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

[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

[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

[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.

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:One step forward one step back

[BringsApples]

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

2 words: Kim Dotcom

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: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.

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.