Holy crap on a stick. These new laws are just stupid.
I don't generally see eye to eye with libertarians (or whoever advocates for minimal interference of state), but out of touch laws like this are just the worst.
The EU and its member states have a penchant for crazy laws like this, GDPR, local movie quotas on services like Netflix, arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute, arresting people for having potato peelers in public, and so on. I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there. I'm aware comparisons to 1984 are a cliche but the EU truly has been inching towards it.
It unnecessarily limits the freedom of anybody who owns a website and doesn't grant any actual freedom to anybody else, almost as if the governments want to be the only ones allowed to collect data.
It's like saying that laws against torture limit the freedom of anybody who owns thumb screws. Well, yes, because _not being tortured_ is a right that everybody has.
Why is it your human right that if you write your name on a piece of paper and give it to someone, you can use the state to force them to give you the paper back or destroy it? That's GDPR.
Come on now. You cannot compare this to GPDR. GPDR was about protecting individuals, this is about protecting corporate interests. That's why this seems batshit crazy and GPDR is reasonable.
The rest of your points are worthless anecdotes. Yes it may have happened once, and yes it was stupid, but it's not like you will be chased down by the police if you walk around with a potato peeler. You cannot seriously believe that.
> GPDR was about protecting individuals, this is about protecting corporate interests
Or how about both rooted in a power-grab by an aspiring superstate that has long been resentful of the influence the US and it's corporates has over it's Internet-dependent citizens?
Or perhaps I'm being too cynical. The remote, barely accountable, hard-lobbied politicians are only looking out for individuals. These new content filter and link tax proposals as just anomalies.
Please stop judging a law on what it's about but instead on its real life consequences. Intent matters little if people/companies are unnecessarily hurt.
I love the GDPR. It came out of nowhere (I hadn't heard much about it before the big hubbub), I couldn't believe they were doing something so bold, and it reinvigorated my belief in the European Union.
You're doing the intent thing where you are saying what you think is the case or the intent instead of the reality. People are hurt by the money they spend applying reasonable compliance risk avoidance measures when new laws come out. People running companies, employees of those companies, customers of those companies, and society as a whole. Maybe you feel the harm is worth it, but please stop pretending it doesn't exist.
And it didn't come out of nowhere, data protection laws had existed before, didn't work before, so they doubled down on the already-failed legislative approach with the same not-working institutions instead of taking more practical or incremental approaches.
Some of us actually do live here. And some of us absolutely share your views.
But you need look no further than this very forum to see one country's feeble attempts to leave the sorry cirkus habitually likened to the end of civilisation as we know it.
“My oh my, we won't be able to sell people online life without them knowing it”
> local movie quotas on services like Netflix
Promoting local culture, what a shame.
> arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute
Of course, if someone is training their dog to do a “Bellamy” salute when prompted by statements including “Heil Hitler” and “gas the Jews”, the chances that this guy is a closet neo-nazi are so low[0] – BTW, you're the only one presenting it as a Bellamy salute, that sounds like if you were trying to cover a neo-nazi.
> I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there.
Nah, even for vacations, please don't come here, it's awful, you wouldn't like it.
First off, the Article 13 in question was already rejected once by Parliament and is expected to be repealed against (but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious, good on Mozilla).
> GDPR
While not uncontroversial, GDPR is generally seen as a good thing by experts.
> arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute
This didn’t happen. The man was arrested for hate speech, not for gestures his dog made. It’s also unrelated to EU law.
> arresting people for having potato peelers in public
This didn’t happen. The man was arrested for wielding a weapon in public. This weapon happened to be a knife (but not a potato peeler, though it was called that by the press: it had a fixed > 3″ long blade) but the nature of the weapon is secondary; what’s relevant for the arrest was the fact that the man wielded it as a weapon. And, again, this has nothing to do with EU legislation. And some additional context: the knife wielding laws in the UK are indeed pretty draconian but the UK, which is generally pretty low on violent crimes, has a specific problem with knife crimes and is therefore tackling the problem heads-on. Seems reasonable.
> I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there.
(In fact, even with occasional questionable laws being passed on EU levels the legal situation in the EU, both on EU and on country level, is still a lot saner than e.g. in the US.)
> First off, the Article 13 in question was already rejected once by Parliament and is expected to be repealed against (but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious, good on Mozilla).
As they say, don't count your chickens before they're hatched
To clarify: I find the UK’s knife ban stupid, and it affects me personally (I often cook at friends’ places and, if these friends have no proper knives, I bring my chef’s knife; I also own two valuable antique swords but the rules for bringing them into the country are so complicated that they are indefintely stored at my parents’ place in another country). But like you said, it has nothing to do with EU legislation. And there’s a specific historical context which at least gives some explanation as to why the rule exists in the first place.
>To clarify: I find the UK’s knife ban stupid, and it affects me personally (I often cook at friends’ places and, if these friends have no proper knives, I bring my chef’s knife
There's nothing in UK law that prevents you from doing this. Bring along a cook book and store the knife securely (and keep it in your bag) and you're going to be fine. If you get stopped by the police mention it straightaway and move from there.
The legislation is written broad enough that discretion is possible in cases like this. Where it's going to look funny is when you're stopped with it in a pub at 9pm on a Saturday night.
So yeah I see both sides (I might go for a beer down the local after cooking on the way home with the knife for example), but really there's not much wrong with your knife laws IMO.
Broad discretion in such laws is the problem. It puts you at the mercy of an individual police officer's whim. More broadly it facilitates discrimination. This isn't a theoretical problem: I know people in London who, due to stop and search, would never dare to carry knives, no matter the reason.
This is also true, I certainly think if you're a white middle class person taking a knife to a friends you're going to get off easier than an someone from a ethnic minority in Tower Hamlets.
It also results in insane things like this [1]. I'm not sure if there's a better way though, it seems much like democracy it's the best of a bad bunch.
You seem to have intentionally ignored "and its member states."
What am I supposed to take away from that quality of life ranking? Yes, the US is below a few EU countries and above others. And it's an average, which means it doesn't mean you can't have a better quality of life in the US than you would in Denmark depending on your individual situation. I for one would be much less happy having to deal with more than doubled gas prices and restricted individual freedoms.
> You seem to have intentionally ignored "and its member states."
I didn’t, but your comment insinuates that it’s all the same. As for restricted individual freedoms, this betrays a lot about your background. EU contries value equal opportunity over individual freedom for a select few. For minorities and poor people, the EU fares a lot better on individual freedoms than the US does.
> For minorities and poor people, the EU fares a lot better on individual freedoms than the US does
That's not true at all. All you have to do is go to France to see how far Europeans are willing to go to restrict the individual freedoms of minorities.
Of course, you won't get data on just how much those groups are in the minority, because France has also conveniently made it illegal to collect this data, but you don't have to have exact numbers to see that the French government has no problem passing laws that directly curtail minorities' freedoms.
I’ve lived in France for several years. And yes, I agree that France unduly restricts individual freedoms (and protested against it). I’m not claiming that any single country is perfect. I’m claiming that they are, on balance, better than the US (when you’re poor and/or a minority). Basic personal safety is a prerequisite for freedom: If you can’t even be sure that you can afford medical care keeping you alive, or if you need to worry that institutionalised racism means you get shot by police or thrown in jail for a trivial misdemeanour that earns a white person a slap on the wrist … then “freedom” is simply a theoretical concept.
And yes, institutional racism also exists in France (and in every other European country) but it’s much less normalised than in the US.
> And yes, institutional racism also exists in France (and in every other European country) but it’s much less normalised than in the US.
This is the line that white people in France often say, but it's completely wrong. Racism is much more institutionalized in France than it is in the US. Racism is so institutionalized in France that it's almost impossible to talk about it, because it's woven into the legal and societal fabric and so deeply embedded.
> Basic personal safety is a prerequisite for freedom
You are dramatically overestimating the extent to which it is safe to exist in France as someone who is Black, Arab, or Muslim. Which is a common mistake, given that France has literally made it illegal to collect data on police brutality and incarceration rates of minorities in France, the way we can in the US. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or that France isn't also an incredibly dangerous place for minorities - and arguably much more so - as anyone (like myself) who looks Black, Arab, or Muslim and has so much as traveled to France or lived there can attest.
> You’ll need to provide a good reference for that because this is completely wrong as far as I know (AI doesn’t mention it, for instance [1]).
Since 1978, it's been illegal in France to collect census information on race. This is done under the guise of providing "equality under the law". In practice, as pretty much any minority could predict, all it does is make it impossible to actually talk about the systemic discrimination which happens[0].
You say you lived in France for several years, and yet you're not aware that it's impossible to legally collect data on anything related to racial, ethnic, or religious minorities (including police brutality and incarceration rates). Which, in a way, is my exact point: making it impossible to talk about these issues in France doesn't mean that they don't happen; it just means that people who aren't affected by them aren't aware of them, and so they can continue believing the illusion that this racism somehow doesn't exist, or isn't as bad as it really is.
Look, I obviously know about this law but this is a completely different thing from what you claimed and it doesn't mean at all that it's forbidden to catalogue police crimes against minorities.
I will concede that it makes it harder to do so by referring to official records (and this is indeed a problem). But your comment sounded like it would be illegal to, for instance, independently collect complaints. And it's emphatically not. Amnesty and others do exactly that, including looking at racial factors.
Yet if tomorrow these statistics were allowed and were to show (for example) that 50% of people in jail are Muslim, what would be the use of that number? The far left would use it as proof of discrimination and the far right that muslims are a danger to society.
Societies like the US where there's a "race" checkbox on forms and where ethnic statistics are legal, are far from being less racist or discriminatory...
> First off, the Article 13 in question was already rejected once by Parliament and is expected to be repealed against
It was rejected rather narrowly (278-318) a few months ago, and only because some of the coalition that voted against it wants to pass a slightly weaker version of the other clauses instead.
"The Legal Affairs Committee narrowly approved the plans (with slight changes) – but in a surprise move, the Parliament then refused to rubber-stamp the Committee’s position, opening it up for further debate."
We’re saying the same thing. The Legal Affairs Committee isn’t the Parliament, it’s merely a committee. The EP only had two options here: either vote in favour of the article (“rubber-stamping”) or rejecting it. That’s what they did. The procedure in this case is to revise the proposal, which is exactly what’s happening here. This is working as intended. Of course the fact that the defeat was rather narrow is cause for concern, don’t get me wrong.
This is simply wrong. The judgement clarifies explicitly that the hate speech in question was the antisemitic slogans that were used as cues, and which were audible on the video.
The Bellamy salute is a palm-out salute described by Francis Bellamy, the author of the American Pledge of Allegiance, as the gesture which was to accompany the pledge. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute". Both the Pledge and its salute originated in 1892. Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which was very similar, and which was derived from the Roman salute, a gesture that was popularly (albeit erroneously) believed to have been used in ancient Rome.[1] This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the Flag Code on December 22, 1942.
Along with the swastika, just another thing the fascists stole and corrupted.
You are absolutely correct. If you have ever owned a potato peeler or a right-leaning dog, it is imperative that you never set foot in Europe. It's just not worth taking that chance.
I'm sure the poor folk in Europe will manage to struggle on without you and they thank you for your concern.
Whether or not you agree with the copyright reforms, it is not helpful to present these opinions (e.g. 'will negatively affect...') as fact. You may as well stand outside the legislative building with a placard.
To my mind, it's impossible to take part in the debate until you've realised that your position is a point of view; that other have a different point of view; and that compromise is going to be necessary.
It's quite hard to talk about a compromise when there's zero benefit in accepting the new law to begin with. Remember how effective the SOPA/ACTA protests were, the only reason these succeded was because no one was interested in a compromise.
They weren't effective. The same has already been implemented through a loophole with Canada (CETA) so US companies can already force their lower standards on us through their Canadian subsidiaries.
Simple distraction and switch and playing into the mindset that Canada has somehow ties with Europe and is therefore 'good'.
I don't agree with these copyright reforms, but I do agree with you. I remember thinking when the swedish pirate party got started in 2006 that it was already late to talk about these issues. Because there had already been so much written about it in the '90s and early '00. Now more than 10 years later neither the tech companies nor "the community" have dealt with any of it. Instead they have been chasing opportunities, not willing to do anything that might jeopardize their own position. Eventually reality just catches up with you and whoever can present a solution will get their chance.
FACT: The proposed new copyright rules will lead to direct surveillance of users’ activities online.
This and the recent 5 eyes document to require backdoors for all technology and services are the same. The surveillance state is coming. It is being bought. You are being sold.
But don't worry, they are doing this for our own security and safety. No one need watch the watchers.
How is that a "fact"? Pretty much every time you upload data to a website, there will be some sort of validation of the uploaded data that will happen. That's not "surveillance" it's a basic process that happens on the Internet. "Surveillance" requires going a step further to track what users are doing. (E.g. checking your ID at a club is not "surveillance"; having the bouncers file a report so someone can track what clubs each person goes to is surveillance.) Mozilla points to nothing in Article 13 to suggest such tracking would be required. They seem to be speculating that such tracking will happen. That may or may not be a good conjecture, but that doesn't make it a "fact."
For EU people who want to take action: call or email your Member European Parliament (MEP) and let them know that don't supper the policy (or support it?!?). You can call them via:
Having called a few of them and spoken to them on the phone about this they are mostly pissed off about the cookie-cutter emails spamming them about this but quite happy to talk about it on the phone.
On the other hand, some of us are much better at typing than talking. And some might have a fit of social phobia at the mere thought of a phone call.
The templates might be tedious, but they are there for people who would otherwise post some random flame or rant. Pages encouraging phone calls have scripted templates on them too.
Yeah and that's fine, personal emails were quite well received. Template emails were universally ignored, regardless of which side of the issue the representative stood.
Please write in your own words, and preferably from your own e-mail address! I can't see getting a bazillion of copies of the same message being anything but annoying and I wouldn't be surprised if they block the sender of such tools.
I wrote to them last time this was voted on and expected zero replies (partly due to the late hour), but actually got 2 out of 13, one of which indicated they had actually taken a few seconds to read some of my words. I later read they had received "thousands" of messages on the subject. I can't imagine most of them getting anything close to even this small amount of attention.
Oh yeah, last campaign of the kind worked great. Members of Parliament really appreciated to have their mailbox (and their voicemail) mail-bombed by hundreds or thousands of such spam and reacted super well.
</sarcasm>
No, in fact, no matter which side and party they belonged to, it really pissed them off and turned them against what the spam advocated for. Many thought it was orchestrated by some GAFAM.
You're not wrong. I remember seeing a couple of MPs lamenting the barrage of messages they received.
On the other hand, if you're an elected representative you better listen to your constituents. They are there to represent the people, not to decide in their place. Or, at least, that's the idea.
If being a public servant is so agonizing, there is a simple solution for them, most European countries offer livable welfare, you don't need to be a MEP if the job isn't for you. We literally have lists of people willing to do their job, it's called an election and it's coming next year. So this can and will be fixed very soon, so don't fret about spam, just stay home.
"Only a handful of the largest tech companies have the technical and financial means to operate the sprawling filtering systems that this law demands."
The smaller platforms often use under the hood Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or equivalent.
Probably the copyright verification is going to be added at that level, and hopefully will be transparent to the platforms built on top of those cloud services.
So hopefully, this will not impact smaller SaaS companies as much as it might look.
> So hopefully, this will not impact smaller SaaS companies as much as it might look.
... this would not impact smaller SaaS companies ...
This isn't a law yet and I don't think most people want it to become one.
That said, I disagree that this isn't a terrible burden for the small guy. Even if it would be trivial to set up, all the other downsides remain and it leads to lock-in in the form of dependence on large companies who have implemented this.
More importantly, why do we want this? What benefits does this bring? I don't see many for the ordinary person.
> More importantly, why do we want this? What benefits does this bring? I don't see many for the ordinary person.
Maybe it could shift liability? So if someone posts the lyrics to a song and Sony sues them for 50,000 euro could they argue that it is the fault of the ISP for not filtering their post properly?
This is a longshot, but I was trying very hard to think of some way in which this law doesn't screw over individuals for the benefit of large corporations.
- Mandated EU Content on streaming providers (Netflix)
- EU Internet sales tax (Amazon)
The simple question begs: how many more regulations aimed at US companies are coming?
At this rate, the more regulations are created at fighting US companies. The number of internet startups and business located in the EU will one day cycle downward to zero.
Well if they only cycle to zero then they'll just come back up again just as fast, so that seems not so bad.
Article 13 is hardly an attack on Github, even if it may affect them. The EU loves US money and tech, and is happy to keep it (it seems it's happy to stay too). I'm totally against this proposal, but not because of anti-regulation dogma. That's rightly unpopular in prosperous and socialist Europe.
It's a carebear legislation aimed at protecting imbecile content creators who can't be bothered with at least trying to run it like a real business. Why not let people figure it out and deal with it on their own, ffs
If you can't generate your own innovation and revenue you have to steal it from somewhere. It'll be interesting to see how much longer the EU consumer can stay relevant before they fade into a tertiary market
Is there a simple, objective summary of the proposed rules? Everything I've seen is propaganda trying to convince me they're the end of the internet, which makes me quite wary of the authors' motivations.
Yes, but with all the cross-references and legalese specifying which level of government is responsible for enforcing each piece of the directive, the actual regulations can be hard to extract for an untrained reader.
> which level of government is responsible for enforcing each piece of the directive
At least that's an easy question to answer: the member states.
A directive obliges member states to introduce local legislation to achieve a particular effect. Usually it's transcribed pretty closely, but some states may use their sovereignty to impose additional restrictions (if they're not precluded by the Directive, a different directive, or human rights law).
Generally if you want to speed up reading a Directive you can skip all the "Whereas" clauses, they're not binding but do specify the reasoning behind the directive.
And the real meaning of stuff like [1.11.3]? It's got to be there, or else the law is underspecified, but it doesn't make for effective lay communication. I still think a real summary would be useful for all the people that don't have your personal guidance about how to decode legislation.
[1.11.3] Articles 5 to 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC and Directive 2012/28/EU shall apply mutatis mutandis in respect of the rights referred to in paragraph 1.
Just ignore that part, which is procedure, and head straight to the meat of the directive.
The controversial article (13) in the EU directive is exactly three paragraphs long. Quoting the article's title and first paragraph in full:
> Use of protected content by information society service providers storing and giving access to large amounts of works and other subject-matter uploaded by their users
> 1. Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter.
As you can see, there might be room to argue that one could remove a word here or there, or perhaps to avoid a euphemism or two, but to me it seems like it's about as plain text as legalese can be.
As an aside, and in stark contrast with what a lot of the UK press would have you believe, EU texts tend to be very human readable; particularly when you compare it to texts produced by other legislative bodies.
To illustrate, compare the EU directive in question:
Anyone want to speculate on the chances of this getting approved by the European Parliament? Last July they blocked an earlier version and sent it back to the commission.
Edit:
And as someone living in the UK, I'm also wondering what the implications of this are for brexit[1]. Will the post-brexit interface between the EU and the UK w/r/t copyright be made even more complicated by this, with knock-on effects on digital service providers on each side?
> I'm also wondering what the implications of this are for brexit
We're well into "who knows?" territory, but what would definitely happen is the UK would lose any say over the EU rules. The UK isn't really large enough to be its own market for startups (unlike the EU and US), so we'd mostly end up using companies hosted in one or the other and obliged to follow their rules.
(Safe Harbour is probably a more interesting one to consider!)
Indeed, may be similar to VPNs back in the day, when the UK was the number one provider. Though I wouldn't place much trust in the current government, they're worse than most of the EU when it comes to Internet policing :(
the IP Juggernauts are pushing so hard and strong that they will be their demise, hopefully.
they are trying too hard to have their claws on every jurisdiction and be the international police that can prosecute everyone based on content piracy. And they are very close to that.
They already have control on north America and southeast Asia (via US, ChinaN and TPP agreements). Now they are "fixing" what they wanted im GDPR but lawmakers were too clever to see the tricks then, so they are being more explicit.
But eventually, what people will start doing is what we see in china. everyone in country A will do whatever it takes to consume content/interact with other people via sites in country B, which is not under the same jurisdiction of country A.
Hopefully people will still be able to live as they live today, and only yhe advertising market will suffer as brands now can't reliably reach one market or another. Maybe that fixes advertising too and force brands to sponsor services regardless of demographic. or maybe I am too optimistic and the IP conglomerates will win and people will not have access to any content that is not made and authorized by them.
It sets up the infrastructure for control of media. Is an image being shared that is unflattering to the current powers that be? Well, now we have a mandated system in place that can immediately pull that image from the web.
I don't think getting totalitarian control is the goal here, but it is the end result of it.
There is one apocalyptic scenario here that everyone ignores: it is monetary compensation that keeps the social norm. Remove that, make it so only the rich or the obsessed write, make music, etc, and they will increasing do so for their own ends, because there is no reason not to. Social alone approval will motivate very few to commit to the amount of work necessary for most creative endeavors.
On the surface, of course, this would seem ridiculous. But we only have to examine how much cultural capital is employed to keep writers writing toward the money and controlled by editors, and ratings boards, etc. And the common consumer expects what they, the consumer, to always be delivered unto with exactly that which they claim to desire. Under the monetary system reproductive advantage slates toward those who accrue capital. However remove that, and the 'shock value' of 'independent artistic work' becomes the most viable remaining path to mate attraction.
So, remove the money, and the only artists, writers, etc, who remain, are the ones that the mass of consumers despise as 'experimental' and 'weird', etc.
And given that humanity is pretty much by definition a story species, the resulting effects on society as a whole, with such a major hit to the mytho-poetic infrastructure that undergirds any society, might be very interesting. Most likely some government or wealth-backed cultural production engine will emerge in the vacuum, however, the question might be whether it will do so fast enough.
How does anyone otherwise do work that is distributed via mass mechanical reproduction?
Disney could operate private theatres that threw out and banned people with recording devices, but how could home distribution function.
For popular work, we are back at the pre-copyright world of patronage.
Popular appeal might lead certain rare individuals to monetary compensation in academia, but this, I would say, will be country and culturally dependent. In France, for example, I might see it, but not the United States. And it might lead to a certain amount of tribal-production to sustain the replication of certain cultural norms, but in order for that to e so the trend of production and consumption previously adhered to in these industries (from the consumer viewpoint) will have to be reverse: the consumer will be paying patronage in advance of the creation of the work which will then be mechanically mass reproduced upon release. However, I think a smaller amount of people than currently consumptive model of media will be as likely to switch wholly to a 'pig-in-a-poke'-model. Even with things like netflix, the primary draw has always been that which pre-exists, that which the consumer already knows to be available, and its primary value is not weighted on what necessarily 'might' be produced in the future. People might be willing to fund such models through 'micro transaction', however, any individual funding themselves, thus, would necessarily require a proportionally larger base of funders; however this would have the function of keeping the cultural mytho-poetic framework in check, producing what commonly referred to as 'the lowest common denominator'. Also, however, even if someone were to make a living in this manner, they might not what to in that, no matter what survivable level of income they may derive, a Disney would then, through the sheer economy of their scale, be able to transform that, now mechanically reproduced work into something distributed through the private theatre system at no cost for the acquiring of the source material. This alone may be a sufficient psychological demotivator for many, and present a common source of burnout (thus requiring a change in employment), or even an obstacle to many taking up the profession at all.
The question remains, if the so-called creator is likely to get no monetary compensation, and little in the way of social capital anyway, what will induce them to create any works besides those they want to create. The problem is that 'artistry' in the mytho-poetics of most western countries attains a somewhat religious significance, but the most of its practitioners (or at least those who mange to make their primary living at it) would leave so-called creative fields for greener pastures; it's a job.
(I suppose I should add here that I am very much against to current copyright system as it stands now, though I realize my reply might indicate otherwise. I do, however, become aggravated when the attitudes of so-called consumers amounts to a type a slavery where they want what they want [produced but want it for free, resembles too much those companies that have baited artists and writer with 'exposure' for far too long. As it stands, what is said about the disruptive potential of the internet aside, most writers and artists make what they do (and paltry sums at that) by effectively signing over their copyrights in perpetuity to what amounts to intellectual property holding companies. So the law may say the author owns it, but to see anything from it (in the vast majority of cases) they have to give that right away, and then so-called consumers come along and claim (purely to pinch pennies) that authors should relinquish even (and presenting no alternative) that is, to me, as aggravating as the media conglomerates who do the same.)
- The prepayment model was quite successful in the past; authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens and Dostoevsky made a living from producing novels in serialized form[1]. This model fits well also with TV shows, podcasts, and potentially video games.
- Plenty of content is already funded by volunteer donations and ads (although, personally, I abhor the latter more than copyright).
- You don't necessarily need copyright to have protection; contracts exist. It's doubtful the competing private theater networks would just copy each other's movies, rather than reach a legal agreement not to do so.
- For certain types of works, live performances provide a funding model that doesn't rely on copyright. It's not copyright that keeps people going to concerts.
The problem is our respective post are sort of coming at the problem from opposite ends. Though, I agree with you, for the most part. Mine is attempting (lazily, I perhaps have to admit) to formulate how a post-copyright world functions. And, again, I agree, for the most part, with what you point out. Fundraising has been more and more a useful model employed by many writers and artists, no doubt. But all of that is still backed by copyright. Even in Dickens and Dostoevsky's day. (Though, in Tsarist Russia, it was the printer and not the author who obtained copyright.). Dickens, however, (in typical author fashion of often going from feast to famine) had almost all of his works circulated in the United States (where he was extremely popular) outside of the control of copyright, as, at the time, and as most developing nations do, the United States (much as China had done with technology in the nineties) neglected, for the most part, protecting foreigns works in favor of 'building themselves up' quickly. This was (to draw in your point about live performances) helpful to Dickens after a fashion, in that, at one point, his speaking tours ere his primary means of income. (However, part of that can be attributed not just to his popularity as a writer, but his phenomenal skill as an orator, so more than anything else, he may represent the exception that allows certain individuals to rise so much within the sphere of social influence.) But, to me, it still remains an unanswered question as to what would happen if, say, writing a 'Game of Thrones' under such a model, where a studio would have access to the material with no restrictions. The only thing that might hinder it is that multiple such entities would have the same rights, and they would most likely not want to step on each others toes (only for the reason they would likely see it as dividing their potential audience and thereby dividing the result money stream), and contractual and wink-wink-nudge-nudge agreements might become common place between them in such circumstances. And given the fact of the enormous amount of capital required for such undertakings (it's unlikely something on the order of Marvel film would be generated solely by crowd-funding) it would be unlikely, I would think, for many upstart companies to produce such, thereby locking in the defacto 'gentlemen agreements'. But there is also the question of just how much social impart such media would have, without the angel of home distribution, something that is fundamental to replicating the modern myths-poetic frameworks of western societies. And in any regard a truly post-copyright world, would seem to have the possibility of reshaping both culture and society in ways that are not apparent or predictable in extrapolating from system that are still in essence backed by it. After all, even Creative Commons and Free Software exists wholly on the back of copyright.
In regards to contracts, I think we only need to look at history: the case comes to mind wether agents of Thomas Edison saw a screening of the film 'Voyage to the Moon' and bribed a theatre operator to get a copy of the film made, so it was Edison, showcasing it in his private theatre chains (he owned an enormous amount of patents in motion picture technology, which is why Hollywood is movie capital of the United States, to get beyond the legal reach of Edison in New York), thereby having extracted the commercial value of the film prior to the director managing to bring it to the United States. Still, this leaves out the entire possibility of home distribution (outside of the most egregious contracts and locked-down hardware (so far as I can see), which, looking at the way things are going, may be the case under the current system as well).
I will completely agree as it regards to live performance. But that is a very small segment of so-called creative work. And even then we are still left with the perennial problem of the lion's share of the resultant capital going no...
This is so ridiculous on so many levels. I will just pick one angle. It's the non-profits like Wikipedia and non-profit-like writers and creators who deliver high quality. Commercial sites and blogs just produce tons of spammy junk.
Yet Wikipedia is licenses share-alike. And I would be interested in seeing a non-niche author who consigns their work to the public domain (or as far as is possible in some legal districts).
Yet more than 90% of the work consumed by (pretty much everyone) is commercial in origin. Even those producing news segments and documentaries for PBS are doing so because they are paid to do so.
I'm not saying people won't write things like Wikipedia articles. But if the value for others (a given corporation, for example) exceeds the social capital they generate for themselves, if they just feed a machine for no benefit, expending more and more of themselves in the process, only to watch a Disney, say, become far more well known for it (thus increasing the desirability of mating with the owners and board members and rich directors involved) why would any so-called rational person commit to such? I doubt all those wiki contributors would feel good if if, somehow, all that content were retroactively re-licensed (or more accurately de-licensed) and incorporated into a commercial, subscription-based encyclopedia. Yes, in one sense, everything that's on Wikipedia would remain as always, as available as always, but I cannot see it as having gone untainted after such a move.
True, a certain proof might be found in the uses of the MIT and 2-clause BSD licenses (and their kind), but still, it seems to me, even in those cases (taking note that they exist in veritable islands of copyleft and proprietary software) the social benefits (mainly in their ability to contrast themselves with the aforementioned alternatives) allows either the potential gain of social capital that can be parlayed both in personal relationships and employment (both having their obvious connection with attraction of a mate based on the expression of extended phenotypes) or, alternatively, such software is created purely for person use and released to the wider world because the commodification and distribution of computer technology makes it trivial and cheap to invest in the possibility of acquiring even minimal social capital, and should none come it, of course, the producer is out nothing, so there, relatively, likely only the possibility of gain.
Even our own present conversation falls within this realm, just as, according to the law (of course, I presume your geographical location to likely be somewhere within a country affected by the Berne Convention, though I will admit the possibility of error here) we are automatically granted ownership over our respective words, either collection of phrases walled off from the other in a way, possibly, and ironically, reflecting our respective mental dispositions on this issue, and just as the terms of service for this sight allow its owners to store and serve them unto any who enter.
Spammy junk, bad movies, terrible TV, is the common binding thread of cultural narrative and the mytho-poetic framework (a phrase I have type too many time I think), but, in any regard, it creates and reinforces who we are. Even those who decry it, in doing so, define themselves in relation to it and in its terms. So...long live the new flesh, I guess.
I admit such a number be highly variable to the individual. But if I were wagering, I would peg it somewhere around that percentage. (Though I don't do well at gambling, so there is that.)
I wonder if media consumption is like counting calories. They do say that (due to various factors) it is impossible for consumers to do so accurately.
Interestingly, can you truly know if my post is commercial in origin. Maybe I am some kind of covert influencer, paid to sow any number of memetic seeds. (Perhaps I'm not even a person as such, at least, not a flesh and blood one, but merely a rather limited Markov Generator.)
(Though, it isn't---at least, not the first part---I'm very much not getting paid money for this.) Which is not to say, however, that I am not getting paid. That is to say, without these posts, I don't exist in this environment. My post, like yours and everyone else's here, is our ongoing construction of both the accounts which contain our social assets (assets that extend even beyond this realm) as well as the social assets themselves, that is our identities in our own minds, and each variant of that identity that exists within each reader of each post we submit. (Facebook highlight reals, various forms of virtual signaling in the comment section for news articles, etc would fall into this category. Though, in a way, this in an interesting model for post-capitalist future, in that, baring those who are an such services for business promotion, Facebook, Twitter, etc are all commercial endeavors where users churn-up content for no commercial compensation, ultimately ultimately creating the state in which these entities can acrue capital. And even though it doesn't in the same way as those entities, HN itself (and the social reputations generated on it) are deeply intertwined with combinator as a whole.) But those identities are also backed by copyright, interestedly enough. And I would claim your ownership of this identity (at least so far as it can be owned, that is the specifics of each post) is intrinsic, no matter to what degree you decry copyright. For example, without such, you collective posts could be taken by anyone and edited in any fashion they desired, thus crafting any public version of you they wanted. It might be argued that if keep libel and defemation laws around, that that wouldn't happen, but doesn't that just become a kind of backdoor copyright? A so-called creator could claim that no matter how the work were modified it would be prejudicial against them and that, even, perhaps, that distributing it to unapproved entities would be also be so (though, that likely is stretch).
Also, I think that there is a disparity in, shall we say, length. That is to say, users are, in general, willing to trade effort that raises capital for an entity wholly other for themselves, in exchange for the opportunity for the construction and maintenance of social capital. And we can see that as a fairly textbook value transaction. The question is how far it can be pushed. The rights already granted to entities such as Facebook would, I would argue, if they tried to pursue it, that the user agreements of such entities grant enough leeway for them to employ a large portion of their generated content anyway they wanted, not just the re-serving of it and the cataloging of it. So let's imagine they do so, using such data for say, effectively, crowdsourced filmmaking, or some such. At what point would the user base become dissatisfied with this? That is, at what point does the value of the transaction shift? So the overall question becomes, while users are willing to generate, in exchange for a certain amount of social capital, a few memes and one-liners, and the typical length of a post on HN, are they willing to do so for substantial work (that is to say, would the typical user be willing to give Facebook one or more 80,000 100,000, 200,000 word books with all the result capital flowing, then, to that entity?). And we can extend this to fu...
(edit: Not just the facts of course, also her opinion, shared by many organisations and individuals knowledgeable on how the Internet should work, eg. Vinton Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee, see https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf).
Europe is a no-go area for any startup. Instead of building your product, you will spend all your time complying with thousands of GDPR-like laws, difficult tax regulations, different languages etc. and every country has also a lot of additional national laws (Hackerparagraf in germany for example). It's just not worth it.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI don't generally see eye to eye with libertarians (or whoever advocates for minimal interference of state), but out of touch laws like this are just the worst.
It's like saying that laws against torture limit the freedom of anybody who owns thumb screws. Well, yes, because _not being tortured_ is a right that everybody has.
The rest of your points are worthless anecdotes. Yes it may have happened once, and yes it was stupid, but it's not like you will be chased down by the police if you walk around with a potato peeler. You cannot seriously believe that.
Or how about both rooted in a power-grab by an aspiring superstate that has long been resentful of the influence the US and it's corporates has over it's Internet-dependent citizens?
Or perhaps I'm being too cynical. The remote, barely accountable, hard-lobbied politicians are only looking out for individuals. These new content filter and link tax proposals as just anomalies.
I love the GDPR. It came out of nowhere (I hadn't heard much about it before the big hubbub), I couldn't believe they were doing something so bold, and it reinvigorated my belief in the European Union.
You're doing the intent thing where you are saying what you think is the case or the intent instead of the reality. People are hurt by the money they spend applying reasonable compliance risk avoidance measures when new laws come out. People running companies, employees of those companies, customers of those companies, and society as a whole. Maybe you feel the harm is worth it, but please stop pretending it doesn't exist.
And it didn't come out of nowhere, data protection laws had existed before, didn't work before, so they doubled down on the already-failed legislative approach with the same not-working institutions instead of taking more practical or incremental approaches.
So if society decides to solve a problem, "it costs some money" is simply no argument against it.
Companies are free to operate in some failed state if they wish not to contribute to society.
But you need look no further than this very forum to see one country's feeble attempts to leave the sorry cirkus habitually likened to the end of civilisation as we know it.
We're on a road to nowhere good whatsoever.
“My oh my, we won't be able to sell people online life without them knowing it”
> local movie quotas on services like Netflix
Promoting local culture, what a shame.
> arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute
Of course, if someone is training their dog to do a “Bellamy” salute when prompted by statements including “Heil Hitler” and “gas the Jews”, the chances that this guy is a closet neo-nazi are so low[0] – BTW, you're the only one presenting it as a Bellamy salute, that sounds like if you were trying to cover a neo-nazi.
> I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there.
Nah, even for vacations, please don't come here, it's awful, you wouldn't like it.
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/scottish-man-who-t...
And I don't care if the guy was a neo-nazi; it shouldn't be the government's job to decide what jokes are too offensive.
Americans even shut down newspapers after WW2 and only gave out licenses to start a newspaper after background checks and ideological checks.
Strange how things you made us do somehow morphed into something that you cannot accept at all.
First off, the Article 13 in question was already rejected once by Parliament and is expected to be repealed against (but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious, good on Mozilla).
> GDPR
While not uncontroversial, GDPR is generally seen as a good thing by experts.
> arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute
This didn’t happen. The man was arrested for hate speech, not for gestures his dog made. It’s also unrelated to EU law.
> arresting people for having potato peelers in public
This didn’t happen. The man was arrested for wielding a weapon in public. This weapon happened to be a knife (but not a potato peeler, though it was called that by the press: it had a fixed > 3″ long blade) but the nature of the weapon is secondary; what’s relevant for the arrest was the fact that the man wielded it as a weapon. And, again, this has nothing to do with EU legislation. And some additional context: the knife wielding laws in the UK are indeed pretty draconian but the UK, which is generally pretty low on violent crimes, has a specific problem with knife crimes and is therefore tackling the problem heads-on. Seems reasonable.
> I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there.
Really? https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
(In fact, even with occasional questionable laws being passed on EU levels the legal situation in the EU, both on EU and on country level, is still a lot saner than e.g. in the US.)
As they say, don't count your chickens before they're hatched
Sadly neither the problem nor the solution is new - the ban on knives in public dates to at least 1953.
It's interesting (and very Brexity) that people blame these things on the EU when they're both very much British criminal law independent of the EU.
There's nothing in UK law that prevents you from doing this. Bring along a cook book and store the knife securely (and keep it in your bag) and you're going to be fine. If you get stopped by the police mention it straightaway and move from there.
The legislation is written broad enough that discretion is possible in cases like this. Where it's going to look funny is when you're stopped with it in a pub at 9pm on a Saturday night.
So yeah I see both sides (I might go for a beer down the local after cooking on the way home with the knife for example), but really there's not much wrong with your knife laws IMO.
This is also true, I certainly think if you're a white middle class person taking a knife to a friends you're going to get off easier than an someone from a ethnic minority in Tower Hamlets.
It also results in insane things like this [1]. I'm not sure if there's a better way though, it seems much like democracy it's the best of a bad bunch.
1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3165489/Gardener-arr...
What am I supposed to take away from that quality of life ranking? Yes, the US is below a few EU countries and above others. And it's an average, which means it doesn't mean you can't have a better quality of life in the US than you would in Denmark depending on your individual situation. I for one would be much less happy having to deal with more than doubled gas prices and restricted individual freedoms.
I didn’t, but your comment insinuates that it’s all the same. As for restricted individual freedoms, this betrays a lot about your background. EU contries value equal opportunity over individual freedom for a select few. For minorities and poor people, the EU fares a lot better on individual freedoms than the US does.
That's not true at all. All you have to do is go to France to see how far Europeans are willing to go to restrict the individual freedoms of minorities.
Of course, you won't get data on just how much those groups are in the minority, because France has also conveniently made it illegal to collect this data, but you don't have to have exact numbers to see that the French government has no problem passing laws that directly curtail minorities' freedoms.
I’ve lived in France for several years. And yes, I agree that France unduly restricts individual freedoms (and protested against it). I’m not claiming that any single country is perfect. I’m claiming that they are, on balance, better than the US (when you’re poor and/or a minority). Basic personal safety is a prerequisite for freedom: If you can’t even be sure that you can afford medical care keeping you alive, or if you need to worry that institutionalised racism means you get shot by police or thrown in jail for a trivial misdemeanour that earns a white person a slap on the wrist … then “freedom” is simply a theoretical concept.
And yes, institutional racism also exists in France (and in every other European country) but it’s much less normalised than in the US.
This is the line that white people in France often say, but it's completely wrong. Racism is much more institutionalized in France than it is in the US. Racism is so institutionalized in France that it's almost impossible to talk about it, because it's woven into the legal and societal fabric and so deeply embedded.
> Basic personal safety is a prerequisite for freedom
You are dramatically overestimating the extent to which it is safe to exist in France as someone who is Black, Arab, or Muslim. Which is a common mistake, given that France has literally made it illegal to collect data on police brutality and incarceration rates of minorities in France, the way we can in the US. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or that France isn't also an incredibly dangerous place for minorities - and arguably much more so - as anyone (like myself) who looks Black, Arab, or Muslim and has so much as traveled to France or lived there can attest.
You’ll need to provide a good reference for that because this is completely wrong as far as I know (AI doesn’t mention it, for instance [1]).
Again, don’t get me wrong: I deeply disagree with the way police acts and is organised in France.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2009/04/france-pol...
Since 1978, it's been illegal in France to collect census information on race. This is done under the guise of providing "equality under the law". In practice, as pretty much any minority could predict, all it does is make it impossible to actually talk about the systemic discrimination which happens[0].
You say you lived in France for several years, and yet you're not aware that it's impossible to legally collect data on anything related to racial, ethnic, or religious minorities (including police brutality and incarceration rates). Which, in a way, is my exact point: making it impossible to talk about these issues in France doesn't mean that they don't happen; it just means that people who aren't affected by them aren't aware of them, and so they can continue believing the illusion that this racism somehow doesn't exist, or isn't as bad as it really is.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/how-french...
I will concede that it makes it harder to do so by referring to official records (and this is indeed a problem). But your comment sounded like it would be illegal to, for instance, independently collect complaints. And it's emphatically not. Amnesty and others do exactly that, including looking at racial factors.
Yet if tomorrow these statistics were allowed and were to show (for example) that 50% of people in jail are Muslim, what would be the use of that number? The far left would use it as proof of discrimination and the far right that muslims are a danger to society.
Societies like the US where there's a "race" checkbox on forms and where ethnic statistics are legal, are far from being less racist or discriminatory...
It was rejected rather narrowly (278-318) a few months ago, and only because some of the coalition that voted against it wants to pass a slightly weaker version of the other clauses instead.
-> Article 13 has not been rejected by the EP.
What has been rejected is a proposal to fast-track the proposal with no debate.
See https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
"The Legal Affairs Committee narrowly approved the plans (with slight changes) – but in a surprise move, the Parliament then refused to rubber-stamp the Committee’s position, opening it up for further debate."
And the hate speech he was convicted for was training his dog to do a "Bellamy salute".
The illegal act was sending the threatening message "gas the jews" through a telecommunications system.
The potato peeler incident: https://dailycaller.com/2018/05/03/british-man-arrested-for-...
Homeless man with learning difficulties wielding a knife-like object in public?
In both cases the relevant law is UK domestic criminal law, not EU law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
The Bellamy salute is a palm-out salute described by Francis Bellamy, the author of the American Pledge of Allegiance, as the gesture which was to accompany the pledge. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute". Both the Pledge and its salute originated in 1892. Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which was very similar, and which was derived from the Roman salute, a gesture that was popularly (albeit erroneously) believed to have been used in ancient Rome.[1] This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the Flag Code on December 22, 1942.
Along with the swastika, just another thing the fascists stole and corrupted.
I'm sure the poor folk in Europe will manage to struggle on without you and they thank you for your concern.
To my mind, it's impossible to take part in the debate until you've realised that your position is a point of view; that other have a different point of view; and that compromise is going to be necessary.
Simple distraction and switch and playing into the mindset that Canada has somehow ties with Europe and is therefore 'good'.
It's amazing how they get away with these things.
If only one side is compromising, it is not a compromise.
FACT: The proposed new copyright rules will lead to direct surveillance of users’ activities online.
This and the recent 5 eyes document to require backdoors for all technology and services are the same. The surveillance state is coming. It is being bought. You are being sold.
But don't worry, they are doing this for our own security and safety. No one need watch the watchers.
The australian 5 eyes memo says they think they can / should be able to require services to report all of this output directly to them.
https://act.openmedia.org/savethelink-call
Or email by finding your MEP details on:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/search.html
More info on taking action can br found here (scroll a little):
https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
The templates might be tedious, but they are there for people who would otherwise post some random flame or rant. Pages encouraging phone calls have scripted templates on them too.
I wrote to them last time this was voted on and expected zero replies (partly due to the late hour), but actually got 2 out of 13, one of which indicated they had actually taken a few seconds to read some of my words. I later read they had received "thousands" of messages on the subject. I can't imagine most of them getting anything close to even this small amount of attention.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Oh yeah, last campaign of the kind worked great. Members of Parliament really appreciated to have their mailbox (and their voicemail) mail-bombed by hundreds or thousands of such spam and reacted super well.
</sarcasm>
No, in fact, no matter which side and party they belonged to, it really pissed them off and turned them against what the spam advocated for. Many thought it was orchestrated by some GAFAM.
On the other hand, if you're an elected representative you better listen to your constituents. They are there to represent the people, not to decide in their place. Or, at least, that's the idea.
The smaller platforms often use under the hood Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or equivalent.
Probably the copyright verification is going to be added at that level, and hopefully will be transparent to the platforms built on top of those cloud services.
So hopefully, this will not impact smaller SaaS companies as much as it might look.
... this would not impact smaller SaaS companies ...
This isn't a law yet and I don't think most people want it to become one.
That said, I disagree that this isn't a terrible burden for the small guy. Even if it would be trivial to set up, all the other downsides remain and it leads to lock-in in the form of dependence on large companies who have implemented this.
More importantly, why do we want this? What benefits does this bring? I don't see many for the ordinary person.
Maybe it could shift liability? So if someone posts the lyrics to a song and Sony sues them for 50,000 euro could they argue that it is the fault of the ISP for not filtering their post properly?
This is a longshot, but I was trying very hard to think of some way in which this law doesn't screw over individuals for the benefit of large corporations.
These companies will then have the definitive say on what is posted online and what isn't. The Chinese will be jealous of our new censorship machine.
- GDPR (Facebook/Google)
- Article 11 (Reddit)
- Article 13 (Github)
- Mandated EU Content on streaming providers (Netflix)
- EU Internet sales tax (Amazon)
The simple question begs: how many more regulations aimed at US companies are coming?
At this rate, the more regulations are created at fighting US companies. The number of internet startups and business located in the EU will one day cycle downward to zero.
What are they going to do next?
This is the proposal that Amazon should pay tax where the goods are sold, rather than hiding it in Luxembourg?
Article 13 is hardly an attack on Github, even if it may affect them. The EU loves US money and tech, and is happy to keep it (it seems it's happy to stay too). I'm totally against this proposal, but not because of anti-regulation dogma. That's rightly unpopular in prosperous and socialist Europe.
Hence my request for an objective summary.
At least that's an easy question to answer: the member states.
A directive obliges member states to introduce local legislation to achieve a particular effect. Usually it's transcribed pretty closely, but some states may use their sovereignty to impose additional restrictions (if they're not precluded by the Directive, a different directive, or human rights law).
Generally if you want to speed up reading a Directive you can skip all the "Whereas" clauses, they're not binding but do specify the reasoning behind the directive.
[1.11.3] Articles 5 to 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC and Directive 2012/28/EU shall apply mutatis mutandis in respect of the rights referred to in paragraph 1.
The controversial article (13) in the EU directive is exactly three paragraphs long. Quoting the article's title and first paragraph in full:
> Use of protected content by information society service providers storing and giving access to large amounts of works and other subject-matter uploaded by their users
> 1. Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter.
As you can see, there might be room to argue that one could remove a word here or there, or perhaps to avoid a euphemism or two, but to me it seems like it's about as plain text as legalese can be.
As an aside, and in stark contrast with what a lot of the UK press would have you believe, EU texts tend to be very human readable; particularly when you compare it to texts produced by other legislative bodies.
To illustrate, compare the EU directive in question:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
To e.g. the US' CLOUD act:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...
Or e.g. the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents act:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/pdfs/ukpga_19880...
Edit:
And as someone living in the UK, I'm also wondering what the implications of this are for brexit[1]. Will the post-brexit interface between the EU and the UK w/r/t copyright be made even more complicated by this, with knock-on effects on digital service providers on each side?
[1] which I continue to oppose
We're well into "who knows?" territory, but what would definitely happen is the UK would lose any say over the EU rules. The UK isn't really large enough to be its own market for startups (unlike the EU and US), so we'd mostly end up using companies hosted in one or the other and obliged to follow their rules.
(Safe Harbour is probably a more interesting one to consider!)
they are trying too hard to have their claws on every jurisdiction and be the international police that can prosecute everyone based on content piracy. And they are very close to that.
They already have control on north America and southeast Asia (via US, ChinaN and TPP agreements). Now they are "fixing" what they wanted im GDPR but lawmakers were too clever to see the tricks then, so they are being more explicit.
But eventually, what people will start doing is what we see in china. everyone in country A will do whatever it takes to consume content/interact with other people via sites in country B, which is not under the same jurisdiction of country A.
Hopefully people will still be able to live as they live today, and only yhe advertising market will suffer as brands now can't reliably reach one market or another. Maybe that fixes advertising too and force brands to sponsor services regardless of demographic. or maybe I am too optimistic and the IP conglomerates will win and people will not have access to any content that is not made and authorized by them.
There's so many problems with this.
It sets up the infrastructure for control of media. Is an image being shared that is unflattering to the current powers that be? Well, now we have a mandated system in place that can immediately pull that image from the web.
I don't think getting totalitarian control is the goal here, but it is the end result of it.
But it won't happen sooner than before majority of creators learn that copyright does not benefit them in any way.
We can teach them that by never paying for copyrighted things.
On the surface, of course, this would seem ridiculous. But we only have to examine how much cultural capital is employed to keep writers writing toward the money and controlled by editors, and ratings boards, etc. And the common consumer expects what they, the consumer, to always be delivered unto with exactly that which they claim to desire. Under the monetary system reproductive advantage slates toward those who accrue capital. However remove that, and the 'shock value' of 'independent artistic work' becomes the most viable remaining path to mate attraction.
So, remove the money, and the only artists, writers, etc, who remain, are the ones that the mass of consumers despise as 'experimental' and 'weird', etc.
And given that humanity is pretty much by definition a story species, the resulting effects on society as a whole, with such a major hit to the mytho-poetic infrastructure that undergirds any society, might be very interesting. Most likely some government or wealth-backed cultural production engine will emerge in the vacuum, however, the question might be whether it will do so fast enough.
Disney could operate private theatres that threw out and banned people with recording devices, but how could home distribution function.
For popular work, we are back at the pre-copyright world of patronage.
Popular appeal might lead certain rare individuals to monetary compensation in academia, but this, I would say, will be country and culturally dependent. In France, for example, I might see it, but not the United States. And it might lead to a certain amount of tribal-production to sustain the replication of certain cultural norms, but in order for that to e so the trend of production and consumption previously adhered to in these industries (from the consumer viewpoint) will have to be reverse: the consumer will be paying patronage in advance of the creation of the work which will then be mechanically mass reproduced upon release. However, I think a smaller amount of people than currently consumptive model of media will be as likely to switch wholly to a 'pig-in-a-poke'-model. Even with things like netflix, the primary draw has always been that which pre-exists, that which the consumer already knows to be available, and its primary value is not weighted on what necessarily 'might' be produced in the future. People might be willing to fund such models through 'micro transaction', however, any individual funding themselves, thus, would necessarily require a proportionally larger base of funders; however this would have the function of keeping the cultural mytho-poetic framework in check, producing what commonly referred to as 'the lowest common denominator'. Also, however, even if someone were to make a living in this manner, they might not what to in that, no matter what survivable level of income they may derive, a Disney would then, through the sheer economy of their scale, be able to transform that, now mechanically reproduced work into something distributed through the private theatre system at no cost for the acquiring of the source material. This alone may be a sufficient psychological demotivator for many, and present a common source of burnout (thus requiring a change in employment), or even an obstacle to many taking up the profession at all.
The question remains, if the so-called creator is likely to get no monetary compensation, and little in the way of social capital anyway, what will induce them to create any works besides those they want to create. The problem is that 'artistry' in the mytho-poetics of most western countries attains a somewhat religious significance, but the most of its practitioners (or at least those who mange to make their primary living at it) would leave so-called creative fields for greener pastures; it's a job.
(I suppose I should add here that I am very much against to current copyright system as it stands now, though I realize my reply might indicate otherwise. I do, however, become aggravated when the attitudes of so-called consumers amounts to a type a slavery where they want what they want [produced but want it for free, resembles too much those companies that have baited artists and writer with 'exposure' for far too long. As it stands, what is said about the disruptive potential of the internet aside, most writers and artists make what they do (and paltry sums at that) by effectively signing over their copyrights in perpetuity to what amounts to intellectual property holding companies. So the law may say the author owns it, but to see anything from it (in the vast majority of cases) they have to give that right away, and then so-called consumers come along and claim (purely to pinch pennies) that authors should relinquish even (and presenting no alternative) that is, to me, as aggravating as the media conglomerates who do the same.)
- The prepayment model was quite successful in the past; authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens and Dostoevsky made a living from producing novels in serialized form[1]. This model fits well also with TV shows, podcasts, and potentially video games.
- Plenty of content is already funded by volunteer donations and ads (although, personally, I abhor the latter more than copyright).
- You don't necessarily need copyright to have protection; contracts exist. It's doubtful the competing private theater networks would just copy each other's movies, rather than reach a legal agreement not to do so.
- For certain types of works, live performances provide a funding model that doesn't rely on copyright. It's not copyright that keeps people going to concerts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)
In regards to contracts, I think we only need to look at history: the case comes to mind wether agents of Thomas Edison saw a screening of the film 'Voyage to the Moon' and bribed a theatre operator to get a copy of the film made, so it was Edison, showcasing it in his private theatre chains (he owned an enormous amount of patents in motion picture technology, which is why Hollywood is movie capital of the United States, to get beyond the legal reach of Edison in New York), thereby having extracted the commercial value of the film prior to the director managing to bring it to the United States. Still, this leaves out the entire possibility of home distribution (outside of the most egregious contracts and locked-down hardware (so far as I can see), which, looking at the way things are going, may be the case under the current system as well).
I will completely agree as it regards to live performance. But that is a very small segment of so-called creative work. And even then we are still left with the perennial problem of the lion's share of the resultant capital going no...
Yet more than 90% of the work consumed by (pretty much everyone) is commercial in origin. Even those producing news segments and documentaries for PBS are doing so because they are paid to do so.
I'm not saying people won't write things like Wikipedia articles. But if the value for others (a given corporation, for example) exceeds the social capital they generate for themselves, if they just feed a machine for no benefit, expending more and more of themselves in the process, only to watch a Disney, say, become far more well known for it (thus increasing the desirability of mating with the owners and board members and rich directors involved) why would any so-called rational person commit to such? I doubt all those wiki contributors would feel good if if, somehow, all that content were retroactively re-licensed (or more accurately de-licensed) and incorporated into a commercial, subscription-based encyclopedia. Yes, in one sense, everything that's on Wikipedia would remain as always, as available as always, but I cannot see it as having gone untainted after such a move.
True, a certain proof might be found in the uses of the MIT and 2-clause BSD licenses (and their kind), but still, it seems to me, even in those cases (taking note that they exist in veritable islands of copyleft and proprietary software) the social benefits (mainly in their ability to contrast themselves with the aforementioned alternatives) allows either the potential gain of social capital that can be parlayed both in personal relationships and employment (both having their obvious connection with attraction of a mate based on the expression of extended phenotypes) or, alternatively, such software is created purely for person use and released to the wider world because the commodification and distribution of computer technology makes it trivial and cheap to invest in the possibility of acquiring even minimal social capital, and should none come it, of course, the producer is out nothing, so there, relatively, likely only the possibility of gain.
Even our own present conversation falls within this realm, just as, according to the law (of course, I presume your geographical location to likely be somewhere within a country affected by the Berne Convention, though I will admit the possibility of error here) we are automatically granted ownership over our respective words, either collection of phrases walled off from the other in a way, possibly, and ironically, reflecting our respective mental dispositions on this issue, and just as the terms of service for this sight allow its owners to store and serve them unto any who enter.
Spammy junk, bad movies, terrible TV, is the common binding thread of cultural narrative and the mytho-poetic framework (a phrase I have type too many time I think), but, in any regard, it creates and reinforces who we are. Even those who decry it, in doing so, define themselves in relation to it and in its terms. So...long live the new flesh, I guess.
Easily more than 10% of what I read has non-commercial origin, like your comment for example.
I wonder if media consumption is like counting calories. They do say that (due to various factors) it is impossible for consumers to do so accurately.
Interestingly, can you truly know if my post is commercial in origin. Maybe I am some kind of covert influencer, paid to sow any number of memetic seeds. (Perhaps I'm not even a person as such, at least, not a flesh and blood one, but merely a rather limited Markov Generator.)
(Though, it isn't---at least, not the first part---I'm very much not getting paid money for this.) Which is not to say, however, that I am not getting paid. That is to say, without these posts, I don't exist in this environment. My post, like yours and everyone else's here, is our ongoing construction of both the accounts which contain our social assets (assets that extend even beyond this realm) as well as the social assets themselves, that is our identities in our own minds, and each variant of that identity that exists within each reader of each post we submit. (Facebook highlight reals, various forms of virtual signaling in the comment section for news articles, etc would fall into this category. Though, in a way, this in an interesting model for post-capitalist future, in that, baring those who are an such services for business promotion, Facebook, Twitter, etc are all commercial endeavors where users churn-up content for no commercial compensation, ultimately ultimately creating the state in which these entities can acrue capital. And even though it doesn't in the same way as those entities, HN itself (and the social reputations generated on it) are deeply intertwined with combinator as a whole.) But those identities are also backed by copyright, interestedly enough. And I would claim your ownership of this identity (at least so far as it can be owned, that is the specifics of each post) is intrinsic, no matter to what degree you decry copyright. For example, without such, you collective posts could be taken by anyone and edited in any fashion they desired, thus crafting any public version of you they wanted. It might be argued that if keep libel and defemation laws around, that that wouldn't happen, but doesn't that just become a kind of backdoor copyright? A so-called creator could claim that no matter how the work were modified it would be prejudicial against them and that, even, perhaps, that distributing it to unapproved entities would be also be so (though, that likely is stretch).
Also, I think that there is a disparity in, shall we say, length. That is to say, users are, in general, willing to trade effort that raises capital for an entity wholly other for themselves, in exchange for the opportunity for the construction and maintenance of social capital. And we can see that as a fairly textbook value transaction. The question is how far it can be pushed. The rights already granted to entities such as Facebook would, I would argue, if they tried to pursue it, that the user agreements of such entities grant enough leeway for them to employ a large portion of their generated content anyway they wanted, not just the re-serving of it and the cataloging of it. So let's imagine they do so, using such data for say, effectively, crowdsourced filmmaking, or some such. At what point would the user base become dissatisfied with this? That is, at what point does the value of the transaction shift? So the overall question becomes, while users are willing to generate, in exchange for a certain amount of social capital, a few memes and one-liners, and the typical length of a post on HN, are they willing to do so for substantial work (that is to say, would the typical user be willing to give Facebook one or more 80,000 100,000, 200,000 word books with all the result capital flowing, then, to that entity?). And we can extend this to fu...
https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
(edit: Not just the facts of course, also her opinion, shared by many organisations and individuals knowledgeable on how the Internet should work, eg. Vinton Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee, see https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf).
I've yet to be fined for not having a cookie popup on my blog :)