The trouble is, Juncker seems to be just about crazy enough to actually follow through with this. If he does, it's probably going to create a lot of trouble for a lot of people and waste a lot of money before it ultimately fails.
Leaving aside that this is obviously a troll, you should know that the current EU administration is heavily on the strong-copyright and big-media side of this debate. For example, EU rules are why the UK government recently failed to change the law to allow a reasonable personal use exception to copyright that was long overdue.
Also, the 10 year penalty we're discussing here is aimed at large-scale, professional distributors. It's not for someone who accidentally downloaded someone's mix that had a bit of Taylor Swift playing in the background for five seconds. It's not even for someone who gave their friend a copy of Taylor Swift's new album at school.
Most consumers don't build-your-own, they buy a box from a major vendor that has the current version of Windows.
That has most likely been the case historically, but if my own experience of friends and family is even remotely representative, Microsoft might actually have upset enough non-geek users to change that situation this time. I imagine that's why MS is about to severely restrict OEMs supplying new PCs with anything older than Windows 10 preinstalled, even though essential support as far back as Windows 7 is still supposed to run for more than three more years.
Erm... Linux runs just fine on numerous ARM designs, and the hardware can happily support modern applications as well. Have you used an Android phone lately, as perhaps the most recognisable example of this actually being done?
Put me down for "wasting time and money" and "people who know what they're talking about to catch mistakes early", please.
The best example of this I've seen so far was an exercise in futility developing a simple in-house process automation system, essentially a glorified database with a bit of e-mail integration and a pretty browser-based interface.
There were literally months of discussions among a team dominated by middle managers. Along the way, they spent approximately a mid-level developer's annual salary just on external consulting about using someone's workflow automation software, and IIRC that consultation eventually produced a single page of documentation that was basically an ugly diagram of a simple database schema. Finally, one of the few real developers on the team gave up in disgust and just built a basic version in about one day. Which the rest of the team then almost completely ignored, because these things need to be managed and showing initiative to solve the actual problems is a rookie mistake.
It's easy to see why these tools are attractive for companies that don't generally do software development or web development or whatever it might be, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Those of us who remember the joys of Microsoft Access databases and drag-and-drop "rapid application development" tools from the 90s have seen this all before. But now it's in the cloud, with convenient subscription-based pricing! There's a saying about those who don't learn from history...
Unfortunately, I don't think that's a safe assumption any more. For example, my businesses can't use Windows 10, because installing it on anything that touches client/customer data would immediately contravene assorted contractual and statutory obligations we have regarding confidentiality and data protection. Microsoft's policies regarding telemetry and forced updates appear to mean using their new software is literally impossible for us.
Whether or not their intention is to use data collected via telemetry for anything other than looking for ways to improve Windows, and whether or not they intend to collect any confidential or personal data via those tools, don't really matter. The facts are that technically they certainly could collect that data, their terms and privacy policy appear to allow them to, and even some of the biggest tech firms in the business have suffered both scope creep and serious security leaks in connection with data they've collected.
As I said before, security is mostly about risk management. For anyone working with sensitive data, using systems running Windows 10 or buying systems from laptop manufacturers that covertly preinstall insecure remote "support" functionality or phone-home reporting are way off the scale of acceptable risks in my professional opinion.
It remains the case that the law was brought down because of arguments about incompatibility with the current EU rules. Had those EU rules not applied, there would have been no basis for the issues raised in the judicial review. The legal technicalities of the judicial review process don't change that fundamental situation, nor does the lack (so far) of a CJEU reference.
Also yes, lots of other Member States have private copying exceptions, but most of them caved to industry pressure and introduced some sort of levy on their citizens in return. Those levies have been widely criticised, both for increasing prices of media and devices even where they would not subsequently be used for private copying purposes and for the manner in which the proceeds of those levies were distributed. If you read the EU resolution you linked yourself, you'll find it's extremely careful about the wording around that exception and it most certainly does not imply that the UK's private copying exception would be reinstated on the original basis or that similar levies should not be applied in the UK.
This is also a fair point. Even if it is legally up to the publishers to decide whether they are willing to allow others to reproduce that part of their content, it's their own problem if they make the wrong decision and it costs them. That's just business.
That's no better than reinstalling on a new hard drive. You still lose to any adversary who has direct firmware/CPU access and gets to run their code before you get to run yours.
Sure, but that trust only extends as far as whoever implemented those security measures and signed those binaries. We live in an era when your own OS may well be spying on you, your new laptop may be shipped with vendor-installed spyware right out of the factory, your new PC's CPU almost certainly has secondary functionality built-in that you can't examine or control, any of those things potentially lead to not just privacy but also system control vulnerabilities, and that's just the threats your chosen commercial partners openly-ish advertise before you get into criminals or state security services physically modifying something between the manufacturer's facility and yours.
Sometimes, but there are no guarantees these days. Once a system has been compromised, it is now almost impossible to make sure it's clean again no matter what you do to recover. In a world with the likes of UEFI and "hidden" secondary processors within CPUs, even wiping the hard drive and reinstalling from known good media isn't a reliable fix. It's all rather depressing, this so-called progress.
The trouble is, all of that remains true if you have anti-virus software installed. Your odds might be slightly better overall, but AV software doesn't catch everything. In a few cases, AV software has even opened additional vulnerabilities itself.
It's surprisingly difficult to be sure that you're only running what you think you're running in 2016 and that your data is safe and private. That's a real and serious problem regardless of which if any AV tools you run.
I agree it's unfortunate that so many people just rely on headlines, and that those headlines are sometimes less than perfect, but that's just the reality of what happens. Did you hear the one about the Slashdotter who actually read TFA before commenting?
So as long as that remains the reality, news organisations could plausibly be losing a significant amount of the value of their work if others are allowed to literally copy and paste the headlines and maybe some introductory snippets and republish them without doing any of the real leg work required to get the stories.
I'm not sure which specific issues you mean, but yes, using the EU to achieve political goals against the wishes of the electorate is exactly what happens sometimes.
It's a complicated relationship, with pros and cons. Certainly a lot of things get blamed on the EU without any rational justification. On the other hand, plenty of things also get blamed on the EU with some rational justification. There is one particularly evil political technique where something that would never get passed back home gets punted to the EU where it's relatively out of sight, and then comes back usually via a Directive a couple of years later, at which time the government can not only claim they have no choice about implementing it but also say they have no way to influence the details... even while their own representatives and allies within the EU were the ones pushing for the new measures in the first place.
The better news sites do provide more detailed and well-informed content. Unfortunately, it turns out that many of their readers still have the attention span of a goldfish, and thus that their headlines and early commentary are disproportionately valuable to those readers, regardless of the quality or quantity of the additional work from the news reporters.
Well, I'm with you on that principle as well. I can't see how an alternative scheme such as you suggested could be workable in practice, but if you had proposed some reasonable power of recall I would probably have agreed.
Still, even without that, it helps if we at least elect people who might act in our interests in the first place. Until money is an acceptable substitute for votes, the voters still have all the power on that one if they only choose to use it.
Yes, because EU. The entire basis for this disagreement was whether or not the UK government was allowed to introduce a private copying exception of the form that it did given the EU rules. If the government were not constrained by the EU Directive, all the questions about whether any harm was de minimis and pricing-in and so on would be moot.
Well, yes. The official campaigns argued as if Brexit was only about immigration and the economy, but in reality I suspect a lot of people voted to leave on the basis of democratic deficit and sovereignty arguments, a belief that the EU shouldn't be used to override national laws in this way. And frankly, in this specific context, I think they are right.
Small snippets are not considered copyright infringment.
That's not entirely accurate. For example, here in the UK, there is no specific minimum amount of material that has to be copied before copyright is infringed. Any work significant enough to be subject to copyright protection in the first place is also potentially subject to infringement.
As an aside, the AC you replied to was overstating the position of US fair use law as well. The amount of the work being copied is only one of the four factors that determine fair use, and again there is no specific minimum required for infringement. If the original publishers could demonstrate (and I'm not saying they can or should, but hypothetically) that the headlines or excerpts being copied by automated news aggregators represented a substantial part of the overall value of the original work, then that copying would not necessarily be fair use.
Google got them by the balls. You hand out your snippets for free or nobody will see your page.
Maybe, but I'm not sure the news businesses don't have a point on this one.
News is very much about the headlines and near real time information. There are lots of real people doing real work to generate that information stream for readers/viewers, both at the news outlets themselves and via the agencies that are in turn paid substantial amounts of money by the news outlets. There is definitely a reasonable argument that automatically scraping the key information to republish on other sites is not transformative in any useful way and the freeloading does significantly compete with the original sources.
I'm also not sure Google really is doing those outlets much of a favour by listing them. I could name the web site for every major news source I read regularly without any help from Google, and I visit those sites via bookmarks or links from other sources, not via anyone's news search engine built on top of a scraper. Even if I were looking for something like a particular newspaper I don't read regularly, I'd probably only need a search engine to find its home page at most, not to republish its most valuable content in some derived format instead of just giving me the original source.
So I wonder whether the news businesses shouldn't just call Google's bluff on this one. If they all banded together and started marking their robots.txt files and such to make it clear that they didn't want anyone else republishing their material, I don't see they wouldn't have a reasonable case both ethically and legally against a news aggregator that was just scraping their content and then directly competing with them.
Buying laws only works because people fall for politicians' campaigning. Ultimately only the voters control who gets to make the laws, but as long as those voters pay as little attention to who they are electing as we (collectively) often do and believe the special-interest-funded campaigning as much as we (collectively) often do, the rot will continue.
Unfortunately, copyright is one of those issues that is just not that interesting to most people, as long as they can carry on ripping Game of Thrones and sharing their meme pictures and putting their wedding first dance video on YouTube without anything bad happening. Most people have probably never even heard of copyright law, and have no concept that the actions I just mentioned might even be illegal.
If people were actually penalised for infringing copyright, consistently and reliably, to the extent that the law in many places now permits, then those laws would be changed next week. But as long as they are only selectively enforced, and as long as only a few genuinely innocent people get totally screwed in places like the US because the legal system is stacked against them, it will fly under the radar and just be a tax on all of us for the benefit of the few huge rightsholders and distribution channels who are creaming off their cut of almost everything.
Slashdot Mirror
No other industry gets this sort of corporate welfare from governments around the world.
Big pharma called and told you to get off their lawn.
The trouble is, Juncker seems to be just about crazy enough to actually follow through with this. If he does, it's probably going to create a lot of trouble for a lot of people and waste a lot of money before it ultimately fails.
Leaving aside that this is obviously a troll, you should know that the current EU administration is heavily on the strong-copyright and big-media side of this debate. For example, EU rules are why the UK government recently failed to change the law to allow a reasonable personal use exception to copyright that was long overdue.
Also, the 10 year penalty we're discussing here is aimed at large-scale, professional distributors. It's not for someone who accidentally downloaded someone's mix that had a bit of Taylor Swift playing in the background for five seconds. It's not even for someone who gave their friend a copy of Taylor Swift's new album at school.
x264 isn't really free if you live or work anywhere that the patents on the underlying technologies are valid.
Most consumers don't build-your-own, they buy a box from a major vendor that has the current version of Windows.
That has most likely been the case historically, but if my own experience of friends and family is even remotely representative, Microsoft might actually have upset enough non-geek users to change that situation this time. I imagine that's why MS is about to severely restrict OEMs supplying new PCs with anything older than Windows 10 preinstalled, even though essential support as far back as Windows 7 is still supposed to run for more than three more years.
Erm... Linux runs just fine on numerous ARM designs, and the hardware can happily support modern applications as well. Have you used an Android phone lately, as perhaps the most recognisable example of this actually being done?
Companies Are ______ With Fewer ______.
Put me down for "wasting time and money" and "people who know what they're talking about to catch mistakes early", please.
The best example of this I've seen so far was an exercise in futility developing a simple in-house process automation system, essentially a glorified database with a bit of e-mail integration and a pretty browser-based interface.
There were literally months of discussions among a team dominated by middle managers. Along the way, they spent approximately a mid-level developer's annual salary just on external consulting about using someone's workflow automation software, and IIRC that consultation eventually produced a single page of documentation that was basically an ugly diagram of a simple database schema. Finally, one of the few real developers on the team gave up in disgust and just built a basic version in about one day. Which the rest of the team then almost completely ignored, because these things need to be managed and showing initiative to solve the actual problems is a rookie mistake.
It's easy to see why these tools are attractive for companies that don't generally do software development or web development or whatever it might be, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Those of us who remember the joys of Microsoft Access databases and drag-and-drop "rapid application development" tools from the 90s have seen this all before. But now it's in the cloud, with convenient subscription-based pricing! There's a saying about those who don't learn from history...
But those organizations [...] aren't adversaries.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's a safe assumption any more. For example, my businesses can't use Windows 10, because installing it on anything that touches client/customer data would immediately contravene assorted contractual and statutory obligations we have regarding confidentiality and data protection. Microsoft's policies regarding telemetry and forced updates appear to mean using their new software is literally impossible for us.
Whether or not their intention is to use data collected via telemetry for anything other than looking for ways to improve Windows, and whether or not they intend to collect any confidential or personal data via those tools, don't really matter. The facts are that technically they certainly could collect that data, their terms and privacy policy appear to allow them to, and even some of the biggest tech firms in the business have suffered both scope creep and serious security leaks in connection with data they've collected.
As I said before, security is mostly about risk management. For anyone working with sensitive data, using systems running Windows 10 or buying systems from laptop manufacturers that covertly preinstall insecure remote "support" functionality or phone-home reporting are way off the scale of acceptable risks in my professional opinion.
It remains the case that the law was brought down because of arguments about incompatibility with the current EU rules. Had those EU rules not applied, there would have been no basis for the issues raised in the judicial review. The legal technicalities of the judicial review process don't change that fundamental situation, nor does the lack (so far) of a CJEU reference.
Also yes, lots of other Member States have private copying exceptions, but most of them caved to industry pressure and introduced some sort of levy on their citizens in return. Those levies have been widely criticised, both for increasing prices of media and devices even where they would not subsequently be used for private copying purposes and for the manner in which the proceeds of those levies were distributed. If you read the EU resolution you linked yourself, you'll find it's extremely careful about the wording around that exception and it most certainly does not imply that the UK's private copying exception would be reinstated on the original basis or that similar levies should not be applied in the UK.
This is also a fair point. Even if it is legally up to the publishers to decide whether they are willing to allow others to reproduce that part of their content, it's their own problem if they make the wrong decision and it costs them. That's just business.
That's no better than reinstalling on a new hard drive. You still lose to any adversary who has direct firmware/CPU access and gets to run their code before you get to run yours.
Sure, but that trust only extends as far as whoever implemented those security measures and signed those binaries. We live in an era when your own OS may well be spying on you, your new laptop may be shipped with vendor-installed spyware right out of the factory, your new PC's CPU almost certainly has secondary functionality built-in that you can't examine or control, any of those things potentially lead to not just privacy but also system control vulnerabilities, and that's just the threats your chosen commercial partners openly-ish advertise before you get into criminals or state security services physically modifying something between the manufacturer's facility and yours.
Sometimes, but there are no guarantees these days. Once a system has been compromised, it is now almost impossible to make sure it's clean again no matter what you do to recover. In a world with the likes of UEFI and "hidden" secondary processors within CPUs, even wiping the hard drive and reinstalling from known good media isn't a reliable fix. It's all rather depressing, this so-called progress.
That's cute, but logically it means you can never run anything, which doesn't make for very useful computers.
IT security is mostly about risk management, and probably always will be.
The trouble is, all of that remains true if you have anti-virus software installed. Your odds might be slightly better overall, but AV software doesn't catch everything. In a few cases, AV software has even opened additional vulnerabilities itself.
It's surprisingly difficult to be sure that you're only running what you think you're running in 2016 and that your data is safe and private. That's a real and serious problem regardless of which if any AV tools you run.
I agree it's unfortunate that so many people just rely on headlines, and that those headlines are sometimes less than perfect, but that's just the reality of what happens. Did you hear the one about the Slashdotter who actually read TFA before commenting?
So as long as that remains the reality, news organisations could plausibly be losing a significant amount of the value of their work if others are allowed to literally copy and paste the headlines and maybe some introductory snippets and republish them without doing any of the real leg work required to get the stories.
I'm not sure which specific issues you mean, but yes, using the EU to achieve political goals against the wishes of the electorate is exactly what happens sometimes.
It's a complicated relationship, with pros and cons. Certainly a lot of things get blamed on the EU without any rational justification. On the other hand, plenty of things also get blamed on the EU with some rational justification. There is one particularly evil political technique where something that would never get passed back home gets punted to the EU where it's relatively out of sight, and then comes back usually via a Directive a couple of years later, at which time the government can not only claim they have no choice about implementing it but also say they have no way to influence the details... even while their own representatives and allies within the EU were the ones pushing for the new measures in the first place.
The better news sites do provide more detailed and well-informed content. Unfortunately, it turns out that many of their readers still have the attention span of a goldfish, and thus that their headlines and early commentary are disproportionately valuable to those readers, regardless of the quality or quantity of the additional work from the news reporters.
Well, I'm with you on that principle as well. I can't see how an alternative scheme such as you suggested could be workable in practice, but if you had proposed some reasonable power of recall I would probably have agreed.
Still, even without that, it helps if we at least elect people who might act in our interests in the first place. Until money is an acceptable substitute for votes, the voters still have all the power on that one if they only choose to use it.
Yes, because EU. The entire basis for this disagreement was whether or not the UK government was allowed to introduce a private copying exception of the form that it did given the EU rules. If the government were not constrained by the EU Directive, all the questions about whether any harm was de minimis and pricing-in and so on would be moot.
Well, yes. The official campaigns argued as if Brexit was only about immigration and the economy, but in reality I suspect a lot of people voted to leave on the basis of democratic deficit and sovereignty arguments, a belief that the EU shouldn't be used to override national laws in this way. And frankly, in this specific context, I think they are right.
Small snippets are not considered copyright infringment.
That's not entirely accurate. For example, here in the UK, there is no specific minimum amount of material that has to be copied before copyright is infringed. Any work significant enough to be subject to copyright protection in the first place is also potentially subject to infringement.
As an aside, the AC you replied to was overstating the position of US fair use law as well. The amount of the work being copied is only one of the four factors that determine fair use, and again there is no specific minimum required for infringement. If the original publishers could demonstrate (and I'm not saying they can or should, but hypothetically) that the headlines or excerpts being copied by automated news aggregators represented a substantial part of the overall value of the original work, then that copying would not necessarily be fair use.
Google got them by the balls. You hand out your snippets for free or nobody will see your page.
Maybe, but I'm not sure the news businesses don't have a point on this one.
News is very much about the headlines and near real time information. There are lots of real people doing real work to generate that information stream for readers/viewers, both at the news outlets themselves and via the agencies that are in turn paid substantial amounts of money by the news outlets. There is definitely a reasonable argument that automatically scraping the key information to republish on other sites is not transformative in any useful way and the freeloading does significantly compete with the original sources.
I'm also not sure Google really is doing those outlets much of a favour by listing them. I could name the web site for every major news source I read regularly without any help from Google, and I visit those sites via bookmarks or links from other sources, not via anyone's news search engine built on top of a scraper. Even if I were looking for something like a particular newspaper I don't read regularly, I'd probably only need a search engine to find its home page at most, not to republish its most valuable content in some derived format instead of just giving me the original source.
So I wonder whether the news businesses shouldn't just call Google's bluff on this one. If they all banded together and started marking their robots.txt files and such to make it clear that they didn't want anyone else republishing their material, I don't see they wouldn't have a reasonable case both ethically and legally against a news aggregator that was just scraping their content and then directly competing with them.
Buying laws only works because people fall for politicians' campaigning. Ultimately only the voters control who gets to make the laws, but as long as those voters pay as little attention to who they are electing as we (collectively) often do and believe the special-interest-funded campaigning as much as we (collectively) often do, the rot will continue.
Unfortunately, copyright is one of those issues that is just not that interesting to most people, as long as they can carry on ripping Game of Thrones and sharing their meme pictures and putting their wedding first dance video on YouTube without anything bad happening. Most people have probably never even heard of copyright law, and have no concept that the actions I just mentioned might even be illegal.
If people were actually penalised for infringing copyright, consistently and reliably, to the extent that the law in many places now permits, then those laws would be changed next week. But as long as they are only selectively enforced, and as long as only a few genuinely innocent people get totally screwed in places like the US because the legal system is stacked against them, it will fly under the radar and just be a tax on all of us for the benefit of the few huge rightsholders and distribution channels who are creaming off their cut of almost everything.