"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"
That's actually a lot of limitation. From my understanding: "organise and promote" means it is not simple hosting, and "in order to make a profit" excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons and "large amounts" most likely excludes smaller websites like fan sites, and "uploaded by their users" exclude search engines.
It is clearly meant to target a form of abuse that is much too common in the "internet as we know it". It is mostly apparent in sites like PornHub. They live by monetizing content they don't have the rights for, and they use their status as a platform as a way to stay legal. I think YouTube admitted that in the early days, they voluntarily turned a blind eye to copyright infringement as a way to grow ahead of their competition.
It is unfair to legitimate companies who do their best to make sure their content really is original or properly licensed.
And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet.
As for the potential for abuse, remember that the article isn't finished, it has yet to be completed, ratified, and tried. Public debate is important and we shall not let everything pass, but IMHO, the spirit is good.
- an Internet platform
- that organizes and promotes large amounts of posts
- which are copyright-protected works uploaded by their users
- in order to make a profit as it is an advertisement for y combinator.
What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law. Besides, 'meant' is a very dangerous word when used by politicians as jaded as the EU folks. It is a way to whitewash unpopular laws, and make them look reasonable when they are in fact the complete opposite.
Fundamentally, laws have jurisdictions that they are valid in. Imposition of a law outside of a jurisdiction is problematic at best, as it enables some bad actor countries (pick and choose who you want to consider to be in this group) to export their internal battles globally.
A great example of this is the US's FATCA rules, which have resulted (at least initially) in many non-US banks denying banking options to US citizens. Due to the threat built into the law, of being unable to leverage US banking system, if they fail to comply.
As someone else commented, the road to hell is paved with "good intentions". Solutions will emerge to route around the liabilities and costs this creates, but probably not initially.
And it will certainly be in trouble people decided to use it to post an entire Harry Potter novel and it becomes the go-to place to read it.
But Hacker News has moderators, and in practice, these posts are aren't likely to stay long, therefore fulfilling Article 13 obligations.
I'm pretty sure that movie quotes are not copyright-protected. And the last point in the article seems to be there to protects such uses explicitly.
As for the potential for abuse, I don't know, I am not a lawyer. But as I said before, it is just a directive, not a law, and it is incomplete. The spirit is all we have now, there is still a lot of work to be done on the letter.
[0] e.g. https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/fair-use-c... for UK and https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html for US
HN does not organize large amounts of copyright-protected works, nor are the links to articles an 'upload'. If HN organized PDFs of the linked articles so you could just skip heading to a third party site then we'd be talking.
'meant' is not a dangerous word. All laws require interpretation, which is why most countries have specific interpretation guidelines for legislation and even then sometimes it takes a few cracks at the can to get it right.
That's not something 'dangerous', although it can and does go wrong from time to time. But it's a standard risk of rulemaking as it's the standard process for courts interfacing with legislation or other rule-making texts.
EU has a different jurisprudence system based on guidelines and interpretation.
There is a wide range of options philosophically. Confucian courts are even farther from what you might recognize.
"Yipee-yi-yea...mother-fucker." ! -- Die Hard
Done :-)
Hold on, that's not true.
The intent of law matters and is codified in various ways, including stating the intent of the law directly in its text. This in turn informs judges (including appellate judges!) of how to evaluate a specific case. In jurisprudential systems, this in turn becomes case-law which further cements the intent of the law as a binding legal construct.
I agree the letter of the law is more strongly binding, but to dismiss intent as irrelevant suggests you don't understand the difference between law and computer code.
Further for your info: Hacker News does not "need a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie", it only needs to take responsibility of you commit copyright infringement by doing so.
I’d happily let Hacker News go if it means other such platforms go with it.
These phrases by themselves are open to interpretation in various ways. In particular, what I find dangerous is that these appear to be specific enough to convince people to believe there will be little to no room for abuse, and yet are vague enough to allow a motivated political actor to target someone if they really decided to.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/18/8803571/sunday-times-inte...
> GDPR: there will be no abuse
https://euobserver.com/justice/143343
> Art. 13; there will be no abuse
yeah, let's be optimistic!
But what about fandom sites like Wikia? There's mass copyright infringement going on quite openly there, but it's survived under the understanding that e.g. Memory Alpha discussing various topics from Star Trek wasn't causing Paramount any financial harm.
But if the hosters of fan wikis like that will need to become paranoid about that liability they might not host them at all.
If this law somehow ends up hurting multinational commercial platforms and opening up a larger space for personal blogs, hobby sites, and nonprofits, I might even consider it a good law on consequentialist grounds. I don't even care about the impact on startups if all they're trying to do is to become the next YouTube.
In reality, though, this is probably just wishful thinking. We have no idea how "organize", "promote", and "large amounts" will be interpreted; Google and Facebook will find a way to comply at least with the letter of the law; and the heyday of personal websites and ramdom phpBB forums are already well behind us :(
Anything with song lyrics or a giphy post would be in danger of additional censorship with this no?
Any kind of web site that allowed user sign ups would be in danger with this pretty much(?)
On the other hand, it could be said that it is unfair to new companies and rewards those who _already_ broke the rules. They already broke the rules, so it would be unfair to stop them from continuing to be broken is a bad argument, but it has to be a consideration when entrenching existing companies (as they can absorb the compliance costs).
I'm not really sure what the correct answer is, as allowing an ongoing harm to continue is clearly untenable[1], but you have to ask if this is really accomplishing the ends we want to achieve, and is it the right way to do it.
[1] assuming no large-scale copyright reform, but that doesn't appear to be on the cards
All these things are very interpretable and can be the root to abuse and mistakes.
"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit" Would include https://news.ycombinator.com as well. It does organize and promote user comments, quotes, references which are of course copyright-protected works as anything created in the EU member states is, including user comments. Now "Hacker News" does not make a direct profit of the content. It is a side-line to a profitable business. It is however trivial to argue that the fact it is a side-line by a for-profit company it must in some way contribute to that. This has been done before. The term upload does not exclude anything, because there is no legal or technical distinguishable difference between upload and post. The law could have read 'provided by their users' and the legal implications would be the same. All sites that are for profit and allow anything from their users are affected by this. This would also include online games that allow users to chat.
I don't agree that its intentions are that clear. Nobody likes a leech, but that does not mean that we should kill all animals to prevent leeches.
"And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet."
This seems to be a call to the internet being just for the technologically savvy. No great number of people are going to self host and any form of support for people self-hosting from a for profit company will run into article 13. Moreover what I remember from the old internet is not self publishing, but the social gathering on IRC, newsgroups, etc. Something that will be impossible to do at our current scale without for profit companies or government backed services. The first will run into article 13, the second one is a non-starter.
- Small organizations can't support repeatedly going to court argue that they are not "organizing" nor "promoting" content in "large" amounts.
- Small organizations can't take the path to being large that youtube or pornhub did. These now host mostly licensed content, because content producers were forced to go along. They can no longer be forced, and a barrier to entry has been thus erected.
Certainly the popularity of the site is due to the large amount of full scenes that have been available. Debates about who has been uploading the full scenes have been raging for years.
The debate about who is profiting from it and who has lost sales I think is pretty easy to figure out.
That's not how you should write laws.
I can see most of the obvious impetus for this, but don't feel it's going to work out very well at all.
I'm not sure what a smarter version of the legislation would look like.
Maybe it works out, but there is some downside risk here which involves a brand new 'lawyer economy'.
You can see this reaction to the GDPR where the discussion of benefits are hypothetical. Most of these pieces of legislation have predecessors that we can look to for real, practical results. And that practical result is that the governments have mandates to govern the internet in a large, globally-affecting, information/data-suppressing way.
> I'm not sure what a smarter version of the legislation would look like.
It would not exist. Different measures (education, funding, public services, public awareness, existing statute enforcement, accepting the costs of open information, etc) would be taken.
All this will mean is that the big tech, Googles and Facebooks of the world, will solidify their position for years/decades to come since only they will have the money/resources to take care of this expensive regulation. New startups on the other hand will stand little chance in this new world.
All these regulations look good on paper. But when you understand their medium-long term ramifications is when you realize how unfairly the deck is stacked now.
Article 13 is fundamentally different from the GDPR. The fundamental problem is that I think (and most people hopefully do) user privacy is an ethical good, and I don't believe (much of) copyright law is an ethical good. If you fundamentally believe copyright must be defended vigilantly Article 13 is not an unreasonable consequence at all - I just don't agree with that premise one bit.
Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too. But for Article 13, the laws are only in the interest of big corporations. I don't care about those.
Besides, there is also a cost to me: the never-ending pop-ups and acceptance dialogues, inability to access information in a straightforward manner for those that choose to block, etc.
What is the percentage of users who actively control their privacy as a result of GDPR (and still happily use the website)? What is the percentage of badly -behaving businesses who will be prosecuted?
I don't. I find it an egregious example of over-regulation. I think not recognizing the obviously large scope of such regulation is extremely suspect.
> The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data
By what measure do you define "good job"?
> The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand
I admit being this kind of spoiled. But it's ridiculous to say that's the only reason. There are measured ways to go about things and to so blatantly say that this is the only reason one might view it as over-regulation (despite real reasons such as size and scope and ineffectiveness of predecessors/enforcement) destroys our ability to have real conversations about the many alternative ways to solve some of the problems we have. Such a black-and-white absolutist view is harmful.
> I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Can't speak for all, but for many, it's because they recognize the difference between what would be ideal and what would actually happen. Large anti-company (especially against companies that users prefer to use) laws have a chance to be frowned upon, despite ridiculous promises/optimism/naivete by the hopeful.
> Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too.
These are not how chilling effects work. You don't get to say "well, if they choose not to do business where a law is, they must not be able to uphold that law". There are compliance costs/risks. The amount of assumptions concerning this topic, whether assumptions that the law is good or assumptions that those disagreeing with it are of a certain ilk, need to stop. You only hurt your cause discussing things in this manner.
GDPR did not really change the media landscape in the EU. Business as usual here. Mostly companies went through a brief period where they had to consult lawyers and expensive agencies on how to cover their asses. Mostly good things have started happening after that. Some companies that were doing technically unacceptable things under pre-GDPR legislation have now grudgingly stopped doing those things.
Their are major complaints outstanding against Google, Facebook & the IAB that will define how online publishers can be funded once they are litigated.
All these big blanket OK consent buttons we see on landing pages have already been shown in court do not constitute informed and freely given consent. The real impact has het to come, hopefully after some stiff fines are handed.
And you are right: I also wonder about enabling large scale VAT dodging by sites like aliexpress.
Even if you are, I'm not actually sure that would be better for anyone involved. Seems like it would essentially stop or severely diminish online commerce between US/EU as too much hassle.
It's like saying that criminal laws prevented people from getting happily scammed.
No idea if such a thing would happen though.
In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup.
This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents.
According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem:
> TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
but this at risk of being dropped:
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.
Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.
They are the winners, not the losers here.
This one's a double edged sword.
Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.
At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.
Yes, it' a strategy of their failing commercial entities to wring a profit out of entities like FB and G who they think are profiting.
Of course it's among the worst strategies available.
What they need is more innovation, not more regulation.
however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it.
google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.
Personally, I don't think laws should discriminate like this, and if a law is not good for business overall, it should be shuttered, not targeted. There are exceptions of course, but I don't think there should be on the internet (or information in general).
While small sites with a handful of staff, can't do that. People may subscribe for big sites like Facebook and Youtube , but they won't subscribe separately for a lots of small sites.
So blocking ads helps eliminating the small guys while the whales can deal with it.
Not true, they also help the end users, who often get lost in these discussions of big-vs-small companies. Turns out these "whales" everyone is so anxious to target provide benefits to end users, who are often the ones that end up bearing the brunt of the pain.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/security-and-risk/2018/gdpr-goog...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/23/google-ow...
Net neutrality regulations include vague language that allows "reasonable network management", which is a multi-million dollar legal hassle that stresses small ISP owners. And I shudder to think how Duck Duck Go's programmers will manage to comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten [from a search engine's results]".
I hope the politicians in Washington, D.C. recognize that America is the world's last refuge for small business growth and economic innovation.
If it's individual pages, then probably just a meta-tag?
I think robots.txt could be leveraged for this though maybe.
America isn’t free from regulatory capture, despite being historically better at innovation than either my home nation or my nation of birth.
Well, who do you think wrote it? Not the fish.
Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.
Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
[0]: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024
Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.
In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).
Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).
This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.
TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts.
Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.
Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
EDIT: Intending to provide a more useful response now, here are links from the post above to the articles[1] and recitals[2] of the current negotiations. I'm seeing relevant platform liability language in the row labeled 239. While marked for continued discussion, the proposed language is concerning to me:
"Licensing agreements which are concluded by online content sharing service providers
with right holders for the acts of communication referred to in paragraph 1...,
shall cover the liability for works uploaded by the users of such online content sharing services
in line with the terms and conditions set out in the licensing agreement,
provided that such users do not act for commercial purposes."
More importantly i have never, ever heard of any local IT unions or societies being involved in the process of legislating these laws (same thing for GDPR). I don't believe this law will change things radically in europe, although i m a little worried with all this predatory lawmaking against US companies. The main issue remains that europe produces very little online (No european-superheroes memes? big whoop)
I think I'd have a bigger chance of meeting a unicorn than a member of a "IT union".
I wish we had the kind of concerted effort that the copyright lobby is able to launch, but focused on issues that reduce the net benefit of these platform more than copyright infringement: hate speech or intentional misinformation.
I can imagine someone writing a TOR-based eMule client or something along those lines but it won't be anywhere near as common as it was back in the days; ease of use has always been an important factor and today we actually do have commercial alternatives in place this time.
As I see it, the main impact will be for social networks and other sites that allow user uploads. There's an actual chance the people behind the law simply don't understand that what they're asking isn't possible, and that many politicians think we just need to solve this with blockchains and machine learning (because that's apparently how to fix everything nowadays). In the real world, however, I really see no way to comply with that law without mass-monitoring and very far-reaching automatic censorship of uploaded content.
Social networks.
There is also too much content to check and enforce it all.
There are bazillions of other sites who don’t (and often can’t) police anything of what they host unless they are threatened with litigation.
Guess who is going to sell content-filter-as-a-service?
> Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
And as sad as the damage of current internet culture will be, there are many potential unintended consequences that may be - at least - interesting.
I don't think this will happen, but if this is actually made into a liability then this would create a rather interesting situation where a platform could be sued for blocking fair use content and miss-identified content.
That and a load of innovative start-ups simply setting up overseas instead of inside Europe, and perhaps major sites simply preventing any kind of contribution from European users.
After all, there's no A13 clause which says that if your US site allows uploads, your European one also has to?
LOL...why though? By the way...which country is that?
Just look on all the big countries of the world, they all kind of suck. There is simply no way for ordinary citizens to have any effect on EU because of it's size alone. Almost all my countries MEPs voted no to Article 13 but it still got passed.
I don't want Germany and France to control Sweden (which is the country I'm from).
In some parts of the EU that's already illegal. Not just a civil tort for which you can be sued, but an actual criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted.
Which would you prefer?
of course not don't be silly.
but so far liability was on the uploader, when the police comes knocking you gave out user data and that was it. see, for example, the jsfiddle constant issue with illegal content: https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-part-5
people miss here that any user generated content could be part of a copyright. even text if they are lyrics. there's NO user platform that's safe.
Following a number of important amendments being made to the Copyright Directive since July, the proposal was put to a plenary vote in September, which over 60% of MEPs supported. During further negotiations between Parliament, the Council (EU Member States) and the European Commission, any remaining shortcomings can be addressed.
I am in favour of a balanced Copyright Directive that allows for a free and fair internet, and also ensures the fair remuneration of creators, artists, publishers and journalists who create important jobs, growth and innovation in the EU.
With regard to a stronger right for press publishers, Article 11 allows for: • Fair remuneration for journalists and press publishers for the use of their articles. • Financially independent press (independent from platforms). • Quality journalism. • Journalists to get a share of the press publishers' remuneration. Private use of press articles is allowed. Hyperlinking is allowed.
With regard to the value gap, Article 13 allows for: • Platforms to take more responsibility for the content on their websites. • Fair remuneration for European right holders (artists, musicians, authors etc.) from the platforms that use their works. • Platforms to conclude licenses with the right holders. • Right holders and platforms to find a practical solution to bring copyright and liability in a better balance. The scope of Article 13 has been limited to those platforms which infringe the most copyright. Platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Netflix, eBay, Wikipedia, dating-platforms, software developing platforms, blogs, private homepages, dropbox etc. do not fall under Article 13.
Copyright rules need to reflect the new realities and business models of the 21st century, particularly the rise of digital media. Press publishers and other content producers should receive a fair share for the use of their content on the internet. Currently, most generated revenue goes to the platforms and aggregators, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube.
It is of course a priority that the Internet remains a platform where free speech prevails. The rules will only affect platforms that explicitly make profit from copyrighted works. Private individuals can continue to share content on the internet for non-commercial purpose. Platforms such as universities, scientific databases and online encyclopaedias, which are not dealing with copyright content as their primary purpose, will all be exempt from the new rules.
_________________
If huge content distribution platforms like YouTube and Facebook are not viable anymore, it might put a renewed wind in the sails of self-hosting systems. Getting the Internet back to it's distributed nature would make it more resilient.
> the sails of self-hosting systems
Self-hosted content is pointless if there are no watercoolers to chat about it.
Honest question here: What can I do to influence this decision?
Mmm...maybe you could write to your local/nearest European Parliament Representative...I think they call them MEPs...
Am I reading correctly that when you have a forum (e.g. Discourse) which is non-commercial i.e. for an open community, that any users uploading stuff or quoting article sections are exempt from this regulation (even though the forum is hosted on Discourse servers on a paid plan)?