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The EU Can Still Be Saved From Its Internet-Wrecking Copyright Plan (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: While the European Union voted this week to pass its widely-criticized new Copyright Directive, activists and members of European Parliament say there's still a chance of keeping the EU from fully implementing the worst parts of the troubling proposal. The most controversial aspects of the plan remain twofold: Article 11, which would require EU News outlets to pay a "link tax" just to share anything more than "insubstantial" snippets of published content, and Article 13, which would require that EU member countries implement the kind of automated copyright filters that have been a chaotic mess here in the States. Other problematic measures were passed as well, including Article 12a, which prohibits sports fans from posting their own photos or videos of sporting events online, while stating that only event "organizers" have the right to do so.
That said, all hope is not lost. While some variant of Article 11 and Article 13 is likely be approved next spring, public pressure could force inclusion of additional safeguards for end users, Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda told me in an email. "While the overall bill was adopted with a comfortable majority, the outcome was more narrow for the two controversial articles (366:297 and 393:279)," Reda said. "Since the final vote will be close to the next European elections, that leaves open a small chance that massive public protest against these provisions may still convince MEPs to kill the entire bill." If passed, individual EU countries will be able to interpret the Directive as they see fit, though Reda believes they will likely steer toward stricter interpretation. "The real hope for repeal in my opinion is in the courts," author and activist Cory Doctorow said. "There's simply no way this passes EU Constitutional muster -- it's generalized filtering and mass surveillance by another name. The fact that they claim to be looking for 'infringement' doesn't change that."
Longtime Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein adds: [...] These articles now enter a period of negotiation with EU member states, and then are subject to final votes next year, probably in the spring. So now's the time for the rest of the world to show Europe some special "tough love" -- to help them understand what their Internet island universe will look like if these terrible articles are ever actually implemented.
UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a report slamming the proposal, offering a number of ways people can fight back.
That said, all hope is not lost. While some variant of Article 11 and Article 13 is likely be approved next spring, public pressure could force inclusion of additional safeguards for end users, Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda told me in an email. "While the overall bill was adopted with a comfortable majority, the outcome was more narrow for the two controversial articles (366:297 and 393:279)," Reda said. "Since the final vote will be close to the next European elections, that leaves open a small chance that massive public protest against these provisions may still convince MEPs to kill the entire bill." If passed, individual EU countries will be able to interpret the Directive as they see fit, though Reda believes they will likely steer toward stricter interpretation. "The real hope for repeal in my opinion is in the courts," author and activist Cory Doctorow said. "There's simply no way this passes EU Constitutional muster -- it's generalized filtering and mass surveillance by another name. The fact that they claim to be looking for 'infringement' doesn't change that."
Longtime Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein adds: [...] These articles now enter a period of negotiation with EU member states, and then are subject to final votes next year, probably in the spring. So now's the time for the rest of the world to show Europe some special "tough love" -- to help them understand what their Internet island universe will look like if these terrible articles are ever actually implemented.
UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a report slamming the proposal, offering a number of ways people can fight back.
Why don't we just remove all EU links and TLDs and just forget them like they want so badly?
Let it all go through. Just let them wreck their own internet, I want to see it. I want to see every popular website out there shut down in the EU because it's no longer worth the money, watch the useless bureaucrats squirm as potentially the entire economy of the EU tanks and takes the rest of the world into a recession.
Why? Because I'm tired of living in a world where tiny minded little interests can impose their influence on governments that would ruin the world, including their own, just because they believe they can make an extra penny. This stupid shit is everywhere, in every country, all the time. And if sensible people keep trying to "make the best of it" they greedy idiots will just continue shoving their stupid shit down everyone's throats to the detriment of all.
So let it fail. Let something fail for once, to show just how useless and corrupt this system of placing narrow minded beliefs over reality is. Let something big fail in front of everyone for all to see, so maybe the system is replaced before the failure becomes the entire planet, becomes billions dead because a few coal mining CEOs needed that second yacht. Let the idiots shoot themselves before they take everyone else with them.
Copyright granted! Now nobody can steal or plagiarize the EU's Plan For Wrecking The Internet (EU-PWTI). If we were to also DRM protect the EU-PWTI... bla bla bla bla...
Just implement the directives in the strictest way possible, to the point that Google/YouTube/everything becomes unusable, before it becomes obligatory, and put a banner there "this service will remain as it is now if EU does not back off". Keep it like that all the time, except for one day a week or so (to make sure people do not forget what they are missing),
Why stop when the EU is having so much fun?
How exactly will the reduction of plagiarism wreck the Internet? Will the DNS-servers stop working? Will connection latencies increase? What?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
All you have to do is create a page that continues creating random links. Then when it comes time to quantify the tax, you will get the bill near heat death of the Universe.
You owe us EUR 2,147,483,647 - I suggest you upgrade your system to contain 64 bit numbers. Okay, you now owe us EUR 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 - I'd suggest you go for a 2048 bit number.
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LOL. This guy is disconnected from reality. Dude: Netflix outside the US SUCKS. The catalog is less than half the size. That's because YOU CAN'T LICENSE SHIT. It doesn't work like that. you don't just go and get a license for anything you want. If it was that easy, euronetflix would be as good as netflix. But it's not.
Could someone please post the actual text of the controversial paragraphs before we discuss this any further?
Article 13 would be a pain, but it'll most likely not wreck the Internet. What'll probably happen is that some company starts offering filtering services for uploaded data. User uploads video/photo/whatever to your site, you then hash that data (with say MD5+SHA256, chance of collision for both is nearly nil). Hash is sent off to 3rd party filtering site, they return back 'Prohibited' or 'Allowed'. They charge your business per unit or per month, costs you a negligible portion of your revenue and you don't have to R&D a solution for yourself. It's considered 'good enough' for compliance with the law, and there's a central place people can go to to challenge misclassified data, which is an improvement over having to go to hundreds of different sites that banned your data.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
That is a solution even i as a citizen of an EU member country would suggest to do. Too bad for me and the people living in EU, but that is the only way to show the idiocy of this BS.
In principle and in justice they could not apply it to links of media outside of EU at a service outside of EU, but in practise they might think they have the right to do so. I don't know if they are that stupid though.
In fact if you look at most of the EU economy, the web site are highly local, otherwise the rest of the economy are local service and exports... So your crash and burn would not happen.
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In Soviet Europe, the news reports you!
I don't know much about this law
And neither does anybody else here, apparently.
There's two main clauses:
1) Google can't put a little snippet of text in links to news sites.
Solution: Stop linking to them. The news sites will be back in a couple of weeks, screaming for a repeal of this law. Google will be able to charge them money for reinstatement
2) Facebook has to check uploaded images to see if they're copyrighted
This isn't even a problem for anybody except Facebook, so, who cares.
No sig today...
Maybe the EFF needs to create a blocked to the EU campaign? This campaign would be hosted by any website for a day or more and illustrate that it may be safer for many sites to simply geoblock the EU, than to try complying. If the message isn’t made in a way people notice, then few people will be making the noise they should.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Doctorow will be disappointed the ECJ primarily a political court, when the court thinks it is in the best interest of the EU they'll ignore certain parts of EU law to preserve the political purity of the EU.
So if the EC bigwigs get behind this stupidity, then the courts are much more likely to side with them even if the law is stupid.