European Parliament approves copyright reform
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The bigger, more popular, and ubiquitous it became the more corporate and political powers were going to seek to rule it. Now were are at an age of internet giants with the GDP of small countries, and political elections being swayed by the bovine herds of Facebook and Twitter users (or useds as Stallman calls them!). The internet has come so far from my happy memories of the late 90s.
My prediction is that we will see multiple 'internets'. Whether for political reasons (e.g. China), or commercial (someone like Facebook or Google providing their version of internet to a 3rd world country).
Then of course we have things like dark web. I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation.
It's an interesting point in history. . . . (I'm a bookwork so please share any recommendations on this topic!)
I think it's more likely that most people will forget that the internet was once wide open and will accept the locked down state as normal.
> I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation.
You mean Tor, I presume. But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. And there are other overlay networks. Some basically just use VPN connections (such as tinc).
And they were always about being "free from regulation". It's just that hobbyists, activists and people into recreational drugs and CP were early adopters.
If you haven't read Vernor Vinge's True Names lately, I highly recommend it.
Hi, I'm a Freenet developer of the past ~ 10 years, so I'd like to clarify upon this :) (The project is still active, there was a release just this week!)
While there technically were indeed lawsuits in the US, the situation is not as black and white as "it's dangerous".
It is an anonymizing peer-to-peer network as well! What is dangerous under certain circumstances is only one of the three modes to use it: 1) Opennet, where Freenet uses random strangers as peers. 2) Darknet, where you only connect to peers you manually select, e.g. your friends. 3) Opennet with some Darknet peers in addition (I'll call it "mixed mode").
So Opennet allows law enforcement to connect to your Freenet potentially and thus analyze your traffic. Still, this does not mean that your Freenet will plainly tell its peers what you are downloading! Traffic is always redirected across a random number of peers, none of which tells the others who requested it - which provides plausible deniability. All traffic is encrypted, only the recipient can decrypt it. So you cannot just watch traffic and filter out illegal JPEGs or whatever.
What LEA did then is to come up some math and then claim to deduct from it that there is a certain probability that the illegal downloads were requested by the people they claim it came from. Their math is known and discussed by the Freenet core team, it may be addressed eventually - but from watching the discussion (not the math) I can say it should be taken with a grain of salt. It's not absolute proof that the claimed downloaders were in fact the downloaders. It's just a probabilistic assumption, which may possibly be wrong because the way Freenet works is rather complex (>200 000 LOC).
So as Freenet stores content encrypted on random user's machines (which is the advantage over Tor, Freenet is completely decentralized!), it is imaginable that law enforcement accusses people who did not willingly download it, but just happened to store it.
But: You can use Freenet in Darknet or mixed mode to be reasonably safe: The more of your peers are not controlled by attackers, the lower the probability that a statistical attack can be conducted.
Further, the said legal cases only happened in the US to my knowledge, and I'd argue that the legal system of that country seems a bit flawed. Outside of the US you can just run Opennet and probably be at the same risk as some random non-exit Tor node. You transport traffic which you cannot look into (because its encrypted) and store files which you cannot look into (because they are encrypted), so what's illegal about it anyway?
If the dark web becomes popular though, won't the same people try to regulate it?
They could make .onion link illegal for ISPs to load and kill it overnight.
"People who use the darknet usually are up to no good. This simple realization should be reflected in our legal system."
and
"I understand why the darknet can be useful in autocratic systems. But in a free and open democracy, in my opinion, there is no legitimate use."
In this case, it helps if the evil US military actually does use Tor :)
You want to regain your freedom? Use not-for-profit, decentralized platforms instead. You can use Mastodon [0] instead of Twitter, PeerTube [1] instead of YouTube, Aether [2] instead of reddit, etcetera. Other interesting P2P projects are DAT's Beaker Browser [3], and ZeroNet [4]. None of those will have problems with Article 13.
[0] https://mastodon.social [1] https://joinpeertube.org [2] https://getaether.net [3] https://beakerbrowser.com/ [4] https://zeronet.io/
EDIT: "Such [content-sharing] services should not include services that have a main purpose other than that of enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity." This is from page 62 of the document wherein Article 13/17 is to be found.
Article 13 dooms smaller companies and startups, thus further entrenching these big corporations. There was a provision added to Article 13 to protect "small and medium-sized enterprises", but according to the EFF [0] this "protection" is fatally flawed. It only protects them for 3 years, or until they attain 5 million unique visitors, or until they attain annual revenues (not profits) of €10 million.
That's not to mention that the exceptions for not-for-profit services also has been regarded as vague, which could be problematic.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/european-copyright-dir...
Europe tries to catch up to the Silicon Valley startup scene. But stuff like this makes it pretty clear that EU is too retarded.
Only "smaller companies and startups" whose main purpose is "enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity". That's what the document says; how it will actually be enforced is still a mystery, of course.
P. S. I have pointed to that "protection" on a previous comment [0].
One of my priorities in the next two years is to protect as much of the decentralised Web from the effects of the Copyright Directive, but it's not going to be easy. The large platforms, in their negotiations with the rightsholders who pushed for this directive, will have the explicit intent to turn it into a moat that can limit the growth of competitors, including non-commercial alternatives.
The rightsholders see even the smallest platform as a lawless environment that has no redeeming features, and worse than the now-regulated giants. Without active and co-ordinated lobbying by decentralised Net advocates, they will paint these alternatives as a "new generation of Pirate Bays", just as they did with YouTube and its predecessors.
https://www.politico.eu/pro/germany-weighs-in-on-copyright-w...
So, what happened to that? ^
Parliament wanted:
> Apply the law to platforms that “optimise and promote” significant amounts of user-uploaded works and are not small businesses (turnover below €10M and less than 50 employees)
According to: https://juliareda.eu/2018/10/copyright-trilogue-positions/
The entire attitude that I should "regain [my] freedom" seems condescending. I don't want to use a P2P alternative to YouTube or Reddit, because 99% of the content is on Reddit/YouTube.
I'm well aware that YouTube collects and sells my personal data, I just don't care.
The idea that legislation is good because it forcefully restricts my choices (indirectly, by harming YouTube), thus preventing me from harming myself seems to be a form of unneeded parenting/hand-holding/babying that I'm not a fan of.
That's the catholic and lutheran authoritarian mindset that is deep ingrained into the minds of EU politicians and large parts of Europe itself, that's what they mean with "democracy". They don't really trust people and their individuality.
Just check the backgrounds of the politicians who voted in favor, you'll find that most have this religious background and distrust in people and are easily manipulated by others "higher up the chain", like those cultural snobs in Paris.
That might change once everybody gets forced off Reddit/Youtube. The best-case scenario here is suddenly starting to look like revival of the distributed, non-profit internet in Europe. If that's the case, I can live with losing Youtube.
Wouldn't the killer feature of these P2P platforms (admittedly, none of which I've ever used) be to have a 'transparent bridge' to the mainstream platforms? I.e., like SciHub, almost transparently pirate content from their original source? Do any of them have it?
1) The legislation in question has nothing to do with protecting individuals privacy.
2) The solutions you offer are essentially not productized, they are not usable to normal people.
3) There is absolutely nothing wrong with companies making money.
This legislation is not being driven by Google and Facebook, it's being drive by Der Spiegel, Le Figaro, The Times etc..
It's also being driven by scared EU legislators who think that all their surpluses are going to American companies, it's a very weak hand to play, the 'strong hand' would be to have exceptional firms in Europe, doing things there.
If Google were a Germany company, this legislation would not exist. Surely German media firms would still want it, but since the surpluses from the situation would remain in the EU, then legislators would be less assertive about it, to the point wherein I think it would fail.
Instead of this legislation, we need:
1) Some tighter privacy rules that actually do affect G and FB
2) Taxation rules for the 20th century - ironically, this is an EU problem as they have Ireland/Netherlands/Luxembourg as their own loopholes
3) Stronger local entities, particularly in Europe to create a balance, that would lead to less motivation for political interference.
I take issue when people use the word profit to mean some evil, shameful thing. Youtube has amazing content and tools, and I'm sure a lot of their profit is re-invested in the platform. I doubt these other platforms come close in terms of functionality and UX. Peertube site design looks like it's from 2005. I know that might not be indicative of their core features, but first impressions are important, and this does not bode well.
There's a reason mainstream users never flock to these decentralized platforms: they don't have the fit and finish of a commercial venture.
You left out the "by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy, and having a persuasive (addictive) design in order to glue you to the screen so they can maximize their ad revenue, dismissing any human cost those practices entail" part. I don't associate the word profit with a bad connotation univocally; that's only an assumption on your end.
"Member States shall provide that, in respect of new online content-sharing service providers the services of which have been available to the public in the Union for less than three years and which have an annual turnover below EUR 10 million, calculated in accordance with Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC 20 , the conditions under the liability regime set out in paragraph 4 are limited to compliance with point (a) of paragraph 4 and to acting expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice, to disable access to the notified works or other subject matter or to remove those works or other subject matter from their websites.
Where the average number of monthly unique visitors of such service providers exceeds 5 million, calculated on the basis of the previous calendar year, they shall also demonstrate that they have made best efforts to prevent further uploads of the notified works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided relevant and necessary information."
Paragraph 4 says this:
"4. If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have: (a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and (b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event (c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b)."
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think this is quite illustrative. Anyhow, do you have an example of a small content-sharing service provider that would be affected? I'm sincerely curious. This is a personal opinion, but I don't think any content-sharing platform should profit from copyright infringement; I don't think forums or other kind of communities the main goal of which isn't to profit from that activity would be affected.
How ironic.
if those communities are aiming for a break even at best, would those as well be considered "for profit", though?
For now, but where will it stop (or will it)? Another commentor pointed out that even small services running ads to pay for hosting could be considered "for-profit". Maybe not now, but it's just a matter of when. First they came for the platforms run by big corporations...
If those small services' main purpose is "enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity", then they are turning a profit from copyright infringement, whether it is to pay for their hosting or not, so they will be targeted, as the document establishes. That's my take on it, at least, but I think it is quite clear.
Many of the cases out there involved people sharing on a large scale. Examples like The Pirate Bay or Sci-Hub or Aaron Swartz, which involve distribution of large amounts of content to large numbers of people.
The smaller the platform, the less anyone will care about it, even if it is distributing a little bit of copyrighted content. Small scale copyright violation is so widespread, and the benefits of fighting individual cases of it so small, that there's simply no value to taking it on and they aren't bothering.
try convincing _anyone_ who isn't already on one of those platforms to switch. It's nice on-paper to say "don't like? don't use" but it's not going to happen.
Well, if that's true, then the big question becomes what counts as for-profit. Do you need to be incorporated? What about a blog that has some ads to pay for server costs? Will Europeans be able to upload to Youtube as long as they turn monetisation off?
If being non-profit is the big way out, then that goes a long way to mitigate the damage from this. Although it still sucks for small content creators who do want to monetize their own creations but lack the resources to create their own platform.
Youtube is the target of this law and as they earn money with your video, they have to comply with European law, if they want to be active in Europe.
Wikipedia probably stands alone as a not-for-profit (as do, incidentally, government-sponsored services - so in the UK, BBC should be fine for any liability, but Sky would be screwed, for instance.)
And then there is the question how "for profit" is defined.
It was always the excuse that 'only the big bad capitalists' will be hurt by this, but its simply not the case and has always been a false premise.
26 March 2019. The day the Internet died.
(at least in Europe)
But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- so what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels into other countries.
That'd be interesting. It'd render GeoIP rather moot, among other things. I suspect the EU and Member States' response would be either "VPNs are banned" or "no service catering for EU users may talk through a VPN endpoint".
This is a law that works to mainly serve the big copyright holders, and in a second degree, impacts the big tech multinationals (=read US companies) less than the smaller ones.
It makes no sense at all. Especially since all member states will have their own law. "Does our filter comply with Belgium law? Also with Luxemburg? And what about Slovenia?".
It's a big farce, that can only be approved by total morons that don't even bother to listen to people who actually know what they're talking about.
This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
It's also why China has such lax IP laws. They are more of a manufacturing powerhouse than an IP powerhouse ( for now at least ) so they have little to gain with stringent IP laws. When their IP portfolio increases, you can bet that their government would be all about IP protection.
And going back even further, we had some of the laxest IP laws in the western world during the 1800s because we had so little IP to protect. Which allowed our businesses to take a ton of IP from IP-rich britain and europe.
It's greed and selfishness.
Google could have stopped all this be immediately kicking off all european newspapers from every google service they have and reinstating them only after they fill out and submit the form that they allow google to use their stuff without any pay.
Instead google only threatened to do this and european newspapers thought they have some power.
The only power they have is making and breaking european politicians, hence current mess.
We are no content powerhouse precisely because we are so concerned about all these bureaucratic things. Instead of just distributing better content more efficiently, we prefer to make it illegal to be better than the status quo.
Can't speak for all of Europe, but Internet-related legislation here in Germany has been a disaster since the mid-1990s.
It's election year. Since the big publishers are all for the reform, any politicians opposing it must fear for bad press.
Is the way this legislation got through because of nasty lobbying? What if it was brought in to stem the tide of American tech companies destroying more European businesses by hiding taxes and dodging copyrights.
>Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse.
Europe has plenty of 'content powerhouse' companies. They just don't wear their nationality on their chest when they sell to the US.
Strengthening privacy protection makes the most popular model for sites to pay for content creation and operating costs--selling information about their visitors to advertisers--much less effective.
Maybe as part of that they want to make it more viable for sites to switch to a direct selling of content model?
This law intent is to prevent unlicensed content to be available to European consumer. That will probably mostly work, with the usual caveat and unintended consequences we all know about, here on HN.
A friendly reminder that this was said about TCP/IP. It does not apply to the application layer (WWW), neither in theory nor in practice.
No. The day the ”Upload Other People's Work" Internet died.
> what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels
Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome?
It will either be the end of any kind of user participation on the European internet, or everything that happens has to pass through Google's filter. Neither are good options for internet freedom.
Note that Google's Youtube filter already has a tendency to block people's own content when it resembles content of the big copyright holders. For example: someone playing a piece from Bach on the piano when Sony has also released a recording of that piece from Bach. Youtube will flag that, Sony is fine with that, and small content creators don't have the resources to fight it.
That situation will get a lot worse.
"Sorry, the video you uploaded 'Me playing Beethoven on the piano' contains BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY by BMG-EMI-XYZ Music Corp. You cannot upload this video."
Therefore every platform provider visible in the EU (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, every blog, newspaper comment sections, ...) needs to stop accepting user content, because they cannot guarantee that copyright violations will not occur. They cannot be filtered and not detected. Think e.g. of song texts in images. Will you OCR every image for a work? There does exist a foolproof method to bypass AI, it's called captcha. Even if you install comment or upload submission queues with manual labor ("manual filtering"), you cannot guarantee copyright violations, only courts can do that.
The politicians might have thought of an GEMA-like index to store hashes of protected content in some form or another, which could be distributed to content certain providers, but this doesn't affect the law, which is much broader and not fulfillable. Thus Web 2.0 is dead.
If I would be Facebook I would rather ignore said new laws and go to court over it. The existing framework is good enough, the best way to handle copyright violations.
People on YouTube are creating content, lots of it. Will they still create it when some filter keeps blocking them?
If you want pirated stuff, just download torrents. They won't disappear with this new law.
The only thing that will appear are filters.
- use of unlicensed samples in music. Goodbye, Soundcloud rap and EDM music scenes!
- use of images and video clips in memes. Goodbye, Tumblr and Reddit!
Until Disney/Comcast/Weyland-Yutani decides that their own your original content. Or the content-id'ing algorithm generates a false positive. Just think a little bit about how all of this will be implemented.
Will they analyze each video if it is a illegal or legal one, checking everything... or just implement a simple, fast and cheap filter that will block most of the content, with no way to appeal the ruling, just like youtube is doing now...
- Online signatures? Gets laughed out of the room. They could be fake, they don't mean anything, they are paid, etc..
- Voting? Voting cycles are too long and voting decisions cannot be made on a single issue, so this is ineffective at best.
- Street Protests? It seems this is the only option. But as said in the article, even the credibility of these can be put into question.
So what do we do?
Same goes for your countries own election cycle.
Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system?
For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.
Isn't the European Parliament supposed to be this entity ?
The real problem is that if you have a single entity, then that entity can easily be corrupted by those who have the means to (read: money). This problem is unsolvable because those who have or profit from this power are also the people who get to decide if we want to do something about it.
Not just "this instance", it's a general problem we have with our democratic system. It's the cause of many problems/bad actions, not just this one.
The solution is to reform the democratic system to be more, well, democratic. There are a bunch of ideas out there. I'm not really holding my breath though :-/
Whenever you start to feel encroached upon by the new world order, the best thing to do is build another one right on top of it.
Build systems which route around this damage. It's the only way to be sure.
The MEPs didn't care.
There are elections soon. But people will just vote for all the usual candidates, so why would they care?
This is just one topic out of hundreds. And most people care more about the road in front of there house than about something as abstract as freedom of speech. Sadly.
It could be an independent non-profit allied to other non-profits like EFF. When one of these non-profits wants to run a campaign against a bad law being enacted they can run a "campaign". They can explain why it is bad, just as they currently do, but as well as asking people to write to their local government representative they can also ask for donations to the campaign. These donations would then be used by professional lobbyists to lobby in the same way large organisations do.
It's probably a stupid idea, but I feel like it has the germ of something useful.
Of course people shouldn't just be able to join this organization and take over the reigns, so they would need to be voted in. Let's say each region of a country will have a couple of candidates and regular votes are held on who will get to join the organization for a limited time. With this organization in place, we will finally be able to truly voice the people's opinion and act on their behalf!
There is something though about that idea that I cannot pinpoint. It somehow feels vaguely familiar. If I could just figure out how...
What is the third-party service doing here besides adding extra overhead?
1. Establishing and consolidating a strong lobbying organisation. There are some NGOs and other interested parties (e.g. companies like Google or supporting organisations like Wikipedia), but they are not united. A united body brings coordination and single, quite more substantial, budget. Then you can efficiently deploy: 1) lawyers 2) accredited lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels 3) public relations professionals running far reaching campaigns.
2. Voting in the EU elections. There are various parties which are consistent in their opposition to such laws (e.g. "Pirate" parties, some Greens and Liberals). It might be a difficult choice, as there may be other positions of such parties you disagree with, depending on your political views. However, such voting could be considered as "tactical" i.e. with a goal to increase their presence or force coalitions, rather than driven by the desire to see them fully in power. It is a question of your priorities.
https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/
I consider myself lucky !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Are there good polls measuring popular backing for (or indifference to) these bills?
Could it be that EU regulatory bodies are normal government functions that run the risk of normal governance-related dysfunction and require the usual controls like limited power, rule of law, oversight, and less-than-worldwide jurisdiction?
> A person contravenes this subsection if the person makes pornographic material available on the internet to persons in the United Kingdom on a commercial basis other than in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18.
> [A notice that the section above is being contravened] must[ ... ]require the internet service provider[...] to prevent persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access the offending material using the service it provides;
That's hardly better for the Internet, and copyrighted material can _already_ be blocked by Court order - it's a small step to making that more widespread. Leaving the EU does not _necessarily_ solve this (it just moves the problem).
Macron is a crook. If any other president from any other civilized country would have sent the military to guard against its citizens' street protests [1] then that president would have been (rightly) called out the worst names, instead Macron is still seen by a large part of the mainstream media as this savior of European civilization and democracy.
[1] http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190320-military-be-deployed-saturd...
Burning cars and breaking windows isn’t peaceful protest. If that happened in New York and the mayor and governor didn’t deploy armed guards, up to and including the National Guard, many people would be rightfully furious.
The difference is America, being a federation, has many layers of armed police, from the NYPD to NYPD special ops to the National Guard to the FBI and Marshalls to the Army. France, being more unitary (departments don’t have National Guard analogues), escalates more quickly to deploying its military.
Neither is burning people alive in Caracas, but that doesn't stop Macron from supporting the riots in Venezuela.
A few people doing that doesn't invalidate a peaceful protest that has lasted months now without doing any major damage (if you exclude Macron's approval ratings, of course).
Of course, when you have a lot of upset people it's easy to have a few problems--specially after months of protesting without the government doing anything major to address people's concerns.
It's also a common tactic from governments to infiltrate into peaceful protests and cause damage and disorders on purpose, to have an excuse to use force against protesters. In Italy it's common practice to send the secret service to attack the Police, and then reply with beating everyone up. Some politicians have even confirmed this practice in the open (Cossiga, for example).
Specially since military draft was made voluntary, in Italy the military are used to walk around at train stations, help out in case of protests, etc.
Actually, in Italy we have two institutions that are seen as "police": Police and Carabinieri. Carabinieri are exactly the same, but they're part of the military.
As for:
> Macron is still seen by a large part of the mainstream media as this savior of European civilization and democracy
The media is usually biased towards left-wing ideology, with a globalist spin. Since Macron embodies both those ideals, it's easy to see why he gets helped by the media.
I have no idea why the French would think that a banker who married his high-school teacher would be one of them. He definitely turned out NOT to be on the side of the average French citizen.
Ahahah, the good joke.
Most medias, everywhere world-wide are owned by billionars and follow the media-line of their owner. These guys are of course, conservative, right side, sometimes liberal .... but definitively not "left".
Qualifying guys like Ruppert Murdoch, Bloomberg, Dassault or Bollore (in France) of "left" ( or the medias they own ) is as idiotic as calling Trump a communist.
> I have no idea why the French would think that a banker who married his high-school teacher would be one of them. He definitely turned out NOT to be on the side of the average French citizen.
Maybe because the other choice was the daughter of a old extreme right dynasty from a party funded by old nazis and negationists. Maybe.
The net result of this proposed law will be more paperwork and more lawyers. In the long run, it will not accomplish its stated goals. It will simply slow down digital innovation in Europe and destroy any European dreams of becoming the next silicon valley
While good for you, EU will have one less citizen opposing internet restriction. We need a better way to deal with this but I cannot think of one.
>Politicians felt like your regular corrupt banana republic representatives this time.
That's what it converges to. Good ones don't survive.
The most effective way to change one's political environment since man could walk, enlightenment and democracy notwithstanding.
Democracy was a nice dream, but ultimately the only way to get anything done has always, is and will always be violence.
Which I am not advocating, because then the state will do violence to me.
I think the take away is to understand the values about what you don't like about whatever is going on... and apply them to yourself as best you can. Otherwise it is just finger wagging and finger wagging is so easy and fun that we often miss the fact that if push came to shove, we might do the same thing, or worse.
This is going to sound weird, but this _is_ why it feels like the old internet is gone: everything is moving way too fast.
Many revolutionary movements are eventually co-opted by elites (often the elites of the overthrown system) for their own purposes. Sometimes the new system put in place after the counter-revolution is worse than the system the original revolution sought to overthrow.
The cypherpunks foresaw the dystopian surveillance state decades before the reality and tried to get out in front of it via cryptography. But the raw economics of central service network effects completely destroyed a distributed, control-your-own-keys world. Going forward there are always proposals for a state-controlled "third-key" on all encryption.
Likewise, the gatekeepers of the old system (record labels, Disney, etc), have always used the state to enrich themselves. The Internet caught them off guard and they tried to fight it in the early 2000s with lawsuits for file sharing, which hurt their public image greatly. But centralized services came to dominate distribution once again. And now we're seeing obvious self-enrichment with these "reforms."
This is a fight between titans of industry in two different verticals. Content is upset that publishing is getting all of the money - and a brief examination of the valuations in those respective industries shows they're probably right on that front. Is this the optimal tool to right those scales? Probably not, but it certainly isn't constructed to kick Grandma's bakery and blogroll website off the internet at the behest of Big Bread.
To the extent that Articles 11 and 13 have problems (and they do) they should be addressed, but the fearmongering makes it very difficult to actually talk about those issues and their context properly.
In my opinion the original version with the amendments was simply insane; the work of technologically illiterate lawmakers in conjunction with copyright lobbyists. The final version makes an awkward attempt to fix some of the criticism by simply making things more vague, so each member state can decide how draconian they want to go with its enforcement. Calling the political discourse that opposes these articles "fearmongering" is disingenuous.
Julia Reda (German MEP for the Pirate Party) had most of the up to date info for the whole fiasco since it started. And she also provided new versions of the texts whenever they became available.
By its nature it attracted a bunch of people with particular political persuasions. But it wasn't only people of those persuasions, and neither was the entire thing an instrument for those people and their persuasions. Technology allowed for newer and richer forms of communication, and things just happened from there. And this is where we are now, sadly.
We can look to other disruptive technologies over time to see how the entrenched / favored industries handled the change. The story is mostly the same, but the players are different.
The mercatilist impulse is to freeze economics to ensure current levels of profit via state fiat. Even companies that start out revolutionary/scrappy/innovative become conservative after they acquire large market share. It's more important to maintain profit levels, quarterly earnings, and share price than it is to make a risky attempt at another disruptive innovation. Unfortunately, that impulse too often leads them to lobby the legislature or crown.
https://edition.faz.net/faz-edition/wirtschaft/2019-03-26/f3...
Via
https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110278976654794753?s=20
That was the rationale when the EU killed South Stream - a proposed pipeline from Russia through the Black Sea and south Europe. Some of the countries involved had already made large investments and had great hopes for the pipeline which would have generated transit fees.
Germany's push for Nord Stream 2 - a more or less direct pipeline from Russia - today feels self-serving and hypocritical. It looks like Germany is abandoning its obligations while smaller and less wealthy countries had paid the price.
Also Nord Stream 2 would make Germany more dependent on Russia gas.
At the same time US wants to have EU and Germany on their side in fight agains China + sell resources to EU. Germany on the other side does not like "being controlled" and has some attraction to Russia. There are thoughts that Germany may want to make an allience with Russia to weaken US influence on EU.
I belive it is just a surface of what is happenning. And it is all related to "peace/war" questions, who are allies to whom, global market shares, etc.
It is not just some "stupid decision", there are lots of issues hidden under the hood. And more such decisions to come in the nearest future I belive.
For the same reasons New York might care how Alaska gets its energy. Climate change concerns. Concerns that a fellow voting union member is building critical economic and energy ties with an authoritarian regime. (More selfishly, perhaps, because New York wants to sell them its own energy.)
See #Controvery
Germany did more than any other country to realize the modern renewable-energy industry and it's failed its climate goals. The lesson should be that you have to try every tool in the toolbox, including nuclear energy.
Fukushima accident revealed the irrationality of the public. Fukushima-scale accident every decade somewhere in the world would be low cost to pay for replacing coal. It's only the drama behind the accident that makes people to lose their minds.
https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/copyrightvot...
For example, all members of (Dutch) D66 voted against this directive, but of their faction (ALDE), 60% voted for. I will not lend my vote to such a faction, so sadly D66 will not get my vote either in the upcoming May elections.
Well nearly no information. I had a flyer for the SPD Senior Citizen Group in my mailbox...
I'm not sure, how the blocking you propose should work (your comment shows as much ignorance as most MEPs speaking for the reform do), as the directive basically enables any rightholder to enforce claims against the platform as soon as they publish any copyright violating material. The whole point is that rightholders should not have to rely on takedown notices anymore, which imho is not necessarily bad – this does also not in any way stand of overdue policy which limits the outrageous fees on copyright violations (for example, why not sign bills which make you pay the (standard) license fee+30% if you're violating copyright, when you are using the protected works in your own work (for blatant theft, like reuploading a music video, fines could still be like they are today...)?).
I'm wondering how much of the current user-created content on those platform is driven by that
Which people? People in his peer group on youtube sure. The world is a big place. I can see 5 people from my seat here on this train, I suspect not a single one has any idea what article 11 or 13 are, not would they care.
Now it's possible pressure groups could argue that they should vote one way or another in a vote on the subject -- i.e. google could turn people against it, or murdoch could turn people for it, but your statement that "people are clearly against it" is quite simply false.
EDIT - at least here's how the parliament groupings voted - https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110552457682264065
Parties and people who run for the European Parliament don't really have concrete policies or manifestos. In particular they can't run on a platform of repealing bad laws, because unlike in a real Parliament, they aren't allowed to do that. All they could do is politely ask the Commission to let them repeal the law, they'd be told no, that'd be the end of it.
So in practice EP politics are wafer thin and the only major differences between parties and politicians are to extent to which they are pro or anti EU. That's why the "Parliament" is stuffed with protest candidates from parties like UKIP. They can't actually do anything, they just make speeches and flame the rest of the MPs, but those MPs can't do anything either except egg on the Commission. So people tune out and don't care about European elections anymore.
There is some fear amongst the establishment now that the next EP elections will be different and people will send anti-EU candidates on a much larger scale than before. But not much fear, because the only thing these candidates can do is slow things down, and realistically even that won't happen because the EU frequently re-interprets its existing laws and treaties to give the Commission new powers on the fly. They'll just do more of that.
We are EUROPE FOR CREATORS. A gathering of professional organisations of writers, musicians, producers, comedians, films makers coming from all over Europe.... [snip]"
Translation: "We are GEMA, BPI, ...., and we make our money from creators' work. And we want more! More!"
I'm sure the automated filters will do a better job than me to make the distinction between parody or original.
Maybe we should let such a filter run on that website, so we know it's a parody or not.
Not doing so means they all have something to gain from this.
Not saying this is the first such thing that happens, but it's probably the one that will make me stop using the word to refer to the society I live in.
The way the parliament is elected is quite fair - it gives a little more power to people in smaller countries, but that's not unusual (UK westminster constituencies vary from 22k to 120k. U.S. congress areas are more even, ranging from 500k to 1 million). There's an argument that it should be more even than the current 11:1 ratio, but we call the U.S. senate democratic and that's a 69:1 ratio.
The actual choice of MEP comes down to a proportionate election, meaning that if you get 15% of the votes, you get 15% of the MEPs. This beats fptp systems where MPs in the house of commons are elected with as few as 30% of the votes cast.
Voting for a representative is the very essence of representative democracy. Perhaps we should have direct democracy. As it happens I watched an episode of The Orville[0] last night which covered this scenario.
Personally I'm a fan of representative democracy. It's the worst system except for all the others. I expect my representitive to work full time in understanding proposals and voting on my behalf, but they are a representitive, not a delegate. This is where direct PR falls down (who gets the seats is down to the party, not to the voter. I can't vote for Candidate B rather than candidate A if they are part of the same party. STV works better in this case, although 90% of voters don't really care and in the UK 80% don't even know who their MP is!
The whole thing was a backroom deal between Germany (which wants gas from Russia) and France (which apparently really likes ultra restrictive Copyright). We would have the same result without this fake theater of the simulated democracy facade. Time to abolish the EU.
TL;DR summary: The directive will have to be implemented in national legislations, a ~2 year long process. There are a bunch of contradictory laws and regulations to be reconciled. Your app or platform can probably ignore the new rules as they're too unclear and unenforceable - but do join trade associations that can provide good, reliable legal support.
[Edit] here's another article from EFF explaining the next steps:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/eus-parliament-signs-d...
As much as I can't do anything about the law itself, I can make sure that it will not wipe out startups and small companies that are trying to compete with the internet behemoths. We at Pex are making our Attribution Engine free of charge to all content creators, rights holders and platforms [0]. We will publicly announce it within next couple of days. I know it's far cry from the law not being enacted at all, but we hope it's something.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CLybxCFg_gz4n62UqVr3XEsy...
It's currently unlawful to format-shift (eg, rip CD to MP3) in England, so it's unlikely we'd have put up much argument against this.
One Labour MEP, both Conservatives - no response. Not even a form letter.
Other Labour MEP - "You are being brainwashed by Google. This is the best thing for the Internet ever! You'll see!" (paraphrased as I don't have the email to hand, but she did use the word "brainwashed"). Frankly the whole exchange struck me as extremely immature on her part!
Two UKIP MEPs - reply a few hours after I emailed them. "We'll be fighting this as much as we possibly can. It's a disaster. The Articles say one thing and say something contradictory a few sections later!"
Much of the fightback seems to have been from the populist far-right parties (with the obvious exception of the various Pirate parties). I wonder if the EU has realised it's just handed a massive win to them -- all they have to say now is "look, we tried to protect your Youtube but the EU stopped us!".
I've had to fill in a GDPR concent form on paper for my local car dealership and I put no to all forms of marketing.
In fact if Germany and France agree on something, this going to happen. I don't think that UK will accept that, even if they risk "hard brexit" (which is largely demonized, I can't believe that any bigger EU economy would just give up trading with UK, especially when World economy will start slowing down and every eurocent will count).
It is immeasurably more complicated than "I'm sure everyone will want to trade with the UK!". This is exactly the sort of line is expect to hear from the fanatics here.
As I said elsewhere on this story -- the EU has possibly just handed Eurosceptic parties a massive win in certain demographics they've had trouble making inroads into.
Is this the page for this vote? https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term8-copyright-in-the-digital-s...
If it is, it says 312 voted for it, 317 against it, 24 abstained. But it passed? Why?
Amendments did not pass 312-317 and Directive passed 3xx-247 (cant recall the exact numbers)
Where the laws don’t apply is if your service is to host user content and you have the size to circumvent justice. YouTube makes a lot of money off legal content, how much is unknown because they literally won’t tell you how much they earn from your content, but they also earn money from illegal content. They avoid responsibility by being large, and these copyright laws is going to combat exactly that.
It’s not perfect, but how else do you suggest that we make the laws that apply to you and me also apply to big tech companies?
The solution to “some of us might be subject to shitty rules” is “make everyone subject to shitty rules”? Also, why do you think large companies won’t be better positioned to comply with these rules? They can more-easily license what they need and lobby the regulators whose powers are being increased under these rules.
Expect a takedown notice and it goes away.
These big companies let people upload their own videos.
Now they are liable for what their users share.
Expect them to disable letting users share videos.
I haven't looked into it too closely, but isn't it the case that they do apply if a platform doesn't have the size, but is more than three years old?
Yes, and I don't want them to.
I would have liked to see a higher threshold so that small and medium sized companies weren’t affected. But it’s refreshing that we finally put an end to the blatant abuse by the ad industry.
"The Copyright Directive protects freedom of expression, a core value of the European Union. It sets strong safeguards for users, making clear that everywhere in Europe the use of existing works for purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature as well as parody are explicitly allowed. This means that memes and similar parody creations can be used freely. The interests of the users are also preserved through effective mechanisms to swiftly contest any unjustified removal of their content by the platforms."[0]
[0] From the final press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-19-1839_en.ht....
> The likes of Google News would have to pay publishers for press snippets shown in search results.
I don't really understand the rationale behind this. Really, I am trying to put myself in the shoes of a policy maker, why would I do this law? It's the publisher's role to ask for money, isn't it? Why should a country force a company to pay for sharing content from another company? I don't understand...
[0]:https://m.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-approves-controversial-cop...
The countries with high corruption get more voting rights than the ones with less corruption.
Wouldn't be so bad if they focused on just trading deficiencies, but no, they want to have their own culture budget ffs.
Never thought they'd actually pass this terrible "law".
Terrible.
But maybe not a complete surprise. Pandora's Box was opened two years ago when Germany privatized censorship. Maybe, back then we did it for all the "right reasons". But in politics, that's all too often just the beginning of a slippery slope. And many of those who today protest this new censorship where in favor of it the last time. Because that time it was supposed to censor "the other side".
This should help prevent fake news and foster a more balanced online discussion.
YouTube really built an empire on copyrighted content, and still continues to profit from it, as a result of liability shield that the DMCA provides. It has never sat well with me.
Today YouTube no longer relies on copyrighted content to be relevant. User generated content is now the primary source of views and ad revenue, but that wasn't always so. I remember when YouTube was the place to go to watch The Daily Show, SouthPark, SNL, and a host of other things. That's how YouTube became popular. This, "It's okay to break the law as long as the end result does more good than harm," is a weird line of thinking that seems to permeate a host of tech startups these days. And in the case of YouTube, while it's true that copyrighted content infringement is no longer their business driver, there's still a large portion of content that is copyrighted and YouTube shouldn't be profiting from that for no reason.
If YouTube was a public utility, as many people—particularly "creators"—seem to want to treat it things might be different. But YouTube isn't a public utility. Letting users hide behind anonymous accounts shouldn't magically absolve you of liability.
I think letting things develop the way they have probably did more good than harm at the end of the day, but I'm not sure that justifies it—and I don't think it should just be allowed to continue.
The current content gatekeepers built their studios by violating Edison's patents. In fact many innovators got started by subverting copyright restrictions in some form.
Perhaps that tells you something.
Also, it's not a one-way street. YT is a platform where artists can effectively reach a worldwide audience for free, something their publishers would have to pay handsomely for before, in the form of prime-time ad spots on multiple TV networks.
Upload-Filtering is impossible if done right. You could implement 30%, but this will not help you as you are still liable on any miss.
return random()>0.5
Will this make companies headquartered anywhere in UK, in more advantageous position, than a company serving user-created content, with HQ in European Union?
Whatever, the faster this EU fails, the better.
What they haven't realized is that paying authors a fair revenue when a copyrighted content is shared is still a problem below the horizon. Or, to be more precise, it's also a problem, and it requires a good degree of innovation (see micro-payments, content consumption tracking, Blockchain+smart contracts etc.) in order to be tackled.
But we haven't gotten there yet because the real problem is upstream: HOW do we recognize that some uploaded content is copyrighted in the first place, and who's the right copyright holder for that content?
How do we do it in a scalable way on platforms where thousands or millions of videos, images or posts are shared per day?
How to pinpoint the right copyright holders for a certain content, taking into account that the current situation is extremely fragmented to say the least, that there are multiple national societies for authors that have barely progressed technologically in the last decades (nor have been pushed to do so), that many of them haven't even digitized their own records, let alone provide a unique database where the information about their intellectual property can be publicly accessed?
And finally, how to find the right balance between blocking the unauthorized publication of copyrighted content and avoiding an over-zealous approach where companies start blocking legit content as well? (Hint: it's not by putting strict time constraints on taking content down and threatening huge fines on companies).
YouTube has already had for some years some content filtering algorithms that automatically block the upload of copyrighted material. It has taken years to build to a company with the size of Google. It required billions of videos to be collected and labelled, massive investments in manual reviewers and engineers, and it's still an algorithm that makes lots of mistakes. How do we expect a smaller start-up to successfully implement a better solution?
How could the EU regulators fail to see that this law will create more entrance barriers than those it promises to take down? Google, Facebook etc. have been fighting against this law because it's really bad for the internet in general, but they'll be the ones to benefit most from it. Sure, they'll have to pay a higher toll to make business in Europe, but it's guaranteed that they won't have many competitors. Because, unless the EU pushed for a more distributed and open access to intellectual property, they will be the only ones who can afford to build an infrastructure that really complies with the new regulation.
It's really a shame because the law could have been written in a way that would have really solved the problem without creating new ones. Even people like Tim-Berners Lee (the dude who created the web) and people at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley have raised their voice: the EU had the moral obligation to sit with them and listen to their concerns before going down its path, and it failed to do so.
There were tons of better ideas. Pushing the associations of authors and artists to digitize their information and make it available in open format. Make a shared database of copyrighted content. Expose an API that businesses can use, where you provide a snippet of some content or its hash digest and the system will tell you whether it contains any copyrighted material, and who are the authors. Set up a continental infrastructure for micro-payments to make sure that authors receive their fair share for each play or view, regardless of where the content is consumed. These are big things to build and no company is really incentivised to do it alone: that's when politics should step in and remove the blockers on the way. Unfortunately the EU this time has chosen the "we set the bar, we don't know if it's too high, and actually we don't even care, good luck you guys" approach without listening to anyone. And that's a huge shame on them.
An upload filter would be good for the internet because.....
-It prevents copyright holders from being infringed upon and having to produce paperwork to enforce their copyright.
-It could possible prevent harmful material from being uploaded before it can be reviewed.
-It puts liability on the tech companies to account for their platforms.
-It protects content creators.
An upload filter would be bad for the internet because.....
-It raises the bar for entry into the tech market.
-It increases the amount of work a new-comer in the market must do before launching a product.
-It adds a lot of localized complexity to the internet.
-The internet was not made to satisfy the requirements of sovereign nations each imposing their own arbitrary laws.
-The internet was supposed too/has the potential to be a globalist resource that transcended political borders.
An upload filter would be good for my business because.....
-It requires me to perform some due diligence on user-submitted data that I otherwise would probably overlook.
-It reduces the likelihood that I'll receive a DCMA takedown request.
-It will increase public trust and perceived security.
-People like to see compliance with regulations, even the ones they don't agree with.
-I could roll out the filter to all users and market it as an added layer of protection.
An upload filter would be bad for my business because.....
-It greatly increases the amount of time I must spend processing simple uploads.
-The user must wait for the file to be processed before they can continue using my service (assuming they want to use their file right away).
-It will cost time and resources to design, test, and deploy a filter.
-It adds complexity.
-I will need some frame of reference before I can determine if a file is original or copyrighted.
-I cannot trust the user to tell me if they own the rights to an uploaded file.
-I could try and geo-fence Europe so I don't have to filter non-European files but what if the copyright holder being infringed is in Europe?
-What if a file I filtered out has a copyright holder in the US who has no rights in Europe?
-Technically OSS is copyrighted. A file licensed under MIT might not be infringing anything although a file licensed under GPLv3 might be infringing.
No forgiveness for kneecapping free expression in return for some lobbyist euros and pretending it protects artists.
And to the artists who were dumb enough to believe it: if your art wasn't mediocre you wouldn't have any trouble drawing the attention of the copyright industry, as they are always looking for something new to milk. So you traded off a big break that won't happen anyway for the collective right to free expression of the entire Union. Good job, you utter tossers.
having said that, it's still a stupid regulation which shows EU parliament's incompetence in this regard.
What you can't do is claim that uploading a rip of Generic Marvel Action Movie VIII is 'communication'.
You don't even need to speculate. Just look at China