The EU's Copyright Proposal Is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

The EU's Copyright Proposal Is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even Wikipedia

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253 pointsMononokay79 comments

For all EU citizens please write, call, speak to your MEP! The vote is on June 20. This cannot wait until the law is done. https://saveyourinternet.eu/

I wrote my MEP a while ago and he responded and made a youtube clip talking about this issue, one of the few times I really felt like I was part of the EU.

On this side of the Atlantic, we successfully blocked SOPA from becoming reality (so far).

Looks like it's your turn, EU techies.

We blocked ACTA and SOPA in EU couple of years ago.

Government mandated, privately paid censorship. That's what it has come to. Again, just like GDPR, this won't hurt any big sites at all (Youtube already does this). But smaller players will struggle, and users will get inconvenienced and censored.

IMHO it isn't helpful that anti-"copyright"-reform initiatives such as https://saveyourinternet.eu/, https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-fi... and now EFF use clickbaity, juvenile, and outright incorrect arguments, foul language, and lacking nuance. Am I an outlier in thinking that YouTube/Google and others should be held liable for willfully profitting from "copyright" infringement at a massive scale, yet simply find the proposed law very badly done and in obvious need of consideration? The elephant in the room being that there is no "media database" that could be used for content scanning; the entire concept is technically infeasible. The whole idea of scanning "uploads" stinks; why not requiring that works are linked to rather uploaded, or use HTML metadata to represent an asserted license/"copyright" weaver. Moreover, the law isn't aligned with press laws: it's completely unclear who is subject to this law in the first place eg. if you're hosting sites on your domain, or at your IP, yet others take responsibility and are mentioned by name for the site's content (under VisdP in German press law, for example).

I sent an email to my MEPs saying exactly this; it's not technically feasible to implement this without having the media in question, so you are shifting this very steep requirement of proof from the accuser to the accused. The media companies are the accusers, they should build this database to make it easier for them to prove their case.

Interesting. How did you formulate your concerns? IANAL (well, took four semesters) and it's difficult even for most lawyers to recap the entire legal theory behind commercial and moral rights of works. Do you know a better template text than https://saveyourinternet.eu/ and in German?

I agree the law should be reconsidered, or at least, as you say, should address publishers's part in eg. maintaining and distributing SHA keys for works they claim, though we all know this can trivially be defeated by just recoding content. I also don't understand why concepts of other parts of the law (link previews of snippets from news, Wikipedia and StackOverflow being shown on SERP pages so users don't go to the original source) aren't integrated, when there are obvious, widely used, and readily available techniques for linking, annotations and HTML metadata, or why these two issues should belong in the same law. I guess it's just a profoundly incompetent law.

I'm still confused who is behind the push for this part of "copyright" reform. German party CDU they say (eg. the party of Ms Merkel) with their buddy/sponsor Axel Springer Verlag, but OTOH last year's equally flawed law for online platforms self-censoring was initiated by Heiko Maas, SPD, so the lack of public or parliamentary discussion smells like a hidden quid-pro-quo deal here to me. I'd really appreciate links to more balanced and comprehensive coverage; even netzpolitik.org coverage is too one-sided IMHO.

> The elephant in the room being that there is no "media database" that could be used for content scanning

For video and music, at least, YouTube already has ContentID.

I agree that the abuse of this excessively strong language is annoying, and I am not sure it really serves the right cause. If I read that "the Internet as we know it will be destroyed" I am much more inclined to ignore than to understand. Maybe they think that people are more impressed by strong language, but this has become so widespread that basically everyone is now "vaccinated" and it does not work any more.

For the sake of the battle, however, I will save my pickyness for another time.

These media companies would be all over a technology that injected content via direct neural stimulation at an authorized retail outlet.

Or a technology that was a permanently sealed container containing the content that must never ever ever be shared. After all, if you can prevent sharing it 1 million times, that translates into pretty low false negative rate on preventing acceptable sharing.

Or a tax collected that covered 100% of estimated revenues "just in case".

Ads, however, are vitally important to our global economy and must be shared widely, as wide as possible.

I still don't understand how roughly the same people can do so well at the GDPR and at the same time screw up so badly on this copyright stuff.

I mean, sure, GDPR isn't perfect but at its core it's a pro-citizen thing that has some decent vision behind it and had to resist a lot of corporate lobbying to make it through. This copyright bill seems to be the opposite in every respect.

If anyone can explain to me how the same organizations can do both these things at about the same time then I'd love to learn :-)

Both GDPR and this new proposal are pro big internet businesses, and anti small businesses & community run organizations. Both increase consumer annoyance. And both will likely in the end not help consumers with privacy or otherwise.

It seems like the same group could definitely be responsible. I see no contradiction.

GDPR is strictly pro-consumer. Data hoarders like Google or Facebook are the ones that were hurt the most.

Google and Facebook were hurt somewhat but they'll be fine. Smaller competitors had to take relatively more resources to comply.

The two most noticeable effects of the GDPR on average consumers so far seem to be a dramatic increase in unwanted messages from just about every organisations they've ever communicated with and the loss of access to various web sites based outside the EU. The intent may have been noble, but the execution was awful, to the point where the GDPR now seems to be widely regarded in non-techie circles with the same contempt as the "cookie" law that results in all of those annoying messages on web sites.

It looks as though the proposed copyright changes are more of the same, horrible for smaller businesses and potentially resulting in the EU being actively cut out of even more Internet services because compliance is too onerous. Let's hope they do a better job of fixing it or forget the whole thing this time around.

>The two most noticeable effects of the GDPR on average consumers so far seem to be a dramatic increase in unwanted messages from just about every organisations they've ever communicated with and the loss of access to various web sites based outside the EU. The intent may have been noble, but the execution was awful, to the point where the GDPR now seems to be widely regarded in non-techie circles with the same contempt as the "cookie" law that results in all of those annoying messages on web sites.

The GDPR became law two years ago; lots of companies that really should have known better ignored it until the eleventh hour. It is materially similar to the Data Protection Directive, which was passed in 1995. Had companies actually paid attention to the DPD, the GDPR would have been largely unnecessary. The GDPR isn't trivial to comply with, but data protection is not a trivial matter.

The proposed Copyright Directive is in parts severely misguided and I will be petitioning my MEPs accordingly.

Very stringent regulation is in the interests of large businesses. They have the resources while smaller businesses do not.

We've seen this in reports after GDPR go live where Google's advertising market share went up: they had the resources to demonstrate compliance as well as a better ability to get consent (google vs random ad exchange asking for your consent.. google vs a restaurant you go to a few times a year..).

People announce good intentions and create laws and regulations embodying these intentions. They don't look at what the second and third order responses are likely to be, just at what they consider bad behavior and what looks to be a first order response to that. It is very, very hard to create laws and regulations that will have the actual effect that you intend but it is very easy to write laws that have good names and have superficial appeal.

Whether the subject is market structure, privacy, or taxation, far too many supposedly intelligent people adopt or accept the superficial response rather than the well thought through one. You wouldn't accept that approach in your code but you're happy to accept it in national and international governance.

People are then shocked that they don't obtain their desired results and argue for new, improved, superficial laws and regulations.

This is true about a lot of regulations, e.g. slaughterhouse regulations in the USA. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have those regulations, or at least some version of those regulations.

> This is true about a lot of regulations

Managing how the regulatory burden falls is a core part of lawmaking. GDPR fails in this respect.

Complain-investigate regimes (where complaints frequently trigger a regulatory interaction) are effective. They're also among the most-onerous forms of oversight. (Second to mandatory licensing and auditing.)

Add to that the power of each of the EU's twenty-eight national data regulators to interpret the rules. Result? A law that's great for Facebook and Google and terrible for almost anyone else. To wit, Facebook and Google's shares of EU advertising has risen since GDPR went into effect.

Cry me a river. I don't want every little startup compiling my information, and selling it once they fail.

My complaint isn’t with the objective of the rules. It’s with its implementation. One can be totally privacy-first, retaining zero customer data, and still incur costs and risks because of GDPR.

What risks are incurred by storing zero customer data?

Read again. That’s not the risk they’re referring to.

> To wit, Facebook and Google's shares of EU advertising has risen since GDPR went into effect.

Isn't this the expected result? Now only a small number of (relatively) trusted companies have my data, not multiple fly-by-nights who may or may not be trusted ALL trying to gather it. To me, that's a net gain - Google/Facebook would have got that data _anyway_, but I now have less companies trying to gather it _as well_.

The GP is saying that a regulation’s unintended or higher-order effects can create a net negative impact on society. Why “should” such regulations exist?

I'd like to see at least some evidence of the "net negative impact". In the case of slaughterhouses, it impedes the local and smaller-scale (and possibly more-human) commercial slaughter of animals. But slaughterhouses should probably, in general, be regulated. I'm not sure if extant regulations are net negative or positive. But I know that their complete absence would probably be bad. It's not a matter of existence, it's a matter of implementation.

I'm not sure it's net negative in the case of the GDPR. As a sibling (cousin?) poster said, good riddance. No company should be allowed to mismanage my personal data, big or small. Until I see evidence that GDPR compliance is cost prohibitive enough to suppress startup formation, I won't be convinced that the tradeoff isn't worth it.

It's VERY hard to demonstrate net negatives on second and third order effects, especially so as to convince a proponent of the first order effect. You're looking at businesses not created, features not developed, strengthening of colossal businesses (celebrated upthread), and adverse changes that aren't superficially related. The most comprehensive evidence comes from decades long comparisons of countries or differences in regulatory regimes (before and after airline and trucking deregulation in the US) and you still have epic arguments over results and effects.

The other issue is philosophical. You seem to want proof that a company should exist and require extraordinary evidence against a law. I want proof that a law should exist and require extraordinary evidence against a company. As a shorthand its France vs America. You'll note that we're not using Minitel bur rather a board hosted by a VC operation who shares a mindset with the founding team of Uber.

As Frédéric Bastiat said, there is that which is (easily) seen and that which is not (easily) seen.

Hazlitt: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

Smart small businesses will simply try to be reasonable and ignore the more onerous parts (and especially the more onerous interpretations) of GDPR, correctly assuming that no DPA and no noyb-style NGO is going to come after them (and that if it happens, they'll likely get a warning, not a massive fine).

Meanwhile, big data companies are going to be prime targets, and will be forced to either change, or start paying a significant fraction of their global revenue in fines every year until changed or bankrupt.

That is naive. The GDPR is structured to require processes that favor implementation by the management structures already in place in big businesses, leaving the little people scrambling. Being good for the consumer is just a cover story.

They will hurt but the smaller companies will stop operating in the EU altogether. So yes its pro big business, just like the war on drugs has for effect to support the large cartels while getting rid of the small local dealers.

That is incorrect. GDPR allows hoarding data from consumers, but requires explicit consent. The business model of FB is to offer a free service in exchange of consent to tracking and targeted ads. Hoards of internet users are already 'hooked' on FB, and would consent to sharing anything with them if it's a prerequisite to participate in the platform.

New and coming businesses require jumping through more hoops to implement GDPR, while big players with their lawyer armies have no trouble adjusting to regulation, hindering competition.

> and would consent to sharing anything with them if it's a prerequisite to participate in the platform.

It has to be freely given consent, so it cannot be a prerequisite.

Facebook has armies of lawyers and lobbyists dealing with this ambiguity in each of the EU’s twenty-eight capitals.

You are free to not use Facebook.

And I am free to use Facebook and not consent. Your point being?

GDPR vastly increased potential attack surfaces (people taught to click consent buttons without reading, easier fishing - click to login to update your personal information, data portability - scammer can more easily extract personal data by impersonation and much more) and provides false sense of security. It only benefits civil servants and large corporations.

How about distributed systems like Mastodon or Blockchain or IPFS? They might not even be able to comply with GDPR.

Well then the only solution left is to make any big business so small that there are no entrenched players.

Or live in a corporate ruled regulation free dystopia.

How is GDPR pro business if companies had to stop contact costumers?

Can you imagine how much businesses are ilegal now? Telemarketing is ilegal now, consultancy companies can't recruit new people via email or phone. People are yet to realize the true impact of GDPR.

> How is GDPR pro business if companies had to stop contact costumers?

GDPR is pro big business. For example, Google, Facebook have not changed their tracking activities at all. OTOH, many small businesses had to stop tracking people and gather less data.

Agreed

maybe they adhered to the same principles, seeing content mafiosi as citizens, too. The article makes it sound as if having your news article cited would become opt-in.

Because it's not "the same people". This is legislation in a huge bicameral legislature with a multitude of interested parties, including 28 member states and eight political groups. That's before we even consider lobbying interests. Such legislation is usually a tug-of-war that involves lots of horsetrading and compromise (similar to the US Congress, really), because it requires majorities in both houses of the legislature. So you have the various political factions duke it out in the lower house (European Parliament) and the member states in the upper house (Council of the EU). The current proposal has seen a lot of back-and-forth between the conflicting interests of the member states (for example, Germany likes Article 11, but doesn't like Article 13, while other member states have different priorities).

Think how much tax payer money those bureacrats wasted. Unbelievable

Are you aware that GDPR made every business that relied on finding costumers trough phone or email ilegal?

How can you defend a legislation that makes everyone illegal, even outside your jurisdiction?

That's not the case. They can find costumers through various channels, but they need consent first, they can't spam.

Not correct. They can't contact without positive consent. How can they prompt consent if they can't contact them in the first place?

The GDPR tricked people into being ok with the gov deciding what you can remember, this just takes the next step. It's a standard incrementalism approach, shrouding them in "just for the corps" to start.

The government doesn't decide what you can remember, your customers do.

Gov decided on classes of stuff you need permission to remember, and that's just the beginning, next the blacklists will be explicit (like this proposal).

And then fascism of course.

Na, the member states are just going to xEXIT, taking their self-determinism with them.

Watch out, the shills are out in force today.

There’s a lot of money in personalized ads and many people here bring home the bacon due to tracking, so GDPR is threatening their future.

It’s amazing to witness. I mean, several years back I was naive enough to think that the smart people of HN are above such hypocrisy. How wrong I was.

I have been involved btw in implementing GDPR compliance. The companies facing difficulties are those that were irresponsible with user data to begin with. And indeed GDPR is a threat to their business model if they don’t change. Which is good – if GDPR wouldn’t be a threat to the business model of irresponsible companies, then it wouldn’t be relevant at all.

Also that line about big companies being the only ones capable of implementing GDPR is ridiculous payed marketing via tainted publications like TechCrunch and it’s catching on apparently.

But yes, it’s about time companies show some responsibility for it. Because if your whole business model relies on the ignorance of users, you’re doing something nefarious.

Ya, pointing out it's (EU) government mandated attack on memory (in a thread about mandated memory blacklists), all the way down to who visited your property; must be shills.

Shocking that the shills are on the right side of the WOGPC, OR (less surprising) your assumption is incorrect.

I doubt you will address the real issue; that this a EU gov mandated memory hole and the GDPR is the obvious framework to start with in the historically standard incrementalism approach.

The copyright proposal is from Mr. Voss, CDU politician.

He already tried to push a similar law in germany, somewhat successfully in that the parliament basically holed it out to be effectively worthless for what he attempted to do.

The reason this gets any support at all is because of corporations like Axel Springer SE (not to be confused with Springer S+B Media) which are the utmost cancer on modern journalism and media.

Of course, once it got through they managed to get delisted on Google News as a reaction and IIRC it took about 48 hours for them to cave in instead of demanding money from Google.

At the moment the CDU fraction in the EU parliament is pushing this and trying to pressure other parties into voting yes.

It should be noted that as in all governments, the EU does do several things at once and different interest groups may propose laws so the people who build up the GDPR may have no involvement in this.

Come on... this is not "Eu's copyright Proposal"... it's one proposal, from one MEP, for one commission of the Parliament...

No: it’s worse than that. This is the last committee vote before a plenary, and the main parties and the member states have decided to support it.

The only way this is stopped from becoming law is if you contact your MEP now.

https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-fi...

> Under Article 13 of the proposal, sites that allow users to post text, sounds, code, still or moving images, or other copyrighted works for public consumption will have to filter all their users' submissions against a database of copyrighted works. Sites will have to pay to license the technology to match submissions to the database, and to identify near matches as well as exact ones. Sites will be required to have a process to allow rightsholders to update this list with more copyrighted works.

I don't understand where this level of detail has come from. Can someone explain?

Here's article 13 as far as I can tell

> Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter.

> 2.Member States shall ensure that the service providers referred to in paragraph 1 put in place complaints and redress mechanisms that are available to users in case of disputes over the application of the measures referred to in paragraph 1.

> 3.Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate, the cooperation between the information society service providers and rightholders through stakeholder dialogues to define best practices, such as appropriate and proportionate content recognition technologies, taking into account, among others, the nature of the services, the availability of the technologies and their effectiveness in light of technological developments.

Edit -

> after Article 13 becomes law, any information hosted in the EU might disappear—and links to US mirrors might become infringing

How would links be infringing? Also where in A13 are they talked about at all?

Edit 2 -

I need to dig out a source but I'm near certain that there is an allowance for review, critique and satirisation of the news in the EU docs they're talking about.

> news sites may seek to withhold linking licenses from critics who want to quote from them in order to analyze, correct and critique their articles

Because fair use is the only way 80% of Wikipedia images exist. This article requires coordinating with rights holders even for uses that constitute fair use. Wikipedia contains a very large amount of content for which the rights holders are not known, no longer communicate publicly, or do not care about communicating with random strangers who may not even be authorized to make agreements on behalf of WMF.

The "in cooperation with rights holders" bit is pivotal.

Even before this proposal, Wikipedia would be flying very close to the wind on copyright were it hosted in the EU. "Fair use" is a US principle that isn't necessarily echoed in EU member states (the UK, for example, has a much more limited concept of "fair dealing").

It's notable that OpenStreetMap, which is hosted and governed in the UK, refuses to take data from Wikipedia because it believes it's tainted. (Specifically, Wikipedia says "you can get co-ordinates for articles by deriving them from Google Maps"[1], to which OSM says "nuh-uh".)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Obtaining_geographic...

But wikipedia is not for profit, it seems the law doesnt apply to it?

The Wikimedia Foundation is rolling in cash.

Fifa has billions of dollars, it is still not for profit.

Not for profit financially just means you cant give profits but have to reinvest it 100%

The current proposal is here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CONS... [1]; the text you have seems to be an older version.

I'll add that there is indeed a lot of wrong stuff in the EFF article. Don't get me wrong, articles 11 & 13 are indeed bad law (IMO), but promoting inaccurate information does not help.

For example, there is no mention of "noncommercial activity" in the entire text of Article 13 (non-commercial activity is only mentioned in one of the recitals for a different purpose). Article 13 applies to "online content sharing service providers". These are defined in Article 2:

"‘online content sharing service provider’ means a provider of an information society service whose main or one of the main purposes is to store and give the public access to a large amount of works or other subject-matter uploaded by its users which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes.

"Providers of services such as non-for-profit online encyclopaedias, non-for-profit educational and scientific repositories, non-for-profit open source software developing platforms, as well as internet access service providers, online marketplaces and providers of cloud services which allow users, including businesses for their internal purposes, to upload content for their own use shall not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive;"

Likewise, the following claim is misleading:

"Speaking of references: the problems with the new copyright proposal don't stop there. Under Article 11, each member state will get to create a new copyright in news. If it passes, in order to link to a news website, you will either have to do so in a way that satisfies the limitations and exceptions of all 28 laws, or you will have to get a license. This is fundamentally incompatible with any sort of wiki (obviously), much less Wikipedia."

Article 11 is about ancillary copyright; now, ancillary copyright is a bad idea, but the above is a misrepresentation. For starters, Article 11 (3) subjects ancillary copyright to the same limitations as regular copyright, in particular Articles 5 to 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC, including the right to quote such content (which in turn requires attribution).

What Article 11 does is (potentially) creating a copyright for small excerpts that might normally not be copyrightable and granting that right to press publishers in addition to the authors. This is a problem for news aggregators and search engines (which rely on producing content that's an aggregation of normally not copyrightable material) but not per se for Wikipedia (where pages consist of original material littered with references and quotes).

The biggest problem for news aggregators is that Article 11 (1) leaves the definition of "insubstantial" up to member states, which will probably lead to a "lowest common denominator" result, where the most restrictive interpretation by a member state effectively determines copyrightability for the purposes of ancillary copyright.

[1] And earlier revisions can be found here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280

Thanks, that has a lot more detail and seems more familiar, I was just using the link in the article (on mobile so hard to dig into things much). Interesting overview too, that was my general impression.

Ugh, I hadn't even realized that EFF was linking to a two year old version. Little wonder that they got so many things wrong.

For a better overview on upcoming EU legislation, I recommend the legislative train schedule [1]. While the current page on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market [2] only has the penultimate version, it's still more up to date.

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/

[2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-connec...

Remembering the EFF's recent EFAIL alarmist campaign against GPG, it's worrying how they seem to have recently gotten so many things wrong. It sadly destroys one's credibility in a debate when the opponent can paint you as someone simply misinformed.

Happy to take corrections to the text (and I can fix that link), but both of the points you're criticising are still correct, and actually re-inforced by the points you make -- noncommercial and not-for-profit are interchangeable in this context: your quotation is from the President's negotiating text, and ours is from the rapporteur's proposed amendment text. Neither are final, or even at this point definitive.

The final text will be a compromise between these positions, but both attempt to exclude Github and Wikipedia with inaccurate and non-useful descriptions. And the key point remains that the limitations on Article 11 will be defined on a nation-by-nation basis, rather those specified in an EU-wide text. The two texts express the same ideas in slightly different terms.

If you'd like an alternative explanation of these issues, I'd recommend Julia Reda's breakdown of the same problems here:

https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-fi...

All content will have to go through "filters" - that means it is the end of end to end encrypted services.

The proposed law applies only to commercial sites which publish user-submitted content which can be accessed by the general public.

For now. If this becomes commonplace and accepted, you can be damn sure they will try to extend this to more and more channels.

I can't see how a messenger type of software to which general public has access wouldn't fall into that.

Because the stuff you put in your messenger is usually not posted publicly but to private groups or single contacts?

If something is end to end encrypted, then by definition it is not made available (in unencrypted form) to the general public (as opposed to a select group of individuals with the relevant keys/logins)

The fact the software itself may be available to the wider public to set up other private communications channels to exchange other messages with other parties is irrelevant

In that case it will be very simple to circumvent. As webpage could be delivered once you log in, in form of an encrypted message.

It’s only bad for Californian copyright lawyers

Why?

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