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Comment by sarcasmic | Hacker News Reader

The relevant quote from this version [1] is:

>"The definition of online content sharing service providers under this Directive does not cover microenterprises and small sized enterprises within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and service providers that act in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned, such as educational or scientific repositories. Providers of cloud services for individual use which do not provide direct access to the public, open source software developing platforms, and online market places whose main activity is online retail of physical goods, should not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive."

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&langua...

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> online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned,

Does the service trust the uploader about this? There will inevitably be disputes about that self declaration.

It's also impossible to know which are all the rightholder of a piece of content. There might always be one more making a claim later on. Any system, automated or manual, is going to have many false positives and negatives.

On the other side, this system is already in place for traditional media. It's dealt with litigation. Again, no need to create special legislation for the internet. The blame must be passed over to the content creator, not to the distributor. This means that the creator must be identifiable, to know who to sue.

However this means that the supposed rightholder is going to automatically sue a zillion of people, with false negatives. This is unfair. I propose that in case of false negatives they lose the right on the content.

An example.

It's May and they play the final of the Champions League (this is about the EU). People will post the highlights. The rightholder will manually identify some hundreds of those videos, sue the uploaders and win. This will teach people not to upload those kind of videos next time. But if they sue a guy because they mistake him playing with friends as the Champions-League final, they'll lose all the rights on it. They'll be very careful about who to sue, people will be careful about what they upload, I won't see highlights anymore on YouTube but I can live with that. It seems fair for everybody.

The part about losing the rights is not going to happen though so I wasted your time, sorry.

Wow. That doesn't even make sense: "service providers that act in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders"

Are they really assuming all online encyclopaedias are non-commercial?

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