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.

Comments

Block them all

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Re:Block them all

[Joce640k]

Huh?

Nobody's blocking anything.

News sites have lobbied for years to get this law passed, hoping Google (et al) will start paying for the privilege of linking to their copy-pasted stories.

What will happen in reality is:
a) Google will stop linking to those sites.
b) The sites will disappear from the Internet.
c) Karma.

I can't wait.

Re:Block them all

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The US doesn't give a flying fuck about either because the goddam citizens are interested in more important things like Farmville.

The US doesn't give an F.F. because the government is still largely in the hands of the party-organization swamp creatures. They are currently largely controlled by the media conglomerates, and don't give a Rat's Ass about what the citizens think.

The big fight here is to drain that swamp, and has been for several cycles. That's what the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus were about. That's why Trump was elected. And that's why trump is flamed 24/7 in the media.

Of course people in Europe have NO IDEA that is what's going on here. Because they get their ideas about what's going on here from the media.

How convenient.

Re:Block them all

[religionofpeas]

How will this work ? You want to publish your own photo on a big site, how do you demonstrate that you are the copyright holder ?

Re:Block them all

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, anyone who legitimately thought Trump would 'drain the swamp' deserves a slap upside the head. Of all the things he promised, that was the most laughable.

Re:Block them all

[bigmacx]

I dunno. We researched this when implemented a year ago and decided the best way to handle was just disavow entire countries we don't want to do business with. I believe redirecting that traffic to a VPN provider would be in some way acknowledging support or service to them and then make us fall under the compliance directives.

If I wanted to be under EU rules, I'd go back and live there (was stationed there for several years on business as Schengen expat) and pay 50% taxes again. No thanks

Funny thing IIRC those EU dictators have posited that even blocking EU IP addresses makes a site fall under compliance. There was discussion that EU citizens using a VPN to circumvent blocks would still be considered protected by EU rules. Ridiculous. Then there was the notion that when an EU citizen is physically in the USA using Internet resources that those USA-only companies were now forced to be compliant with EU rules. Absurd

Thank you but no, EU don't own the Internet. Certainly don't own my USA Internet

Re:Block them all

[Rick Schumann]

He just 'rebranded' the 'swamp' to a 'cesspool' and started filling it with crap.

Re:Block them all

[Cid Highwind]

As a content provider my self (photographer), it's disheartening to see my work pop up on social media in numbers without end and I only get compensation from the tiny Internet real estate that I initially did business with.

What value would you put on a "wow, that's neat" *clicks share button* repost of one of your photos on instafacetwit? And how many of those reposters do you expect to pay it?

Re:Block them all

[Shotgun]

No one is forcing you to give away anything. That is what your bi-weekly retention is for. You can walk away any time you want and keep all your ideas.

Re:Block them all

[apoc.famine]

Uh, duh. AI checks all the photos and puts them in the blockchain which it stores in the cloud to provide a scalable platform which will allow synergistic end-to-end copyright notification.

I thought that would be obvious, no?

Re:Block them all

[Blue Stone]

>As a content provider my self (photographer), it's disheartening to see my work pop up on social media in numbers without end and I only get compensation from the tiny Internet real estate that I initially did business with.

Mate, none of those people sharing your images on social media would have paid you to do that anyway. You realise that, right? Nothing, as such, not even the *opportunity* to make money from those images, has been lost in that respect.

One problem with IP law and the mentality that can surround it is that it gives some people the false impression that creative cultural expression is exactly the same as tangible material property. And it isn't.

I'm not saying that commercial operations should be free to use any image as they see fit without financial and legal obligations to the coyright holder, but I am saying that to expect people who use non-licensed copyrighted material casually on social media the same as if they should have paid for a license, is ridiculous.

European law, with this new copyright law, as well as others such as the so-called 'right to be forgotten' law, has shown itself to still hold to a pre-digital, pre-internet mentality. Copyright is not fit for the modern age, and laws such as the one just passed are, if anything, a step backward.

Stuckists stamping around in their sabots. Except this time, it's not the working classes calling a halt to the new age, it's the establishment and factory owners (which is why it's succeeding and will probably get a lot worse).

Re:Block them all

[Tom]

*yawn*

This stupid troll comes up every single time there is an article about the EU on /. - literally every time. I should have an answer on a shortcut. Don't you guys ever learn anything?

If Google, FB, Twitter or whatever you have were to leave the EU, or block the EU or whatever, the first thing that's going to happen is that their stocks take such a massive nosedive, you'll think it's the dot-com-crash all over again, just in fast-forward.

The EU is a larger market than the USA. With more people and more GDP. I'm tired of looking up the numbers every time this nonsense bullshit troll is posted, so do it yourself this time.

Excluding yourself from the largest single market in the world is shooting yourself in both feet, then both knees, and for good measure let's cut off the hand that did it.

It is not going to happen, never, ever no matter which loud noises someone might make, and everyone who keeps posting this old, stupid, zombified, keeps-coming-back idiocity on /. only reveals that he's using his brain as a sponge in the shower, but not for thinking.

Re:Block them all

[fenrif]

Anyone else find it gross when people call themselves "content providers?" Photographers used to be considered artists. Now they are described with the same terminology people use to refer to industrial machinery. I wonder if it's because the internet has made every artist into a mercenary. The expectation is that art should pay the bills, instead of being art for arts sake. I also wonder if this correlates with the general decline in the quality of art across nearly every medium.

Re:Block them all

[Mathinker]

> because businesses can't afford to police any of that.

Because there is no way to check if anything is under copyright, I don't see how these businesses can actually legally allow user-posted content. The biggies will do it anyway (allow user-posted content), because they have billion-dollar legal budgets and agreements with some large content creators already, and can afford to see how this mess will actually work out in court. No one else will try, so there will be a lot of geo-blocking of the EU.

Re:Block them all

[fuzznutz]

I think the biggest problem is that, as Stewie said on Family Guy, anybody that can aim a camera thinks he's a photographer. A Shutterfly account does not confer "professional" status on anyone. The second issue is that the "value" of photography has dropped so much because almost everyone now carries around a quality camera 24/7. Most everyone is delighted to share their photos online whether they be good, bad, unusual, incriminating or obscene, all the time. Look at all the portrait studios that have closed down over the past 30 years. This is no longer 1970 and photography is no longer the very expensive hobby/business that copyright was supposed to protect.

One step forward one step back

[plague911]

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.

Re:One step forward one step back

[BringsApples]

However, the whole illegal uploading part seems, well...... extraordinarily draconian.

2 words: Kim Dotcom

Guess it's time

[bobstreo]

to start sending millions of takedown notices to EU government websites for copyright violations.

Some help to understand all this better

[CustomSolvers2]

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.

Re:Some help to understand all this better

[CustomSolvers2]

Thanks for providing the misinformation!

So, the body creating the legislation puts together some clarifications and corrects some of the things which have been said online about it and they are misinforming?! You can like that directive or not, but the EU Parliament is certainly telling you its contents exactly as they are. Trolling, what a fascinating "occupation"! LOL.

Re:Some help to understand all this better

[Opportunist]

Why do you think you get the whole picture that way?

I'm actually willing to cut them some slack and accept that they honestly believe what they're writing. Never attribute to malice and all that. The devil's in the details, though, because of how companies will (have to) react to it.

Saying it does not affect end users is very ... let's say naive. Because with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the like, end users ARE content creators that are dependent on those targeted by the directive. Now, these companies do not have the resources to check every video, posting or picture you upload for copyright violations (and are frankly also not too interested in wasting them on something like that). What will happen because of this is that they will implement some upload filtering mechanism. Yes, the directive never mentions anything like this (and the Q&A you provide actually claims it does not mean this), but there is simply no feasible way to do it any other way.

It also does not directly mean censorship. What it means, though, is that the main outlets people use to communicate with each other will be forced to censor content. You can still create your own little homepage and say whatever you want there. But what good is the right to speak if nobody can hear you?

Re:Time for anonymized services to be free and eas

[sims 2]

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.

EU beams back to the brutish past

[harvey the nerd]

Europe seems hellbent to go back to the 7th century, one way or another...

Re:EU beams back to the brutish past

[Opportunist]

The world is. Not just Europe. Everyone is scrambling to put the genie back into the bottle because the very last thing governments want is people being able to talk to each other and organize unsupervised.

Re:EU beams back to the brutish past

[Brett Buck]

This is the same highly mature and sophisticated culture that resulted in regular wars at about 20-30 year intervals like a bunch of squabbling children, halted only when they were tightly controlled from the outside and their toys were taken away. So expecting reasonable decision-making is asking too much.

   

Presumably

[UdoKeir]

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.

Re:Presumably

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha... ...haha... ...hahaha... ...hahahahaaaaaa!

Re:Six countries didn't want this law, but are for

[JeffOwl]

Brexit anyone?

Will hurt EU in the end.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

At least we can see who

[anarcobra]

Is not bought and paid for by the old media trying to destroy the internet.

Re:Shotgun confirms, he's retarded, headed for pri

[fuzznutz]

"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.