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European Commission Gives Final Seal of Approval To Copyright Law Overhaul (variety.com)
The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, has approved a long-gestating major reform to copyright law, which had already been passed by the European Parliament last month. From a report: The overhaul contains two controversial provisions that will make online platforms liable for illegal uploading of copyright-protected content on their sites, as well as force Google, Facebook and other digital companies to pay publishers for press articles they post online. "With today's agreement, we are making copyright rules fit for the digital age. Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong rights for users and responsibility for platforms," said European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, six countries -- Italy, Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Poland and the Netherlands -- voted again the reform.
If the entire EU is blocked from accessing all content on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and every other social media and news site, they'll get the hint and re-think these ridiculous polices.
The whole adjustment to force Google etc to provide compensation for article snippets seems fair. If the companies don't want to agree to a fair price, don't include them.
However, the whole illegal uploading part seems, well...... extraordinarily draconian.
to start sending millions of takedown notices to EU government websites for copyright violations.
... and everywhere.
And then rapidly become a basic part of normal browsers, used by default. Not just for end users, but also hosting content.
Culture flows through free expression. People refer to well-produced works. Places like Youtube are already becoming nearly useless for sharing basic culture because of laws like this - seemingly any reference to a popular work is becoming forbidden - or just random information since anything can be claimed by almost anyone.
So - the answer isn't to not share culture. The answer is to openly disdain and technically dismiss these attempts to contain culture.
I have zero interest in defending EU legislation and much less one about copyright (e.g., all my public activity can be considered public domain). But I think that there is a lot of misinformation online, perhaps even provoked by some interested parties. I found this Q&A from the European Parliament very informative.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
One of the biggest issues on this is how compliance is demanded.
I assume this will be like the DMCA where there isn't any real deterrent for false claims.
Big companies can afford to hire people to validate the requests to ensure they aren't claiming things that aren't theirs.
Startup projects will simply honor all requests without validation as they don't have the time or money to do validation.
Even youtube run by one of the largest companies runs by a honor request then check only if someone disputes policy so even a bogus request can take legitimate content down for a while. Further last I heard if they just claim ownership they are able to steal whatever money is made from monetization until the dispute process is completed and even if the claim is successfully disputed the creator doesn't get that money back.
AFAIK the only company that is actually doing validation is google for their search product because they keep having companies take down things that aren't theirs, are their own websites or are overly broad like insisting slashdot be removed because one of the comments in 2008 quoted lyrics from a song.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Jean-Claude, are you drunk again?
If anything this made the whole mess even worse since now nobody knows what to do. Neither do the various EU countries that don't even know how to adapt this in any sensible way into their laws, nor do companies that don't have any idea how to comply with them, nor do the users who are pretty much preparing to simply ignore it by using VPN services.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Europe seems hellbent to go back to the 7th century, one way or another...
Presumably this goes both ways. So those "news" outlets whose only content is made up of republishing Twitter (or Reddit) comments and pretending they did some work are now liable for paying those Twitter users for their content.
What YouTube will do is easy to figure out. If you're on their A-List, whatever you say is gospel and will be removed immediately. If you're not, any of your content that was removed stays removed.
Why do you think they'd change anything?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If they're smart, they will.
Since it does not matter where I put my server within the EU (if I want to put it inside the EU for whatever reason), take a wild guess where I'd put it...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Brexit anyone?
My blog is indexed in Google. My stuff is copyrighted. Where's my money?
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
First, the Internet doesn't owe anyone a living. If you can't make money on the Internet, then don't be on the Internet.
Second, there's the example of Randall Munroe and his xkcd comic. He allows free use of all his webcomic, and the quality of his content has allowed his survival by other means.
So does this mean that sites like Twitter or even Slashdot would have to pay news sites when users link to them in posts? It seems like a big article being linked with a few thousand retweets could be a crazy expensive hit. Perhaps links will no longer be allowed.
Two countries, Germany and Spain, already tried to pull this stunt before. Germany was first, and Google retaliated by making companies sign a thing stating that if Google was to host those snippets they would do it licence free. Spain didn't like that so they made sure Google couldn't do that in their country. Google was like fine, guess what, we aren't hosting your news snippets at all. Spain complained, tried to take Google to court and told the judges that Google wasn't being fair, because them not hosting such content was hurting tons of business. Courts told Spain Google don't have to do business with anyone they don't want to do business with. In the end news companies in Spain were losing far far more money by not having their content hosted because Google wouldn't pay for license vs going license free.
Finland has the power to declare war, Rhode Island doesn't. Finland also has the power to block a lot of EU actions that require unanimous consent, whereas nothing in the USA except for changing senate representation requires unanimous consent of states.
While both the USA and EU are fundamentally undemocratic structures, I'd much rather see the USA reform into a more EU-like structure because the EU does provide significantly more autonomy. Not to mention an escape hatch (article 50).
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Google -- and any other online site -- cannot possibly know the upload contains "illegal" content until the upload is completed. So much babbling here about "Upload Filters" is even more perplexing, as though filter software will need to be installed on your computer before uploads are even allowed!!!!
The EU politicians are idiots, of course, and YouTube has long since had copyright detection where your video will be blocked from viewing if YT's algorithms think your video has protected content.
As far as news stories, Google is doing the news sites a favour, driving traffic to them. Talk about biting your gift horse.
I am not saying that Google is a shining company, as the recent fiasco with James Damore demonstrates. But come on. Google provides so many free services to everyone, why bitch? Maps is a fine example, and I use that app daily to navigate through the rush hours in Berlin. I would actually pay for that service. And yes, yes, I know they are storing my movements -- for me, they have my movements stored all the way back to 2009. I actually find it useful to see precisely when and where I've travelled around the world. It's a privacy issue for sure, but then you don't have to use Google, or you can simply create a burner account if it matters that much to you.
The EU seems hell-bent on destroying the Internet. At least for Europe. All Google and others have to do is simply block Europe (and I'll have my VPN at the ready!!!). How would Europe get along without Google? Bing? Yahoo? Sure. It would be funny as hell if the big Internet companies boycotted the EU. Funny as hell.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Is not bought and paid for by the old media trying to destroy the internet.
Italy, Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Poland and the Netherlands voted no. This law needs to be written into the laws of each EU country. What if those six countries simply didn't write laws implementing that, or did write laws implementing those two sections but half-assed it by making the burden of proof high and/or the punishment low?
It would appear msmash is drunk again.
#DeleteFacebook
If there's still room between the servers of Amazon, MS and Facebook, sure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think I insinuated that youtube would change anything. I was using them as an example of the chilling effects seen by abuse of the DMCA and suggesting that other companies would be adopting similar or even more user untrusting policies.
User untrusting as in anyone makes a claim no matter how baseless and the content is removed automatically by machine trusting the accuser while the person who posted the content must defend themselves and prove they actually own it.
Like the recent EFF twitter debacle the company filing the DMCA couldn't even tell them what was being infringed on and they still pulled it.
It'd be like if someone said to the police "THAT MAN COMMITED A CRIME!"
And the police asked "What did they do?" and they replied "I don't know arrest them!"
Now in any normal scenario the police wouldn't take action in this case because the accuser is obviously being abusive because they aren't even able to form a valid complaint for what might have happened.
But with the DMCA (and many seem to think the new eu law will be much worse with preemptive blocking)
they see the claim and are immediately "well this is an open shut case take all their stuff until they can prove they did not do that thing. What thing? Doesn't matter."
The EU law is expected to have preemptive scanning so like if a computer thinks your picture of your cat looks similar to someone else's cat you won't be able to upload it and you will likewise have to contest that your cat is not their cat instead of them in any way having to show that your cat is theirs.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
> Even better - add filters requiring all EU Facebook, Twitter, etc, users to add a credit card to their accounts
> and when they post a link to an EU based news source, the poster much pay the article fee directly (as it should be).
That's an interesting solution which I did not think of. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the "you must filter out content under copyright even though it is impossible to know what content is under copyright".
About the only solution to that problem that I can think of, is to allow anyone to register as a "creator of content to be filtered" while requiring such creators to provide a free service which checks if a given upload is theirs. Then a small business could, eventually, after clearing content through all the registered services, actually allow a user-provided upload. It would probably take a significant amount of time, though, which, like this legislation, is not particularly in line with user expectations ("I have to wait for my upload to be cleared? WTF?").
"How many of those high level investigators on the Mueller team have been fired? Strok, Page, McCabe, etc. ." ARE YOU RETARDED LOL? They were fired for a prima facie POTENTIAL IMPRESSION of conflict of interest.
If you're going to accuse someone of being retarded, you ought to at least get your facts straight. McCabe was fired after an internal Inspector General investigation determined that he lied to investigators. That's PERJURY to the rest of us. You and I would be indicted just like Michael Flynn if it had happened to us. As for Peter Strzok (correct spelling by the way) and Lisa Page... We'll let the Barr investigation run its course before making any definitive judgments.