The EU's bizarre war on memes is totally unwinnable | Hacker News Reader

The EU's bizarre war on memes is totally unwinnable

wired.co.uk

55 pointsjkaljundi13 comments

Because most people on HN have never read this, here is article 13:

Article 13

Use of protected content by information society service providers storing and giving access to large amounts of works and other subject-matter uploaded by their users

1.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.

Sorry to rain on the outrage parade, but I don't see any evidence of a "war on memes". Sure, the EU might force Imgur to implement some kind of content ID system and Hollywood could register source images in that system to block some memes, but the motivations for this new copyright law appear to have nothing to do with memes.

If I understand you correctly: it's not that this is a law against memes. Rather, blocking memes is one of the unintended effects that the new law would have, for the reason you said.

"War on memes" is a catchy nickname, the same way the Patriot act is not really about patriotism.

Honestly, blocking memes would be the only good result of this law. I can’t wait to see social networks cleaned of that crap.

Every user generated content will have to go through censor machines meaning 3rd parties will be collecting private information and control it on massive scale. This will allow governments to block protests or any movements against their agenda before they even start forming.

Content filtering wouldn't necessarily be outsourced to third parties and I don't think governments need to use copyright law to perform surveillance or censorship.

That would make it much easier.

But who is at the source of such a law ? I mean who's interest does it serve ? Who had the idea.

Because afaik movie and music creators are already winning the piracy war right ?

Old legislators that have no idea on how the internet works heavily backed by copyright heavyweights that think they can still win this fight

Government will be able to control content shared on the internet and block whatever they see fit.

> But who is at the source of such a law?

You know who. You KNOW WHO.

> I mean who's interest does it serve? Who had the idea.

Guess who had the idea.

> Because afaik movie and music creators are already winning the piracy war right?

Urm. Nice guess, actually. And guess again: you might be a bit off there, because this is about "publishers" wanting to monetize "summaries" when you're "linking" their content.

The laughable part of this ridiculously huge pile of BS is that your Dori - "Just keep swimming" meme or your Marvel'ous "I get that reference" meme is precisely what they're after. - Because somebody ... just keeps suing, just keeps suing.

It's laughable to state that such a war is unwinnable.

Totalitarianism is a historic precedent which demonstrates the possibility of propaganda supremacy.

It's only impossible to win a fight like this, if one refuses to do harm to those who engage in the behavior being controlled. Make an example of a few people, and wow, look at how quiet it gets.

  (HN Moderators, feel free to chime in, lol)

It is. Make the EU collapse.

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