If it becomes standard practice for all except certain large corporations to ban all EU addresses, how will this impact the web and the EU?
That would be great, because better solutions with less monopoly would quickly spring up if those corporations don't make deals with publishers. That's just hypothetical, counterfactual speculation, though, since corporations like Google would make deals.
Like others have pointed out, these regulations will primarily have bad effects on small content providers such as individual authors, small forum sites, and not for profit information-providers.
Using VPN services would be far more practical. Although some sites do discriminate against VPN users, it's much less common than for Tor users. The EU could of course block access to VPN servers, just as China has done. But some VPN services use obfsproxy, and so can piggyback on obfuscation efforts by the Tor Project.
This law is bad, but the negative predictions are unhinged.
There is no link tax. Article 11 is a requirement for commercial sites using copyright material as part of their commercial work to either get permission or pay a licence.
I'd be interested to know how article 11 is any different from existing law.
A German court ruled a few years back that use of a creative commons image by a non-profit publically funded television station was "commercial use" with the argumentation that "had the CC-NC image not existed they would have had to license an image and pay for it". Another German court ruling decided that a personal blog containing any sort of advertising qualifies as "commercial use" (in the context of the exemption from making the operator contact information visible on websites operated for personal use). The definition of commercial use is not clear-cut and definitely not in line with US rulings. This is why Art11 is a significant increase in reach. Small organizations and nonprofits operating mailing lists with a web interface would now have to screen all messages to make sure nobody quotes a news snippet. Same with forums and such. And of course it would shut down wikinews (wikipedia is explicitly and narrowly excluded, other wikimedia projects are not) and other user-operated news agregators where users are likely to quote parts of articles.
Ideally, people would submit their own creative content. Personal blogging and vlogging would flourish. Gallery sites would expand exponentially with floods of new, self-made art. The Internet would shift back from primarily consumption to creation.
Ideally...
This is how Russia made Yandex censor the Russian web. Search about a gay topic? Sorry, comrade, we don't want to violate the law about promoting homosexuality to minors, so we're going to self-censor the result.
In Europe, this will make it unsafe to provide search results with anchortext or snippets that might be hate speech, Holocaust denial, or encourage sex trafficking. Choose your snippetizing algorithm carefully! Drop the wrong words and someone's going to jail.
The EU will be blocked out from the latest and greatest experiences on the web.
> What about bookmarks, all I am really doing is saving a link
Perfect example of the confusion caused by these fucking stupid articles.
i) The law doesn't apply in any way to your book marks.
ii) The only way the law could apply to your book marks is if you're a commercial organisation, and you publish them as part of a commercial venture, and if they are also more than hypertext links but include non-fair use portions of a copyright work.
Laws that might apply to a very broad set of behaviors and situations can be selectively enforced. If you are uncertain if you activities became illegal, you are incentivized to err on the safe side and self-censor.
The next step would be to shut down proxies, systems such as Tor, and connections to sites in rogue states that don't sufficiently enforce copyright.
And that not all content will be covered (although they appear to have accidentally forgotten to include that bit in what they published).
Article 11 targets news aggregators and search engines. Unlike blog posts or newspaper articles, they generally cannot benefit from the right to quote [3]. Article 11 has two goals. One, it aims at protecting pieces of a work that are generally too short to enjoy regular copyright protection; second, unlike the usual practice in continental European copyright law, it grants ancillary copyright to publishers, not authors, for easier enforcement of these rights.
Note that this does not mean that I endorse Article 11 (I do not and actually consider it harmful and the result of misguided lobbying), but we should be clear what we are actually talking about.
[1] Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote
[3] As the Wikipedia article above summarizes it, "the resulting new work is not just a collection of quotations, but constitutes a fully original work in itself".
So, what it will really do will be to create a monopoly enshrined in law, that news aggregation and search is a business you can only be in, if you already wield Google-esque influence over the world of media.
Which is wrong. It's just wrong, on so many levels.
I don't deny the util of being able to see movie times without having to click through, or a businesses contact details, but the effective redirection of traffic with reduction in site's ad revenue of whatever feels 'wrong'.
So it wants to expand copyright coverage and give it not to creators but to those who profit on them. Why should anyone accept that? Copyright is already crazy overreaching, it should be reduced, not expanded. This corrupt control grabbing should be completely repealed.
Facebook can afford to just implement the damned upload filter.
But if you're an operator of a small blog, you'll likely just turn off commenting functionality and stuff like that.
If you're even smaller, and relying on other people to provide infrastructure for you to be able to comment on stuff, where does that push you? You guessed it. Back to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
They want specific, centralized corporations or entities (eg government) that they can get upset with when something goes wrong, whether that's PayPal, or Amazon, Twitter, or Comcast. They love that aspect, it provides a blanket (which tech people will call an illusory blanet).
The decentralization premise is a standard techie failure to understand product, markets and average consumers. It's solely an allure for tech people. That's why for it has been thrown about as a lure for so long with so little success to show for it, there's a reason for that: it's a fantasy for an extraordinarily small niche of people. A decentralized Internet is the absolute last thing on a list of wants from the bulk of users that make up the Internet, they have no idea what it is, no idea why it matters, and couldn't care less. It will not be possible to get them to care about it, because their Internet works for them right now.
The average user is not upset about the Internet and how it operates now. In fact quite the opposite, they're overwhelmingly satisfied with the Internet. You can see an ideal representation of the techie failure to understand the average user, in the dire predictions thrown at Facebook the last number of months, and the actual end results of what the average user did (they didn't quit Facebook, the techies were entirely wrong and didn't understand average users). Decentralized Internet is an emotional issue for most techies, just as Facebook is, that's where the fog comes in, and obvious reasoning mistakes are made.
If one of Facebook's users (anywhere in the world) posts a piece of copyrighted material, and that material is served to a European user, then the copyright owner can take Facebook to court for copyright infringement under this legislation. I'm not even sure the owner has to be a European entity.
European law considers the offence to occur in the browser's country, not the server's country (hence Yahoo having to block all references to Nazi memorabilia as a result of a French court case held in France under French law despite Yahoo not being a French company).
Mind you, the US takes the same viewpoint, hence them suing to extradite Mr Dotcom from New Zealand for trial in the US for transgressing US law. The fact that he wasn't a US citizen, MegaUpload wasn't a US company, and he had committed no crime according to New Zealand law didn't matter. The US still considered his breach of copyright to have occurred on US soil, so he had committed a crime on US soil.
At least that's how I read it... I am not a lawyer.
Regarding links that people actually click on, the current situation is that it'll take users to the publishers' websites, where the publisher monetizes it through advertising. Nothing wrong with that.
But, apparently, that's not enough. Because the state of journalism has been reduced to providing headlines that make people go "...naaaah. not worth it."
At the same time, the way they lobbied for this law was based on the notion that media companies don't get adequately rewarded for the bang-up job that they're doing, creating all this high-quality and highly original content.
It’s a noble art on 2ch and japanese groups to sum up articles in the most insane way possible. I understand bean counters wanting money on where the action is happening, irrelevant to their deserving of any.
[1]http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f... [2]http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
Rather than lawyers not understanding technology I think this interpretation is just the reverse.
Can anyone post some links to a long form article that can explain how we got here and what is the logical fulfillment of these forces?
To me it looks like the destruction of the internet and transformation to a new version of televison.
No it doesn't.
For fucks sake, the law is lousy, but we don't need shit articles from techdirt who are completely unable to read and understand law.
