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The EU Could Vote To Wreck the Internet Tomorrow (vice.com)
The EU is preparing to vote Wednesday on sweeping new copyright guidelines that could dramatically reshape the internet and potentially harm your ability to share content online. From a report: As noted previously, the proposal is being driven by rights holders frightened by technological change, including brick and mortar publishers eager to blame companies like Google for their failure to evolve in the modern internet era. And while the EU's new Copyright Directive may be a well intentioned effort to modernize EU copyright rules, it still contains numerous provisions that could significantly harm the open internet. Most of those provisions remain largely intact despite a July vote that sent the proposal back to the drawing board in the wake of widespread activist backlash. The most problematic provisions of the plan include new licensing fees for sharing anything more than "insubstantial" portions of content. Such a "link tax" could prove costly for small news outlets, and, depending on final wording, could put volunteer-centric organizations like Wikipedia at risk since the original proposal failed to include a noncommercial exception.
The most controversial component of the plan mandates that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption (read: most of them) would need to employ automated copyright systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works at the website owner's expense. As we've consistently highlighted, such filters routinely don't work very well.
The most controversial component of the plan mandates that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption (read: most of them) would need to employ automated copyright systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works at the website owner's expense. As we've consistently highlighted, such filters routinely don't work very well.
And how does such a database of copyrighted works work?
Full text of anything ever generated? every frame of every film in case someone might make a meme of it?
Not to mention, who oversees it. " He who has the Gold (copyright DB control) makes the Rules. "
Assuming that they will vote to wreck the internet, how much of the internet is under EU jurisdiction?
I'm ever more strongly inclined to have them push through the most obviously lobbied-together most atrociously anti-free-speech filtering censorship everything for all websites accessable from the EU. And I warmly invite every website inside the EU to shut down on user content as much as possible and every website outside the EU to block anything EU by geoIP.
Burn it down. Burn it all down. If that doesn't get my fellow EU-citizens up in arms against the EU, well, then what will?
one for the EU, one for everybody else. let the EU built the filters on their own dime, or just pull out.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's because of them that I have websites constantly saying, "We use cookies on our website to track you" et cetera. I thought the US solution under DMCA was good:
- You upload something
- It gets taken down
- You respond by saying "This does not infringe copyright" and the item gets reinstated by the website (as required by DMCA).
- At that point the copyright claimant must either file a lawsuit and Prove in court that they are the legitimate owner.... or just let it go.
It provides a way for us average people to deal with takedown requests, without causing permanent harm. It appears the EU and the corporate donors will dismantle this regime, so you have NO way to reinstate legitimate uploads of yur own creation.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That should solve the problem.
Publishers are doing just fine, it's the journalism profession that's not. It's because journalism never established a culture over the last 200 years of habituating people to pay money directly for the content. So now only a handful of publications have such a rapport with their readers that they can get them to pay a premium to access the content.
It gets worse when you realize that in the US (I know this is Europe) at least half of the content came from Reuters or the AP, so where was the value of buying Local Paper over the NY Times or WaPo at that point? To see a handful of local interest stories you'd probably get through gossip anyway?
I'll have you know that America already voted to wreck the Internet.
Yep 2016 has given us the best apocalypse ever. If I had of known ruining the economy, putting NAZIs in office, starting a nuclear war in Asia, and turning the environment into a radioactive ruin on an earth scorched by global warming would have been so pleasant I would have worked to make it happen long ago.
you have NO way to reinstate legitimate uploads of yur own creation
You're assuming the ONLY way to put content on the web is via the "social media" sites. That couldn't be further from the truth. You can post whatever you like on your own web site, without worrying about takedown requests.
You're bitching about Facebook, not the web. Don't use Facebook.
I don't respond to AC's.
I think this is a good law. It finally makes the "social media" sites police what's on their servers. They can and they should. They make have to make a few billion less dollars than before, but tough shit. I know exactly what's on my web server, and I'm responsible for it. These giant web sites can very easily do the same.
I don't respond to AC's.
The politicians think they can regulate behavior with a pen again.
Good luck with that.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Since linking to anything directly will cost money, I propose a new approach - a google search link where you know the first result will be the link target.
Then we could easily write extensions for browsers to convert a Google link with some special URL query param to automatically visit the first link result... might fail sometimes but it would work often enough to be useful.
Can't stop the signal, EU.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It might make search/response times a slight bit longer, but that's not our problem, is it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Checked, as expected Facebook is legally a Delaware corp.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A. Facebook is not the Internet. It's a shitty website that preys on stupid people.
B. Anybody can compete with Facebook. This law just says that you'll have to monitor the content, just like Facebook is going to have to do.
C. The Internet is alive and well for those with brains. For dummies who think the Internet is Facebook... well... they never really used the web... any more than the people who used AOL did.
I don't respond to AC's.
From a mechanics of dealing with copyright it isn't bad.
The Europeans might not like the idea of Google or Facebook interfering in their elections
https://www.washingtonexaminer...
You go through the bloodiest conflicts in human history, and the whole better to seek forgiveness than ask permission idea gets a little threadbare.
Let them do it. Let's see how they like their internet then.
That has lead to the explosive and valuable growth of internet companies in the US -- any company that lets people post stuff need only take down copyrighted items in a timely manner when notified of the violation, and they are safe from a lawsuit.
This has greatly hampered companies in Europe, to Europe's detriment. This new stuff will only exacerbate it as it is more than worth it for companies to spit implementation than let Europe decide the form of the Internet.
Btw this is what that idiot US senator was threatening to get rid of if Google and Facebook didn't self-censor to the government's liking. Go ahead, fool, and do an anti-American thing and punish those who don't censor (if the SC lets you, which is unlikely) destroying their trillion dollar stock value and crushing the retirement savings of tens of millions.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
New law: your corporate offices is where your have the most employees.
#DeleteFacebook
Silly alarmist article is silly and alarmist. And they're just talking about the web. This doesn't affect any of the other numerous things the internet does, besides serving web pages.
And how the hell are they going to enforce this? Who would run a website in these proposed conditions? I wouldn't, I'd relocate my server to a more friendly nation without stupid rules. In this day and age, your geological location matters less and less. I can rent a server anywhere in the world from my home, in my PJs and slippers.
How exactly are they going to 'force' a website located outside the EU to comply with their rules? Seems like they're are shooting themselves in the foot with this stupidity.
Internet knows no borders, and the EU trying to erect a wall around their internet..well.. they are going to find this all just insanely difficult to implement. So good luck with that. The internet will be just fine without you, thank you very much.
What there should be is a tax on ad revenue based on the country where the eyeballs are located at.
The internet is in no way open or fair. Just look at how conservative voices have been censered everywhere. This laws must be passed in order to prevent the companies like Google from blocking the free market of ideas with extreme liberal free speech violation. Google is a huge donor to Clinton and Soros funds, and are in investigation around the world for their antifree speech tacticks.
Bullshit.
Google, Facebook, Twitter,etc. are private companies. There is no such thing as "free speech". They can do whatever they want. It is not "censorship". Only the government can engage in censorship and restriction of free speech.
Those companies are not vital to society. If you don't like what they are doing then ignore them. And there's nothing preventing conservatives from starting their own platforms.
database of copyrighted works
GREAT! All I need to do is start a website and I can get a digital copy of every copyrighted work for free from this database. No more torrents!
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
It's dying and needs to die.
Corporatism != Free Market
"The EU Could Vote to Wreck the Internet Tomorrow"
"As noted previously, the proposal is being driven by rights holders frightened by technological change, including brick and mortar publishers eager to blame companies like Google for their failure to evolve in the modern internet era."
No the internet will not be wrecked tomorrow. No this is not driven by businesses that failed to "evolve in the modern internet era."
Stop being a fucking ass-hole and report the facts. That's all you need to do, promoting FUD does not help your argument.
And need I point out that you're being fucking hypocrite and Luddite when you say businesses need to evolve in the internet age but at the same time say technology solutions (automated copyright systems) won't work in policing copyrighted works. So you need to evolve but only to a certain point?
Ass.
The world has turned. It was Craigslist that killed a lot of local papers.
They survived on classified ad revenue. Sunday papers where half classified ads when I was kid.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which is quite a feat for an organization that doesn't have any guns. Let's just ignore them.
Enforced? Lol
I thought the US solution under DMCA was good
This post brought to you by the states that legalised marijuana.
It's because of them that I have websites constantly saying, "We use cookies on our website to track you" et cetera.
Yeah damn them providing choice rather than just loading you with so much tracking garbage that your browser slows to a crawl. You should google how much faster common websites load in the EU compared to the USA because of that pesky meddling. The time you spent clicking ignore is well made up for how much time you save not loading tracking scripts and planting 100 cookies for a stateless loginless session.
1. Your corporate office is where you book the largest amount of corporate revenue.
2. All the tech companies who have parked revenue in other countries are required to transfer their foreign accounts into US accounts and be subject to US taxes.
Okay so how does that work for non-US companies? Also, your first law just declared that your corporate office could be in another country. That would mean Apple is an Irish company and would not be subjected to your second law.
#DeleteFacebook
Does the EU have a worldwide police force with rights to operate in every country on the planet? No? Then I don't see how they'd enforce such utter nonsense as this, any more than they could censor the Internet. How, really, do they think they can enforce anything on a website that's not hosted in an EU country? Rhetorical question, they can't. I guess they can demand that everyone block the aforementioned website, but again, do they really think they have some special power to allow them to enforce their rules on non-EU countries? More clueless, toothless legislation by moron politicians who don't understand the Internet.
I really hope that laws like this and the closed garden culture will eventually lead some people to create another web/gopher/usenet within the internet, which will be freer than this one. Yes, I know this a naive hope, but let me dream.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Time for the next search to have a few limits.
Use the -site:"nation" to stop getting search results from country domains in Europe.
Create a no EU results add on for a browser and a list of search engines?
No links to any EU nation.
The rest of the internet just moves around all EU content and EU online publications.
Filter the EU from daily internet use. Support nations that have the freedom to publish and support the freedom to link.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's already running at 10 Gbps in many areas and 100 Gbps near portals and it will continue to function without all this cruft your ad-supported "internet" relies on.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is no copyright protection scheme store.
Everything is copyright, even though most of it was never produced for profit, and nobody is likely to pay for it.
This just makes the material unavailable. Imagine Wikipedia with virtually no photos at all.
You're assuming the ONLY way to put content on the web is via [YouTube and other] "social media" sites. That couldn't be further from the truth.You can post whatever you like on your own web site, without worrying about takedown requests.
YouTube has a feature that lists "related videos" and "recommended for you", including videos from other uploaders. On desktop, this is down the right column. On mobile, it appears in a scrolling list below the video. In the case of hosting video on your own domain, what do you put in place to replace this feature? Is buying AdWords the most effective way to get your video recommended to viewers?
Articles in an encyclopedia are supposed to be verifiable, containing claims supported by reliable secondary sources. If no reliable secondary sources have covered a subject, how is it even possible to build a verifiable article about that subject? I'm interested in your answer to that question, as it'll help others explain notability.
If publishing a printed periodical is so costly, then how do nonprofit publishers that accept no ads stay in business? Such an organization publishes Consumer Reports, a monthly magazine that reviews products marketed to individual home users.
I just have to make sure that people don't post copyrighted stuff on it, just like I do now on my own website.
What steps would you take to ensure that? I guess you could paywall the service and use the revenue to hire someone to review each post for copyright infringement before it becomes visible to the public. Is that practical? How would the reviewer even be familiar with all copyrighted works in existence? Or what other practical means of prior review did you have in mind?
The provisions of "you must provide copyright filters on any upload site" seem tailor made to restrict content uploaded to Wikileaks. That's something to keep in mind, if such laws are universal throughout the UK and make no clear accomodations for journalism.
Of course it hot-diggety-did, goshdarnit.
What other possible explanation is there for the overwhelming "no" in the Brexit vote after his 'back of the queue" threat?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
providing choice rather than just loading you with so much tracking garbage
Where is there a consumer choice involved that wasn't there before?
You should google how much faster common websites load in the EU compared to the USA because of that pesky meddling.
This has not-much to do with the meddling on its face and much more to do with Privacy Laws that have teeth.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac