media. Rainbow parties, bullshit claims about video games and anime, etc. They still love to use Millennials as a slur.
I personally suspect that demographic warfare came back to bite them hard as they grow up and don't trust the ones constantly talking shit about them on garbage grounds.
And that would clearly be ridiculous (though believable that the EU would try). Are they going to fine Google for monopolising weather queries next? How about putting Casio out of business by abusing search monopoly to provide a free calculator?
No we don't. I get my news from public broadcasters. They have the bonus of not pushing the owner's political agenda and being subject to public oversight.
Not always true, although they do tend to be soft on their own country. In either case you can solve that just by reading multiple countries' public news.
Yeah. Start a newspaper that talks about such issues honestly, not like those so-called journalistic conglomerates that curate "local" newspapers across whole countries.
The issue comes from companies that were too powerful before they went to ask google for money.
I’m under the assumption you have to setup your site and apply for Google News before they start indexing your articles. Of the
Big publications opt out it just leaves space for smaller outlets to grow.
If I'm not mistaken, it's still an option out basis. Google crawl, index and search everything by default and allow content owners some controls, either via site manager or via flags in your html.
Didn't Spain news media ram through some kind of link-tax laws to try and extricate money out of Google, and that's why we don't hear any news out of Spain any more?
Yes, Spain has been shut out of Google News since December, 2014. It's a good example of regulation that can actually go so far that even the biggest companies will stop doing business in your country.
Google News for Spain certainly closed in response to that law. I guess that Google News for other countries then also doesn’t link to spanish newspapers, since those could still somehow sue google as a company that operates in Spain.
Google should resolve this by conspicuously refusing to link to newspapers. There should be a banner saying "results from certain news sites are not available in your country", like the existing chillingeffects one.
(This dealt with an earlier local version of this in some European countries)
Google’s end goal is that the only way to monetise content is by one of their ads. That’s not a world good for either democracy or journalism or any artistic work.
It is an intended block on convincing people through facts. In all reality, the EU is ruled by old bureaucrats and they see internet like a commodity that needs to be controlled and regulated. Make a joke on the internet? Think twice your IP will be your liability.
This already is in progress on Youtube (an Alphabet company). There is significant push to onboard the well known cable news brands on Youtube, on preferential conditions as compared to the regular, individual youtubers.
Basing a decision on nationality is. Does it really make that much difference that it's a company rather than a person ? I mean, it does, but ... on the other hand companies are nothing but groups of people.
It's far less than actual racism, but it's still not right.
Germany was a pioneer with its "Leistungsschutzrecht" and German publishers indeed wanted to force Google to show their news snippets (and therefore pay for them).
Their reasoning was that Google as a monopoly position and therefore they have to show news from all publishers equally.
Equality really wasn’t what the german publishers had in mind. They wanted Google to pay for being able to show a snippet of their content in News. A ridiculous idea, that was countered by the only sensible answer: Google asked publishers if they wanted to continue to have their content listed in Google News for free or if their content should be removed. Needless to say that almost all of the proponents, including the most vocal publishers, agreed to keep their content indexed, thereby rendering the law useless.
Tells you something about Google. They seem to think they're just another company doing business. They're not - they are a monstrous monopoly, quoted response is clearly bullying and should be treated as such.
I disagree. The publishers line of thought is absurd.
How can anyone reason that publishers should be paid for the major share of visitors Google forwards to their content? Of course publishers have every right to de-index their content from news, search or both and the tools to do so have always been available. However apparently they had to be reminded explicitely.
Google, or similar services like Apple News, certainly can't be forced to pay for content they don't want or need.
Is the license fee really for a simple link? I'd think the other publishers would love for sites like Google to be linking content and driving traffic to their platforms.
If it's about scraping content and presenting it in a separate feed or otherwise outside of the source platform, I can see why they would not want that.
I was wondering the same thing then read in the article that links with 'single word' descriptions are ok. So my guess is that it's aimed a "linkers" who quote a significant fraction of an article (I.e. eliminating the reason to click on the link)
> I was wondering the same thing then read in the article that links with 'single word' descriptions are ok. So my guess is that it's aimed a "linkers" who quote a significant fraction of an article (I.e. eliminating the reason to click on the link)
Wouldn't that also preclude inclusion of the title? How would single word descriptions even be meaningful beyond being used as citation link anchors?
The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly, and so I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown. The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue. I think there is also a valid argument for this as well.
But I do think that the EU copyright law is significantly flawed because it's purpose is to further extend the already ridiculously over-extended draconian copyright laws that exist in the EU. I don't think the issues they (ostensibly) set out to solve are something that should be ignored though -- Google acting as a biased monopoly which implements features that impact people's ability to make money is a real problem that needs to be solved somehow.
> The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly
This is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
> The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views..
This is just false. Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com). Unless you're talking about AMP, but that's a decision made by the publisher too.
> [Google being a monopoly] is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
I don't think the existence of other websites on the internet is not really an argument against Google being a monopoly. Without question, the vast majority of the population (outside China) uses Google. This means that the majority of people who use the internet are using Google as their method of accessing websites, and thus Google has an effective monopoly on what links people see (and thus by proxy what articles they read and what they think about topics).
I'm arguing all of this from a point of view where you don't really care how Google or anything behind the scenes works -- most people view Google as a utility that just tells you what "the internet" has to say on a topic. Given it's prevalence and significant impact on people's decision making, it should have far more accountability.
> Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com).
Google also has their Q&A thing where they parse the contents of web pages to answer questions you ask Google -- so you don't end up on the person who wrote the answer's website. I think that is pretty clearly an example of Google showing people's content without giving them page views (whether or not you agree that it is an issue).
If there are viable competitors then can’t consumers simply move to different platforms? I primarily use DuckDuckGo, so how is Google search a monopoly?
If you’re going to base it solely off number of users then you’re effectively punishing businesses for being successful and NOT from harming consumers.
Google can (and has) changed large things about their platform that may negatively impact their users (~90% of the internet population which is ~3 billion people -- larger than the population of any single country) and their users don't really have much of a choice.
For instance, changes to PageRank have negatively impacted websites and business consistently in the past (so much that there's an industry around making pages cater to the whims of an unauditable algorithm -- SEO). I think the fact that websites obviously cannot just switch to a competitor (unless they want to stop catering to a potential market of 3 billion people) rules that as being monopolistic behaviour.
That's what I mean when I refer to a monopoly. If you have exclusive control over an algorithm that affects more people than any government body on earth, then you are a monopoly. Same argument goes for quite a few of their other products (if your personal mail server isn't effectively "blessed" by GMail you cannot communicate with the majority of internet users), but Search is the most obvious one.
Monopoly doesn't mean that there's only one company in the market. It means that one company has an overwhelming amount of market share. Google unquestionably fits this description when it comes to internet search, outside of China at least.
Generally it's measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index - HHI.
Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?
I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countries).
My point is not that Google is doing something illegal (and thus arguing over the legal definition of a monopoly is not helpful -- just like arguing over the legal meaning of the US 1st Amendment is not helpful in discussions over the concept of free speech). I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). Now since you don't pay for Google accounts this isn't a strict violation of anti-trust laws, but it is very close in concept to the sort of thing anti-trust laws protect against.
> Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?
100% certainly would.
> I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
What do you mean by "the ordinary meaning of the word" here? It's also not clear to me that "effectively everyone uses Google".
91% of internet users is about 3 billion people. They control a platform that affects more people than any single nation state (2-3x larger than the largest nation state and larger than the top 3 countries combined). For instance, changes in PageRank (which is an unaccountable and unauditable algorithm) affect every user of their site in terms of what links they see, what articles they read, and by extension what they think.
You might argue it's the fault of users for not being informed, but I think that if a company has a significant impact on the lives of 3 billion people (which again, is a larger influence than any single government on this planet -- and nation states have constitutions and laws specifically to ensure that they serve the people and are accountable) then it has reached the point where it either needs to be broken up or be regulated. I don't care which, I just think that this cowboy mentality (that software is somehow special and lives in a world where regulation is always an unreasonable viewpoint to have) has to stop at some point.
Regarding the term monopoly, there are different views on what precisely the term means. Google does have anti-competitive practices which you might argue make them act as a monopoly. You can argue they have a monopoly on internet searches because whenever they change PageRank in a way that negatively impacts some users (or when they make changes to GMail's spam filter so that it starts blocking valid emails) there isn't a rush to a different service because there is no way to co-ordinate such a rush. Instead you have other secondary industries like SEO which exist purely to try to keep websites reachable from Google. The fact they have the power to manipulate how the majority of sites operate clearly means they have significant (and in my view monopolistic) control over the market.
They also have a market share that is actually incomprehensible. Microsoft was indicted under anti-trust laws because of Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows. I think Google acts as much more of a monopoly than Microsoft did in the 90s, and "good guy Google" really is an outdated mental model for a company with that much influence over people's lives.
> But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service).
That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i... opens for me without asking for a login). I'm subscribed to that mailing list from an email address which is not a Google account, and I didn't have to log in to any Google account when I subscribed. I can post to that mailing list directly from a normal email client, through a non-Google email provider.
The link you just posted requires me to log in, and I've had this problem with go-nuts and the OCI mailing list in the past. It's strange this doesn't happen to you -- maybe it's a geographically specific thing (I'm connecting from Australia)?
Of course you don't need to login in order to post on the mailing list, but I think that's only one of the three main features of a mailing list (broadcast, subscription, and archival) that I can do without logging in.
Though the word implies otherwise a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors. At least not in a legal sense anymore.
It is defined by it's marketshare. And google search is by and large a monopoly in this regard having ~90% market share in virtually all segments of the market.
> Though the word implies otherwise a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors. At least not in a legal sense anymore.
Yes, it is, though in practice that's based on complex factual analysis of whether there is real competition not whether there are other players in the same descriptive market.
> It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, marketshare is a “same descriptive market” test that people casually talking about competition use; legally, the more relevant tests are things like pricing power—can the alleged monopolist raise prices in some range without losing sales to a competitor. You can have a very large marketshare in a descriptive market but lack pricing power, or have small marketshare in a descriptive market and have pricing power because the market described is really multiple segregated markets in practice.
>[..] a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors.[..]It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, I can't agree. I don't even consider Microsoft a monopoly, even though their product comes pre-installed on every PC you can buy in shops. If you can't get any alternative ISP (to e.g. AT&T) where you live, by any means, now that is a monopoly.
Move house? To where? In areas with only a single ISP, and that ISP 'owns' the poles/whatever, you can move as much as you want. Nothing changes.
Or did you mean moving to another city? Another part of the country? Really?
It should be obvious that it's perfectly possible to define something as a monopoly in a certain area. If a monopoly could only be defined as a monopoly if it were global, there wouldn't be many.
For the record, I do agree that ISPs are monopolies (or oligopolies) in many parts of the US and other countries as well. However they are not the only form of monopoly, and I don't understand why you seem to be saying that the statement "Google is a monopoly" is implicitly saying "ISPs are not a monopoly". They're both monopolies, just different kinds -- the geographic argument doesn't make sense for websites for instance (outside of countries that massively censor the internet).
> The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly
Is it? I mean, sure, far more people use Google than, say, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But there's nothing actually stopping them from using those alternatives, other than the fact that they're not as good.
That's obviously correct, but it seems weird to use a different metric for market share and lock-in. If you define Google's customers as ad buyers, then they're very much not a monopoly, have way less than 91% market share, and their competitiors don't have a lack of users.
If they have a monopoly on search because of their share of searches, then surely the relevant lock-in would be how easily users of search can move to competitors?
Think about it this way: there are plenty of products and services that you can't advertise anywhere else but on google search, so Google has a monopoly on that. This monopoly exists because of Google's abusive practices to prevent competition from entering the market it wants to own.
> I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown
I agree that regulation might be useful here, and impartial search results are a good goal. But linking fees go against that. If newspaper A wants a fee from google for showing its links but newspaper B doesn't, it would be unfair to the entire market to force google to include both A and B equally. If A and B agree to charge google the same fee, that sounds a lot like a cartel doing price fixing, which is already illegal. The government could set a fixed price google has to pay, but at that point we have given up on finding a free market solution, so that's a last resort that isn't nessesary yet.
It's fine that people can demand money for links, but I don't see any scenario where this would happen in reality.
>The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue
Think about how grossly afflicted with clickbait the news ecosystem is today, and then imagine how much worse it could get if Google were legally prevented from even attaching a blurb to the links that it shows users.
How do you judge impartial objectively? You can't even handle fake news without it being a cudgel for censors denying reality. Pure stats won't work and as seen with the moderation problem with Facebook not advocating their partisan view sets off their persecution complex.
Also by previewing they prevent load as well and boost relevance. That favors real data instead of SEO page caching garbage that tries to get matched to every common keyword. You do not have a right to a business model, much less it being unchanged by time.
ooh the widget content. wow that’s huge, most google results have some kind of widget content be it q&a results or images or even key excerpts. never really thought that it’s reducing a lot of page views but with enough of those little widgets it probably adds up. If you’re getting what you’re looking for right on the results page then why click on a link?
This is wrong on more levels than it seems from the first glance:
1) I've witnessed creeping internet censorship starting just like this: first it's something as innocuous as "let's protect creators" or "let's protect children from harmful content", then 6 years later you can't criticize the government. They've just created a legal framework for massive automated censorship, and also Overton window was moved. I expect this to happen as soon as this law is backed up with the technical means.
2) People in power are uncomfortable with the current state of the internet, that is a true p2p platform for communication. Can't have that! We just got moved one step closer towards their vision of the Internet, that is nothing more than TV + storefront.
Case in point: abuse of the DMCA ironically took down this[1] article titled "EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line".
If we look at the DMCA notice[2], you'll see that the claim was made to Google that a song belonging to Real Housewives of Melbourne breakout act, Gamble Breaux, was used on the site. There is no such song on the page.
Here's a few other sites that were taken off of Google with that claim. There's a theme.
In Finland, 2006 the parliament made a law that that Finnish police will keep a block list of foreign web addresses containing child porn, and Finnish internet providers should block access to these.
In 2007, a website appeared, that criticises the law, and claimed that using a web crawler, they had found that actually over 95% of the blocked addresses contain only legal porn. Also legal gay porn was quite overrepresented in the block list. Occasionally also for example www.w3.org was on the block list. And a memorial website for a dead princess of Thailand, which caused a minor diplomatic crisis, since defaming the royal family is a severe offence in Thailand.
And then in 2008, the Finnish police also added the aforementioned criticizing website to the block list, although the law clearly said that it applies to blocking foreign, not domestic, websites.
Russia. The first bill was passed around 2012. There is one key difference, though. As Russian government generally lacks influence on Western tech companies, they chose to target ISPs, while the EU law in question goes after hosting providers.
It is significant because while network-level filtering is potentially more destructive, the agency in charge of enforcement of the russian law (Roskomnadzor) stumbled upon cryptography (who could have thought!). Their IP-level filters don't work for TLS, so the only option they are left with is all-or-nothing block by IP. This kind of censorship lacks subtlety, therefore big companies have some room for negotiation (small ones get banned without any questions asked).
The EU law doesn't even bother with networks, it threatens companies directly. And the EU market is large, so tech giants won't just shrug, they'll probably choose to comply.
Russian Federation was never like western democracies. It began long time before 2012 in Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003, because he wanted to oppose current status-quo in politics. State media are propaganda machines for the state a lot longer too. You can't really compare EU bill to Russia situation, they are at totally different level. The bill you are mentioning was just introduced to keep up with modern media censorship in Russia. Papers and TV were censored a long time ago.
Western countries indeed have functional democracies, but freedom of speech is not sacred here either. Consider Britain for an extreme example. And you're only talking about the current situation, while I am making a pessimistic prediction based on the current attitude towards freedom of information exchange and some past experience.
> And you're only talking about the current situation, while I am making a pessimistic prediction based on the current attitude towards freedom of information exchange and some past experience.
It's indeed a pessimistic opinion but I understand where it's coming from based on where you live. I was born in authoritarian country also and lived in it when I was a kid, I am living now in western democracy in EU and based on my experience, knowledge and after reading most of the legislation myself I am more optimistic.
If it was just censorship maybe, but this is also trying to tax them on essentially all content they link to. No way is google taking this one sitting down, if it actually goes into effect expect first google, then probably others (Facebook almost certainly) to slap blanket bans on all of EU with a nice little landing page helpfully explaining exactly what everyone should complain about to their local EU representative.
I don't really understand why this comment is downvoted? OP wrote he is not disputing but want to study it. What's wrong with that? I am curious also and would like to know.
Because we live in an era of increased authoritarianism.
And the reality for those of us that don't like it is that authoritarianism doesn't appear from nowhere. It appears because of the prevailing attitude of large segments of the population.
This means that criticism towards authority is generally received with skepticism and a very high evidence standard is used to judge the 'correctness' or the 'paranoia/conspiracy' of the claim. This while simultaneously accepting authority claims with little questioning and zero, even negative demand for evidence.
I would agree the down voting is uncalled for given the good nature of the question. But given the previous explanation, I'm not surprised by it.
"If you are using the internet to actually learn, you are using it wrong, that is why internet must be reduced to TV + storefront."
Regarding voting too: just compare the number of bits per ballot (log2() of valid number of ways of filling in the ballot) with the number of bits of compressed text of all changes in law during a term. It's not a vote or voice, the information flows in the opposite direction. It just projects the law on our supposed desire. demokratia or demophimia (muzzling/gagging of the people)?
That will be unnessary and inefficient for the Chinese government. The social operation system runs very differently in China. And you can still feel the impact the Cultural Revolution has on how the modern day population thinks in general when it comes to politics (e.g. when you ask people about their opinions on a certain lawmaking decision by the Communist Party).
Speaking broadly, nobody is afraid of Finland or Denmark genociding its own population (or large sections of it) and moving to a Mao or Stalin style authoritarian model.
Liberal democracies are generally given more of a benefit of the doubt when it comes to their anti-liberal policies (eg Patriot Act), as it pertains to the seriousness of the threat they represent to the well-being and freedom of the population. That is, it's not anticipated or widely feared that those policies will next lead to vast gulags and the near total elimination of all human rights.
Human Rights Watch just put out a hundred page report on what's going on in Xinjiang. To paraphrase their findings, what's going on in China is the most repressive large-scale effort seen in the country since the cultural revolution days of mass murder and purge.
With China, given they're already an authoritarian dictatorship with few human rights, and they're regressing rapidly from the small gains they had made, there's a built-in legitimate fear of its surveillence programs being directly used for terrifying things. Indeed, it's happening right now.
The whole thing really makes me furious beyond words. I shouldn't be that aggravated, but unfortunately I am. I feel like this is really the opposite of progressive and will leave the EU even further behind the US and China. Meanwhile, people who don't understand how the internet works are deliberately breaking it to save their out-dated business models instead of embracing the new.
> Meanwhile, people who don't understand how the internet works are deliberately breaking it to save their out-dated business models instead of embracing the new.
The link tax is really absurd. Traditional news is now almost completely useless. Information distribution is near free in todays market and "journalist's" opinions don't add much value to the information either. A large amount of stories are almost pre-written and sent off to publications anyways. Quality curation is really the only aspect that I would consider valuable, but these establishments just spread click-bait and junk articles.
So bad is this legislation that it's almost enough to make me change my views on Brexit.
It's ludicrous to me that the same body that approved something so user-centric as GDPR could come up with legislation so incredibly hostile to small players as to effectively abolish the open internet by financial attrition.
Once this comes in, we'll collectively need to finally start work on that peer-to-peer, onion-layered, encryption everywhere Internet we keep putting off building.
At least this is a lot more compelling in terms of a call to action. It's been a death of a thousand cuts for the last twenty years, so at least it'll help motivate us all to get a move on.
Snort, the GDPR is fairly hostile to small players by pretending they don't exist when they wrote the law. It's like signing a contract with employee hostile clauses that the employer pinky swears they will never use.
There is probably a similar pattern of ignore the small players in other new EU laws, but since it's not my industry I don't hear about them.
> the same body that approved something so user-centric as GDPR could come up with legislation so incredibly hostile to small players as to effectively abolish the open internet by financial attrition
GDPR arguably hurts small players most. Mismanagement of a single users data could cost the farm. It greatly increased the cost for small businesses to do business in Europe.
It is insane. I see the same argument in every thread about GDPR and I just can't wrap my mind around it. I can't imagine how well represented or identified by nation-state politics these people must be that they are willing to concede such degrees of discretionality to a government.
No. EU regulation uses court as a matter of last resort. This is a good thing. It lowers barriers to entry because the regulators are not the enemy that you need to lawyer up tot talk to.
The more EU critic your website/you/your consumers are the more risk for this potential cost.
They will use this in any way they can. Just because a few say this is not the intent of the law, I have yet to hear a court ruling that minds the intent of the law and not what the law says. (On a EU level that is)
I believe the EU would be the lesser of two evils here. If we leave it up to the UK Government and Mrs May we will have it far worse. She has tried several times to ban WhatsApp and encryption in general. I wouldn't put anything like this past her.
The UK is currently (it's law!) going to impose mandatory online age verification for “adult content”, including IIRC the ability to block non-compliant foreign sites (will they block twitter, tumblr?)
I don't know the EU/EuroParl equivalents, but the UK still has a robust Judicial Review system.
I would strongly argue that the UK has a longer history of independent judiciary, both capable of standing up to misguided legislation, as well as willing and enabled to do so, with the sense of purpose, clarity and finality, which [at least apparently, or perceptively] absent features are longstanding argument behind EU cecessionism.
In 2006, the Data Retention Directive got passed. [0]
In July 2006 a legal challenge started. By 2014 the directive was ruled incompatible with the EU charter of fundamental rights. It took a while, but that's due to having to go through your own country's courts first for a referral to the ECJ.
> I would strongly argue that the UK has a longer history of independent judiciary
Yes. I could equally strongly argue that the UK has a longer history of the judiciary delivering very favourable decisions that fly in the face of basic logic and rely on the privilege of the judicial classes.
regarding your second statement, counter argument to my claimed argument:
Unfortunately I cannot disagree.
I certainly had a much longer history in mind, as well as being selective to begin with the start of the twentieth century, whereabouts the modern system of judicial thought appears to be becoming established, and largely healthy in the broad directions.
(For personal context, my father was born in 1907. Illegitimate, because his father, fearing debtor's prison caused by a profligate young business partner, shot himself, unknowing his wife, at 43, was with child, my father. Ensued flight from our locality, the social opprobrium literally excommunicating. Paperless, illegitimacy was illegitimacy, I will never know how my father, late but present, attended a good school on scholarship, the only document most people ever then could show, unavailable. He couldn't vote, until marriage and property ownership, conveyed superficial ascendancy to the class system. Outright property ownership was still necessary to vote, during his youth.
So, very generally, I think the animus of the judiciary, began to turn, during the years my father grew up. This was in wide canvas a positive effect caused by legislation. But legislation followed countless decisions that created a weight of case law leaving legislators little option but to relieve the courts of the eash of applications, and relieve parliament of increasing embarrassment the result also inadvertently of the suspension of the Houses during wartime. So then we arrive at the classical post war history of equality in the workplace and massive massively painful demographic adjustments that only died out, never were truly assuaged.
I believe that bu the nineteen sixties, the judiciary began to asset a collective sense of greater immediate responsibility. Not least a generation among them by this time ascended or even rocketing to on high, since no encumbents sat above them - although few officers, comparatively, died in the Great Ear, appetite for public service was greatly diminished by experience personal and emotional as well as utilitarian futility. If not life, then so much hope for life, was denuded from a generation whom we don't immediately suspect to be ear casualties. This, too, was (immediately post war, from 50 anyway) the time of great individualism in the Bar. Desire to speak forth, rather than sit in Review, appealed to heartbroken men. Counterintuitively, the common trenches of the first, spurred little individual cry - the nation was st home, almost all, the war a newspaper report of alien incomprehensibility. Counterintuitively, considering that total war, involving all able, promoted iconic, stereotypical, nonconformity and isolation self ideation of a supreme personal victory. My own pet take how individualism was acceptable in total war, arose from the beginning of the concept of universal sacrifice of workshops, farms and all for the effort, leading to a new search for identity. Thus"we're all in it together" did not resonate with the irony it probably should. Unfortunately, this set a dangerous precedent, of heroism and the diminution abstract, of collective costs of war, which mars our vision and sensibilities, today.
I can't fairly stud my comment with case examples, because without a thorough survey and definitions chosen after thorough triage, I will crudely sculpt citations and findings from insignificance into fractured lay icons, else omit the most emotionally charged decisions for completely over sensitive reasons; I should make a complete hash of tracing the notable cases in isograph landscaping for beneficial study of the landscape formed by the nation's elements in fullest force.
It is altogether too easy to speak of exceptional counsel the oratory and the skills of summary, and never know when you are reviewing the true seismic shifts of history.
But I will - I have been in undercurrent throughout my comment - guiding by the hidden valley of my argument, the reader of my thoughts towards my perception that the judiciary took a conscientious active role, forcibly I think, from the time of first post rationing government. So much was in flux, I don't think of party politics before about 1965. This is totally arbitrary on my part, no different from opening a dictionary close enough to the first letter of the sought word, to be convenient.
I offer a single reason behind judicial activism, as relatively speaking certain rulings arguably might be considered: cold war and specifically the outlawing of the Communist Party Of Great Britain. I think the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe, for example, was intended to relieve others of the the danger of blackmail.
You have the ability to vote Teresa May out of office and change UK laws through your member of parliament. The European Commission, the European Council, and the Council of the European Union are entirely undemocratic, and the European Parliament is democratic only in name. There's no serious argument that the EU is in any way responsive to voters.
> the European Parliament is democratic only in name
It was representatives (MEPs) today that chose to vote in favour of this directive. They could have voted differently and rejected the proposal outright. Can you elaborate on how this is a "democratic only in name" institution?
EU parliament used to be a place to dump 2nd rate politicians who:
(1) Were appreciated by their party, but not so much by the voters. The real politics happened in the domestic parliament, so the parties would run their 1st rate politicians in the domestic elections.
(2) And were personally very interested in the EU, and thus wanted to run.
We have been sending 2nd rate but very pro-EU politicians to the EU parliament. So the opinions of the members of the parliament are quite far from the average opinions of the EU populace. We are slowly beginning to realize that the European Parliament actually matters, and we should give some serious thought about who we vote there.
It's democratic on paper, sure. But in reality, does anyone know who their MEP is? Five year terms? Total lack of responsiveness (according to comments on here today), lack of real democratic accountability. Sure, it looks democratic, but in reality it's not. Particularly when the EU Parliament doesn't even initiate legislation, the un-elected European Commission does.
The UK government is democratic on paper, sure. But in reality, does anyone know who their MP is? [0]
Five year terms? [1]
Total lack of responsiveness [2]
lack of real democratic accountability [3]
Sure, it looks democratic, but in reality it's not.[4] Particularly when the UK parliament doesn't even initiate (propose) legislation: ministers are appointed by the government, and are not elected to their position. And civil servants write the legislation before it goes to parliament.
[3] There is an ability to recall MPs, but they need to have breached the parliamentary code bad enough to be suspended from sitting for a number of days or engaged in criminal behaviour and been duly sentenced. The current UK government is actively trying to strip people of voting rights who do not have the money for suitable photo ID (minimum £34)
[4] The UK's first-past-the-post electoral system means that the majority of votes do not matter.
I’ve never understood the argument that the Councils are undemocratic. They are made up of leaders elected by each state. Do you also think that the UK Cabinet is entirely undemocratic and that individual ministers should be elected to each role?
First, people would have to vote an EU-sceptic majority for their domestic parliaments. This would need to happen in a majority of EU countries. Then this majority of EU-sceptic governments could achieve a majority either in the Council or in the Commission, and propose laws to change the EU governance. Then the Parliament would have to accept these laws.
I think it would have to be the Council, it's difficult to see the Commission proposing a law that decreases the power of the Commission.
Didn't the people of several EU countries vote against the EU treaty, only to have the rules of the game changed so that it would go into effect anyways?
On a side note I do wonder if Amber Rudd passed along the necessary hashtags to Theresa May before taking the fall and hanging up her clipboard.
It's dire all over if the best we can say is we've got the least of all evils. Sadly, that appears to be the case, even with this disastrous legislation.
"So bad is this legislation that it's almost enough to make me change my views on Brexit."
I am not British and I don't (nor have I ever) live in the UK.
I also have a very limited knowledge of that culture and economy, garnering most of what I know from reading the LRB every few weeks.
But all else being equal I am happier in a world post-brexit because I want very much for there to be diversity in governance and nation states.
I realize it creates inefficiencies and I also realize that to what degree you can say states are "competing" with each other for citizens is quite low (since it's a fairly sticky relationship) but I want some diversity to exist.
Coming up, we're also working on IP masking (onion layering), and we already have an option to do end-to-end encryption (which prevents middlemen from being able to read your data).
If you are passionate about this stuff, there are a lot of projects moving in this direction and all Open Source, and they/us/them could really use help/contribution! Political reasons only shorten the timeline on needing this.
How does decentralization, p2p and encryption change anything? They won't protect you or prevent enforcement. If there are issues they will just tighten the law and increase enforcement mechaniams.
I share your perplexion. At best, these technical solutions will just break off a smaller, "splinter" Internet, unused by the vast majority of users. The average user does not know or care about these things and this isn't likely to change without an effort to properly educate future generations.
Moving from a world wide web to a decentralized, fractured web? Instead of WWW you have FBW (FacebookWeb, GW (GoogleWeb), AW (AppleWeb). What a sad future that would be.
If there is no service then GDPR acts as a higher precedent. EU would have to change their law that users are not allowed to store XYZ content on their own harddrives.
So yes, P2P/decentralization is a perfectly legal alternative for the time being.
GDPR is extremely hostile to discovery in lawsuits. In this sense it does not help the little guy. It's almost tailor made for coverups and protecting the guilty in civil litigation.
The article itself cites GDPR, Arts. 6(1)(c) which, aside from 6(1)(f), are exactly the provisions that can and should be used to comply with the GDPR while allowing for U.S. discovery. The rest of the text reads like scaremongering to me.
> So bad is this legislation that it's almost enough to make me change my views on Brexit.
I don't know how you came to that conclusion. Did you read the legislation? Which points of this legislation made you think that this is "enough to change view on Brexit" ?
EDIT: Well, downvoting this comment will not make the discussion any better. I've read most of the legislation, that's why I am asking why OP is reacting like that, wanted to clarify his objections (if any).
Both GDPR and this were intended to hurt American tech giants. However the people pushing this have very little understanding of how internet works so it would certainly have the opposite effect. The grim reality is that deregulation is the only sure way to help homegrown startups compete against the incumbents but you cannot push for deregulation without losing your entire political base in Europe.
>The legislation approved today still faces a final vote in the European Parliament in January (where it’s possible, though very unlikely, it will be rejected). After that, individual EU member states will still get to choose how to put the directive in law. In other words, each country will be able to interpret the directive as they see fit.
It's not totally over yet, both the final vote and the implementation in member countries can disarm the worst parts of the directive.
Individual countries cannot "interpret the directive as they see fit". Transposition has to match the directive, otherwise the whole excercise would be pointless.
They can interpret anything sufficiently vague as they see fit. For example Article 10 of Directive 2004/38/EC states that a government shall only require "a document attesting to the existence of a family relationship", which most people would consider to be a marriage certificate, it also states the residence permit will be granted within 6 months of presentation of the documens. Article 25 limits the cost of the issuance of the residence permit.
Unlike many EU countries, the Netherlands requires that the marriage certificate is "legalised" and charges for the process. They will not even accept the documentation before you go through this extra legal procedure thereby increasing the total time to over 6 months. Under some interpretation of article 10 and 25, this would be illegal, they have a different interpretation.
You can find various compliance studies for directive 2004/38/EC and other directives as well. It is just a fact in Europe that the transposition into local law leads to inconsistent application of the law. Applying for the same visa (from the European perspective) in the Netherlands and in Germany can be two wildly different experiences.
The point is that, overall, the requirements of the directive must be met
Your example is actually a good one: The Netherlands might have added that the document must be legalised but their law still matches the directive's requirement and the added restriction is neither unreasonable nor onerous and might keep in line with the country's practices.
The bottom line is that those who hope that transposition will change the directive in any meaningful way are going to be sorely disappointed.
Not true. Many of the directives differ in countries (even major ones - for example countries in EU that don't use Euro). EU wants people to believe it is USA but it is not. The directives are not enforceable directly but if you want to be good EU country (which has its benefits) then you need to behave :)
Directives have to be transposed but, again, transposition has to match the contents of the directive otherwise there is no point.
It is possible to lodge a complaint with the Commission if transposition is deemed inadequate (and I'm sure copyright holders would do exactly that), and the Commission may bring a case against the country before the ECJ.
For the anecdote, Nils Torvalds, the father of Linus, is one of the many authors of this text law.
I'm from EU, I had the time to look at the recent amendments about this law, in which they added precisions about the fair use of data, for non-profit and public research.
They also precised that this law and the technical implementations should not go against already in-place freedom of speech rights.
Hopefully, people will be able to easily defend themselves versus the big corporations in case of abusing take-down requests. The recent example of Twitch streamer Lirik being unrightfully suspended on a simple request from UEFA shows there will be an adjustment period for everyone involved. His case was quickly resolved and he was unsuspended in less than 24 hours after the take down request. However, he is one of the most famous streamer from the Twitch platform, he can easily use his social network to acquire visibility. For smaller and not well-known streamers, it may be more difficult to obtain justice...
Note that Nils Torvalds voted against the directive today.
My source is the Finnish tech magazine Mikrobitti [1] which gives a link to the vote results [2, p.38]. I'm sure someone will eventually post a more readable list of who voted what.
A good source for votes is votewatch.eu (free account registration required) - their site is a bit slow, but it does let you slice and dice the vote totals in all kinds of interesting ways.
> For smaller and not well-known streamers, it may be more difficult to obtain justice...
Currently, yes, but that is, as far as I understand it, something this directive actually makes better. Article 13(2b) requires "effective and expeditious complaints and
redress mechanisms that are available to
users in case the cooperation referred to
in paragraph 2a leads to unjustified
removals of their content. Any complaint
filed under such mechanisms shall be
processed without undue delay and be
subject to human review".
Also, "Member
States shall also ensure that users have
access to an independent body for the
resolution of disputes as well as to a court
or another relevant judicial authority to
assert the use of an exception or
limitation to copyright rules".
Also , the major issue is not so much with the process of takedown itself, but with the "terror" it inspires which will lead to the end of the "meme culture" upon which internet media rely on. It's not so much about the number of take-downs , but about the number of people that will quit before even trying.
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your link is the latest version. It says 2016 because the procedure started in 2016, the linked document itself has been updated with the following amendments :
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/report-details.html...
On a side note, there are a lot of information on several EU websites about procedure, steps, people, etc, for example :
This is a decision that will end up benefitting the big players on both sides, i.e. regulatory capture.
Google, Facebook and the like already employ filtering and copyright techniques and they can afford it. So, this law lifts the barrier to entry for smaller internet companies.
On the other side, it's also beneficial almost exclusively for the larger publications or copyright holders as the collected amount of license payments would end up there.
So, while I accept that the benevolent interpretation of this initiative is correct – big internet companies have an unhealthy market share and it's unfair to make money from other peoples' work – I suspect this might be another step towards more corporatism.
They are in favor of this. Maybe it's worse for them than in the current legal situation. But when the law comes into effect they are better off than any of their smaller competitors.
Do you have any statements or signaling you can link to from either of these companies to suggest they are in favor of this law? I know Google, for example, has fought strongly against similar link tax and other laws related to Google News in the past. There is also a statement from them referenced in this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/plan-to-make-google-pay-for-...
> The Commission’s proposal “would hurt anyone who writes, reads or shares the news — including the many European startups working with the news sector to build sustainable business models online,” Google said in a statement.
I think it may be true that they may suffer the law better than their competitors. But I think if it was likely that they would benefit absolutely, they'd be in favor of the law, or at least ambivalent, rather than strongly opposed. Don't you?
I personally believe (without any evidence) that they are ambivalent, maybe slightly opposed. However, they needed to oppose in public, otherwise, this would have been a PR disaster:
Publishers: "You steal our content and are unwilling to pay, so we need a law!"
Google: "You're right, please do the law, because it would harm our competitors!"
They could easily couch the statement in such a way that they would appear blameless, if they really wanted to make a positive statement. E.g. "We recognize the critical contribution of publishing companies to our society and want to do our part to ensure the continued existence of a strong publishing industry."
I sometimes have the same feeling,but I'm not sure it's true.
From an economical point of view it makes no sense to put legislation in place that will strengthen the market position of mostly US, non-EU companies.
Another reasoning could be to "prepare" a censorship infrastructure, but I can't find any hard evidences to this.
>From an economical point of view it makes no sense to put legislation in place that will strengthen the market position of mostly US, non-EU companies.
The EU is failing in both the tech sector and the media sector. This is just sacrificing one to slow down the other's decline. Censorship is a bonus but it's not the goal, just like privacy was a bonus and not a goal of GDPR.
>Another reasoning could be to "prepare" a censorship infrastructure, but I can't find any hard evidences to this.
The only thing you need to watch for right now, and what will be seen in the future, is uneven enforcement. You'll have a choice to either censor material Europeans [are bound by law to] find offensive, or face a nice fine. Again, much like GDPR (though that law is also designed to get big tech companies to pay their taxes). This probably will come in the form of a deal with companies that won't be disclosed to the general public, but it's a nice backdoor way to get around US law which correctly doesn't require such censorship.
I'm worried not so much about the outcome of this decision (which indeed is bad), but more about the whole decision-making process and how often we'll see such uninformed decisionmaking in the future.
I'd rather not call it "uninformed". We pay good amounts of money to parliamentarians, including their personal assistants.
It's more like a "bug" in democracy as such. As long as a topic doesn't have widespread attention, it's the lobbyists who make the laws, not the citizens. I am pretty sure there are other bad laws in other very specific areas, we as techies don't have a clue about.
As I've written in another comment here, this is obviously an unavoidable "bug", but the more centralized a legislation process is, the more it is prone to exactly this "bug".
Why unavoidable? For example, if a sufficient number of qualified people complain about any law, isn't it possible to hold MEPs accountable by openly questioning them about their reasoning? I'm sure there are journalists who can make good use of any suspicious argumentation.
That's shifting the problem a bit, but does not solve it. Which journalist would investigate a topic which is considered unimportant by most of the readers (and in this specific case the decision is also welcomed by most of the journalists employers).
And who would read MEPs reasonings about something "uninteresting"?
So, yes, there is plenty of room to improve democratic processes today, especially with the communication tools we have. However, I guess that laws which make things worse for the general public but are in too complex niche areas for people to actually realize the issues, will ever remain a problem. Try ask your non-tech social contacts if they consider it fair, that big internet companies like Google don't have to pay for other peoples' work. And this is the narrative of the supporters.
Unfortunately this bug, which is in my opinion most of the time caused by the people and not the system democracy itself, can be exploited by both lobbyists and populists.
Considering that communists are historically against private property and their usage as a means of production, eventhough the statement is very loaded and inflamatory it still is somewhat appropriate when addressing critics who are against the use of intellectual (private) property as a mean of production.
> Considering that communists are historically against private property and their usage as a means of production
No, Communist are against “private property” where “private property” is specifically defined as exclusionary ownership of the means of production. If it isn't specifically in the means of production, “private property” in sense the term is used in the modern capitalist world is not “private property” as opposed by Communists (in more like what many Communists accept as acceptable “personal property”, which again is different than what that term means in capitalist society.)
And it's not clear to me that intellectual property (or other intangible personal property not representing control of tangible goods), strictly speaking, can be a “means of production” in the sense Communists are concerned about; it's certainly not in the sense of basic Communist theory.
> No, Communist are against “private property” where “private property” is specifically defined as exclusionary ownership of the means of production.
...and in this case it's the intellectual property of content providers who use it to run their business.
>And it's not clear to me that intellectual property (or other intangible personal property not representing control of tangible goods), strictly speaking, can be a “means of production” in the sense Communists are concerned about.
Even if we ignore how this law was created to help private media companies that are vilified for controlling the press, I'm sure that we can agree that media companies do depend on the existence of strong intellectual properly rights to run their business. That's pretty much thr central argument: if they can't enforce their rights over their private property them it ceases to serve its purpose as a means of production.
> and in this case it's the intellectual property of content providers who use it to run their business.
No, that's not a “means of production”, in the Communist sense, and so ownership of it is not “private property” in the sense that Communist theory opposes such.
> I'm sure that we can agree that media companies do depend on the existence of strong intellectual properly rights to run their business.
That's irrelevant to whether intellectual property qualifies as a means of production in Communist theory, which does not define “means of production ” as “anything a business relies on to run”, but instead as the physical instruments to which human labor is applied in the course of production.
Opposing media companies on this is not something which has anything to do with the Communist opposition to property rights in the means of production.
Communists are ideologically against privare property. Historically, not so much.
Be that as it may, I don't get your point. Communists opposing private property, therefore I, as opponent of the "law", must be a communist? Please, I expect better from the HN crowd, although not from the insufferable mr. Rohde, MEP.
> Be that as it may, I don't get your point. Communists opposing private property, therefore I, as opponent of the "law", must be a communist?
I'm not defending the idea. I'm pointing out that the accusation is not baseless. If you oppose the right to use private property as a means of production, and consequently oppose a law that enforces your right to profit from your private property, then you're clearly advocating a basic communist dogma.
> I'm not defending the idea. I'm pointing out that the accusation is not baseless.
Having a tangential thematic connection with a fact doesn't stop an accusation from being baseless.
> If you oppose the right to use private property as a means of production, and consequently oppose a law that enforces your right to profit from your private property, then you're clearly advocating a basic communist dogma.
No, you aren't. Communists do not oppose the right to derive profits from property, they oppose the right to have propietary ownership of the physical instrumentalities of production.
Intellectual property is not a thing which can be a “means of production” in the sense used in “basic communist dogma”, and thus ownership of it is not “private property” in the sense of “basic communist dogma” (in communist theory, “private property ” is exclusionary ownership of the “means of production”, and the “means of production” are physical instruments to which human labor is applied in the production process.)
I'm not aware of opposing such a right.
I'm not aware of being a communist, and that's putting it mildly.
I'm very much aware of being opposed to the deluge of terrifiyng, imbecilic megastatecontrol over ever increasing areas of my life from the sinecured, corrupt, and largely incompetent members of the EU so-called parliament.
Any thoughts on how that relates to Axel Voss and his friends? We know about Ajit Pai's dodgy dealings, but is Voss in someone's pocket? He seems too young to be this dumb about tech.
He's not young, and Axel Springer has been cited as a potential "sponsor" of this (I assume companies behind GEMA as well, which I could only describe with adjectives not allowed here)
You see where this at national level, I have some access and ability to plead against it. But instead we've three MEPs serving a constituency of near 800,000 and they're never around.
I hate the removal of substantive access to local politicians that the EU has.
the EU's capability to be authoritarian (and from what I gather, propensity to use this authority) was one of the reasons I voted to leave. The central dictation of "how it shall be", reality be damned, reminds me of the Soviet Union. Obviously not to the same extent and severity, but the EU is making the same mistakes in thinking that broad-brush central planning of a huge geographic region isn't a fundamentally flawed concept.
If you voted for Britain to leave the EU because of the EU's "capability to be authoritarian", then perhaps you should have already voted (with your feet) to leave Britain because of its much worse capability to be authoritarian.
For example, it was Britain that introduced the Snoopers' Charter:
you're not wrong, I'm fairly anti-state-overreach so I'm also really unhappy with the Snoopers Charter and just so, so many things my government does. But hey, given two layers of authoritarian rule if I get an option to remove one of them you can be sure I'll take it. Especially if it's the one that I can't affect democratically.
> Out of interest, can you name another example where the EU was authoritarian (acting in a way that the British government wouldn't have)?
I can't really speak to things the EU would do that the British government wouldn't - as you've already said, the UK government is pretty bad too. But we have more democratic control over the UK government than we do the European, because it's more localised. I've heard many examples of overreaching EU directives through listening to parliamentary debates but my memory sucks, so I'll give you a couple of examples that I can remember without re-researching the topic: the EU national fishing quotas (famous for decimating the British fishing industry), and the EU's "enthusiasm" for collective bargaining at the WTO. Rather than negotiate directly, many of Britain's trade agreements are bundled up into the EU's and then the EU makes special concessions to Britain. We've actually been historically quite good at forcing the EU to give us trade concessions so as far as I am aware it's not been too harmful to our prospects (I welcome a correction from anyone more well-versed in the UK's international trade standing) but it's still an example of EU authoritarian practices.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. You start by saying that you can't affect the EU democratically (even though you have much more democratic control over your MEP than you do over the House of Lords or your monarch), but then correctly point out that one of the important factors is how localised the decision making is. It's true that your MEP has a wider constituency than your MP, for example, but as I see it, the "less democratic" EU is actually undoing the authoritarian tendencies of the British government, rather than adding to them (in net, I suppose, especially since this copyright law hasn't actually been finalised yet).
Excuse the triple pun, but speaking of "in net", I don't see how EU national fishing quotas are an example of authoritarianism. I suppose you are saying it is an example of state-overreach, but my understanding is that the quotas are set to avoid over-fishing of British waters (a problem which has historically done more to decimate fish populations than any EU politician has), and to allow an open market for deciding which fishing companies are allowed which part of the quota (leading to better prices for the consumer). You may not like the idea that non-British citizens can fish in British waters, but it could equally be argued that it would be state-overreach for the British government to effectively raise the price of fish to give a subsidy to British fish catchers.
> You start by saying that you can't affect the EU democratically (even though you have much more democratic control over your MEP than you do over the House of Lords or your monarch)
This is true, but the Queen's job to sign new laws is purely ceremonial at this point, and while I can't democratically affect the House of Lords, I can affect the House of Commons and the Cabinet. The House of Lords is a bit of a relic at this point and though I don't know of any bad things they've done, I am skeptical of their existence.
> It's true that your MEP has a wider constituency than your MP, for example, but as I see it, the "less democratic" EU is actually undoing the authoritarian tendencies of the British government
This is not the EU's job. It is the remit of the British people to hold our government to account, not an even higher, more abstracted government that is even less accountable to the people. The EU can make good decisions and bad decisions, but in either case it is unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
> I suppose you are saying it is an example of state-overreach, but my understanding is that the quotas are set to avoid over-fishing of British waters
This is the same as above. As an island nation with limited resources we have to manage our ecology and stocks of fish. The EU is not in the right position to do this. Our fishing industry has been suppressed leading to even less job opportunities in the coastal North, but then Norway (which is not an EU member but has mutual fishing agreements with it) is permitted to come in and fish our waters. So you don't even get the theoretical benefit of the EU's legislation in this case, because the EU has handed the supposedly-restricted fishing rights to another country that is only bound by trade agreements, not membership under a unified international court. And I have to ask - who benefits? Because the EU negotiates over all its member states, and this arrangement certainly doesn't do Britain any favours. I did enjoy the pun though ;)
> it could equally be argued that it would be state-overreach for the British government to effectively raise the price of fish to give a subsidy to British fish catchers.
Excluding transportation costs, this might be true. But we're not talking about an open market - the EU licenses which countries can fish British waters. If Norwegian fishing boats are collecting British fish and selling them from Norway, there are two options: 1) they aren't selling them to Britain, leading to a simple drain on our natural resources, and 2) they are selling to Britain, adding transport costs (both fiscal and ecological) to the production of fish, meaning increased costs. I agree with the need to regulate the waters, but it should be Britain that manages its own resources (after all, the incentives are aligned to provide for future generations, 5-year election cycle notwithstanding) by capping the fishing, but choosing for itself which fishing vessels get to harvest our waters. This way Britain can balance its own interests between increasing supply of locally-caught fish, and exchanging use of our natural resources in mutually-beneficial international exchange.
>> It is the remit of the British people to hold our government to account, not an even higher, more abstracted government that is even less accountable to the people.
Why does it stop exactly there in the multiple layers of goverment we have? Because you say so? Why is the remit of a citizen of say, Ipswich, to hold the Ipswich City council to account, the Suffolk County Council to account, the British government to account, all elected with ever larger constituencies, each more abstract and less accountable than the last, but not the EU government?
> Why does it stop exactly there in the multiple layers of goverment we have? Because you say so?
I think you're misunderstanding me - granted, the sentence was ambiguous. I was saying that it is not the remit of the EU to hold the British government accountable.
> This is true, but the Queen's job to sign new laws is purely ceremonial at this point,
The fact that her role is purely ceremonial (at least the parts of it which the British public are privy to) just means that her powers are either unexercised (potentially a dereliction of duty) or are exercised by the Prime Minister, concentrating too much power in one person's hands. If Britain had an elected head of state, with a democratic mandate, then there could be a proper separation of powers, and a less authoritarian executive.
> and while I can't democratically affect the House of Lords, I can affect the House of Commons and the Cabinet.
You may be able to affect one seat in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister (and the Cabinet) are determined by an extra layer or two of abstraction (just as EU commissioners and the members of the European Council are chosen).
> The EU can make good decisions and bad decisions, but in either case it is unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
I suppose you are saying it is "not sufficiently accountable" or "not as accountable" rather than completely unaccountable. I would say that there is a trade-off between how accountable/local the government is, and how effective it is at protecting rights and producing positive outcomes for citizens. At one extreme, we'd all be kings of one-person kingdoms, as sovereign individuals, not subject to any other laws, and at the other extreme we'd have a global government with perhaps log2(7 billion) levels of indirect elections. While there might be an intuitive appeal to the idea that the correct balance is for all decisions to be made no further away from you than London (as if there are no decisions made outside the country that can affect Britain), I personally feel that having the EU as an extra level of accountability for the British government is, in practice, beneficial for British citizens (and European citizens generally, to whom the EU is accountable).
> Our fishing industry has been suppressed leading to even less job opportunities in the coastal North, but then Norway (which is not an EU member but has mutual fishing agreements with it) is permitted to come in and fish our waters.
If non-EU member Norway has decided it is in their interests to enter a bilateral agreement with the EU regarding fishing, then I don't think we can rule out the possibility that Britain would end up in a similar agreement with the EU next year.
> the EU has handed the supposedly-restricted fishing rights to another country that is only bound by trade agreements, not membership under a unified international court
The existence of a bilateral fishing agreement with Norway doesn't mean there are no restrictions on fishing (indeed, it proves that there are restrictions, otherwise there would be no need for an agreement). Also, I'm afraid you're wrong about Norway not being part of a unified international court, since the EFTA Court exists and Norway is subject to its jurisdiction.
> And I have to ask - who benefits? Because the EU negotiates over all its member states, and this arrangement certainly doesn't do Britain any favours.
Is it really certain that carrying out negotiations at the EU level doesn't do Britain any favours? By "negotiations" I assume you are talking about trade negotiations, since the size of quotas is based on scientific evidence, and the allocation of them based on market forces. It seems intuitive to me that when a large economic entity is negotiating with a small economic entity, the larger entity has more bargaining power, since they have more to offer. Therefore Britain is (in general) more likely to receive a favourable deal when negotiating as part of the largest economic bloc in the world (rather than treating that bloc as a competitor in a zero-sum game). Also it's not accurate to treat all trade as being subject to negotiation at the EU level, since Britain can and does negotiate its own trade deals even while a member of the EU:
> If Norwegian fishing boats are collecting British fish and selling them from Norway, there are two options: 1) they aren't selling them to Britain, leading to a simple drain on our natural resources, and 2) they are selling to Britain, adding transport costs (both fiscal and ecological) to the production of fish, meaning increased costs.
As for option 1, is anyone really claiming that there is now less fish available to British consumers since joining the Common Fisheries Policy? Similarly for option 2, is there evidence that fish is now more expensive in Britain (and that this isn't caused by historic over-fishing)? You make it sound like Norwegian companies are taking boats over from Norway to the UK, fishing there, taking the fish back to Norway, and then shipping the fish back to the UK for sale in British shops. Given that Norwegian companies (like any other companies) are motivated to cut their costs, it would make more sense for them to take their catch directly to British fish markets, and indeed to use British boats, and even British workers. If Norwegian companies really have increased costs, then presumably their bids for fishing rights are less competitive than the bids of British companies, in which case you have nothing to worry about.
I concede your point that arguably, the UK is not democratic in that the final word on laws is held by a monarch. Personally, I like the Royal Family on a cultural level and am largely ambivalent on a legislative level because as far as I'm aware, they've never done anything to a bill that gave me cause to dislike them. That doesn't preclude their having done so though.
> You may be able to affect one seat in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister (and the Cabinet) are determined by an extra layer or two of abstraction (just as EU commissioners and the members of the European Council are chosen).
Given that our general elections are held against parties, there's 1. nomination of a party leader by party members and 2. election of a party by the population. But election of the ruling party is in my mind important but complemented by the real power of the populace in democracies - the power to influence the government through protest, petition the Prime Minister, to write to our MPs, and so on. This is part of the reason I dislike the "distance" between the EU and the public - a protest in a large city is going to definitely get the council/MP's attention and probably get talked about in parliament, but to get the EU to act it needs to be passed on by the MEP and then the other nations (all of whom are still separate entities with their own concerns) need to express interest in solving the problems of the protesting nation. Plus any motion has to go through the "democratic deficit" portions of the EU.
I suppose at the root of my issue is that the EU is made of nation states that are vastly different both culturally and economically. Within the UK there's a lot of difference of opinion, but we're still bound by the same culture, land mass and national economy, so that helps to hedge the divisions between us (North/South, England/Scotland/Wales/N. Ireland, London/Everywhere Else etc). We can have internal disagreements but that bond still exists. I don't harbour any dislike or ill will towards the other European nations (some are strangers to me, others I really love), but I recognise that they have little reason to sacrifice their interests to support Britain and we have little reason to sacrifice our interests to support theirs. This is where international agreements work better than a shared supranational entity - we can find mutually beneficial agreements and are never forced to go along with something we dislike that another country wants. I think this is why the UK is known in the EU as having been a royal pain - we keep demanding exceptions and concessions and different rules, because we just aren't that similar to Germany or France or Belgium or Italy. I guess it comes from being an island nation.
> If non-EU member... next year.
And that's a good thing, if we can negotiate such a deal to our benefit as a sovereign nation. My issue is where Britain has to sacrifice its interests for the sake of other nations, when we get such a small say in the decision. To be honest, I would prefer it if this "coming together based on mutual interests, not hierarchical authority" were to operate at even more local levels, but the nation-state model isn't something that's likely to devolve any time soon.
> The existence of... its jurisdiction.
I'll concede you that point. The point I was trying to approach rather ham-fistedly is that the natural rights to the UK's resources are (from what I can see) being packaged up and sold off, to the detriment of the British fishing industry. If Britain were to do that as an independent entity it would still suck but at least you could be reasonably sure (corruption aside) that it was in exchange for something that would, in return, net-benefit the national economy. When it's the EU doing the bargaining, the benefit we get in return isn't so clear. Is the EU trading British waters for German access to Norway's market? It would be conspiratorial to suggest an explicit example like this were literally true, but the prospect is there.
> Is it... a member of the EU:
First off, there's a miscommunication occurring here - I was trying to say that EU trading off British fishing rights isn't benefitting Britain. Of course, collective bargaining nets the EU as a whole a stronger bargaining position. However, when a large entity is negotiating for a deal that spans each of its member states, each with different interests, you have to wonder whether the benefits that reach the states are better than those they would have negotiated if you were doing so independently. You get a bigger slice of pie, but it's no longer your favourite flavour.
On the issue of independent trade deals, I know that we can make our own deals still but there are confounding factors. If the EU negotiates as a bloc, how hard is it for us to reject a proposal? If each member state can reject a trade agreement then you're not really negotiating as a bloc because the benefit to the trade partner of uniform access is no longer there. Also, if we make an independent trade deal does that cancel, supplement or supersede the deal that nation has with the EU? Say, the EU negotiates a steel market with India. Is the UK still free to sell bulk steel to India for less than the EU? I can't really give any answers here as I'm not well versed in the topic, but then that's part of the problem with the referendum - it's impossible to have a deep enough knowledge of the EU's operations to make a fully informed vote.
> As for option 1, ... even British workers.
I wasn't claiming that my cases 1 and 2 were definitive, real life is always more complicated than that. More that the logistics of Norway fishing British waters don't make much sense compared to Britain fishing British waters. If Norwegian companies are indeed selling to British markets, using British workers and British boats, doesn't that mean that they're doing nothing but capturing the profit for their own economy? That still strikes me as a net negative compared to a British company doing the same.
> If Norwegian companies really have increased costs, then presumably their bids for fishing rights are less competitive than the bids of British companies, in which case you have nothing to worry about.
If it really is an open market, you would expect that British companies would win out given their proximity to the waters in question, and cost-free access to the nearest fish and job markets (given presumably there is at least some cost in foreign boats selling in British markets and hiring British fishermen/women). So then, where is this unexpected result coming from?
Fundamentally though, I don't think the price of fish to the consumer is the metric to be optimising for, which is the metric that a totally free globalised market will optimise for. There's also local employment, taxes, secondary sector benefits (as you mentioned, using British boats for example). Probably more beyond that. I don't see how this combined tally could possibly be higher when using a foreign company. Thus, offering our waters to another country should fundamentally come with a return that is greater than the loss of these benefits. This can be controlled for when negotiating individual agreements on a nation-state level. When the EU does the negotiating, not only does the net effect just have to benefit the EU as a whole, but it's hard to see how and whether the return comes back to us at all. Even if those benefits are redistributed one-for-one back to the put-out country, you're basically just implementing the trade agreement system with extra steps.
Having thought through the trade issue, I think it at least in part comes down to a trade-off of opportunity cost against collective bargaining + administrative overhead that cannot really be quantified. But then, that's a common thread of EU debates - the system we're talking about is so large and its concerns so diverse that in a finite timespan you can only really talk about ideals and principles. Any argument about specific industries, agreements, laws etc can be countered by another like example that is perceived to have a countering or exchanged effect.
I'm glad we're having this discussion, I feel like I'm learning a lot about both my position and yours.
[edit]
I've had to abbreviate your quotes because the comment was too long otherwise. Hopefully nothing is lost in translation.
> as far as I'm aware, they've never done anything to a bill that gave me cause to dislike them. That doesn't preclude their having done so though.
There are bigger questions than just whether the royals have done something that you personally don't like (or failed to do something that you would have liked them to have done). It is worth considering whether their power has legitimacy in a democracy (including whether they are illegitimately taking power away from the role of an elected head of state, who could veto bad legislation, for example), and whether there is sufficient scrutiny of their actions that we can feel confident that they really aren't acting against your interest without you knowing it. For further reading, I offer:
> Given that our general elections are held against parties, there's 1. nomination of a party leader by party members and 2. election of a party by the population.
We are told that our general elections are about local candidates and not parties (as an excuse to avoid certain types of voting reform), but moreover I don't think that there is a requirement that parties have to let their entire membership have a say in who is selected as party leader. In any case, parties generally do not allow you to be a member of more than one at a time, so most of the UK population cannot influence your option 1, and parties generally don't win the support of the majority of the population, so most people are unhappy with the outcome of option 2 as well, even before the party has a change of leader mid-term.
I'm sure you know all that already, so I'm just reiterating that there are abstractions, and distance, and "democratic deficits" in the UK system too, and that you may be more comfortable with them because you are more familiar with them (and perhaps the problems tend to work in your favour over all).
> I suppose at the root of my issue is that the EU is made of nation states that are vastly different both culturally and economically. Within the UK there's a lot of difference of opinion, but we're still bound by the same culture, land mass and national economy ... we just aren't that similar to Germany or France or Belgium or Italy. I guess it comes from being an island nation.
I think this gets to the core difference between our two perspectives. I would say that I have more in common with a German, French, Belgian, or Italian person that had a similar profession to me, a similar age, and similar politics, than I might do with someone living across the street from me. Indeed, I've met, and lived with, and worked with, people who have travelled from across Europe, and I felt I could trust their input into the political processes that affect me (on a supra-national level) than apparently the average British voter. That doesn't mean I want someone in France deciding what the income tax rate is in the UK, or someone in Italy deciding whether to send British troops to war, but these are examples of political decisions which are deliberately left to member states (and we're not talking about one country deciding another's policies, we're talking about an electorate of equal individuals collectively deciding the evolution of their shared environment).
> the natural rights to the UK's resources are (from what I can see) being packaged up and sold off, to the detriment of the British fishing industry.
If the UK has "natural rights", they are the rights of the people of the UK, not of the British fishing industry (as I'm sure you'll agree). My point is that the government is entrusted with the duty to let those rights be delegated to whomever will serve the British people best (ignoring for the moment the more complicated judgements of making concessions in one area to gain greater benefits in others). As such, I don't think that the government is actually "giving up" its rights, as if some bureaucrat in Brussels is rubbing his hands with glee that he has tricked Britain into banning British fish catchers from British waters, and forcing the government to sit back in despair as "undeserving" foreign boats "invade" our waters. The only thing that the British government has given up is the ability to set its own (unrealistic, but politically expedient) quotas, and the ability to block competition from businesses that happen to be registered elsewhere in the EU. You could try to make the case that the one thing that coastal communities need is (in effect) subsidised industry, and that the British government would love to provide it if they weren't prevented by the EU, but even if that were true (at a time of record high levels of employment), I think that the benefits of EU membership (including the ability for British fish catchers to operate in other European countries' waters, and to sell fish tariff-free within the Single Market) outweigh this cost.
> You get a bigger slice of pie, but it's no longer your favourite flavour. ... If the EU negotiates as a bloc, how hard is it for us to reject a proposal?
I really like that analogy. But yes, the question you ask is a pertinent one and I don't have an obvious answer. Personally I rely on the reports of experts working in these areas, who seem to suggest that Britain does have a good amount of influence in these negotiations (and ends up with better deals than it would get outside the bloc), and look at the macro trends that suggest that EU membership has been good for the UK economy (even though that growing prosperity may not have been shared or invested correctly).
> capturing the profit for their own economy? That still strikes me as a net negative compared to a British company doing the same.
It strikes me as being similar to allowing foreign companies to trade in the UK, or allowing foreign goods into the UK. It would in theory be great for British businesses if they had no competition, but I'm not sure it would be so great for consumers and the economy generally.
> If it really is an open market, you would expect that British companies would win out ... So then, where is this unexpected result coming from?
I suppose we would similarly expect that a British search engine would offer better search results to British people, or a British social network would offer better friends. Sadly international trade isn't as simple as that.
> Having thought through the trade issue, I think it at least in part comes down to a trade-off of opportunity cost against collective bargaining + administrative overhead that cannot really be quantified.
Right, there are a whole load of variables that it is difficult to get an intuitive feel for, or even clear cut numerical values. That's why I resort to looking at high level trends, and checking specific (hopefully representative) areas against theoretical models and logical arguments and opinions of experts in those fields. I don't claim it has given me a perfect perspective (and I would be suspicious of anyone who said they had achieved that), but I'm reassured that I can go looking for alternative viewpoints without facing too much cognitive dissonance (just the amount you would expect when being prepared to change your mind about something you think you understand).
> I'm glad we're having this discussion, I feel like I'm learning a lot about both my position and yours.
This is something I'm very happy to agree with you on. It is rare to have a conversation with someone who can clearly express the other side of this debate without both sides feeling frustrated and resorting to rhetorical short cuts that fail to shine light on the underlying issues.
> Any action taken by platforms to check that uploads do not breach copyright rules must be designed in such a way as to avoid catching “non-infringing works”.
Utterly hilarious and scary that they think that's possible.
Because you need to catch infringing works, while only "avoiding" to catch non-infringing works, the result of that phrasing means those filters will have a high false-positive rate. Like content ID strikes on white noise...
Oh yeah good luck trying to stop library genesis/scihub/PirateBay with that. Meanwhile everyone else doing business legally will have to suffer while the perpetrators go free.
We already have lots of tools to block user access from the EU, time to upgrade them!
The EU fail to understand that the internet is inherently free and you can’t regulate it well (unless you’re a dictatorship in China, but you have bigger issues there).
This is the real bummer, IMO. It's not even like they're reaching the sites that truly, genuinely don't give a fuck about copyright. The big sites have long implemented all of this, anyway.
It's basically just more bureaucracy if you're running a start-up or mid-sized company and want to do things by the book. Something to worry about, something to fear. I genuinely wonder if copyright holders will make a single cent off this.
> I genuinely wonder if copyright holders will make a single cent off this.
What’s to wonder about? Of course they won’t.
At best nothing will change. At worst people start removing links and contents driving them traffic in fear of link-taxes and fines. Not to mention large-scale exclusion/filtering for EU users and content platforms.
> Oh yeah good luck trying to stop library genesis/scihub/PirateBay with that. Meanwhile everyone else doing business legally will have to suffer while the perpetrators go free.
That's not what this law purpose is. There's already copyright laws covering these cases.
They are targeting Google and likes. And also making sure that Google and likes have no serious competition due to the financial burden these laws impose on new comers.
Websites that distribute pirated content are already illegal.
Both copyrights and patents are stupid in a digital age. If you don't want people to make copies of bits and bytes (large numbers) you found to be interesting or even arranged to be interesting don't upload them to the internet.
Once those bits and bytes find their way into the digital world you might as well kiss them goodbye. When you try to control them it is like going to a public street and yelling "I am going to go get a burger from Bob's Burger" and then getting upset when a bunch of people also go to the same place and make it all crowded for you.
Simply put, nobody should own any arrangement of numbers, sorry if that fucks your lucrative monopoly up.
A bit less discussed aspect of the law is the recent addition that makes recording sport events illegal. While the intention looks clearly intended to be about large sport stadiums with explicit deals, the scope is not limited to those situations and simply cover any "sport event". It will be interesting to see what happens if they try to enforce it for marathons and bike races on public roads.
Copyright is a contract between two groups where a copyright holder dictates the terms under which their material may be used or duplicated. If the receiving party to that material violates those terms (say they've received a movie screener for an unreleased film and leaked it), they are in violation of that contract and should pay the fees dictated in their contract.
To argue that all parties everywhere should be forced subsidize the enforcement and policing of that contract is outrageous, economically unsound, and violates liberty.
I like your idea, but it's hardly the case currently.
If you find a book on the ground, or read it in a library, or learn of its contents any number of ways without entering into even an implicit contract with the copyright holder, you are not then entitled to publish the contents without limit.
>To argue that all parties everywhere should be forced subsidize the enforcement and policing of that contract is outrageous, economically unsound, and violates liberty.
And if the contract is violated and the violator taken to court and the court rules against them and they refuse to pay restitution? Without the potential of government violence brought to bear, there is no point in contracts in the first place (except in the general sense of an agreement that includes 'go against me and I won't associate with you again'). But, however, if there is no government violence to be rendered applicable in any case, that does open the opportunity for the violated to employ violence directly. However, it also puts each individual in charge of insuring themselves against appropriation of their own property by means of said violence. So, at a minimum, such a position wants to establish the collective garnishment of funding for 'police services' to protect such rights, yet this is fundamentally in favor of those who have a greater quantity of property to protect, as the owners of such will (as history shows) that they should be required to reimburse no more than any other member of the collective, and if they do, then they are entitled to greater service, leading, again, to the same asymmetrical form of society, where all are equal, but some are more equal than others.
There's no need for violence and no need for taxation in such a system. The two parties willingly choose a court to fall back on if their contract needs arbitration.
>if the contract is violated and the violator taken to court and the court rules against them and they refuse to pay restitution?
If you're entering into a contract with someone and you're worried they won't pay restitution, mandate terms in the contract that require up-front collateral for a performance penalty. Problem solved.
Each person in the stage of production has the appropriate incentives to collect payment and protect their property. The reason why copyright law has been perverted is because there are distribution companies who'd rather not pony up performance capital and want to socialize the cost of enforcement onto the state.
And if the collateral holder doesn't want to return said collateral?
And while this may work(1) for a theatre-model (where the consumptive act can be funneled into a tightly-controlled venue (which is something I already posted about a few day ago, so I won't repeat that but what is necessary)), how is any mechanically reproduced media to be distributed to individuals? That is to say, DVD and Blu-ray and such media, electronic books for sure, and, possibly, physical ones as well, and any and, essentially all, material delivered to the individual for (relatively) private consumption.
(1)[And even then what of 'media laundering'? It may be illegal for a third party to interfere in a contract by, say, bribing the contract signer to break said contract and distribute an copy of the media in violation of contract, but, say, if one or the other party simply leaves it in the middle of the street and someone unassociated with any of the involved parties picks it up, they could then distribute their own copies of said media at will, legally.]
Under such a system, where does the contract into play? For example, your posts in this conversation, which are conveniently protected by copyright law as it stands now from being appropriated by myself, or any other reader, to use in whatever fashion we please. Should we have begun negotiating these posts before we knew what we were negotiating about?
> The two parties willingly choose a court to fall back on if their contract needs arbitration.
But, again, what does a decision one or more parties are not 'compelled' to follow matter? There are only two alternatives: either everyone agrees that they can't be held to account because they refuse on some kind of intellectual/moral/ethical grounds, in which case, the only consequence to being a bad actor is the likelihood of reduced future business with the offended entity (and even that is not assured, based on the state of the market, localized monopolies, power relations, etc), or it devolves into a shotgun wedding.
> The reason why copyright law has been perverted
From Tsarist Russia to the Act of Anne in Britain, copyright began as state censorship, so arguing for some 'golden age' (other than the vaguest wording in the U. S. constitution) is to ignore history.
We can use a simple hypothetical test for many of these issues: Say I read and memorize a book of poetry which statists and corporatists categorize as "copyrighted". I then go into my friend's house and tell him these poems aloud.
You either believe that I have the right to my own memories and I can talk to my friend or you think I should be fined/imprisoned to subsidize a particular business model.
Supposing there are only two alternatives and that the elimination of the one vindicates the other is at best intellectual laziness and at worst disingenuous.
One could posit you shouldn't be able to read poetry in the first place, so the rest becomes moot. And I would probably bet there are likely many more alternatives that someone more intelligent and more erudite than I could conceive.
First, you erred in thinking there only two poles in this argument. Then you erred by ascribing me to either one of them.
You, of course, are always free from this point forward (I wouldn't propose that you revisit all your former post as that would be an undue burden), but you are, of course, free from this point forward to prefix your further posts with: 'this post is hereby released under the terms of the CC0', or something equivalent.
Your definition is some alternative Libertarian definition of what copyright could be in an alternative society.
Update: I cannot comprehend the reason for downvote without reply. You provided a false definition of Copyright and I provided a correct definition along with why your view might not be the reality.
GDPR is TOTALLY different. If you can't run a business under GDPR legislation then what you're doing is almost certainly unethical or at worst mismanaged and irresponsible with customer data.
On the other hand this legislation will completely change the internet as we know it.
I don't believe that. If a compagny has no idea where does their data goes and what their use is, they have shitty practices and / or are incompetent. Good riddance
All you need is a privacy policy and the ability to delete / return customer data when requested. But that doesn't have to be in real time/automated, you can just set up an email address and respond manually. It's rare you'll even get a request if you're a company with such a small IT budget.
All the other things (double opt-in email, not contacting your customers in an unsolicited way) are process changes that can be implemented without IT cost.
Good riddance then. Not gonna cry for them like I'm not gonna cry for a restaurant that gets shut down because complying with health standards is too expensive.
maybe - but the philosophy behind it is similar. The EU lawmakers just cannot stand to the existence of unregulated area. Everything gotta be under their control. Unfortunately, once you support pro-strict regulations, then there is no going back. One day, I believe, the internet as we know today won't exist in the EU.
Bureaucracy, compliance cost, uncertainty of enforcement... The category doesn't need to be the same, just the pile upon pile of anti-(small)business regulation.
You say "anti-business", I say "consumer rights" (and more importantly "human rights").
As a small business you can comply with the GDPR fairly easily unless you have no regard for anyone's privacy to begin with. And even if you're not 100% compliant you won't be insta-sued to bankruptcy, you'll only be reported and the relevant data protection agency will check on you. The GDPR encourages data protection agencies to help businesses fix their problems and only use fines as a last resort for gross violations and wilful negligence.
Unless you're storing/processing information that has special protections (e.g. religion, sexual orientation, medical data) the bureaucracy is also fairly tame, especially for small businesses, especially for businesses that aren't at their core based on processing personal information (e.g. not online dating startups).
Compare this with the "upload filter" as it has been interpreted in the media so far: allegedly every website that allows users to upload content would have to implement their own Content ID database and sign deals with publishing companies or license filtering services.
It's a bit ironic, since the very first thing I see when I visit the link is a giant banner to consent to being tracked, or visit each and every third-party advertiser's opt-out site from the giant list of advertisers present on Vox's platform. Said list carries the explicit note "We provide the table below as a courtesy, but we are not obligated to maintain or update it. We are not responsible for third-party sites and their privacy practices as it relates to opt-outs from tracking activities."
So since the majority of the voices here on HN seem to be pretty negative towards this, I think it's worth noting there are some creative voices who are in favor of some copyright law. For example, here's one fellow on the twitter machine who's a composer and seems pleased: https://twitter.com/Howard_Goodall/status/103983376226213478...
Simultaneously, I'm not campaigning in favor of the "link tax" component, here. I think it's widely agreed upon that that part of this proposal is pretty dire bunkum.
But let's not be eager to discard the baby and bathwater together. The idea of some EU copyright policy consensus is not inherently evil. If HN wants to rally about the "link tax" issue, do so. Don't jump directly to "boo, the EU is undemocratic because they didn't do what I want". That's just bizarre and we should be above that.
The crucial issue that I miss both in this directive and the current practice is that companies are encouraged to use automatic filters while actual copyright holder have almost no way of appealing against false copyright claims.
I'd be fine with automatic content tagging if at the same time false copyright claims by someone who does not actually hold the copyright would lead to a hefty fine and/or be considered a crime.
Right now, large corporations seem to spam the systems with automated take-down messages without any control and any incentive not to do so, to the effect that actual content producers have almost no way to defend themselves against false claims. Every youtube channel owner can sing you a song about that.
That's a problem for both the US and EU copyright system, but it's also not clear to me if and how the forthcoming EU directive would fix that problem. For all it's worth, it seems to make things worse.
> For all it's worth, it seems to make things worse.
Actually, adopted amendment 160 reads:
> Members States shall ensure that
online content sharing service providers
referred to in paragraph 1 put in place
effective and expeditious complaints and
redress mechanisms that are available to
users in case the cooperation referred to
in paragraph 2a leads to unjustified
removals of their content. Any complaint
filed under such mechanisms shall be
processed without undue delay and be
subject to human review. Right holders
shall reasonably justify their decisions to
avoid arbitrary dismissal of complaints.
Moreover, in accordance with Directive
95/46/EC, Directive 200/58/EC and the
General Data Protection Regulation, the
cooperation shall not lead to any
identification of individual users nor the
processing of their personal data. Member
States shall also ensure that users have
access to an independent body for the
resolution of disputes as well as to a court
or another relevant judicial authority to
assert the use of an exception or
limitation to copyright rules.
I generally agree, living in a democracy means that sometimes you have things happen you don't agree with because a majority either doesn't agree with you or doesn't care enough to bother.
In a few years the EU could be on it's way to undo the linktax again, who knows? Meanwhile there are other EU proposals on the way that are also interesting for tech people, not only the linktax and "delete terror in 1 hour or else"... And non-tech proposals too!
I do believe that it'll be possible to work with the filters and link tax considering some edits during the initial phases did disarm the worst of the first proposal (it's still not a very nice one).
Disclaimer: I operate a platform for user generated content in the EU as well as working for a platform for user generated content, HQ'd in the EU, my views may be biased.
>because a majority either doesn't agree with you or doesn't care enough to bother. //
That's why we've not moved on from representative democracy. The problem is the representatives are supposed to represent the people - and the people think they do (or try) - but in practice the representatives often don't.
In the UK we very rarely get chance to influence decisions, instead we get to choose the people who will decide, and they almost? always lie about how they will make decisions and what will influence them.
PR would make it better, but reduce the power of those who need to decide to give us PR.
I think the easily solution (for the EU) would be the better advertise the fact they have MEPs and that you vote for them.
EU elections have a rather disappointingly low participation, it's no wonder that things get lobbied into existence.
Representative democracy is IMO the most effective form of democracy for large scale hierarchies of authority, at least if you want something democratic. (There is always the option of a benevolent, immortal god-princess but we lack candidates with qualities in the categories benevolent, immortal and god-, not for a lack of belief or trying)
I think I agree per representative democracy, it's the best of the options that we practically have.
But, it relies on honest, forthright representatives and the people who covertly back most of those representatives are getting better at lying and presenting a fake reality.
This breaks democracy.
We need laws like they have for financial adverts on the radio, so when the drugs minister speaks about illegal drugs she has to say "my husband owns the largest cannabis producing company in the UK, and I personally profit from sale of cannabis products due to their health uses; but despite this cannabis growing will remain illegal here, I benefit financially from that".
That's not an isolated example, all the Tories appear to have other interests above their constituents. PM May's husband profits from companies seeking to avoid UK tax, he also presumably has insider information; the chances of May making a decision that negatively impacts her husband's interest in a reportedly £1.4 Trillion are probably infinitesimal -- regardless of whether that benefits the country and/or her constituents.
Before every party political broadcast they need a list of the manifesto promises they made for the last election, and whether they met them. Remind us to look most carefully at who we choose to represent our interests.
Those "artists" believe that if their music disappears from pirate sites, they'll start to make money. They don't take into account the fact that likely nobody is downloading their stuff.
> Simultaneously, I'm not campaigning in favor of the "link tax" component, here. I think it's widely agreed upon that that part of this proposal is pretty dire bunkum.
I actually believe the ``link tax'' is less bad than the content filtering. Because it only governs Google publishing snippets of articles. That is pretty close to Google 'stealing' the article from websites. (Similar to google's AMP cache)
An upload filter is censorship by another name. Have you written a text critical of the government and haven't copyrighted it? Congratulations, the state now has and issued a "copyright filter" on your manifesto.
I find it interesting that the conversation is mainly about fair use and not about false positives.
I've been working with filtering and fingerprinting technology for some time, and while its "pretty good", false positives happen frequently. Its a case of continual disappointment, even from the largest tech companies with the "best" technology. I expect that widespread "filtering" will equate to widespread non-fair use related false positives.
This law is going to work like the DMCA for many providers, carpet bomb everything and worry about the cleanup later.
So we now got our own SOPA to deal with. Important note: the bill now goes to trilogue before it's ready to face a plenary vote. Though I'm not holding my breath.
As I understand it, Article 11 (the "link tax") is actually fairly tame. It only requires reimbursement for "use" and explicitly permits linking and citations. The term "use" is a bit ambiguous but it seems to be more directed at scraping and republishing rather than mere link aggregation. It's not a link tax.
Article 13 however still sounds worrying. It describes automated image recognition (i.e. an upload filter) as a possible mechanism for preventing the upload and publishing of illegal content. However I can't find any language that explicitly requires the filtering, non-commercial platforms like Wikipedia are explicitly exempt and it's fairly directly aimed at companies that make money from publishing content users upload to make them liable for the content they're hosting.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like it will mostly be trouble for companies like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and file hosters (e.g. Mega). How dangerous it is to startups exactly depends on how "appropriate and proportionate measures leading to the non-availability on those services of works or other subject matter infringing copyright or related-rights, while non-infringing works and other subject matter shall remain available" is to be interpreted in practice.
EDIT: To clarify: I'm skeptical of this and was extremely biased against this because of what the EFF and others have said about it. But the final text seems far less terrible than the first draft that everyone got up in arms over.
Does anyone have any resources saying what all impacts this legislation would bring and how it would change current online applications?
How can anyone think that while uploading a new set of content on a website, it would be an instant job to compare against all other legal content already uploaded?
So no comments containing "decentralization" yet.
These days, I'm really not sure any longer if decentralizing all the web to the point where this kind of legislation becomes completetly futile is harder or easier than fixing the politics... :|
I think the most "noble" angle you could have is that it's supposed to protect artists and help them benefit from their work instead of having it "stolen" by third parties. Of course in practice it seems like it will do nothing of the sort but if you only look at it on the surface to a casuals observer it might look like it would actually do some good.
On one hand I'm sad that the EU fell for that crap, on the other copyright law is so fucked up already that it kind of feels like more crap in a bucket of crap. One day this whole thing will become completely unsustainable and will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Well, look at Voss cheering there.
I'm sure his bank account will benefit.
Same goes for the right owners who will sue people. I mean, they need to get along in the 21st century and if you are to lazy or old, suing people is the only way left.
The same tired bullshit that publishers trot out every time they push copyright enforcement responsibilities onto companies, governments and the tax payer:
"Won't somebody think of the creators!"
And they have pushed this kind of crap on us relentlessly for decades.
Neglecting to mention they absolute shafting these obsolete middlemen of cultural access give to the artists and creators they sign.
This sort of stuff is exactly what many GDPR opponents were warning about. Once the floodgate of aggressive regulating is open you don't get to pick the ones you like. At the end of the day there are going to be very few winners.
> but the shift in the balance of power is clear: the web’s biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet.
What? Where? How? Is the author of this article somehow confused? The article doesn't make clear in any way how the new law would threaten any tech giants' grips on anything. Tech giants are the first to jump regulatory bullets that would kill anything on a tighter budget in its way.
It's worth noting that this is not a law in the commonly understood sense. It's an EU directive, which requires member states to achieve a required outcome, but leaves the legal implementation up to the individual state. It'll be interesting to see how the member states interpret the language and what legal framework will be used to enforce it.
And also how giant fuckup will be, once every country will implement it differently. 27 different versions and levels of upload filter. How will you display content upload by someone in Italy to someone in Germany if Germany has stricter filtering policies? Will you need to recategorize it for display in different countries?
Member states can be even stupider. I get scared thinking of what a "reasonable interpretation" by some right-wing local government with poor understanding of digital markets would look like.
Do you really believe this is something politicians came up with in the first place?
This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.
Also, if they think this will fix the revenue problems of the majority of newspaper publishers they are certainly wrong, newspaper are not dying because people read news on Google.
> This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.
It's still the politicians passing the law. The fact that back-handers might be involved only makes them potentially even more corrupt.
Well, yes. Politicians created the system where it was possible for this to go through without any support from citizens, because they have simply no idea what is going on inside the EU.
TL;DR, politicians created the EU, it currently sucks even if they pass some very good laws sometimes. Now it's time for some very bad laws, the issue is that these laws is so bad the good laws seems very small in comparison.
>Rightholders are liable for unjustified takedowns
That's potentially interesting, what does it mean in practice though? How would they be liable? If there was a monetary penalty attached, the record companies would be bankrupt in a day based on the false positives of the youtube content ID algorithm.
Technically, we can say no. But our politicians never do. My guess is that they do not want to step on any toes, which could make getting a sweet job in Brussels after their term ends harder.
If there is great resistance from the public after it becomes a disaster for all eu-countries it is much more likely to not go through than in an eu-country with resistance.
If you think being outside the EU will stop politicians voting for these types of laws, here's a nice UK example for you that "make administrators and moderators of certain online forums responsible for content published on those forums"
the European Parliament (here the body making a decision) is the EU institution that supposedly does not have the "democratic deficit", they are elected by the citizens. So in what way is this different from what we expect in democracies?
Well, first of all I have yet to hear about this vote from any of my local news sources. If I didn't browse hackernews I likely wouldn't know about it.
Secondly I don't recall voting for any MEPs, as far as I can tell it's similarly not reported on. Besides given the lack of news about what any of the parties are up to it's hard to say anything about who you should even vote for.
Thirdly just because somewhere at the end a vaguely democratically elected group of people get to make a decision about it that doesn't somehow absolve the rest of the process from being undemocratic and seemingly driven by corporate interests. The biggest problem being that the decisions on what should be voted on and how seem to be mostly taken by an unelected group of people, who will evidently (given the way Selmayr was promoted) vote for anything if it gets them better pay and pensions.
I won't deny that the local press is at fault, however it's too simple to just blame them and release the EU from any responsibility. You can't have a democracy without public oversight, so if it's lacking then blaming other people for it isn't particularly persuasive. As it is the EU seems perfectly happy to keep things this way.
Actually this proposal was a commission proposal, so the democratic deficit here is that this proposal could have gone through, EVEN IF it was voted out.
So that's one, in my opinion very big problem.
Second, people are just not aware of what power the EU has. And the politicians I speak to actually see this as an advantage. One told me specifically that without power like this we would still have the insanity of driving on the left of the road in Norway, or would still have the separate currencies (which of course, would also have prevented a lot of problems in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, and provided better lives for probably 100 million (!) people).
So that's the second part. Nobody cares about the EU, because there is no unity. Europeans don't feel part of Europe. They feel they're part of France, Belgium, UK, but not of Europe. So they don't care. There is little to no local presence of any EU agency.
> Actually this proposal was a commission proposal, so the democratic deficit here is that this proposal could have gone through, EVEN IF it was voted out.
No! If the parliament had rejected the proposal, then the "ball" would have come back to the Commission, which would have had to amend their proposal, pass it through the Council again, and if successful, returned it to the Parliament, which would be again given the choice of rejecting or passing the amended proposal. (This is similar to what happens in other entities/countries with bicameral legislatives — e.g. the US senate vs. the House of Representatives.) Importantly, without the EU Parliament's approval, the proposal could never become law.
Now, granted the situation is more complex than just that the commission can push through whatever it wants, but the following statements are true:
1) the commission can block whatever it wants (ie. it has a monopoly on legislative initiative). So it has a negative veto, and can prevent (and does prevent) anything it wants.
2) the commission can, in cooperation with the EU council, create and adopt legislation, without anything more than getting the Parliament's position (but not approval) [1]
3) they can even use other procedures to get what they want [2]
In practice the commission and council requiring each other is essentially the commission doing what it wants because it's mostly the same people, and even when not, they're necessarily from the same country and party (well, everyone in one has a counterpart in the other that's from the same country and party).
So no. The EU is a dictatorship. The commission has the only lawgiving power, and can block anyone else's initiative. The parliament ... is better paid but no more powerful than my cat ... (plus the politicians in there couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag whereas my cat has claws).
(and let's ignore the fact that the commission also controls the EU court of justice)
> Well, first of all I have yet to hear about this vote from any of my local news sources. If I didn't browse hackernews I likely wouldn't know about it.
Where do you live if I may ask? here in austria it was everywhere before the vote and now new articles with the result.
1) You could argue whether the EU Parliament has democracy deficits or not. I assume it has (based on the legislation process itself with involvement of the Committee, but also based upon unequally weighted votes of citizens from different countries).
2) However, the most important point is that this law is considered as a "techie niche" by the vast majority of citizens. Also, EU topics as such suffer from a very narrow attention in the general public. Having said this, it is far easier for lobbyists to place such an initiative "under the radar" than it would be to lobby in 28 countries. In techie speak, a centralized entity like the EU is more or less a single point of failure for the unavoidable "bugs" of a democracy.
Isn't this the same attitude as "it's the user's fault if they click OK" on shrink-wrap legalese, repetitive security prompts, and the like?
People are constantly overwhelmed with choices, and eventually they start to economize on their decision-making to focus on immediate needs. Certain systems (particularly those designed by marketers and politicians) are set up to take advantage of this trait.
This is somewhat true, but are national legislatures really any better? There's nothing quite like Brexit to convince me that my local legislature is completely refusing to listen to me (or anyone with any sense) at all on even the most basic issues.
National legislatures are better to the extent that the populace exerts direct electoral control over their representatives.
If the election of Trump or Ocasio-Cortez taught us anything, it should be that appealing to voters can get you into office, even with powerful entrenched interests running against you.
Elected politicians are 100% beholden to their voters, now more than ever.
I don't think the link tax will have any real implications. Any individual party that starts charging for links will simply not be liked to. It would only work if an entire industry/sector would start charging for links to them, but then we are talking about collusion and price-fixing which is already illegal. It's hard to start demanding money for something that was free and costs you nothing.
And the link tax has excemptions for plain hyperlinks and the like, which prevents most distopian uses of such a provision.
If google acts on this it will be because they know this was written with them in mind and if nothing happens stricter laws will follow. But for everyone else it will be a non-issue.
Upload filters on the other hand are a much bigger problem, mostly because copyright law is way to strict to make them reasonable.
It's a choice between more money or less money, but the opposite way around to what you're implying—because nobody will pay for the privilege of gifting traffic to someone else.
If you're a web publisher and you're not making more money as your traffic increases, you're doing it wrong. And if you can only make money by taxing all potential inbound sources of traffic, you'll quickly find yourself with no traffic—and no money.
Say BBC decides they don't need the money and doesn't charge for links, but every other major outlet does. Now everyone will just link to BBC when they want to link an article on the topic, and Google News would essentially be BBC and a bunch of small independent outlets. Shortly thereafter the market share of all major news outlets that aren't BBC plumets as less and less people visit their online presences.
Youtube, Facebook, etc., should simply pull out of Europe and block all European users. I don't think it would take very long for this to sort itself out...
Comments like this are extremely naive given the fact that Google/Facebook cannot do anything at whim without Board/Investors backlash. Stock price would crash, future projections would collapse and it would create a havoc for bailing out of a major market. It happens, but rarely (Google China exit).
I'm pretty sure it's still the case that Zuck can effectively do whatever he wants with FB due to his stock ownership position. But that isn't really the point... nobody said anything about anybody doing anything "on a whim". And if these companies were to get serious about playing the long-game, instead of fixating on short-term fluctuations in their stock price, I believe it is the case that what I propose is actually in their best interest.
I overheard some discussion of the "upload filter" on the radio. It was very simplified, all about big rights-holders that have to ensure they get paid, and nothing about the power of consumers or even journalists or those acting like that (review/commentary).
It seems to contain a bunch of amendments that seem to make at least Article 13 a bit less draconian. In particular, 13.2b seems to require a human-reviewed and appealable complaints mechanism.
All in all, it's still very shitty.
I intend to save the list of those who voted for and set a reminder to dig it out when the next EU elections come up. I hope people with more social media presence than I do the same.
> They say that the campaign against the directive has been funded by US tech giants eager to retain their control over the web’s platforms.
While I am not a particular fan of the dominance of Google and Facebook, I like it better how they handle the web than what we have seen from the 'creative' companies. It took years until they found a way to monetize their content properly (e.g. Spotify, Netflix) and even now after they pushed DRM down our throats, they kinda complicate things by not letting you watch the full HD version on certain platforms or restricting streaming rights on a per country basis.
Many companies are so out of it they don't even let you stream content to browsers running on Linux distros. Even Amazon owned Audible just fixed that issue a few months ago.
Well, I find it hard to compare those two. I mean, yes, if DRM works I have no issues with it either, but sadly it causes a lot of issues where none should be (e.g. Hardware DVD Players not being able to play certain DVDs, Spotify Web player having issues because it doesn't overcome its own protection, not being allowed to view 'your content' on your favorite device, not being able to save 'your music' to your old mp3 player) and one of the biggest issues is that you aren't allowed to do anything against it.
Tracking is a completely different beast. They take what they can get, but you can fight back. My biggest concern is that they (Google,Facebook) gain so much influence that they can change the political opinions via Ads. So yes, tracking and advertising can be a lot more harmful, but at least you can kinda opt-out (e.g. use curl to browser the internet ;-).
What exactly do you mean by 'monitored'? Of course sites you visit on the internet know you visited them, just like shops you visit IRL know you visited them. But it's not anyone is actually monitoring you or any other user personally. The worst that happens is some algorithms change your ads.
This law is to prevent any non-mainstream news outlet to share content. From the UKIP site:
"The great danger is that it will destroy the capacity for free speech on the internet and social media, which has exploded in recent years and is an invaluable alternative to the so-called mainstream media."
Hijacking the top comment: Can someone explain me why EU was considered knowledgable about the internet in case of GDPR, but isn't now? Have they lost their knowledge in the meantime?
I think they just shifted into the general direction of regulating the internet more and are listening to anyone who's complaining loudly and then just copypasting their ideas into legislation, instead of coming up with the specifics themselves. It just so happens that they heard the privacy guys first over the copyright guys first.
I wouldn't say the EU had knowledge to begin with. While GDPR was a step in the right direction, how poorly, and vaguely it was written created problems. GDPR isn't a concrete thing, but a high-level set of guidelines with no clear direction on what falls into each camp. This is why leading up to GDPR there were n consultancies, and articles vocalising "Our interpretation of GDPR".
I'm not sure what you mean. GDPR has everything to do with Internet, the Internet has been the whole reason it was created. Without the internet, the previous laws were OK. During the discussions (on state-level politics as well) only the internet was mentioned that frequently along with internet companies such as Facebook and Google, except for the note that it of course affects everything else.
Even if GDPR was merely touching the internet, it is touching the internet, which is my point - people said things like "the people in EU know what they're doing", why isn't it true now?
I know, thus the "except for the note that it of course affects everything else" part. However all discussions revolved around the internet and the internet was the sole reason why a change was made.
Because the GDPR people, just like the musicians supporting this copryright law, are incapable of seeing unintended consequences. As long as they get their “thing,” they are happy. But GDPR and the copyright law are coming from the same “place.” They are obviously different, but they are variations on the anti-American tech superiority theme that seems to be playing out across Europe.
I'm European but as many don't have a clear idea of how this will work.
At my understanding, there will be discussions about the amendments and another vote, like the one we had two months ago. Is it right? There is still time to act, right?
Also, is there a place to see who voted what? Elections are close and those choices could impact the vote of many. I knew Votewatch but I don't know if it still doing it, saw some excel file going around last time and wondering if they are being updated, to see who changed ideas.
I'm getting the impression that many Europeans don't seem to have a grasp on how their laws are passed. Is my impression correct? I'm baffled by the commission, Parliament, individual states, and how they interact to make laws. Is this topic teachable to 3rd graders in Europe?
Yes, that is unfortunately the case. Exactly this is creating a feeling amongst many of us that something is fundamentally wrong with the EU as governing and legislative body. Of course, you could reverse that and say: People have to inform themselves properly. But that's just the situation were in right now.
Most of those citizens don't speak any of the languages that the EU operates in. And the EU only translates the result of the legislative process, not the process, so participating in Polish or Greek ... or even French ... is almost impossible. Eventually the outcome of the whole process is translated, but that's it.
And starting next year there will be exactly 0.9% [2] of the citizens that speak the language that the EU government conducts itself. Now it is 13.9% [1], which is not exactly a good number. As if it wasn't already a huge problem that the French and German governments essentially control the EU.
Combine that with the fact that large blocks hate eachother. Like famously the French and German governments, for example, but those are hardly the only examples. Some blocks have actually recently had shooting conflicts with deaths (the Catalan and Spanish governments, if you're wondering, and yes, both have representation, even though the Catalan government gets no representation in the commission or council, the only institutions with real power in the EU).
> Any amendments approved on Wednesday will be subject to further negotiations between politicians and member states in a closed-door process known as “trilogues.” Whatever emerges from those debates will be subject to a final vote by the EU Parliament in January. After that, it will still be up to individual member states to interpret the directive and turn it into law.
A couple of YouTubers from the UK went to EU Parliament to make the case against Article 13. Unfortunately, their pleas mostly fell on deaf ears. They discuss the (undemocratic) process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHwaA3fMPgc
The copyright laws are totally wrong. If you produce an opera and don't want it to be reproduced or used in other works, don't share it. Keep it for yourself, don't show it to anyone. If an author spontainously share an opera making it public available (for free or selling it is not important) must accept the fact that the opera can be used and elaborated by anyone. If I see something I must have all the right to try to reproduce it, rielaborate it, use it to create something new, resell it, givit it free to other. If author don't want this, must keep it for himself. Sharing something (free or by fee) and asking to not reshare, re-elaborate, copy ecc. is an act of intellectual violence. Author thinks that is this violionce is necessary to grant him the right return for the work he have done. But this is totally false. The copyright law is useful only to aliment of an ecosystem of leeches that prolifer around the artist limiting his and his audience liberty and freedom. "Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. (Mark Twain)"
I emailed my 10 UK MEP "representatives" about this law, explaining why it was bad news and encouraging them to vote against it.
I received one "pre-canned" email acknowledgement from UKIP, attempting to make the bill into an "EU bullying us" issue, and nothing from anyone else. One politician I tried to call had a published phone number that connected to a commercial money lending service.
And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).
> And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).
Just wait until you walk around Brussels. EU politicians don't mix with the locals. They've got separate everything. They have reserved parking spaces, separate taxes, separate restaurants, separate social security, separate supermarkets, schools and swimming schools that the locals are excluded from.
Needless to say, all are vastly superior to what the locals get.
Compared to that, I would argue you're wrong. I don't know how UK politicians live, but I very much doubt it is half as "separate class" as the EU class in Brussels. In Brussels the politicians live like the politicians in Beijing live.
It is an unpopular opinion, but they were given the mandate by all those cheering the internet restrictions in the GDPR. Whether you still like that law or not is unrelated to the mandate given. You should have drawn your battle lines there instead of being so dismissive of those warning about government intervention.
Sadly, I suspect you are right. It's as if the EU wants a firewall and wants to make every other country pay for it, even if that was not the intention, that will be the end result.
Perhaps the most disastrous side effects of articles 11 and 13:
1. Access for EU residents is shut down on many sites.
2. GDPR is not taken seriously, even if 11 and 13 get repealed.
3. We once again do not have a legal body to look to as privacy thought leaders.
3. People will stop taking the EU seriously as a
Let's take a look at some background here. Freedoms are in the eye of the beholder and what is considered a "right" by one can be and often is quite different to what is considered a "right" by another.
The changes going on at such governmental levels should not be unexpected. These kinds of changes have been happening over many decades. Very few, if any, governments (I am not talking about politicians here) want to give the citizens of itself the freedoms that could threaten the well-being and growing control of that government.
Politicians may have agendas (obviously they do) and can in some way direct how the relevant government will operate. They have less control than they think and they are there only fo relatively short periods of time. Most of the legislation that citizens end up suffering under is dictated not by the politicians but by other control structures.
Policy changes made by the various political representatives will be warped by those who are in charge of bringing these policies into reality.
The changes being discussed here for the EU are in line with the premise that government will gain more control over its citizens and the ones who have pushed for this will find out quickly enough that there are very large unintended side-effects that will come back and haunt them.
The fundamental concept driving all this movement towards control of what citizens can and can't do is to ensure that when needed those same citizens will follow whatever directives are given. This is just repeating what has happened in the past many times.
Does that mean we lie down and just take it or is there something that we can do?
If you are going to actively do something, you must start out first realising that there are going to be consequences. You have to make up your mind as to whether or not you are willing to face those consequences.
Then you need to look at what action you can take and take without the destruction of others. Peaceful civil disobedience can be a strong motivator of change in some cases.
Here's what I don't understand. How is Google/Facebook supposed to know which are news sites and which aren't? Apart from the known ones there are hundreds of thousands smaller ones which can start looking for royalties. How do you tell which is which?
If you accept visitors from the EU, you have to abide by their laws. If you're exclusively based outside of the EU, you could just ignore the laws. But Google has offices inside the EU, so they can't.
Google benefits from this and almost certainly secretly lobbied for it.
This is great for the FAANG providers who already have automated content control tools and massive help centres to act on anything 24/7. It is a death-knell to any upstart startup who would challenge Youtube or Facebook however.
Wouldn't they still get cash from advertisers? The sites are still accessible from the EU, it just means local businesses who want to advertise need to pay the US division?
As a general rule, in most jurisdictions, you cannot do business across international borders in this way, no. As soon as someone from the EU pays Google while they are physically inside of the EU, that business is subject to the EU's laws.
If someone in the EU buys it while they are in the EU, you just imported something to the EU and the EU's laws apply to you, yes. If that person buys it from you in the US and then carries it back to the EU, they have the liability for following law, paying duties and taxes, etc. When it comes to things that are completely digital, I believe where the money is changing hands is what matters most.
Do you think that after GDPR and the fact that everyone actually took it seriously the EU is trying to see if they can keep pulling the same string and making the world dance?
As an American, I can gladly say fuck the EU. Their laws do not and never shall be imposed on me or the work I do ever. I'm glad not to do business within the EU.
Quick reminder of a common misconception: contrary to what you may believe, MEPs do not propose laws. The EU Commission (that you don't vote for) propose laws.
> Article 13 requires certain platforms like YouTube and Facebook stop users sharing unlicensed copyrighted material.
How is this different than making gunmakers responsible for shootings? Continuing with the analogy, the only option the gunmaker has is to essentially close up shop. Seems like an impossible law to follow. "Develop better algorithms for filtering inappropriate material or you're gonna be sorry" sounds like tyranny.
Unfortunately, the actual text isn't available yet, and now I can't seem to find the list of amendments I was reading earlier, but if I recall correctly, in both the original and proposed amendments, scholarly publications were considered not to be press publications and were not covered at all by the press publication protections.
The EU Parliament press release is also claiming that a number of non-commercial and "small" platforms will be excluded.
Thank you. Anybody who has any influence in the discussion, please help to make this clear. It is important for the researchers, I think. In this particular case arXiv is by no means "small" (has 1.4 million articles) but is non-commercial, What about Figshare which may classify as commercial? Other platforms?
Two more examples examples for arXiv and one for Figshare. (1) Article in journal has a flaw. For some reason the journal is slow or unhelpful concerning a correct version, so the author posts on arXiv a revised and perhaps much bigger version. Filters (will these be on arXiv?) detect a copyright infringement. (2) I translate an Euler article and post it on arXiv (with all attributions). Or an English translation of an obscure German or Russian article by a great mathematician. (3) I post on Figshare (and GitHub?) the meat of a published article (like data, procedures, results of experiments, programs) in order to make the research Open Science. I explain the context but maybe I don't pass the automated filter which detects a copyright infringement. For all examples, same questions as before.
If something was a copyright violation yesterday, it will still be a copyright violation tomorrow. And vice versa.
If you fear that arXiv will implement filters that will recognize that what you are uploading is a translation of an obscure Prussian research paper and block the upload, I don't think that's going to happen. (But I will be really impressed if it happens!)
Example: article in arXiv gets later published in a journal. Will the arXiv article version be still available for anybody? Only for non-EU people? Will be removed from arXiv? None of these?
Oh I replied to another comment. The answer is "no". Fact is that 1/3 (anyway a significant proportion which can be referenced) of the arXiv articles appear later in journals. So it is a totally credible concern. The arXiv has a system of copyrights which allow them either a perpetual non-exclusive dissemination right, or a CC-BY copyright.
Depending on the journal and its licensing agreement, they may not even accept manuscripts which have been circulated as preprints. Some of them will allow you to publish the corrections made through the review process. Some of them will even allow you to distribute the final article as published. But this is essentially unrelated to the law being discussed.
Well in mathematics and physics the usual thing to do is to first post on arXiv and then submit to the journal. ArXiv references are totally allowed. I heard that the situation is different in other fields but as you say this is not relevant for this discussion.
Smaller platforms are exempted on the directive (ie, startups, single person corporations, etc.) as well as anything that doesn't do profit oriented content/active content moderation.
Why would you? The Link Tax and Upload Filter specifically affect service providers that moderate user content to generate profit, if you upload something with explicit consent of all rightholders then this is explicitly exempted from the directive.
So? They're not published there illegally, arXiv (AFAICT) is non-commercial and publishing similar content elsewhere does not retroactively make the existing content illegal.
Sure, they are not published illegally. IANAL but as I understand the process, is like this: the author submits to arXiv and either (a) gives arXiv a perpetual NON-EXCLUSIVE licence to distribute (which does not change the fact that the copyright is with the author) or (b) the author chooses a CC-BY licence. The author submits the article to Journal and after acceptance, may transfer the copyright to Journal. Is perfectly legal and it works like this for a significant part of the arXiv articles. See also here in the comments for cases when a revised version of the article from Journal is posted on arXiv. But now, with the new EU Copyright Directive, how will this delicate process interact with the dumb one-size-fits-all automatic filters which may detect (wrongly) that the article on arXiv infringes the copyright of the Journal. What if arXiv will receive a bombardment of requests from various Journals? What will they do? They are admirable but they don't have the surface to fight this ddossing from journals. Or maybe my concerns are void, I'd be very happy if this is the case.
Right, will arXiv implement such filters? Same question for other green or gold OA platforms. We all know about Elsevier, but if I put my paranoid hat then for gold OA this is even more perverse, will they try to kill green OA (not that I believe in this failed classification which separates between green "repositories" for archiving and gold publication platforms). Anyway arXiv is a monument which has to be protected from this madness.
> "Exactly how the legislation will be interpreted will be up to individual nations, but the shift in the balance of power is clear: the web’s biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet."
I don't see it very clear that the biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet with these new laws. They will be able to weather this and even profit just fine.
If this directive is voted, it will be interesting to watch the aftermath. Copyright is a legacy concept that is incompatible with digital media. This will make the absurdity of owning an idea and profiting from it virtually forever (at least as a ratio of human life) stand out. I hope it leads to a changes in the mindset/laws regarding IP.
I think it will change only when the world order changes, which may be soon. Many Western countries operate on untenable platforms in the long term that are designed to preserve existing order in the short term (uncontrolled creation of Fiat money, uncontrolled welfare programs). This just adds to the list and hastens the change.
Am I wrong in seeing merit in the argument for blocking people/entities from re-posting copyrighted content and simultaneously holding the platforms accountable? Of course, they should exempt businesses valued below a fair figure like $50M so as to not bother startups with compliance expenses.
"Exactly how the legislation will be interpreted will be up to individual nations, but the shift in the balance of power is clear: the web’s biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet."
I feel like this is actually forcing the biggest tech companies to increase their grip on the internet.
You say that as if that's an accident. You see, the politicians at the EU aren't just malevolent, they're also incompetent and lazy. You see that's why they're doing this: force everyone's opinions into a few companies, and foreign ones that Europeans won't care about at that.
Next step is to sue those companies into submission. To give them the emails of everyone on their platforms. Their location. To make them pay for everything. To ...
But if they had to do that against 10000 companies, they wouldn't be able to. So they're enforcing Google's monopoly on Europe, to then force them to abuse it on their behalf (and of course blame them for it all the way).
The only thing GDPR and this new law have in common is that both of them will make it very difficult for new internet companies to challenge incumbents (not that it was very easy currently). But if every video distributing company is going to need something like contentID, good luck to them.
I'm rather conflicted about this. Whenever big companies say a new regulation is going to be "disastrous" or use other similar hyperbole I'm immediately suspicious.
On the other hand when the government wants to regulate something I'm also immediately suspicious.
And the publishers are in nice conflict of interest with this piece. I saw one online medium that I follow(It is relatively balanced), to publish only one article saying that we shall support this law. For 5 million country pretty sad. But not really surprising.
The headline is rather misleading. The EU parliament has approved it, the EU as a whole has not. The parliament is one step on the legislative process. National governments carry much more weight. Time to lobby your local politicians.
I've seen many posts on HN questioning whether there is any value in a permissionless uncensorable internet of the type some cryptocurrency platforms are building toward.
I'm not surprised that people that believed GDPR was good legislation would approve this law. The EU is simply not that important, internet businesses should simply not do business there.
Will this affect the global internet, or will big sites simply make a reduced "european version" where some filtered content isn't shown in the EU but is shown in North America?
The EU was furious when the large internet firms chose to have a reduced EU version and informed their customers the EU had forced them to remove stuff.
So they will do their very best to make it affect the global internet.
Given that all major powers want that, it'll happen. Maybe not right now, but it's coming. It would have happened a long time ago if it wasn't for the stroke of luck that these companies are in the US and the US government is protecting them (for now succesfully).
Can these laws be suspended or judicially reviewed if someone or government entity in the EU sues? I'm an American and unfamiliar with the lawmaking process in the EU.
What a sad development. The two major implications of this law I see are
- (even more) privatization of the jurisdiction and
- inverted presumption of innocence
There are some projects going on to do just that. Another (now dead) comment mentioned Zeronet, which is a good start. There's also IPFS, and some other lesser known ones. I think there were some based on Ethereum and other crypto as well.
The problem with all of these projects is content. Because there is low usage and a technical barrier to entry, nobody is bothering to put up interesting content that would attract users. (Except for some, ahem, "fringe" interests.) It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I keep hoping that one of these regulations will rekindle interest in distributed hosting, but it hasn't happened yet.
If some advocates would be willing to convince (and possibly help) some major OSS-related resources to establish a beachhead, it might help draw in some of that crowd at least. Adoption there would probably improve the systems, gradually bringing in people from the outside like with the original Internet.
I wish the EU would, so that it stops damaging things for the rest of the planet. Eventually the costs of complying with the EU's decrees will get high enough where it will make more sense for companies to block European traffic than comply.
If (cost of providing content to EU visitors) > (revenue generated from separate non-personalized ad network for EU visitors) { turn off EU visitor access }
Nor me, but I would guess that blocking EU traffic is neither necessary nor sufficient for avoiding compliance with EU law. Not doing any business in the EU would seem to be a more obvious general solution.
For example, you may block EU traffic, but if you have a bank account in the EU, and if an EU citizen discovers somehow, perhaps while travelling abroad, that you are misusing their personal data...
Just imagine how easy it's going to be to screw over other websites, just by making an account, uploading material that could in some way be construed as violating copyright but passes the filter because it cannot be perfect, and then reporting the site to one of the bodies responsible for upholding this directive.
Hell, just by doing that you could probably end any potential upholding of this system really fast.
Maybe someone (with a big following on Twitter, let's say) needs to start compiling a list of national government and EU websites that publish user generated content, for example petition sites. If the law goes through, people can go to those sites and post "unexpectedly copyright infringing" content, such as a paragraph from a book (perhaps a self-published one that consists of just seemingly contextless paragraphs).
(Inb4 the national laws end up including huge exemptions for site run by the government or political parties).
A more technical campaign would be reverse engineering the filtering algorithms (censorship machines) that sites end up forced to install, and finding a way of generating new copyrighted content that has the equivalent of a "hash collision" against already popular (or political) content hosted on websites using the filter.
Chans allow anonymous users to upload images and historically this leads into a lot of illegal content, especially stuff like child porn, to be uploaded unless you have strict moderation.
That's 4chan. The other big site is 8chan, where users can create their own boards and there are less rules, which makes it much harder to moderate. Then you also have all of the smaller chans which tend to get spammed by bots posting illegal stuff like child porn.
The users certainly don't, but I think that Hiroshimoot will be rather miffed if he starts getting shit from the EU for not complying with these insane rules.
Great, we are turning into the Banking industry: stupid regulation to make big actors bigger and make it almost impossible for newcomers with great ideas. These regulation always started with good intentions, but turned out to just add cost for... no value added to the final customer. I can imagine their will be many opportunities for "middleman" services to support these regulations. The days of many free services are numbered.
Everyone in this thread is asking the wrong question. It's not whether or not some rule the EU approves is good or bad, it's whether or not the EU is legitimate and has or should have the authority to dictate these types of things.
Business's who depend on the livelihood of free speech: Google, Facebook, Apple, Cloudflare, Netflix, Salesforce, et all need to get together and say "No, or we'll stop doing business in the EU".
This is fantastic for Google in Europe - they aren't making money from hobbyist publishing remixes and can easily filter it out with the infrastructure and training data they already have. They make money off Despacito and the likes with whom they already have a revshare in place.
I don't understand why any of this was necessary in the first place, the only reason I can think of is this being on the wishlist of a powerful lobbying bloc.
There is something suspect about the EU's cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.
Newspapers are dying and try to find a way to make money from their content. They find that the big user distributor Google doesn't give them their fair share and therefore try to make him pay. They get supported by other content producers and now we all are facing another absurd law.
I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.
I think the upload filters are meant to serve a peeking hole for EU governments to listen to what people share on the internet, as this bypasses the encryption. This will enable governments to stop content harmful to the regime from being shared and also track individuals who are working against the government. This all happened before in all socialist regimes. I remember it well, when I was phoning someone there were censors actively listening to the conversations. This is being transplanted on the internet. It is ironic how people fought this through the 80s only to have it reinstated.
The one case where I can see it being useful is when 1 news site has some exclusive content that they post, and then every other news site copies the story by linking to the original and paraphrasing the whole thing. I see this happen a lot and I can totally see how it disincentives creating original content when every other news story just copies the story and users only read the first article they see about it.
Google being a monopoly that applies biases to the results it shows (in a way that has no public accountability) is a significant problem -- as well as the fact they implement features which effectively take away revenue from websites by showing their content without giving them page views. That is (ostensibly) the justification for these kinds of laws. I think that they are flawed because they focus on further copyright extensions that I find draconian, but the problem itself I think is pretty obviously a real problem.
I don't agree with the legislation in question (the upload filter is an awful idea, and the link tax is a really bad way of attempting to solve a real problem because it clearly exists to make sure German publishing houses get even more money).
But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?
This shows you the power of old money vs new money ( tech companies ). I laugh when people say tech companies are powerful when you see even small newspapers bully them into submission.
Of course what's best for the people and the internet is a non-consideration for these politicians who work for the moneyed-class rather than the people.
The news companies ( especially the big ones like BBC, NYTimes and CNN ) already bullied google and facebook to give them exceptional preferential treatment. Now they want a link tax? We already have news companies' social media team bombarding the internet with their spam, now they will go into overdrive mode if news links are monetized. That's so ridiculous. What's to stop anyone from creating a "news" company and them spamming their own links everywhere to profit from this tax?
As for the upload filter, all that's going to do is to impede or silence critics, artists, etc using materials protected as "fair use".
People talk about china or russia all the time, but the biggest enemy of a free internet so far has been the EU since their legislation can be global while china and russia are pretty much confined to their own borders. And of course with EU behaving so erratically, this will just embolden china, russia and the rest of the world to act in bad faith as well.
So now it's time, if you have news agregator or img/video upload site, to close it to Europe and if not, just ignore the new laws and see what happens next.
How long until the EU ruins the internet so much that the rest of the world just cuts off completely from it, and the EU is left with their own little hyper-legislated enclave net?
This is the most hilarious quote in the article. The only thing this will do is entrench massive players like Google and Facebook who already have these systems in place. I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone could support this law while having any understanding of how the internet works. Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use? Just look at the abuses that already happen with the existing systems and now we have to spread this across the entire web, absolutely insane.
A truly sad day for the future of a free internet in Europe.