jeremija

I own a small software development company in the EU and have been working on a SaaS product that I would like to release soon. However, I am concerned about the recent EU copyright directive, mainly articles 11 and 13, colloquially known as the link tax and the meme ban.

Most web applications nowadays allow users to submit text or image posts, as well as post comments, whether it's a blogging platform like Wordpress, an aggregator/forum like HN or Reddit, or a platform like GitHub or GitLab. My product also provides similar functionality.

If I understand correctly, this directive makes the hosting companies responsible for any copyright violation in user generated content. I don't want to risk being sued in the future, but I am also not aware of any existing system I could use for automated content filtering. Even if it did exist and if I wanted to use it, it would most likely have a lot of false positives.

Does this mean my company could get sued only after not responding to content removal requests? Or I could be sued as soon as a third party notices a "bad" link or copyrighted material in user generated content? What if it's a false copyright claim, like it commonly happens on YouTube?

This whole mess just makes me want to abort the whole project, or open a company outside the EU. Are there any other EU devs here thinking about the same issue? Have you been doing anything about this? Would love to hear any thoughts about this!

I just had a weird experience on NameCheap. I found a .app domain that I really liked and wanted to buy it. Unfortunately, I got an error message after trying to add it to my cart.

As an example I'll be using `drive.app`. There is no whois record for this domain, but https://domains.google says it's unavailable:

    $ whois -h whois.nic.google drive.app
    Domain not found.
    >>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2018-12-29T10:51:11Z <<<

Here is also a link to my screen capture of domains.google: https://i.imgur.com/an9Gp4M.gif

Thanks!