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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 ...
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.
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?"
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.
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!
You will probably get your wish more and more. I follow a lot of companies. When they talk about opportunities, they never mention Europe. If Europe is mentioned at all, it's usually when they discuss the headwinds they face in their business.
Business leaders have a lot of places they want to to do business. Increasingly those places don't include Europe because Europe is expensive and stagnant.
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.
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INB4 newspapers "waaaaaah no is visiting our site anymore"
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Question: Do the journalists make any money if no one can find their articles to read them?
./
I think the majority of people go to Google and type in search queries, hit the Google News Feed, or look to news aggregators like
Few people go directly to joebobs247news.com to read up on the latest political scandals.
Now, if a news aggregator copy and pastes the entire article, then yeah, they should be liable for some copyright infringement. A quick summary of said article or the first couple sentences with a "read more here" is something completely different though. In that case the aggregator is generating traffic for the news site, not stealing it.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.