Everyday things on the web the EU Commission wants to make illegal | Hacker News Reader

Everyday things on the web the EU Commission wants to make illegal

juliareda.eu

89 pointswalterbell55 comments

The internet in its current form is not under threat from Russian and Chinese government but rather from EU, France & Germany. Germany with its outdated publishers trying to seek rent and France with its bureaucrats practicing neocolonialism on internet (only french residents being privileged enough to be forgotten). If the US government does not counters EU, it wont be too long before Silicon Valley loses its edge. Sadly over last few years the valley has rolled back its lobbying effort. But it cant afford to do that in future.

Currently Chinese entrepreneurs can already innovate faster than American companies due to the lax IP laws. In Xiaomi & DJI you can already see this happening. Imagine if USA lets EU dictates new set of convoluted copyright/internet laws designed to keep old-money publishers and out of touch bureaucrats happy. The eventual casualty would be American businesses which rely on both USA & EU for revenue.

So a lot of the issues mentioned in the article seemed, to me, to relate to rights extensions for publishers.

I'm a little surprised that you think that the US goverment is likely to champion the cause of Internet companies against copyright holders give the fact that, AFAIK, the US has led the way in extending the rights of copyright holders. Indeed there was a story today on HN on this very topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13297792) which pointed out that Canada and the EU actually have less restrictive copyright laws than the US.

Julias talk on the topic at 33C3: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8229-copywrongs_2_0

The EU leadership is heavily pro-big-copyright at almost all levels, with all the negative connotations that comes with. Oettinger has been one of the worst, and these kinds of proposals aren't exactly surprising coming from him.

That said, the details always matter, and it's also worth remembering that the critic here is a vocal Pirate Party MEP who is obviously not neutral on these issues herself.

Not all of the points challenged here are entirely unreasonable. For example, I've never quite understood how a site like Pinterest isn't flagrantly violating existing copyright laws, never mind any new ones lobbyists might be asking for.

> For example, I've never quite understood how a site like Pinterest isn't flagrantly violating existing copyright laws

They have a DMCA process which seems to protect them.

That should only apply in the US, though. How would a publisher in - let's say Sweden - care about DMCA?

Sweden is a member of WIPO, too, and it's laws incorporate the same copyright treaties that the US does.

http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/profile.jsp?code=SE

OK, fair enough, and there are analogous safe harbour schemes in other jurisdictions as well. However, realistically those schemes were only introduced because otherwise the entire business model for these sites would be infringing.

Even with those safe harbour provisions, just because the hosting services have successfully covered themselves, it doesn't make it any more legal for their users to upload copyright-protected material to them without the consent of the copyright holder. For the services where the user doesn't actively upload the material but instead directs the site to find it somewhere else on the Web and has the service fetch it themselves, I wonder whether even the safe harbour laws are entirely clear in some places.

In any case, I have significant reservations about the broad brush safe harbour protections afforded by some of these laws. It seems to me that they are still very much enabling large, very profitable businesses to circumvent the normal rules even to the point of knowingly running services whose main or only purpose is to facilitate actions that are most likely illegal, with just enough of a nudge and a wink to avoid any legal responsibility for doing so.

Assuming these proposed laws would only apply to web services operating in the EU, could affected businesses evade these laws by simply moving their services to other continents, outside of EU jurisdiction? For example, registering their business in Hong Kong and renting servers outside of Europe?

If you happen to collect any "personal information" about the users from the EU, e.g. things like real names and addresses, you have to operate from the EU, or implement the EU-level protection in your country [1]. All major players, like Google or FB, have EU-based subsidiaries to handle this, AFAICT.

[1]: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/data-collection/...

The first line of the article you linked says "The Data Protection Directive applies to countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes all EU countries and in addition, non-EU countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway."

So, why would it apply to a Hong Kong company, with no presence in any of those countries?

If I use a web service based in Hong Kong, there's no expectation on my part that they keep my data in the EU. And they're not even the ones transferring the data outside the EU. I, as the user, am the one sending the packets from my browser, to their server in HK or wherever.

You may not collect personal data of EU residents if you're operating from Hong Kong. If you did, you'd be doing so lawlessly and likely fined. How exactly this could be enforced is a different matter, but likely there are ways to do so, like arresting Hong Kong property if the amount due is high enough. Maybe if you operated from within China, and have enough backing, you could try to ignore it.

So, if you want to make a service for EU residents, make sure you're not collecting any personal information. Should be fine for a MMOG, but probably impossible for an online store.

"You may not collect personal data of EU residents if you're operating from Hong Kong."

This is incorrect, unless the Hong Kong business has an establishment in the EU. This was clarified in an opinion by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party in 2010: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/docum...

It's a long document, but in short, the law only applies if the company collecting the data ('controller') has an office ('establishment') in the EU, or if they're processing the data on equipment in the EU. The 'equipment' doesn't count if it's just forwarding the data on (so a router or proxy wouldn't count).

Like many public officials that hold a 'digital' portfolio, Oettinger is completely unqualified to hold it.

This is the man who recently called Chinese people 'slant eyes' and now he's been promoted to another EU role to oversee budgetary matters. It dents your faith in the EU Commission when people like this can crawl to the top.

More on Oettinger: http://www.politico.eu/article/the-strange-successful-career...

The European Union has so many stifling regulations, no wonder UK voted to exit.

I'm sure UK post-Brexit will be a freewheeling wonderland of copyright sanity!

It's tough to say. On the one hand, the British government has historically been heavily pro-copyright itself. On the other hand, in recent years there have been some real attempts at significant, if still rather modest, copyright reform. The last of those actually reached the statute books, though it was undermined shortly afterwards, in part thanks to shenanigans involving European law.

There is still a depressing amount of old school thinking within the civil service and, particularly offensively, the House of Lords, where any time this debate comes up it seems a succession of privileged and wealthy individuals disclose interests that sound a lot like "I own millions of pounds of shares in Big Media companies" before telling us all why big copyright is essential to our national well-being.

But within other parts of the civil service, within the succession of formal reviews conducted by senior judges in recent years, and sometimes even within the Commons, there are also signs of our representatives and political leaders entering the 21st century and realising that the laws of the 20th may no longer serve either economics or technology well.

And yet we passed the Investigatory Powers Act with almost no public opposition. EU lawmakers seem distant and out of control. That doesn't mean that domestic lawmakers are any more sane or accountable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

How can such laws be enforced? If people are uploading thousands of images to my web service every day, who is going to sift through each and every image and determine whether it violates a copyright?

No one really cares how you do it...but you have to comply.

Which in itself isn't an unreasonable position. Complying with the law isn't optional just because it happens to make an otherwise extremely profitable business more difficult or expensive to run.

What we should be doing is going back to first principles and asking what we're trying to achieve with the kinds of restrictions that IP laws impose, and what sorts of trade-offs and incentives are in the best interests of our society overall. Laws that serve those purposes should be kept or introduced as necessary, and everyone should comply with them. Laws that no longer serve those purposes or perhaps never really did should be removed.

Exit the EU and problem solved, as well as many other problems.

I wonder how the German OP is helped when Germany left the EU. What do we do with Oettinger? Tie him to a tree and hope someone feeds him from time to time? He is German, we'd have to take him with us!

I wonder how viable the EU is now. They've had so many tests and failed. They failed to have a unified front on the Iraq war. They failed to coherently respond to the migrant crisis resulting in many member states re-establishing border check points and even fences. They failed to provide any military deterrence to the Russian federation - NATO is still completely dominated by the US. And now they failed to persuade one of their most powerful members from leaving.

Co-operation between neighbours is a inherently a fairly good idea, but that doesn't mean the bureaucratic fustercluck of the EU is the only vehicle with which this can be accomplished.

The handling of the immigrant crisis was a failure, but the other two issues have little or nothing to do with the EU. The EU is primarily an economic union, it is not and will never be a military one. After all there is the NATO already. Also the list of European NATO members is quite different than that of the EU.

Actually, with the UK out the EU might (finally?) turn into a military union at some point. The UK was the main force against going in that direction, in that the UK didn't want their foreign policy done by Brussels. The smaller roadblock that remains will be to convince the Nordic countries that flexing the EU's military muscle is OK for purposes other than strict humanitarian purposes (or France and - to a lesser extent - Southern Europe the other way around).

The current rules around military cooperation mean that it's opt-in and wouldn't so much be an 'EU military' as one might think of it.

Plans for greater military integration appear to have been discussed recently:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/06/europe-forges-ahe...

The EU was created to ensure peace within Europe. The economic aspects are secondary and merely enable that to happen by binding the economies together, so that you cannot start a war or leave the EU without significant harm to your own economy.

There is a European Defense Agency and there are EU battlegroups that sort of form a standing EU army. The EU definitely is a military union and there are quite a few people pushing for even more cooperation on that front.

EDIT: For those people down voting I would suggest reading the preamble of the Paris treaty[1], which essentially started the EU. It's not exactly subtle or ambiguous about the goal.

[1]: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

The EU has been around for 50 years in evolving forms. It's easy to cherrypick failures, but the achievements ought to get some mention too.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, about twenty countries wanted to join the EU as soon as they could. Some like Serbia are still working to fulfill the entry criteria. Brexit does nothing to change that: Britain was always an exception with its recent imperialist past.

The EU institutions are often bureaucratic. Yet they offer more representation and individual freedom to small countries than does the American constitution, for example. Given the often conflicting requirements, many aspects of the EU work amazingly well.

>Britain was always an exception with its recent imperialist past

This is a joke, right? Ever heard of French Indochina, French Syria, or the Algerian War? Or how about the Belgian Congo? Or Spanish Morocco? All from the second half of the 20th century.

And let's not forget the Germans conquering all of Europe. And your own country, Finland, siding with them.

The difference is that Britain still has factions clinging to the remnants of the Empire. Among Brexiteers, this was a common theme: "We should work with Commonwealth nations rather than continental Europe".

As far as WWII and Nazis -- that is precisely the reason why we have the EU, and shouldn't be brash in dismissing it. Nationalism in Europe ends up badly.

I'm not sure how wanting closer economic relations with former colonies is equivalent to lusting for empire, or even a bad thing. With Canada, Australia, New Zealand (and the US) especially, the UK has a lot of cultural and political synergy.

My point exactly. What does that have to do with the EU?

If Brexit proponents feel Britain should work with English-speaking former colonies on the other side of the planet, that's fine -- but why come up with lies about the EU to advance that goal?

Given that the EU has a common external trade policy, that's kind of difficult. Also, closer economic ties with countries outside of the EU are not the raison d'etre of Brexit, but a proposal for a viable alternative economic arrangement that would make Brexit feasible.

And that's why Britain is an exception. If they don't want to be part of the EU, it's not a failure of the EU.

The UK joining the EEC in the 70s had a huge effect on the New Zealand economy.

>Yet they offer more representation and individual freedom to small countries than does the American constitution

I had to laugh after reading this line. American constitution gives much more power to the residents of the smaller states because of the Senate and the electoral college. In addition, US offers everyone much stronger civil liberties than most European countries. Compare the First Amendment with Germany's hate speech laws for example.

The European Council is the most powerful decision maker in the EU, and it decides by consensus except where treaties specifically provide otherwise. For a small country that's hell of a lot more power than the biases of Senate and electoral college representation.

Civil liberties between USA and EU are a toss: the First Amendment is strong in its scope, but on the other hand things like privacy are much better protected in most EU countries. American legislation doesn't do much to protect citizens against corporations.

I feel like I need much more protection from governments than I do from corporations - so putting the government in charge of protecting me from something much less dangerous/violent seems very very odd.

I suppose governments are regarded as inevitable, which is why this strange double standard exists.

>I wonder how viable the EU is now. They've had so many tests and failed. They failed to have a unified front on the Iraq war.

Why should they have a "unified front" in an irrelevant peripheral war?

>They failed to provide any military deterrence to the Russian federation

Because the "Russian federation" is a viable antagonist for EU?

If anything, the US overestimates how important its "shield" is, as if they are some kind of cavalry and EU a damsel in distress.

US involvement and NATO are mostly remnants of the Cold War, when USSR and its satellites in Eastern Europe was indeed a formidable antagonist for the European countries. The US, due to its size and economic/diplomatic influence still has lots of European politicians by the balls, and can buy others. This is what prevents an EU-driven NATO-like body.

That, plus the fact that EU is just a loose union of different national countries, and not an actual federation of a single people, like the US is, and European national interest don't always see eye to eye.

Russia is of little consequence in the European state of affairs/influence, and fundamentalism terrorism from the failed states is a mess the US created and/or fueled, and which European powers like France and UK could have handled 10 times better (and had, in the past).

Why should they have a "unified front" in an irrelevant peripheral war?

Because the war definitely created issues between states in the EU at the time, between those states part of the coalition of the willing and those states that were not.

Because the "Russian federation" is a viable antagonist for EU?

I don't know why you're scare quoting "Russian federation" - that is the official name of the Russian state.

An economic union and monetary union that can't secure its on borders or have a unified foreign policy is just completely putting the cart before the horse.

Several countries in the EU aim for neutrality. A common front on defense issues is and will always will be difficult to pull of because of that. Additionally some countries have very high barriers for military interventions. Every time the German military does anything outside of German territory they're on questionable ground constitutionally. You either have the EU always be neutral or it will be split on matters of defense. Neither is necessarily bad.

>Because the war definitely created issues between states in the EU at the time, between those states part of the coalition of the willing and those states that were not.

Hardly. There were and are tons of issues between EU states, but none of those were created by "the Iraq war" and by whether said states wanted to join the "coalition of the willing (to be led by the US)" or not. The tension at the time was just an expression of pre-existing differences and divergent interests, not something new brought up by the response to that war.

>I don't know why you're scare quoting "Russian federation" - that is the official name of the Russian state

Because unless one is speaking in official capacity, or wants to make it sound scarier than it is, one can just call it Russia.

>An economic union and monetary union that can't secure its on borders or have a unified foreign policy is just completely putting the cart before the horse.

Europe has never shown much of an issue in securing its borders, at least not any more than 9/11 or the presence of millions of latinos in the US is a sign that it cannot secure its borders.

The state is called the Russian Federation. I was referring to the actions of that state, not the actions of a country called russia, which isn't quite the same thing.

Pedantic, sure. Trying to make it sound scarier? Hardly.

> NATO is still completely dominated by the US

That is how NATO was designed.

It's also the purpose of NATO. NATO was created not only to provide defense during the cold war but also to prevent conflict between European countries and ensure US military dominance.

There is not and never was a plan for the US not to be dominant.

> I wonder how viable the EU is now.

Stratfor/Friedman have been claiming EU is on disintegration path for years. Now George Soros, previously upbeat about EU and its values, is acknowledging the same trend.

Fascinating collection of "insights" you have there.

> They failed to have a unified front on the Iraq war.

All member states of the EU consider pluralism a core value. But yes, it would have been much nicer if all of Europe had just said "no".

> They failed to provide any military deterrence to the Russian federation

After a few hundred years of cultural exchange on an amicable level and another 50 years of a forced, much tighter relation between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, one cannot seriously expect Europe to fight the US' war against someone most still consider a friend. Oh yes, we, as Europeans, also don't need to turn Europe into a war zone just to satisfy US geopolitical dreams. Or maybe it is just the memory of fighting in our home countries that makes us understand that we don't want this.

> And now they failed to persuade one of their most powerful members from leaving.

If you had followed European pre-Brexit news, you'd know that all reporting was against Brexit and that the vote for Brexit surprised even those who fought for it.

I'm definitely no fan of the EU, but unsubstantiated generalities won't help you make your point.

> After a few hundred years of cultural exchange on an amicable level

Do you know how many times Poland has been invaded or partitioned in the past 300 years?

How about all the map redrawing in Europe over the past 1000 years? I'm guessing this too was completely amicable and was primarily just an excuse to ramble across the Prussian countryside? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2LgiMMGf6Q

> Oh yes, we, as Europeans, also don't need to turn Europe into a war zone just to satisfy US geopolitical dreams.

Unsubstantiated generalities won't help you make your point.

> Do you know how many times Poland has been invaded or partitioned in the past 300 years?

177 years. Poland has not existed as a sovereign country from 1795 to 1918. Since not even the Polish can agree on an answer to your question, I'll refrain from it as well.

> How about all the map redrawing in Europe over the past 1000 years?

Excluding islands, not much worse or better than anywhere else in the world?

If you look at any of the published/leaked scenarios for US/RU-wars: All of them predict that the most heavy fighting will be in Europe, unless it's just nuked en passant.

> 177 years.

Ughh. That's like saying the UK has only existed for 301 years; It's the answer of an idiot savant.

The thing that really bothers me (or rather the preception they create) is their stance towards American Tech companies. They have an automatic impression that American companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google are ripping EU off because of their success and stopping local innovation.

The European Commission thinks that by putting roadblocks in front of American companies they'll be able to foster home-grown tech giants. Unfortunately for them, innovation doesnt work like that.

I would throw in the failure to deal with the economic impacts of their single unified currency. The eurozone ties the poorer states to the richer states, they serve as a forced export market and cannot depreciate their currencies to provide labor-intensive products/services. They clearly need capital transfers to shore up the budgets of the poorer states (or direct spending to relieve some of the basic burdens of infrastructure/medical care/etc). The US accomplishes this with Federal spending - the coastal states have booming economies that pay much more in Federal taxes than they received in Federal spending; that money goes to the poorer states in the heartland and midwest.

You don't act like a single nation either. When a hurricane hits the US we don't worry about who foots the bill, we collectively respond at the Federal level to solve the problem, in the expectation that if we ourselves have a similar disaster then everyone will step in for that too. You can't say that about, say, the refugee crisis in the EU, which has entirely been lumped onto the backs of the states least able to afford to deal with it.

Basically the EU's problems are fundamentally the same as those of the Articles of Confederation. You can run down the list: no Federal military force, no Federal ability to tax and spend, a body of members who espouse values of unity but actually stand for the values of their own independence and sovereignty, who work against each other every step of the way if it'll mean a bigger slice of the pie for themselves, etc. Fundamentally you still view yourselves as sovereign nations and national citizens, rather than Euro Member States and Euro Citizens.

Honestly what the EU really comes down to is a bunch of tiny, insignificant states who think they deserve a seat at the grown-ups table of international politics but are unwilling to make the sacrifices they need to get there. You don't have one foreign policy, you have 28 foreign policies, and the same thing internally.

The EU is first and foremost an experiment in integration of economic and foreign policy, it clearly doesn't work at that. If you want to be a United States of Europe, then you need a Federal government with some authority. If all you want is European Peace, can't that be handled at the United Nations?

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