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Europe Passes Controversial Online Copyright Reforms (venturebeat.com)
EU lawmakers today endorsed an overhaul of the bloc's two-decade old copyright rules, which will force Google and Facebook to pay publishers for use of news snippets and make them filter out protected content. From a report: The set of copyright rules known as the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, but more succinctly as the EU Copyright Directive, has been debated and discussed for several years. While it is broadly uncontroversial in many regards, there are two facets to the directive that has caused the internet to freak out. Article 11, which has been dubbed the "link tax," stipulates that websites pay publishers a fee if they display excerpts of copyrighted content -- or even link to it. This obviously could have big ramifications for services such as Google News. Then there is Article 13, dubbed the "upload filter," which would effectively make digital platforms legally liable for any copyright infringements on their platform, which has stoked fears that it would stop people from sharing content -- such as GIF-infused memes -- on social networks. In a statement, EFF said, "In a stunning rejection of the will five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive in its entirety."
I told you this is what would happen if we let regular people use computers.
Laws not written by the people for the people, the EU showing it doesn't give a fuck about democracy.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Hope they pull facebook from europe good!
We all know how this will end. Google, Facebook et al are going to just drop all EU content and depending on how aggressive the individual laws are may even just block entire countries outright. They aren't going to give up their business model over this, it will be Spain all over again and soon Euro IP's will be blocked from /. Its been fun Euro users, may we meet again some day.
This means that I can't link to any legitimate news site. However, fake news sites are fair game ...
Digital storage has been sounding the death knell for artificial information scarcity for decades now. Industry backlash continues inevitably.
I wouldn't blame any company for completely blocking all uploads of anything including text / comments, this law simply isn't workable, it's complete censorship. Fucking idiot politicians and yes I contacted my meps about this more than once.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I really wish American companies would juet abandon the EU and let them try to make their own tech. It's worked well for Russia and China. That's where the EU is headed, and I don't want them to drag the American web behind them with their giant market.
Why should we let you decide who is the scholar and who is the fool?
Turns out lots of really complex social problems are addressed by the wisdom of crowds. The educated elite came up with eugenics. I think it's safe to say the educated elite should not be in charge of things.
The internet was built around two basic principles: links are free and you can upload everything and sort out the mess later.
Now really, what's the rationale behind charging for a hyperlink, even if no content is displayed? Greed? Stupidity? Idiocy?
I suppose this is European content providers trying to build a wall around their "internet?"
Google, Facebook and other megacorps can afford to take measures which they can afford to defend in court afterwards, while the judicial system tries to make sense of bad legislation. Sites of the magnitude of Slashdot or smaller, however, probably will not be able to budget for that, and may just geo-block Europe. Not that geo-blocking is effective. Probably may cause a small up-tick in US VPN adoptions....
Why should the scholar get as weighty a voice as the fool?
Because: Corruption. Scholars had many studies paid for big oil saying that leaded gasoline was not harmful, but the "crazy conspiracy theorist fools" were right. Big tobacco pointed to inconclusive scholarly research indicating that there was no link to smoking cigarettes and cancer. Tell me more about your "scholars", who are all either funded by corrupt government or with grants by big business earmarked only to promote specific research. It is common that the fool is more wise than the scholar. At the core of every persistent conspiracy is a kernel of truth surrounded by PSYOPs of poisoned wells and muddied waters.
Why should the results of your past votes not affect the weight of your present vote?
You answered this yourself: "authoritarianism", "imposition". Academia finally became aware in the 1990's that tobacco caused cancer. Should we then say that your scholars are all discredited and have no weight in the present vote? GREAT! I agree. You are a pseudo intellectual with no grasp of history or reality, it is not your fault, but it is your problem. This is the age of deception, fool.
This is very easy to fix. All search engines and websites in general boycott publishers that backed this and that would demand payment for linking/snipping by simply removing all links to them, period. No search results. No links from other websites. Let's see how long publishers survive when nobody can find their shit.
The end result? The publishers will be begging the EU to reverse this.
The big sites aren't going to drop a couple hundred millions of eyeballs. Just look at how hard some of them are bending over backwards to accomodate China, India, and so on.
It does mean the small ones outside the EU will probably just block EU traffic, like some are already doing over cookie laws. Instead of "asking for consent" or just, you know, not setting the damn third party cookies in the first place.
And small or would-be websites inside the EU are outright fucked. Which is of course exactly what the copyright mafiaa likes.
Also, possessives don't get apostrophes, but contractions do.
To be blunt, this all leads to censorship and less ways for people to express their thoughts and opinions on the internet.
This is like a guy relocating his store to the middle of the ocean to reduce theft.
I sell art online, and without search engines indexing my copyrighted material, would find it very difficult to make a living as an artist. A blanket prohibition on linking to copyrighted content would effectively "disappear" a lot of emerging and professional artists from the internet. The internet - and its ability to reach millions of people - has made it possible for countless artists to make a living who would otherwise be unknown. Without it, we'd go back to handing control over art back to the local, physical galleries and the "starving artist" model.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The inventor of the World Wide Web, hypertext, and linking was European, and invented it all at CERN in Europe. And now Europe effectively destroys the entire thing by taxing the very item (hyperlink) that created it all...
Truly, it is just a matter of time before the EU taxes air and sunshine...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
How will the contracts be enforced?
... journalists got paid for their work.
No one owes Google or Facebook a free ride. Those mega corporations are making money with the links.
Let them pay for the links.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
In many parts of Europe, Copyright automatically exists without need for registration. This means anything beyond a few words is automagically under copyright. Forums where people meet and discuss their hobbies... all those posts are copyrighted. The assumption is of course that it was a public post and meant to be shared with everyone, but that doesn't mean a malicious actor can't use this new law to disappear him or herself from the internet under threat of incredibly excessive fines and even imprisonment.
This post is copyrighted under EU law, no need for registration. Quote me, and you are now violating the Copyright Directive. That's how stupid this 'law' really is. You don't even have to get to the bits about link tax and other stupid crap with upload filters and such because this law seems to have been made by people who don't even understand the basics of how their copyright system actually works.
Seriously? You still believe that Copyright "protects artists"?
We had such a law in Germany. The Urheberrecht! An author's privilege law! Implicit and non-transferable too!
Copyright is a *distributor's privilege*! To take power *away* from artists. By the same distributors that regularly try to *lower* the meaningless peanuts that artists get from the cake.
If you had ever been an artist, you'll know that they get their money from gigs and merchandising, and it has been shown time and time again, that if they just share all their works as a form of marketing, they make *more* money, than they ever did from copyright!
I've worked in the organized crime called "media industry" for two decades now. My mentor did since the 60s. We've personally seen it all. EMI bosses *requiring* hookers and blow to even consider negoating contracts. Band after band hooked on contracts, sucked dry, and thrown away. Designer after designer used, madr money from, and laughing in his face when he has to go buy his own work in the shop and license it, to be even able to play with it. Even parties that turned into "Wolf of Wall Street"-style "basically mass-rape" orgies.
And we both agree that the ENTIRE "media industry" thing is just cokehead paranoia and overconfidence turned into a "business", and is, will be, and has always been solely for the purpose of leeching on artists and their fans without doing any value-adding work whatsoever yourself.
So excuse me if I, in the name of all artists ever, give you a big fat FUCK YOU from the middle of my fingers.
Or did they think about this, or think anything through at all?
This is pretty shit but it's not worth burning everything to the ground over, and if you don't expect the uk gov to follow suit under the smallest amount if pressure then you're as deluded as farage et al.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Wrong. The EU -does- have a parliament elected by the people directly.
Get your facts straight.
Having said that, I believe this is a dark day for an open internet in the EU.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
INB4 newspapers "waaaaaah no is visiting our site anymore"
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Go find me even a single corporation whose actions are not massively *opposing* a free market where any such contract could be fair and with both parties on the same level.
And I'll show you so many, who do, that your case becomes a statistical fluke.
Like libertrarianism, peace-and-love, democracy and communism, your state theory is wonderful, eleganty nice, idealistic, and *completely unrealistic and out of touch with actual human behavior*.
I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't.
(And even then, I'd prefer a nicer one than your psychopathic lizard brain dog-eat-dog world one.)
Google / FB just requires a new HTML header that explicitly gives them permission. If the header isnâ(TM)t there, Google just displays the link and no additional information. As soon as the media outlets watch their views plummet they will either add the header or demand the law be changed immediately.
So the possible removal of all things aggregated or social from the EU could be a Great Thing for the rest of the Wild West Web.
Such companies Hosting in the EU would become a thing of the past, giving a small boost to business in other places.
The traffic would still flow, of course, but Doing Business in the EU would become problematic. Users there will just get their pages
served from elsewhere, at least until the EU enacts a Great Firewall of their own. Probably implemented by Huawei, of course.
Yes, that's why the EU parliament is essentially powerless. It's mostly a dump for politicians you can't keep at home because they're a liability and you can't just fire because they know too much. Essentially, it's what we came up with when political murder went out of fashion.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From a tech perspective, Shutting out ideas is never a good idea. From a Business perspective, more markets are better. Politically, that sh*t is how wars start.
Europe's strong privacy laws usually require servers in an EU country. That might have changed (based on this passing I think it's pretty obvious that American style political corruption has bled over to the EU, sorry guys), but if it hasn't Google et al will just leave.
That said, these are mostly American (i.e. foreign) countries. I don't think they care if they leave. I could see the EU wanting their own, home grown alternative services. The whole point of the EU was to make a large market to stand up to the US economically.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How about a test to see if someone is fit for voting? Nothing complex. Like asking for the difference between first-past-the-post and proportional representation. How about "what are we voting on today?" (and I mean the office or body we're voting for. And with body I don't mean what warm body to put in the position). Or "name three parties and their main candidates?" (of course only in countries that actually have three parties that anyone might know). I'd even exclude trick question like "name 3 politicians without a police record" (because at least in my country I'd have to dig in the past to find some).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
but the American House is the ultimate power here. Don't underestimate the power of holding the purse strings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We all know how this will end. Google, Facebook et al are going to just drop all EU content and depending on how aggressive the individual laws are may even just block entire countries outright.
Every major web property needs to do this right now especially if it's a search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo), a social network of any kind (Facebook, Twitter, private webforums, blogs) or a user hosted content provider (Wikipedia, YouTube, SoundCloud). Pull out of all EU countries and explicitly block access to them. I mean, how do you do business in these countries when they've effectively banned hyperlinking.
Frankly, when GDPR happened they should've pulled out right then and there, but they didn't because of "The potential market share". Well that potential market share is about to cost you billions in GDPR fines alone making any gains a loss sum game. Now imagine the billions lost from this law, and the next law, and the next law...
This will continue for as long as these sites put up with getting fined for doing their purpose. The only way stupid laws ever get repealed is when the law causes unnecessary harm and pisses off enough voters. Every major web property shutting down for the EU sounds like it would get the job done.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Most parliaments don't propose laws, or at least have very limited powers to do so. In most countries laws are almost universally proposed by the executive to be either passed or rejected by the parliament.
Those artists are going to have a hell of a time when nobody links to their work
Stop indexing links from companies that want money for them.
Problem solved.
Who cares? It's off topic.
You know, I would actually be fine with strengthening some aspects of copyright protection - if there were softening in other respects. Media producers want paid for snippets? Fine, absolutely fine. But their copyright expires in 12 months, after which the material enters the public domain.
What is actually likely to happen: Media companies will be shocked, shocked when companies like Google simply stop linking to them. Their business will collapse, until they see the solution: issuing a general public license allowing anyone to link to their content with no fees whatsoever. At which time, Google&Co. will start linking to them again. We've been here before, more or less. And we'll be here again in a few years, when the next generation of clueless MBAs decides to try to monetize links.
The liability of platforms for copyright infringement by their users? I'm not seeing a great solution to that one. Stupid politicians, this is why we can't have nice things...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Why should we let you decide who is the scholar and who is the fool?
Turns out lots of really complex social problems are addressed by the wisdom of crowds. The educated elite came up with eugenics. I think it's safe to say the educated elite should not be in charge of things.
The BBC once broadcast a live chess match between a grandmaster and the people, who would call in and vote on the next move.
Hint: Voting did not solve a complex problem.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
just upload an image of the letter "E" in lots of diffident fonts and see how fast sites get taken down.
The differnce between the US and the USSR demonstrates separation of powers in a country is not smoke and mirrors. The US design is, in the words of those who wrote the Constitution, to set ambition against ambition among the powerful in the various branches.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Seriously? You still believe that Copyright "protects artists"?
Absolutely. Not even a debate. That doesn't mean it also isn't being abused widely as well. Those are not orthogonal concepts. Same thing for patents. Yes they protect inventors. Yes they are also being abused by large corporations and patent trolls.
Copyright is a *distributor's privilege*! To take power *away* from artists. By the same distributors that regularly try to *lower* the meaningless peanuts that artists get from the cake.
That is only true if the creator of the copyrighted work grants a distributor such rights. Don't sign a bad contract with a distributor an it isn't a problem.
If you had ever been an artist, you'll know that they get their money from gigs and merchandising, and it has been shown time and time again, that if they just share all their works as a form of marketing, they make *more* money, than they ever did from copyright!
Umm, you do realize not every "artist" is a musician right? What you are describing has nothing to do with most forms of copyrighted works. Sure the music industry is pretty fucked up in a lot of ways but you can't take that industry and generalize it to all uses of copyright. And even as screwed up as the music industry is, copyright still does protect artists from rampant plagiarism of their work. The fact that musicians tend to fritter away the benefit they get from copyright by signing one sided deals with scummy media companies is a separate issue.
Your government doesn't want you to know what this is about.
Granted I know it's that they want it paid for, but this would be easier AND pettier! More fun. (I seem to recall some South Park game had to remove a scene in one country and they just put up that country's national flag and text about the government saying no while the scene's audio continued to play)
The Peter Principle writ large.
The BBC once broadcast a live chess match between a grandmaster and the people, who would call in and vote on the next move.
I appreciate your analogy, but calling the European Commission members "grandmasters" is a bit of a stretch. For example, the president Jean-Claude Juncker is usually so drunk that he can barely walk (search youtube for Juncker drunk to see some examples)
So basically you are saying it is an optic/face saving law and not one that should really be on the books. If it is relatively circumventable, it isn't a good law. It's only purpose is to try to convince people who don't know better that you are doing something substantive. Everybody wises up to and eventually loses trust in things that are run that way.
It is blatantly two-faced and that's going to blow up eventually.
Anything that discourages GIF infused Meme's should be celebrated.
If the major players such as Facebook, Google and AP put a block into place with a message saying it was because of the new law. I bet they would quickly get it overturned.
This gives more power to the one publishing content. Looks like big bro G and friends have lit a fire under most of the cattle. Probably bad for Slashdot as well.. But If you want others to be able to use your content just give your terms/rights away with some meta tag to indicate such at least you have the power to do so.
Holy Fuck , he is really drunk all the time.
My takeaway from this is: great news for the big boys in the game, primarily Google.
Link Tax: Most news sites need Google more than Google needs them. They will waive the charges for Google or see traffic plummet. Google's less-well-known competitors, though... perhaps not. You wanna launch an aggregator as a competitor to Google News, expect to have to pay a lot more for content than Google does.
Meme Ban: Google has the economies of scale that will allow it to afford the investment that complying with the regulations requires without simply blanket-banning anything containing any copyrighted content. Google's competitors... not so much.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
Depends on how you define executive. In the Commonwealth for example, the executive is the Queen and never proposes laws or even gets involved in law making besides rubber stamping laws passed by Parliament.
It can be argued the defacto executive is the PMO (Prime Ministers Office) or Privy council but they have to introduce laws in Parliament and private members, whether part of the government or not, can introduce private member bills, which occasionally even pass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
several major companies said they will restrict their websites from viewers in the EU, wonder how many will now follow through or if they were just empty words
Up next...
Frexit
Grexit
Spexit
you get the idea
Google will do a deal with the content providers to pay them a very small fee to link to them. Content providers that do not agree will simply not be linked to.
Some of the big ones may drop off, and this might be an opportunity for little ones to gain traction. No big issue for Google, one site is much the same as another.
Google might also offer a paid service which lets users see links to more expensive sites.
Wikipedia, OTOH, will be in trouble. They will just not be able to include links to other sites at all. Nobody can negotiate for each and every link.
Just don't link into any EU nations. When a link into a EU nation is seen suggest an alternative to a free non EU nation.
Dont pay an EU gov tax for your internet.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ah right so if the contract is broken you have to spend time and money suing the other party. Sounds awesome. Especially if they're much richer than you.
Whatever one thinks of the law, it is good to understand how the European Parliament is promoting it, as at that link: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
This is not in any way to defend that law, just to say it is useful to try to understand the mindset and world view behind it -- and how it was spun and sold.
While I agree a tax to link to something risks breaking the web (or at least the European part), here are some positive spins from the article about other aspects of copyright reform in the EU probably used to help sell the rest of the restrictions that otherwise seem to favor big publishers: "Uploading protected works for quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody or pastiche has been protected even more than it was before... It also stipulates that copyright restrictions will not apply to content used for teaching or illustration. Finally, the directive also allows copyrighted material to be used free-of-charge to preserve cultural heritage. Out-of-commerce works can be used where no collective management organisation exists that can issue a license."
Of course, what those sentences really mean in practice however they may seem to sound, I don't know.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
No, we're more timid. MJ is only illegal here because you couldn't tell the living from the dead anymore if it wasn't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What matters is what's in someone's skull, not what color the skin has that stretches over it. If you want to find out whether someone is fit to vote, you can't tell by looking at them, you actually have to talk to them.
No, I don't like that either, talking to people is something I try to avoid on principle, but democracy is worth the suffering.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thanks to accomadations to GDPR, many webpages now have an extra click-through before you can access the content. I hope that Google/Youtube/etc don't kowtow to the EU, and castrate their services globally. Geoblock search and Youtube to the EU. I hope they're happy with that.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user