Free software is at risk in the EU | Hacker News Reader

Free software is at risk in the EU

fsf.org

"If Article 13, embedded within the proposal, becomes official policy, it will be impossible for developers to build off of one another's code"

I'm not happy about laws dictating content distribution, but can't we still host our own content if this passes? All this seems like it will only hurt content-hosting-as-a-service type businesses, which are typically not libre and tend to converge into a de facto monopoly. I feel like, if passed, it will encourage individuals to host their own content and share it via links to URLs they own. Isn't that something FSF encourages?

Even if you host your own web server, this could apply to your ISP. It could definitely apply to cloud service providers.

I’m not sure how you get around unless we have some new WiFi worldwide mesh protocol (which would be awesome).

ISP's couldn't function if they had to check all content, and they shouldn't be able to if SSL works. Cloud service hosts would have to know something about how the content is going to be used. It's legal to back up my MP3 collection in the cloud, it's just not legal to share it. Even if they make sure I can't link directly to it, I could write some code to fetch it with my credentials and serve the bits through a web app I don't even host with them. And that's assuming the content isn't encrypted before uploading it to the host, preventing them from analyzing it.

> I feel like, if passed, it will encourage individuals to host their own content and share it via links to URLs they own.

If you look at the mastodon ecosystem there are a lot of small instances but these belong to a club/city/group of poeple and all allow registration.

So should everyone of the users host their own instance and disallow registration? What to do about federation?

Article 13 makes all of the worse for alternatives because Google and Facebook will use either algorithms or people to filter this and they have the manpower to pull that off but all of these federated spare-time / volunteer projects are now even greater risks than before for the individuals running them.

I disagree. Why would it block modified licensed code instead of looking for a COPYING or LICENSE file?

On the contrary, it could enforce copyleft by detecting GPL code that's made it into a proprietary codebase (or a more permissive one).

I am curious about the rationale behind this action... hmm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com