Anyway, now it is not the time to stay idle, it is time to call your MEP and campaign against link tax (article 11) and upload filters (article 13). https://saveyourinternet.eu/
After that the next fight will be when the trilogue between Commission, Council, and Parliament is done.
Also, this whole "GDPR has good intentions therefore it's good" idea that is cropping up on this thread is very problematic. We don't judge laws by their intentions but by their outcomes.
GDPR is one of those things.
I have the strong suspicion that the EU parliament is acutely aware of its situation. That's why they pushed for a lot of pro-consumers laws, as part of the their PR campaign to make them seem as a benevolent force of good. After people have their guard down, they can start with phase two do what politicians do best.
Would you rather have one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with, or thirty different potentially incompatible ones, not all of which are translated into English?
A study of American history reveals the wisdom of governments defaulting to inaction. If the country is split 50/50 on an issue, the proper thing to do is debate. Not wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population hates. We love to complain about gridlock in Congress but, most of the time, that is the system working as designed.
Twenty-eight countries would be harder to do business with. But as it is, GDPR will be interpreted by each of the the EU's twenty-eight national regulators. A single market the EU is not.
Co-ordinating twenty-eight nations to enact a treaty is a huge friction. But perhaps that is needed to counterbalance the continent's instinct for useless, often protectionist bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, neither of those things happens consistently the way you might expect. One of the big problems with the EU VAT changes for digital services was that suddenly instead of just knowing your own country's tax rate and being able to apply it throughout the EU, you had to know each member state's tax rates and in some cases their oddities around things like invoice formats or special classes of products or services that carried different rates. In other words, those changes did essentially the opposite of what the EU is supposed to do.
Going the other way, if treating the whole EU as a single entity also means you can't offer products or services at different prices based on the widely different economic conditions in different member states, that is a large and entirely artificial distortion in the market, and it's a policy with questionable social and economic benefits.
a) It's only potential incompatibility. Nothing stops governments bilaterally or multi-laterally synchronising their rules when the differences are trivial and unimportant.
b) What you describe as potential incompatibility, I call competition. If Spain and Germany wants to go off and try to extract money from Google for the "privilege" of linking to newspapers, they can do that, but it shouldn't impact everyone else. The EU artificially ties together many different policy areas that are unrelated and do not need to be take it or leave it, because they know full well that only a near-fundamentalist opposition to "cherry picking" as they arrogantly call it can ensure the bad ideas are universally adopted along with the good.
And as for not having English translations, that's on governments to fix. We live in a world where bilingual English speakers are not exactly hard to find.
> one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with
because it makes my life easier.
As a citizen:
> thirty different potentially incompatible ones
People in France and Greece and Poland have very different values.
Some countries think people should work for a large part of their lives and retire when they're old. Others think everyone should be able to retire much earlier and spend time with their families.
Some are liberal Christian / agnostic countries, others are conservative Christians.
None of those positions are right or wrong, but enforcing the views of 29 others on you and your citizens is fraught with trouble.
It might be as simple as it being both.
Clearly, 51% are sufficiently convinced it's bad to want to leave.
The remainder are not made up of people who think it's good. Many of them also think the EU is bad or deeply flawed in various ways, but that either leaving is too risky due to the EU's stated guarantee of severe retaliation, or that the EU is bad but the UK could stay and fix it.
In my own family we split down the middle. Two voted out, two to remain. The two remainers voted to stay only because they feared the economic consequences, and the promised recession that was supposed to follow any vote to leave (it didn't). Neither of them are especially keen on the EU, although they don't dislike it either. They didn't really think about it much before.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/06/21/is-the-eu-reall...
A popular claim by many supporters of the Leave campaign is that the EU is run by ‘unelected bureaucrats’. How much truth is there behind that claim?
This claim mainly refers to the EU Commission: the EU’s executive body. It is true that the Commission President and the individual Commissioners are not directly elected by the peoples of Europe. So, in that sense, we cannot “throw the scoundrels out”. It is also true that under the provisions of the EU treaty, the Commission has the sole right to propose EU legislation, which, if passed, is then binding on all the EU member states and the citizens of these member states.
It's in the nature of the institution that is has no personality or theoretical consistency beyond a very basic legal and cultural compatibility.
While it could get ratified into law, at this point it seems out of character of the EU in general. It might have been intended as a shot across the bow towards search engines, and to get a bargaining chips for some other legislation or initive that also somehow includes the search engines.
But whether it's ratified or not, a lot of damage has already been done, as this is just too easily made into very plausible EU-skeptic newbites even though some of the skeptic representatives had a hand in it.
I'm not a particular fan of several aspects of EU, but when the alternatives looks mostly the same old tired nationalistic yearnings if they are thought out at all, I'll take the EU any day.
The Maastricht Treaty explicitly formed a supranational organization [1]. We can debate whether the expansion of the original EEC was wise. But the expansion was mandated.
This new copyright law though seems quite a departure. TBH a law that is practically speaking unenforceable is not a law. I'm surprised it has been allowed to get this far.
It is unhealthy.
For those not familiar. There are two main points that are quite harmful:
#1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies
#2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.
The whole thing is nuts. Please, if you live in the EU, call your MEP about this. @senficon is leading the fight on this.
> ...who obviously don’t understand how the internet works...
Legislators are not requested to know how things do work: they are requested to define how things will work!
It's really important that people who oppose this law are strictly correct when talking to their MEP, because otherwise we risk everything being ignored because of these factual errors.
This is a policy, and a lot of people want to and will game to varying degrees. They want to extract money from others using this regulation.
Sure, this sounds nice to have a license, and sure negotiating with Google et al. is very hard, and I'd be happy to help content creators somehow, but this is basically legislating the BuzzFeed model. Mo' clickz, mo' moneyz. That's a very risky deal to enshrine in law.
The law explicitly states that the size of the company, the amount of data that is uploaded and the availability, cost and effectiveness of the measures should be taken into account.
I don't understand how you call call this completely absurd considering that sites like Twitch and YouTube are already doing it.
> Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content.
The "link tax" has nothing whatsoever to do with linking. If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to obtain a license to do so. That's all there is to it.
Suppose someone posts a Der Spiegel article. I read it and quote a sentence in a comment. Y Combinator must now (a) reach out to Der Spiegel, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail? (I'm ignoring questions around whether including the article's title itself requires fee remittance.)
That's what is being proposed and that is dumb.
b) do you know how a link works? Any link is usually a preview of content because it has e.g. a title. Where do you draw the line? And what is a commercial site exactly? Google news is free for example. We have tried this in Germany and in Spain. It didn’t work. Why do it on EU level again just to put every site owner at legal risk?
teamhappy, your arguments make no sense. Obtaining a license to quote a news article? YouTube's content filtering held up as an example of a system that works well? These are ridiculous statements. I hope you are getting paid well and don't really believe this stuff.
I find this actually quite good. Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless, cost a lot of bandwidth and unnecessarily centralise yet another part of our lives. Anything which harms them will effectively be a net positive.
> #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.
Note that it’s not a link tax but a tax to use snippets of the article. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. Right now this is already a somewhat grey area and, again, it won’t exactly hurt anyone but the right people.
So, sure, this is some extra burden yadda yadda, but mostly it will just limit pointless business activities sucking up bandwidth.
Is this user-uploaded content to Hacker News intended to be ironic?
You just uploaded user content to HN... well.
You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok.
This is a link in HTML: <a href="URL" title="link title" target="link target">link label</a>
The "link lable" is a preview/snippet of content. If I a quote 1-2 sentences from the article, it is a snippet. Where do you draw the line?
Bureaucrats who have a complete disconnect with what they are legislating but that somehow need to keep justifying their own job existence, will go ahead and vote regulations one after another even if they are unnecessary or harmful.
Bureaucracies will keep themselves alive by inventing new rules constantly and the EU is no different.
GDPR was not that bad though, it was about making sure that our personal information is not being sold to third parties like HR companies that provide services like telling companies your sexual orientation and other things of that nature.
GDPR was about telling the consumer what is being done with their data and about transparency, so at least it was for the people.
But this link tax is beyond absurd, and the content upload copyright infringement is only enforceable by the biggest companies.
In practice, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud will implement this on their cloud services and probably charge for it directly or indirectly to SaaS companies, and there will be a couple of years of a grey zone period where the law will not be actively enforced.
Or previous "rounds of solutions", if you were a music or video or print rights holder / publisher.
The flaw in the EU's design appears to be how easy it is for the EU to enact new legislation versus the public's ability to stall that process through hearings or a court.
The current attacks on the Internet are sponsered by Axel Springer (largest newspaper buisness in Europe) and the result of massive lobbying. They even used openly pressure and the supporters in the EU are fed bullshit stories. There is a useless lex Google in Germany called Leistungsschutzrecht, the link-tax is the attempt to a weaponized version through the EU - sponsered by the CDU and conservative and right-wing politicans.
Their hope is to somehow rescue their broken revenue model and make everyone pay for their content.
Upload filters are likely the lobbying result of the content companies.
s/innovative/"innovative and illegal"
While everybody has got used to "freely" enjoy copyrighted content on internet, IP protection is still a pillar for the low of most (if not all) countries in the world. Let's stop being hypocrite: either we push IP into oblivion or we enforce it consistently. Pretending that IP laws matter only when it concerns our own content doesn't help innovation.
False dilemma. I can quote a sentence from the New York Times in a Hacker News comment without incurring, for myself nor Y Combinator, any financial obligation. "Fair use" has admittedly been over-narrowed in the U.S. But it still exists.
The problem is that no mechanism can exist to reliably enforce genuine IP rights as provided by law today without also causing collateral damage and excessive costs.
Why do you think it isn't enforced consistently? The vast majority of copyright infringement isn't a criminal offence, but a civil matter, which means the rights-holders are the correct people to take action if they wish.
If you say so. Seems to be more about threatening small players with risks well beyond anything reasonable.
Their intention doesn't mesh well with the law as created. I'd say the biggest outcome is the number of services the EU has lost from the GDPR.
The biggest problem with the GDPR is the FUD that surrounded it. How often is it that people are charged to the maximum effect of the law? Yet for some bizarre reason that's exactly what people thought would happen against every small operation once GDPR came into effect.
Not every country is represented in these committees and as such you might not have a representative and you'll have to look for the parties to find an equivalent from another country.
IMO, this is also glaring hole in the design of EU's democratic structures, because the chance of other-countries representatives answering to your questions is practically zero, while at the same time them being subject to corporate lobbying from whatever country.
the legal affairs committee : http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/juri/home.html
the votes on "copyright in the digital single market" (pdf) : http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/149721/juri-committee-...
And if your country like mine is about to have elections this fall, don't forget to mention that in your letter to the politicians! ;)
https://changecopyright.org/en-US/ https://www.saveyourinternet.eu/ https://act.openmedia.org/savethelink-call https://edri.org/next-steps-copyright-directive-article-13/ https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/not-giving-up/
For example Netopia which is sponsored by the film and music industry and the Premier League says consumers are diverse and that is why EU wide licensing is a bad idea.
An organisation of the picture industry claims directly to speak for photographers, even though they are their suppliers
But it works, politicians of all parties argue that those copyright regulations will help creatives and creators, that those people need platforms to present their art is not important, they are supposed to go to the old players (gatekeepers).
P.S. Platform company are also not speaking for creators and creatives. I think HN is full of links to articles about how YouTube isn't listening to the creatives who use their site. And how YouTube is changing the site to make is worse.
Here they're talking about letting the content creators retain their rights, and that copyright protections cannot be used to prevent publication in other places.
> 2. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall leave intact and shall in no way affect any rights provided for in Union law to authors and other rightholders, in respect of the works and other subject -matter incorporated in a press publication. Th e rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked against those authors and other rightholders and, in particular, may not deprive them of their right to exploit their works and other subject -matter independently from the press publication in which they are incorporated. When a work or other subject -matter is incorporated in a press publication on the basis of a non- exclusive licence, the rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use by other authorised users. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use of works or other subject -matter whose protection has expired.
This new right was "tested" in Spain and Germany. In Spain news sites lost 15% of their traffic. Bigger site were hit less hard because people knew them and got to them directly. In Germany they gave Google essentially a license for free because Google didn't want to pay and because the publishers couldn't lose the traffic from Google. But smaller companies than Google and start-ups had to pay, putting them at clear disadvantage. Also the scheme costed around 10 million euros in legal fees had almost no income for the publishers. A Massive failure.
But they passed it anyway yesterday.
This is just a committee vote. It's not law yet. The overall vote is in July.
English -> German: "Ich würde sagen, dass es möglich sein sollte, die "Snippet-Steuer" (auf die die "Link-Steuer" tatsächlich zu kommen scheint) zu umgehen, indem Sie eine generierte Zusammenfassung des verknüpften Artikels anstelle eines Snippets verwenden."
German -> French: "Je dirais qu'il devrait être possible de contourner la "taxe de snippet" (que la "taxe sur les liens" semble en fait arriver) en utilisant un résumé généré de l'article lié au lieu d'un extrait."
French -> English: "I would say that it should be possible to bypass the "snippet tax" (which the "tax on links" actually seems to arrive at) by using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt."
Close, but not identical. Using different translation engines gives results which differ more from the original text at the cost of accuracy, e.g. feeding the French text to Bing Translate renders the following in 'English':
(Bing) French -> English: "I would say that it should be possible to bypass the "snippet Fee " (which the "tax on the links" actually seems to happen) using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt."
Not perfect but certainly usable.
If you think the law establishes a link tax you should be able to link to the article that does so.
