"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"
That's actually a lot of limitation. From my understanding: "organise and promote" means it is not simple hosting, and "in order to make a profit" excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons and "large amounts" most likely excludes smaller websites like fan sites, and "uploaded by their users" exclude search engines.
It is clearly meant to target a form of abuse that is much too common in the "internet as we know it". It is mostly apparent in sites like PornHub. They live by monetizing content they don't have the rights for, and they use their status as a platform as a way to stay legal. I think YouTube admitted that in the early days, they voluntarily turned a blind eye to copyright infringement as a way to grow ahead of their competition.
It is unfair to legitimate companies who do their best to make sure their content really is original or properly licensed.
And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet.
As for the potential for abuse, remember that the article isn't finished, it has yet to be completed, ratified, and tried. Public debate is important and we shall not let everything pass, but IMHO, the spirit is good.
- an Internet platform
- that organizes and promotes large amounts of posts
- which are copyright-protected works uploaded by their users
- in order to make a profit as it is an advertisement for y combinator.
So hacker news needs a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie.
What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law. Besides, 'meant' is a very dangerous word when used by politicians as jaded as the EU folks. It is a way to whitewash unpopular laws, and make them look reasonable when they are in fact the complete opposite.
One way to "fix" this, unfortunately, is the same way some firms "fixed" their non-GDPR compliance. Block European users. More specifically, block users coming from IPs known to be located in Europe.
Fundamentally, laws have jurisdictions that they are valid in. Imposition of a law outside of a jurisdiction is problematic at best, as it enables some bad actor countries (pick and choose who you want to consider to be in this group) to export their internal battles globally.
A great example of this is the US's FATCA rules, which have resulted (at least initially) in many non-US banks denying banking options to US citizens. Due to the threat built into the law, of being unable to leverage US banking system, if they fail to comply.
As someone else commented, the road to hell is paved with "good intentions". Solutions will emerge to route around the liabilities and costs this creates, but probably not initially.
And it will certainly be in trouble people decided to use it to post an entire Harry Potter novel and it becomes the go-to place to read it.
But Hacker News has moderators, and in practice, these posts are aren't likely to stay long, therefore fulfilling Article 13 obligations.
I'm pretty sure that movie quotes are not copyright-protected. And the last point in the article seems to be there to protects such uses explicitly.
As for the potential for abuse, I don't know, I am not a lawyer. But as I said before, it is just a directive, not a law, and it is incomplete. The spirit is all we have now, there is still a lot of work to be done on the letter.
Keep in mind that "fair use" is an American doctrine, not built into international copyright treaties and often defined administratively (not legislatively) in other countries. And we are discussing copyright law in Europe. Europe uses several itemized exceptions to copyright; a movie quote could fall under 5.3i "incidental inclusion" or 5.3k "pastiche", or in some contexts 5.3d "criticism and review", but there's no overall doctrine that "reasonable uses" are allowed.
Except in the U.S. judges can organically evolve the system as new questions arise and better resolutions are found. The continental legal system is much more bureaucratic. This matters because it's easier to push boundaries when the rules aren't written in stone, permitting more rapid and responsive evolution of the law.
Interestingly, the U.S. is slowly moving toward a more continental-style legal system while the E.U. is actually moving toward a more judge-made law system. That's because fragmented jurisdictional power in the E.U. has forced European judges (at both the national and EU level) to embrace de facto law making powers, and increasingly embracing doctrines that look exactly like stare decisis. (French-style civil law is a relatively recent development, anyhow; Europe isn't adopting the English system so much as reaching back into their own legal traditions to find a similar model of jurisprudence.)
By contrast, the bitterly partisan, winner take all politics in the U.S. has seen both the Democrats and Republicans attempt to centralize more power, both at the state and federal level. And judges, especially at the Federal level, increasingly eschew their law making role (albeit inconsistently). This is, arguably, why many common law copyright doctrines long relied upon by the open source community have begun falling to the wayside; judges increasingly prefer sticking to the strict letter of the statutes, effectively discarding the old doctrines that channeled and constrained their application.
This isn't true, even from a textualist or originalist point of view.
"Judicial Conservatives" in the US disagree with "Judicial Activists" on whether (or to what extent) it is OK to creatively interpret laws (including the Constitution) to get preferred outcomes.
But all common law systems take for granted that judges fill in the inevitable gaps in the law by setting precedents. They can't just interpret it ab initio each time (which in principle is what they are supposed to do on the Continent, though I don't know about practice).
So for example, suppose a city bans anti-abortion pamphleteers from operating on the street outside an abortion clinic. Does that violate the 1st Amendment? Does it matter whether the pamphleteers are quiet or noisy? Does it matter if the exclusion zone is 10 feet vs. 1000 feet?
The text of the constitution is too compressed to answer those edge questions directly. Instead judges have come up with finer-grained rules to satisfy the general requirement of the text, and try (or claim to try) to apply them consistently. Developing these rules is lawmaking.
easy from the perspective of this law: build a db of every line spoken in every movie. Then block all posts containing a line from this db. If this blocks too much, dang provides human appeal.
UPDATE: To be clear, I am very much against this law. The collateral damage will be immense. But the politicians who want this law, they simply dont care.
Is HN a EU entity? Sure they could decide to abide, but legally, the EU has no jursdiction over other countries. It's going to (continue to) break up anyway so this is all rather moot.
Most film quotes on HN would be covered by "fair use"[0]. If someone pasted an entire script in a comment that would be something different entirely, and likely to be picked up by the existing flagging or moderation system. Also, I'm not entirely sure how HN itself can be said to be profit-making, e.g. there are no subscription fees to use it and it doesn't appear to have any advertisements from any advertising platforms.
Fair use is annoying vaguely defined in the law. This means media companies will tell you that's it is so limited as to be almost useless, while the EFF and the courts may disagree. You may hear stuff about "10 second clips are the max allowed by law", but the law doesn't draw any clear likes like that and in fact is usually much more generous. Typically quotes like that come from a single precedent where someone was acting outrageously in many other ways and not relevant precedent for what you're doing.
That's true in the US. EU law actually knows no such thing as vague, court-interpreted fair use. The EU instead has a list of very specific exceptions and limitations to copyright – which member states don't even have to implement, so what you can do varies widely.
I highly doubt they would be flagged and instead upvoted. I have seen multiple instances here where a US website has blocked the EU due to GDPR and some user posts the entire content of the article as a comment.
I feel like we had this exact same argument over GDPR, but no horror stories have descended about Mom and Pop operations run out of business but the evil Brusselcrats.
> we had this exact same argument over GDPR, but no horror stories have descended
Romania has already deployed GDPR as a weapon against its press [1]. I also have a short list of anecdotes of economic activity (start-ups and other new market entrants) that would have happened in the EU but, in large part due to compliance costs–including GDPR–wound up happening outside the EU.
And the EU is trying to prevent Romania from doing it. I don't see your point. Romania could just have used another law or just made a new one to harass the press.
> the EU is trying to prevent Romania from doing it
Giving people in power broad discretion with the law and then counting on them being nice is a delicate strategy. It counts on every administration being benevolent.
> Romania could just have used another law or just made a new one to harass the press
There is a big difference between using the authority of the EU, through an EU regulation, and passing a domestic law to go after people you don't like.
More broadly, this argument can be made against any over-reaching law. Just because some hypothetical law could be bad doesn't make an ambiguous law granting widespread power to select bureaucrats okay.
This is not related to business but there's a horror story with Romania (it's in the EU) asking a news organization to provide informants information related to some corruption leaks.
The information is requested by the national GDPR enforcer so it bypasses the prevention written in the GDPR about news leaks.
Now there's a trial going around with this which blocked any further spread of that information until it's solved. It can be easily seen how the GDPR can be weaponized.
Isn't that just straight abuse of the law? AFAIK GDPR only protects your personal information, it can't be used to request someone else's personal information (if anything, you could argue that GDPR prevents you from giving out another person's info).
This isn't the police or the parliament asking for the information. It's the regulatory body that does inspections to companies to see if they respect GDPR.
So the pretext they're using is that they want to see the information to make sure that the news organisation is not selling it or mishandling it to other third parties. In the process, they'll be able to get the information and maybe it will go to the people involved in the corruption charges (which is the head of one part of the Parliament).
They aren't actually following the letter of the law, so to me it's unclear how much they actually abuse the law rather than simply pasting the GDPR logo in one corner in a sort of legal phishing attempt.
GDPR has had a very detrimental effect on user experience, with never ending popups and warnings about crap nobody understands. And being in the EU there's several US publications we can no longer access.
I can buy arguments that extra compliance efforts make some businesses not cost-effective in Europe, but this particular argument is nonsense.
It's like a factory that dumped toxic waste into a river complaining that, because of a ban on dumping toxic waste into rivers, they now "have to" dump them to nearby meadows instead, and that makes local customers unhappy.
"Detrimental effect on user experience" is an intended effect that clearly signals the company doesn't want to stop abusing its users.
GDPR is the size of a novel and attorneys can't even agree yet on what counts as PII. It's nowhere near a crisp law that only prohibits bad things you'd know not to do.
Yes, that's right, it's messy when you are tackling legislation to play catch up with technology. We've seen how wrong it can go with stuff like the last generation of cookie laws that were too tightly coupled to implementation details. GDPR is actually a nice step forward into resolving these huge gray areas that the web and smart phones have enabled as they become mainstream.
The status quo where corporations make vast profits peddling ever finer-grained user data unbeknownst to the consumer with no oversight is not good. A cultural shift is necessary. I'm glad to see the EU has the stones to tackle the issue because there is zero political will stateside for any political action other than driving corporate profits masked by populist appeals to xenophobia and whatever other irrelevant distractions they can cook up.
> Every business: "Hey, we use cookies to provide a better experience. That okay?"
They're not required to unless they're using cookies for something other than providing better experience. Also, that's cookie laws, not GDPR.
It's more like:
GDPR: "We see you doing X, Y and Z which are pretty abusive. We want you to not do X, Y and Z, but if you absolutely must, you can only do that to volunteers and you can't deny service to people who do not volunteer. Oh, and it really must be opt-in."
Every business: "Hey, we do X, Y and Z. That okay? [x] no >>> [ ] <<< !! YES PRETTY PLEASE".
Seeing HackerNews complain about GDPR is a strange experience. Every day I utilize GDPR to ensure that I am not tracked by the websites that I visit. The expectations of GDPR are lower for smaller companies.
> Hey, we use cookies to provide a better experience.
Cookies are a separate law and entirely unrelated to GDPR.
Also the annoying "this is what we are doing, you have to agree to this to proceed" is explicitly forbidden for the GDPR. So your criticism does not apply.
You can thank large media conglomerates for the latter, all it takes is one executive decision for dozens of networks and websites to start geo-blocking Euorpe.
GDPR is still fairly new, and it usually takes a while for the full consequences of complex new legislation to be felt.
As an American who spends a lot of time in Europe, what I have noticed is that a majority of local news sites in the US block me from accessing them using IP geolocation.
An old client of mine, an actual mom and pop operation in Germany was harassed and was almost ran out of business by a law-firm who went around, the moment GDPR dropped, trying to find targets to sue.
They received a letter threatening a lawsuit due to the fact that they had a newsletter sign up form without double opt-in feature on their site and some explicit legal documentation missing. Other than that it was a really simple presentational site made in Wordpress. Our business relationship ended years ago but I received a mail from them years ago asking for help in putting those things in because they were afraid of having to deal with legal stuff over such small bs. I obviously did.
Now I don't know German law, as I'm not German, but it felt like they were really afraid that it could happen.
These are enforced on a national level though aren't they, in the UK ICO doesn't have the resources to hunt people down and are probably only going to enforce action against major players in the market as they are under the most scrutiny.
The problem comes when a nation decides to use those rules in a way that is detrimental to the populace or a service they see as troublesome.
GDPR has a very worthy purpose though: companies were taking far too many liberties with people's personal data. I don't see analogous problems with copyrighted material (there is some infringement, but it doesn't really seem problematic to society).
That's not what it's for. The GDPR legslates what events one can remember (using incrementalisim). It's ultimately an attack on general purpose computing.
But people can store data on themselves on their own PC of course. I don't see how GPDR affects that. I don't want a GPC that sends personal data back to the mothership anyway.
It's incremental. The companies covered by the EU's GDPR are untimately comprised of people too. It's easiest to start with a subset, and the GDPR is no exception to that rule.
Ya lost me on the reporting to the mothership thing, that is definately what many power centers would like, for example, non-DRM 3D printers that can cheaply print metal objects will be reserved for criminals in countries controlled by repressive regimes because they can make effective life saving tools.
It's not clear what's going on with GDPR, good test cases are only now starting to be tested. But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
> But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
They are not blocked. They have chosen to take their services offline because they don’t think changing their business model such that it no longer depends on aggressively tracking their users is worthwhile or cost-effective. Which is fine by me imho.
You must understand the economics. Newspapers have zero cash on hand these days, so their choice was to fire staff to allocate money for GDPR or not. Seeing how staff is at a minimum, that was the practical option. Result is equivalent to censorship. I'm surprised you don't find this a terrible outcome.
I don't agree that if a business chooses not to operate in a country, because it's unwilling to spend the money required to comply with the country's laws, that that is equivalent to censorship.
Another person's personal information is not protected speech.
I always viewed it as a transaction--go to the news site and read the news, in exchange they will sell data on what articles you're reading, etc.
I was fine with that transaction. In fact, I would rather have them sell my data instead of charging money.
Consumers have a choice on whether or not they want to go to these sites, it's not like they are forced to give away their personal information to news sites.
I would say the GDPR blocking news sites is a net negative because it denies consumers the choice to read news stories.
> I always viewed it as a transaction--go to the news site and read the news, in exchange they will sell data on what articles you're reading, etc.
And I always thought (back in my more naïve days) that I read the site in exchange for being advertised to. Point being, the exact details of the transaction were never shown to the visitors. GDPR fixes that by forcing companies to state the terms of this transaction explicitly, and actually ask the visitors if they're willing to participate in it.
GDPR isn't blocking any sites, it's only disallowing a very particular way of getting users to give up their data and then monetizing that data. Nobody is entitled to their business model working forever, and some companies prefer to shut off a large segment of their market instead of updating their business model. It's their choice.
Agree. There are ways to protect your data if that’s important to you. If I walk out in the middle of a freeway I should expect that I might be hit by a car rather — the EU instead says, “let’s ban freeways”.
No, EU says "let's put signs that point to where there are (previously invisible) freeways".* GDPR does not ban any practices, it just says that certain practices need to be communicated to and approved by the people affected by them.
I personally don't think that it is any government's business to regulate a company that is not inside its jurisdiction, I also don't think think it should be their prerogative to stop me from engaging and communicating with one just because they rightfully say that it's not their job to bend the knee to them. As an adult the EU is neither my parent nor my guardian.
You’re muddying the waters. Just because someone doesn’t want to take on the compliance burden does not mean they have an antisocial business practice. What you’re saying does not logically follow.
It does, you just made an illogical connection. I didn't say that companies who self-block must necessarily have antisocial business practices. I only said that GDPR is banning those practices. I also said that companies have a choice between removing themselves from European market or adjusting their business model to be compliant.
> companies have a choice between removing themselves from European market or adjusting their business model to be compliant
The problem isn't only adjusting business models. It's proving you've adjusted your business model to twenty-eight EU regulators. If one of them misbehaves, you now have to wage a legal fight in a foreign jurisdiction. Against those costs and risks is a minimum required revenue. If that revenue doesn't exist, it doesn't make sense to serve that market. Regardless of your business model.
So if a law gives you a choice in how you choose to censor a work of literature, would it be the artist's self censoring and not an act of government censorship? Assuming we applied the same logic.
> But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
There's just one large company that decided to block EU visitors: Tribune Publishing[0]. Yes, them blocking Europe is bad. Them owning so many local newspapers that this decision even makes an impact is a bigger problem.
I'm not saying that they're the only ones blocking Europe, but I am saying that we wouldn't think of it to be as wide spread if it weren't for Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and LA Times (among others).
The GDPR is very similar to the old Data Protection Directive, which came into force in 1995. Many member states had done a piss-poor job of implementing and enforcing the DPD, which was largely the motivation for passing the GDPR. Directives have to be transposed into national law by individual member states, while regulations are immediately applicable across the entire Union.
I'm not saying there won't be an effect, but having an effect it's why you pass a law. But 8 months in, and the landscape doesn't seem radically altered.
If anything, major players deciding not to compete in a market is good to my mind, as a means of increasing a diversity of business styles. Laws like this make businesses pay for the actual cost of thier hidden externalities.
[humor] Given the "quality" of reporting in most of the publications here, we should be thanked for that outcome [/humor]
More seriously, GDPR should not extend beyond its jurisdiction. It does though, and there are consequences. Blocking european IPs cost (loss of revenue) must be balanced against compliance costs.
Claims that "they've had N years to prepare" are specicious, if for no other reason than they aren't bound by the specific law. Meanwhile the law introduces a new, potentially large, liability. Which results in companies self censoring by geolocation.
This is what you call an unintended consequence. Remote access to quite a few resources outside of Europe is likely to be restricted should this pass into EU law. As we like to say here, elections have consequences.
FWIW, I support the aims of GDPR, and wish we would get a sane law on this here in the US as well. But I don't want our law extending to others. That would be unfair to them.
Have you ever heard about the financial law Fatca? Please read up. What about sanctions of Iran that the US forces the rest of the world to go along with?
The US is probably the biggest "exporter" of laws that are forced down the throaths of all other countries.
American newspapers don't need to care about GDPR. Most websites don't need to care about GDPR. Europe does not get to dictate how non European based websites operate. The GDPR can be outright ignored for a significant part of the internet. I have no idea why an American newspaper would give a shit about GDPR. They could literally put a huge banner up saying "fuck GDPR" and face zero legal consequences.
I’m not sure how accurate that is. It’s obvious to me that American companies larger than mine have cared enough to take action. If they really had no obligation I’m sure they would have simply done nothing.
>"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"
HN does not organize large amounts of copyright-protected works, nor are the links to articles an 'upload'. If HN organized PDFs of the linked articles so you could just skip heading to a third party site then we'd be talking.
'meant' is not a dangerous word. All laws require interpretation, which is why most countries have specific interpretation guidelines for legislation and even then sometimes it takes a few cracks at the can to get it right.
That's not something 'dangerous', although it can and does go wrong from time to time. But it's a standard risk of rulemaking as it's the standard process for courts interfacing with legislation or other rule-making texts.
Many of the comments on HN are substantive enough to be covered by copyright, and modern copyright law protects everything protectable whether there’s a copyright notice or not.
Comment content is governable in the site ToS, where copyright assignment or other methods of defining the respective user/site rights can be dealt with.
Even if it wasn't, your performance in posting implies consent to provide at the very least a limited license to publish content you posted.
Which is probably non-binding or invalid in most non-US jurisdictions and does not address the problem.
> Even if it wasn't, your performance in posting implies consent to provide at the very least a limited license to publish content you posted.
That is like claiming a random user uploading Star Wars movies on youtube is no problem because that user gave them a limited license. That "license" is obviously invalid and Disney can claim copyright infringement. The proposed law now discusses whether "random user" or youtube or both are liable for this.
Only that, the comments section alone on HN is pretty straightforwardly “organis(ing) and promot(ing) [...] copyright-protected works uploaded by (its) users”, and so whether or not it falls under the scope of this section(1) hinges only on the regulators’ and courts’ opinions of what a “large amount” is.
(1) In a hypothetical world where this law has unbounded jurisdiction
> What's the scary remedy for a copyright holder if they already provided a license to publish the published content?
The core problem this law is trying to address is that website users are, en masse, contributing content to websites when they don’t have a license to do so. This behavior is against pretty much all websites’ terms of service.
As there are many users with no money all putting illegitimate content onto a few websites with a lot of money, this law seeks to shift the burden of liability onto the websites. As a policy, it’s not completely unreasonable, but makes the mass content-farm websites like YouTube unfeasable.
The lawmakers fear for their jobs if YouTube shuts down because of their new law, so they carve out a bunch of exceptions to let key sectors of the internet continue operating (with some work to comply).
The broadest of these, implementing automated content filters, is expensive and unreliable. Operators of smaller websites, such as a typical Internet forum, have their own exception. The problem is that the boundaries here are vague and (potentially) poorly drawn, leaving sites like HN (if it were in EU jurisdiction) with a bad set of options:
* Hope nobody notices
* Accept the liability and vigorously police the site manually, probably buying insurance against a judgment
* Rely on judges allowing them the small-volume or non-profit-seeking exemptions
* Implement content filters that are expensive and a terrible user experience
"As a policy, it’s not completely unreasonable, but makes the mass content-farm websites like YouTube unfeasable."
...? Where are you getting this?
Have you read the current copy of the draft proposal? I did.
None of the restrictions are going to kill sites like Youtube (let alone HN). The proportionality element alone makes the 'we need to invest 200% of our revenue into content blocking' myth absurd.
Will some margin need to be shunted into mitigating unauthorized distribution of works that profit the platform? Yes. But that's already the law. It's literally unjust enrichment 101.
My imagination, mostly. Note the policy being referred to in that sentence is meant to be a hypothetical one that was never actually proposed, which shifts liability without any of the safeguards. The second clause is the justification for the various limitations and exemptions bolted onto the basic concept.
> Have you read the current copy?
Not the current copy, no. Last time this came up I tried, but I had a hard time slogging through the European legalese to get to the meat, which I’m not used to reading. That’s why I’ve tried to keep my analysis here in the small, only considering the particular clause that started this discussion thread.
Given how hard it is to read, and the general unhelpfulness of the community (1), it’s probably a good assumption that effectively no one has read the actual text, and instead is relying on the reporting, which feels extremely biased to me on this one.
> The proportionality element alone makes the 'we need to invest 200% of our revenue into content blocking' myth absurd.
You should consider making this the lede instead of burying it three replies deep. This shows that the entire discussion about the other clause is moot, as there won’t be a problem in our scenario regardless of the result of that analysis.
(1) When I did ask for some help getting through the citations last time, the only substantive advice was “just skip that stuff, it doesn’t matter.” If I have learned anything, it’s that everything written into legislation matters.
As an aside, my original reply to you was simply trying to correct your statement “HN does not organize large amounts of copyright-protected works” by means of a counter-example. I think you may be reading things between my lines that aren’t there.
I am, and always have been, calm on this matter. I don’t find the situation scary in any way. I simply enjoy exploring the logical consequences of various lines of thought through the medium of writing, even to the point of playing the devil’s advocate for the purpose of a more thorough exploration of the various issues.
I’m really not sure where my opinions lie on this one, so I’ve been free-wheeling a bit more than usual. I’d like to apologize if my mental wandering caused you any distress. It was not intended.
It's just that there's a big disconnect between what people have read out of the article regarding it's applicability and what remedies actually flow out of it.
Hence the ...so what?
Large sites will have a tool like photoDNA or ContentID to be able to flag works so you can't do something like repeatedly upload something like Aquaman an hour after release. That's reasonable. With respect to a site like HN, it's highly probable the entire article literally has zero impact, unless people take to posting book chapters in comments constantly (and if that happened, you'd expect they should take action in some way).
The proportionality requirement alone alleviates almost EVERY concern people are bringing up. I don't think the legislation is perfect, but it's pretty good, fairly clear, and very easily suited to judicial interpretation to create fair results in unanticipated situations.
Comments are copyrighted works uploaded by the users of HN. HN organizes and promotes comments. There are certainly a large amount of these comments. Profit motive of HN is uncertain, but it may receive payment for jobs ads? And it certainly operates as part of a for-profit organization.
I have a pretty limited understanding, but at first, I would think you would have this the other way around? The US uses a case law system where precedential judicial proceedings modify how the law works in practice relative to how they got written. Besides the UK, most of the EU has a statutory law system, where the law gets applied as written with less regard for previous judicial decisions.
So, the short version of the question, in regard to your original comment, how so..?
I get the larger point you’re making, but I’d guess that copyright-protected works make up less than 0.05% of all content posted to this site and that includes repo links. /new is mostly just TechCrunch articles and things like that. I’m aware that bad faith interpretation of imprecise wording can be used to weaponize laws, and that laws are sometimes passed for this very reason, but it would be an incredible stretch (both legally and colloquially) to claim that phrasing applies here.
Another article of the same law (Article 11) would apply copyright also to shortest excerpts of news articles, anything longer than "individual words". (Colloquially known as the "link tax" provision.)
So even reproducing the full title of a news article would likely be an infringement, and then that becomes another thing platforms take liability for/need to filter under Article 13. Whether there's a link or not would be irrelevant.
(It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.)
> It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.
I see this as an unreasonable reduction of previously established fair use. The fact that most of the companies linking to news articles using snippets are American, like Google and Facebook, while many news publishers involved are EU-based hints at a geopolitical motivation rather than any fundamental change to the fairness of this sort of use.
You are absolutely right: The mere fact that these publishers don't block Google using robots.txt and that they in fact spend a lot of effort optimizing their metadata so that link previews show up just the way they want them to proves that it's at least mutually beneficial, and not an abuse of their intellectual property.
Because google owns the index, if they don’t allow google to index they get no traffic. Google is a monopoly, there is no choice here, no market driving competition.
The sources I could find with a quick Google (yes, possibly ironic) search suggest news sites get most of their traffic from direct visits, but Google contributes a substantial amount[0]. It seems to me that the news sites want Google to provide them traffic and simultaneously pay for the privilege of doing so.
The behavior of publishers in countries where they won this battle is telling: a when laws were passed in Belgium and Spain requiring aggregators to license even small excerpts, Google stopped, and the publishers didn't take very long to offer free licenses.
They don’t want google or any other monopoly that is in competition with them to ‘give’ them traffic. They do want their services available and indexed on the internet. If the internet search market was evenly distributed among 5 search engines the I suspect this conversation wouldn’t exist.
>What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law.
Hold on, that's not true.
The intent of law matters and is codified in various ways, including stating the intent of the law directly in its text. This in turn informs judges (including appellate judges!) of how to evaluate a specific case. In jurisprudential systems, this in turn becomes case-law which further cements the intent of the law as a binding legal construct.
I agree the letter of the law is more strongly binding, but to dismiss intent as irrelevant suggests you don't understand the difference between law and computer code.
Or they are exceedingly cynical about the arbiters and paranoid about abuses - not a bad tradition when defending rights.
Intents may be pretenses which are cheap and mean nothing. The USSR was "for the people" and killed record ammounts of them. Even if ungrounded in displayed maliciousness a "how will this be abused" mindset is its own tradition and I argue a good thing when considering and writing laws.
Since writing a law meant to allow self defense that has text which allows shooting jaywalkers from your backyard is a bad law "to stop offenses in progress" is a bad law. Even if "reasonableness" is applied that leads to more judiciary work, uncertainty and the possibility of injust absurdities holding. Like bashing the head man who is stabbing you right now into the tile wasn't self defense because wood could have stopped him with less force. Explicit text definitions could have stopped the absurdity with say "threat of lethal force by an invading interloper may be met with lethal force" or "proportionate force" even.
I recognize EU law holds different principles but it isn't treating law as computer code. The opposite in my opinion - you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor. You are accurate when describing people and the law.
>you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor
C compilers have been known to "optimize" code with undefined behavior in such a way as to introduce a security vulnerability that would not exist in the most direct translation of the C code to machine code.
There's very good reason for that : this law is yet another example of the EU's new favorite tactic: laws without the justice system.
The ONLY person that can use this law is the EU executive (commission). They get to sue, essentially any site they want on the internet. You, EU citizen or not, do not get to sue anyone else, no matter how much copyright infringement, how much damage. You can politely ask the (no doubt up to 10 person) EU agency that the commission puts in charge of this law, but that's it.
The EU commission is not just the only party that can use the law, they are also arbiter of this law. They never have to build a case before court, and of course in practice this means you're declared guilty and punished before your first chance to see a court.
In other words: they can prevent any site they like from getting sued at all and they can sue any site and convict. Then you can fight that decision in court (after, of course, penalties are extracted). In court, you start from an extremely disadvantaged position: you have been tried and found guilty. Effectively, in court you only get an appeal option.
I mean I know the EU is a dictatorship (because the both the positive and negative legislative power is in exclusive hands of the executive alone, the EU commission and council: they can enact any law they like with or without parliament approval and they can prevent any law from becoming law, no matter how much parliament wants it. Or they can change it at will, or ...
But this is even worse than that. This law does not just give them dictatorial power, but essentially makes them an international public prosecutor for internet sites, who does NOT report to any elected government (only reports to the commission which is not elected).
For your info: Hacker News being responsible for the data its users provide is not a problem for the users, it is a problem for Hacker News and similar platforms who leech off content from the general public for their own profit.
Further for your info: Hacker News does not "need a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie", it only needs to take responsibility of you commit copyright infringement by doing so.
I’d happily let Hacker News go if it means other such platforms go with it.
> I’d happily let Hacker News go if it means other such platforms go with it.
Why?
I'll take as a given that many platforms are profiting from copyrighted content uploaded by users, but I very much doubt that the copyright owners would secure any of those profits for themselves if the platforms in question were driven out of existence.
This would indeed seem to be a copyright infringement in many EU member states. For example, in Germany it wouldn't fall under the quotation exception (no such thing as vague "fair use" here), since you aren't critically engaging with or commenting on the quote, which would be allowed – you just reproduced it.
The movie studio could now hold HN liable.
Well, except that HN is not under EU jurisdiction, so it could probably choose to ignore EU court decisions against it. Bigger platforms of course won't have that luxury, so they'd need to come up with some way of limiting or avoiding that liability... or maybe just blocking EU users.
True, I guess you could see "the comment thread" as the larger (collaborative) intellectual work within which the movie was quoted for illustrative purposes.
"internet platforms", "organize", "promote", "large amounts", "uploaded by their users", "in order to make a profit".
These phrases by themselves are open to interpretation in various ways. In particular, what I find dangerous is that these appear to be specific enough to convince people to believe there will be little to no room for abuse, and yet are vague enough to allow a motivated political actor to target someone if they really decided to.
Are you talking about directives in the E.U.? Or the law of a specific E.U. country?
It doesn't seem to be like this in the US. If you look at laws in the US, they try to define every word and every situation with a lot of cases. Vagueness seems to be avoided, and I'd say it actually doesn't seem too unfamiliar to programmers if used to the jargon
My response was in reaction to the parent comment brushing aside the level of ambiguity in the statement, and labelling it as "surprisingly reasonable" based on just another subjective interpretation of it.
As for vagueness, the issue has more to do with the scope. To me, as a citizen, the expanse of a given law is over the union of every possible interpretation of it that can be made by a reasonable person.
The more vague the language in a given law, the larger the scope for interpretation; the more specific and descriptive the language, the more restricted the scope.
It seems like an abdication of responsibility by duly elected legislators to leave the interpretation of the bounds of a vague law onto a far-removed, indirectly-elected judiciary, rather than passing specific laws defining those bounds more carefully from the get go. Why not just create a single law "Enforce good. Punish evil.", and leave it to the courts to implement?
As for why this uproar happens specifically on topics regarding the internet, the audience here on HN has a larger interest in everything to do with it compared to other issues. I do think that the same level of caution should be applied w.r.t. any and all vague laws, regardless of the topic.
Because it's often applied across borders, and in cases of late, potentially by independent bodies of different countries. IME, it's often brought up on any large set of laws, especially those governing freedom of information, and why most people discourage large encompassing new laws over meager ones or none at all.
The real question is why people take the it's-very-common approach to belittle people's concerns.
Being open just means that the judiciary has the room to make it work as cases emerge. Suggesting that this stuff would be politicised - what, the ECJ? - seems unlikely, although I'd be open to hearing of examples of blatant political interference in the EU-wide judicial process.
[paraphrase]
You keep using that phrase "no abuse". I do not think it means what you think it means ...
[/paraphrase]
Single paraphrased/modified quote from a movie, meant to mock the abuse that has, and surely will, happen, under the existing, and new regimes. Fair use, and parody all wrapped up in one sentence.
> and "in order to make a profit" excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons[...]
But what about fandom sites like Wikia? There's mass copyright infringement going on quite openly there, but it's survived under the understanding that e.g. Memory Alpha discussing various topics from Star Trek wasn't causing Paramount any financial harm.
But if the hosters of fan wikis like that will need to become paranoid about that liability they might not host them at all.
A lot of them just won't exist then. Many of those communities aren't organized enough to self-host, and if you can't run ads whoever's hosting it on their personal server is going to eat the cost of hosting it, and getting to the point of running it as a foundation like Wikimedia is going to be hard.
But maybe there'll be some meta-foundation like a fanbase version of Wikimedia that'll bring these all under their umbrella, or more likely sites like Wikia will just be hosted commercially by fans in the US blocking EU IPs and fans will need to use proxies or VPNs to browse them.
Yeah, the "in order to make a profit" part caught my eyes, too, and I immediately thought of Wikipedia.
If this law somehow ends up hurting multinational commercial platforms and opening up a larger space for personal blogs, hobby sites, and nonprofits, I might even consider it a good law on consequentialist grounds. I don't even care about the impact on startups if all they're trying to do is to become the next YouTube.
In reality, though, this is probably just wishful thinking. We have no idea how "organize", "promote", and "large amounts" will be interpreted; Google and Facebook will find a way to comply at least with the letter of the law; and the heyday of personal websites and ramdom phpBB forums are already well behind us :(
Are you suggesting there are no more forums online not run bi the big 5? I have not searched for 'powered by phpbb' in some time, but certainly there are many forums / phpfox / buddypress / similar sites out there that are not big companies funded like reddit.
Anything with song lyrics or a giphy post would be in danger of additional censorship with this no?
Any kind of web site that allowed user sign ups would be in danger with this pretty much(?)
> It is unfair to legitimate companies who do their best to make sure their content really is original or properly licensed.
On the other hand, it could be said that it is unfair to new companies and rewards those who _already_ broke the rules. They already broke the rules, so it would be unfair to stop them from continuing to be broken is a bad argument, but it has to be a consideration when entrenching existing companies (as they can absorb the compliance costs).
I'm not really sure what the correct answer is, as allowing an ongoing harm to continue is clearly untenable[1], but you have to ask if this is really accomplishing the ends we want to achieve, and is it the right way to do it.
[1] assuming no large-scale copyright reform, but that doesn't appear to be on the cards
>From my understanding: "organise and promote" means it is not simple hosting, and "in order to make a profit" excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons and "large amounts" most likely excludes smaller websites like fan sites, and "uploaded by their users" exclude search engines.
All these things are very interpretable and can be the root to abuse and mistakes.
I'm sorry, but you reading the text of Article 13 far more narrow than it actually is:
"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"
Would include https://news.ycombinator.com as well. It does organize and promote user comments, quotes, references which are of course copyright-protected works as anything created in the EU member states is, including user comments. Now "Hacker News" does not make a direct profit of the content. It is a side-line to a profitable business. It is however trivial to argue that the fact it is a side-line by a for-profit company it must in some way contribute to that. This has been done before.
The term upload does not exclude anything, because there is no legal or technical distinguishable difference between upload and post. The law could have read 'provided by their users' and the legal implications would be the same.
All sites that are for profit and allow anything from their users are affected by this. This would also include online games that allow users to chat.
I don't agree that its intentions are that clear. Nobody likes a leech, but that does not mean that we should kill all animals to prevent leeches.
"And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet."
This seems to be a call to the internet being just for the technologically savvy. No great number of people are going to self host and any form of support for people self-hosting from a for profit company will run into article 13. Moreover what I remember from the old internet is not self publishing, but the social gathering on IRC, newsgroups, etc. Something that will be impossible to do at our current scale without for profit companies or government backed services. The first will run into article 13, the second one is a non-starter.
If it's defined as loosely as you state, it will benefit big players:
- Small organizations can't support repeatedly going to court argue that they are not "organizing" nor "promoting" content in "large" amounts.
- Small organizations can't take the path to being large that youtube or pornhub did. These now host mostly licensed content, because content producers were forced to go along. They can no longer be forced, and a barrier to entry has been thus erected.
I thought most clips on Pornhub were uploaded by the content owners, basically as advertisement for their sites. They are not full length clips usually, or am I way off?
A few.. I'd say percentage are this way (and more today than there were some years ago as Phub climbed to fame).
Certainly the popularity of the site is due to the large amount of full scenes that have been available. Debates about who has been uploading the full scenes have been raging for years.
The debate about who is profiting from it and who has lost sales I think is pretty easy to figure out.
Must be great to feel that optimistic about the law. Your interpretation is unfortunately just one way to look at it, why would you give the law the benefit of the doubt?
> I can see most of the obvious impetus for this, but don't feel it's going to work out very well at all.
You can see this reaction to the GDPR where the discussion of benefits are hypothetical. Most of these pieces of legislation have predecessors that we can look to for real, practical results. And that practical result is that the governments have mandates to govern the internet in a large, globally-affecting, information/data-suppressing way.
> I'm not sure what a smarter version of the legislation would look like.
It would not exist. Different measures (education, funding, public services, public awareness, existing statute enforcement, accepting the costs of open information, etc) would be taken.
All this will mean is that the big tech, Googles and Facebooks of the world, will solidify their position for years/decades to come since only they will have the money/resources to take care of this expensive regulation. New startups on the other hand will stand little chance in this new world.
All these regulations look good on paper. But when you understand their medium-long term ramifications is when you realize how unfairly the deck is stacked now.
This seems like it will benefit the whales more than the fish, as they can absorb copyright infringement costs into their already expansive legal departments, whereas a smaller company will likely go belly up or be chummed.
This is exactly the ongoing problem with the EU they don't distinguish between large corporations and small businesses which really illustrate how clueless the EU is when it comes to the market and the businesses that are governed.
The post explicitly mentions a clause that will make that distinction. The author argues it might be removed from the final text as part of the ongoing horse-trading, but at least it’s clear MEPs do understand the difference nowadays.
It would be insane to implement privacy and data regulations differently for smaller companies. You would end up with startups having free reign to abuse peoples privacy in order to gain market dominance against their larger competitors who don't have this advantage, and you'd have larger companies near the threshold arguing about and doing everything in their power to stay under their threshold so they can avoid doing things like allowing people to delete their profiles or downloading their data to transfer to a competitor. Smaller or less important leaks would be brushed up under the rug because 'Well, at least they're not BA', nothing good would come of it. If the law is unduly harsh on smaller companies that's due to the realities of dealing with people's personal information in a secure manner, not because the legislators decided to put people before corporations.
You are assuming that there is no room to game that. There is and the problem is now you have given those who want to cheat the system a better base to do it on now that the customers have actually given their consent.
There is a difference between making a law that punishes wrongful use of information and then forcing companies to do things a certain way. That's the point here which seems to be missed on most.
> This is exactly the ongoing problem with the EU they don't distinguish between large corporations and small businesses
Personally, I don't think laws should discriminate like this, and if a law is not good for business overall, it should be shuttered, not targeted. There are exceptions of course, but I don't think there should be on the internet (or information in general).
Laws are discriminating by their very nature when they apply the same price on something for a small company vs. a larger one.
Keep in mind that mostly we are ADDING regulation not removing with which means that existing companies get the benefit of not having had to deal with the same when they were small.
Just like adblockers. You can advocate using them, but they only help the big players, because Facebook and such can ask for subscriptions if needed and they can also afford implementing anti adblock measures.
While small sites with a handful of staff, can't do that. People may subscribe for big sites like Facebook and Youtube , but they won't subscribe separately for a lots of small sites.
So blocking ads helps eliminating the small guys while the whales can deal with it.
> You can advocate using them, but they only help the big players
Not true, they also help the end users, who often get lost in these discussions of big-vs-small companies. Turns out these "whales" everyone is so anxious to target provide benefits to end users, who are often the ones that end up bearing the brunt of the pain.
Net neutrality regulations include vague language that allows "reasonable network management", which is a multi-million dollar legal hassle that stresses small ISP owners. And I shudder to think how Duck Duck Go's programmers will manage to comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten [from a search engine's results]".
I hope the politicians in Washington, D.C. recognize that America is the world's last refuge for small business growth and economic innovation.
I would imagine you'd be able to simply submit a domain to DDG, they would ask for a txt record or file to be present within the site, similar to a DNS verification tool. Then it would be queued up in a crawler for removal upon verification. Is there something I'm missing?
If it's individual pages, then probably just a meta-tag?
I think robots.txt could be leveraged for this though maybe.
In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage to Google and Facebook, as this law will encourage development of alternatives on decentralized peer-to-peer technologies. However, I'm not sure if EU politicians are that smart...
If this is their intention, then the measure might be totally counterproductive. Regulations very often hit small businesses harder than big ones, because big businesses have capacities to deal with them.
In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup.
This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents.
According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem:
> TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
but this at risk of being dropped:
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
It’s not made by EU politicians, it’s made by a combination of lawyers, engineers and public administration majors.
In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.
>but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.
The EU is far from "perfectly functioning". It functions pretty well but it's not perfect. There's some non-negligible group in pretty much every country that rightfully has some major gripe with the EU. If there wasn't we wouldn't have things like Brexit. I get that you can't please everyone but if the UK GTFOing isn't indicative of some sort of imperfection than I don't know what is.
Brexit has nothing to do with the functioning of the EU, it’s a byproduct of a broken political culture. British politicians failed at their jobs for 20 years and then blamed others for it, simple as that. The EU could have been the most enlightened organisation on the planet, and the result would have been precisely the same.
> The EU is co-ruled by an opaque system of non elected bodies
The EU council (comprising of democratically elected heads of government from the 28 member countries)
The EU parliament (comprising of directly elected MEPs from the 28 member countries)
The EU commission president, nominated by the council, approved by the parliament, and standing on a ticket to be EU Commission president during the parliamentary elections
The EU commissioners, appointed by the democratically elected heads of government from the 28 members
Laws are only passed by agreement by the democratically elected council and the democratically elected MEPs.
That's the version told to high schoolers in "How the EU works" lessons.
In actual EU, decisions are made by informal bodies like the Eurogroup, meeting under close quarters and with no documentation, with economic and diplomatic pressure from top dog countries, with satellite states vote how their sugar daddy states ask them, and a whole lot more besides.
"Eurogroup", which (like the Economic and Financial Affairs Council) would be meetings between the democratically elected finance ministers of the countries in the EU?
Representative democracy, with it's paltry accountability except every 4 years, gerrymandering-schemes (not a US-only problem), typically revoked election promises, backroom talks, corruption, and private interests paying politicians is already undemocratic enough as it stands.
And suddenly removing the voters even further (as in the EU Commission), or adding "bodies" with no officially defined role and protocol, and closed discussions, like the Eurogroup, is "democratic" because those involved were "democratically elected finance ministers" under unrelated to the EU national elections.
Do you really think that it would happen any differently, without the EU? There simply would be international treaties, which are even more opaquely-discussed, with no democratic oversight whatsoever and no recourse (national justice courts typically have no jurisdiction over international agreements).
With the EU, the process is formalized, opened up for scrutiny at many levels (sure, they could be more, there are people working on that problem), and then everyone can have a say through the European Court of Justice process.
The fact of the matter is that we live in an increasingly globalized world, and we must find ways to live together without resorting to the traditional genocidal ways (which are now practically unsustainable - a serious war on the continent would produce hundreds of millions of casualties). Somewhere, the political sausage-making has to happen.
No, but I really believe those at least represent the public and private interests of their own country, not some big-dog country to the detriment of the periphery...
have you ever been to rural Germany, Italy, France or heard of gilets jaunes? Any idea why they might exist?
I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places. Ask the so called middle class in Croatia, Slovakia, Italy what they think of the EU and how well it works for them. Avg salary in these places is 500 to 1000 EUR. And if you visit supermarkets all they have is shit. Literally everything like fresh veg tastes like feet because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places. Companies have 2 production lines making low-grade products (despite being the same brand) for these markets. I'm not an arm-chair bureaucrat who forms his opinion on Google. I actually live in these placed because despite all this shit and poverty the people are actually warm.
One more example: thousands of people wiping arses in nursery homes in Germany are working through shady polish, slovenian, etc outsourcing companies where they're stripped of all benefits that a German would enjoy. They work for 500 to 1000 / month (in a high cost country) because their home country has no jobs for them. Then they're being exploited by the rich EU countries.
Again I lived in Germany, ran 2 companies there, lived in France (operated 3 businesses), now I live in Eastern EU. As much as I want the EU to succeed I can't be blind to the hypocrisy that I see every day on the streets in my own surrounding.
Not all of this is the EU - which is not exactly some super-state that controls every aspect of life on the continent.
Almost all of these things are in the jurisdiction of the member states themselves, and the EU has little power to control them.
If the EU didn't exist, Germany would still be staffing its nursing homes with cheap(er) foreign labour, just done under a visa rather than EU freedom of movement.
If the EU didn't exist, companies would still produce high-quality products for rich markets, and low-quality products for poor markets. (If you want a fascinating example of this, read this Twitter thread about the manufacture of sanitary pads in Africa - https://twitter.com/aprzhu/status/1083278476310913024)
If the EU, ceased to exist, would eastern European supermarkets no longer be filled with "shit", or would local producers continue to export their good produce where they can get the most money for it?
There is a tendency to avoid criticism of the EU and congratulate it for things it does not do, but it is also a mistake to assign all the ills of Europe to it, when blame for them is much more accurately laid on national governments.
> If the EU didn't exist, Germany would still be staffing its nursing homes with cheap(er) foreign labour, just done under a visa rather than EU freedom of movement.
Or worse: the care would be become too expensive and peoples arses wouldn't be wiped at all..
Datapoint: UK family have been looking at such services for a relative with Alzheimer’s. ~£1,000/week, compared to the ~£60/week the government pays in benefits to those looking after relatives.
That's not really the EU failing, that's just poor countries being poor. A smart businessman will export his goods for the highest price to make more money if he can. That will lead to shittier products sold in poor countries, but it also brings food to the table of the farmers.
It's not as if Poland and Hungary would have been booming economic superpowers if it hadn't been for the EU. The people fleeing their country because of the lack of jobs won't suddenly find new jobs if they can't leave.
The exploitation of cheap, foreign labour is an issue though and it's not just hurting the people being exploited; the natives of the country the exploitation takes place in will see their wages drop if some shady outsourcing company can have the same work done for half the price. Those old people don't want their assets wiped by someone who can barely understand their language either but they need to put up with it because of cost-saving measures that has degraded the level of care. This is something the EU can change, but the many labourers who'd be out of a job if the EU added more restrictions to foreign travel wouldn't agree with changing the policy to make them unemployed.
The double production line issue would just come back in a different fashion if quality goods weren't exported; there'd be no money to be made selling most of the goods, so they either become a luxury product or only the cheap, garbage production line remains.
Despite all the known problems, countries like Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia are all applying for (or already negotiating) a position within the EU. If they would really be better off without the "dysfunctional" EU, they'd form their own bloc or remain independent. Even for poor countries, the EU brings benefits.
>Despite all the known problems, countries like Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia are all applying for (or already negotiating) a position within the EU. If they would really be better off without the "dysfunctional" EU, they'd form their own bloc or remain independent. Even for poor countries, the EU brings benefits.
do you know why they do this? They can see how easy it is to milk the EU for money in ways that benefit these mafia states. The major of Zagreb is connected to the Bosnian Mafia, he just spent some time in hospital (the mafia put him there but you won't read this in the news). The top lawyer of Zagreb is an asset for the mob. If you want to kill somebody here it's possible to make that happen for very little money. Have you been to Albania, or Macedonia? You should seriously go there before assuming that absorbing them in the EU is a good idea. I'm all for bringing in the people of these countries but before that can be done the organized crime there needs to be cleaned up. The result otherwise is that you'll enrich those that don't deserve it.
The TV series McMafia was set in Croatia (even the non-fiction book and the TV show plays out in a global theater). There are good reasons why that country was chosen for the series. You want to meet some dangerous people? I can introduce you to the guy who shot the Minister of Tourism here not so long ago - he is my age and now runs a drug ring in Austria. This is common knowledge here and as normally talked about as the weather.
My GF's sister was recently alerted by the owner of the building that the mob has asked them to isse them with keys to their flat because they refused to sell it. The person refused to hand it over and alerted her. The poor girl now lives in fear every day.
The Balkan is the wild fucking west. I live in one of the most civilized parts of the region and love it here, because it's also easy to stay away from this all. If you think for one second that the state would want to ( or even could) protect you, you'd be wrong because they're all part of it. If you're rich you don't pay any fines, if you're poor you get fucked. It's always been this way and thanks to globalization it's getting worse (more ruthless competition from foreign mobs fighting over territory).
I can go on and on ... but Misha Glenny's "McMafia" really explains it all rather well.
With respect, the examples you gave seem like more of a problem with employment law and governance in individual countries than with the EU as an institution.
The gilet jaunes were/are angry about a carbon tax and lack of wealth taxes. Not Brussels or brain drain.
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy, though not perfect, keeps huge swathes of rural Europe afloat. Its regional development funds builds infrastructure in areas that can't afford it.
You can't really blame the EU for bland vegetables either. That's just silly. The French aren't exactly appropriating Croatian tomatoes by force. It just means that (thanks to the EU) producers can get a higher price for their goods by exporting tariff-free to another country, so they do. Why wouldn't they?
The EU maybe is functional maybe not, but one thing is for sure: The Kremlin anti-western propaganda machine is obviously highly functional. More and more people are blaming their countries poverty on the EU while being oblivious to the actual scope of the EU jurisdiction, to the detriment of both their home country and the EU. Without the EU the poor countries would be way, way worse off.
Yeah, those silly people, blaming an EU that enforces a monetary policy for the benefit of Germany, imposes pro-corporate and anti-labour laws and agreements (Maastricht, Lisbon treaty, etc), and is ruled by backroom deals and "might is right", for their countries ills...
Obviously they were victims of the "Kremlin anti-western propaganda"...
after 2008 the EU had a gun to their had and were made to sign loans that they could never ever repay. they were lent that money because private citizens mostly owned their homes.
Asset stripping is generally what happens to those who are in default on their debts. The EU reduced that asset stripping from what the creditors could’ve demanded — but did not eliminate it entirely.
That’s happening everywhere. One of the reasons you have the wacky politics that you have now in the US is that the people left in flyover country aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.
Russia is the most extreme example of the phenomenon.
free movement should be a human right. I lived a decade in Asia before returning to EU. I'd also move to different countries even if it would require a visa. That has never stopped me. I hope to go to India next year. Has little to do with the EU "giving me the benefit". I alone make that possible not some political entity.
yeah. I was ignorantly thinking of those that follow the law, are highly skilled and are welcomed into the country but didn't consider the folk who immigrate for economic reasons or refugees etc. sadly many will be prevented by a barrier if they have "the wrong type" of passport
Food in Italy is of extremely good quality and variety. I live in Bulgaria and fruits and vegetables are exceptional and extremely cheap.
If you refer to supermarket food I may agree.
indeed Italy (and France) has some o the best food I ever bought. Germany can't compare even with what's available in a Le'clerc or Carrefour in France. yes I was mainly talking about supermarkets. In my current home I only buy stuff at the wet-market - e.g. directly from farmers because the chains just deliver crap. Even the higher prized items in supermarkets (which cost the same as Germany despite the salary differences) are terrible quality - literally nobody in Italy or France would eat those veg.
I wasn’t that impressed with French supermarkets, including Carrefour. Sure, Germany is the home of Lidl, Aldi, and Netto, but Rewe, Edeka, Kaufland, and Biomarkt are all at least as good as what I saw in France.
On the other hand, in the UK, Tesco, Waitrose, and Sainsbury’s are all at least as good as their German equivalents; and (beyond the EU) even the worst EU supermarket was better than almost every supermarket I saw in the USA.
shopping at carrefour Antibes with over 100 cashiers you could buy wines from €15 - €1500 in the same shop. Not just wines but fresh fish section that is bigger than some Kaufstadt shops in Germany themselves. The level of choice there was phenomenal (closer to US than anywhere else in Europe). Fresh whipped cream from the Normandie that costs €30,-- for 500ml (and you could taste it) ... exotic meats (goat, horse, pigeon, rabbit, fresh fois-gras ...). At the same time Germany had scandals with their "Klebefleisch" essentially meat that consists of lips+arseholes glued together to make it look like genuine ham ...
I never paid attention to the price of groceries when shopping in Germany because growing up poor I always had the attitude not to be stingy with food and only buy what appealed the most. Coming to France I had to pay attention and actually look at the label because I might pick stuff that I simply couldn't afford. Doing this in Germany I might end up paying for regular groceries 250,-- (avg feeding a family), while in France I might pay 800 or more if I didn't pay attention. The first few times had to actually return once the cashier presented my bill.
two line stuff is straight out lie?!
I live in a small european country (same level as croatia, slovakia etc....) stuff in markets is good quality. local stuff stays here and gets sold to locals.
Brain drain is a thing that exists, but I argue it's not really a problem. I'm not going to address the other aspects of your comment for now at least.
I live in India, where complaints of brain drain are the main topic of discussion among adults here, and the main thing politicians love to blame when looking for excuses. There are no feasible ways to ""solve"" brain drain without either a) taking away people's choices - North Korea has no brain drain, or b) Making your country's incentives better so the problem becomes irrelevant. If you want b, then the term "brain drain" is bad because it is almost always seen as an attack on the choice of people moving out. Use a different, more specific, and more understandable term.
Most of it does not sound like issue with EU, but issue with specific countries. Polish people working through shady Polish companies in Germany is not EU issue, it is mostly Polish issue and partially German issue.
All of your examples strongly pattern-match to my sister-in-law. From a poor nation, moved to a rich one, brain drain, local economy a mess.
Trouble with your argument is she’s from the Philippines, which isn’t in the EU.
It’s not even a problem with globalisation, the usual next scapegoat, but a problem with unequal gains being combined with literally exponential growth. The EU does at least try to counteract that by getting all nations to invest 1% GDP in EU projects including projects designed to lift the poorest EU regions out of relative poverty.
> I live in a very poor EU country (out of choice) and most young people fuck off to Germany or France because their home states have no jobs for them. They don't come back either which causes a massive brain drain on these places.
> because the good stuff that is locally produced gets exported to the rich places
The cynic in me would say this is an example of the EU functioning very well, for it's intended purpose of funnelling resources to those of the equal who are more equal than others? ;)
FAANG will be pissed but I doubt it really makes a dent. Their focus is Asia (has been since 2 decades now). Us Europeans are just a sleepy backwater of old people with lot of history which makes for nice tax havens and retirement homes.
Even worse. They will be the ones which can comply. They can write legal terms, they can check real government identities and create a significant upload filter strategy.
right! in a way it creates a couple of jobs but only for those who can program - somebody has to implement these policies into technical reality. looking at GDPR (which I fully support) it has created quite a large niche of specialized lawyers and people are now busy educating themselves about how to isolate PII. No doubt this bill will also produce quite a bit of demand for specialists. But it's hardly innovation.
As you say the small start-ups in Berlin & Paris are left in the dust because only the big ones have the resources to take care of this bureaucratic horse-manure.
In the long run we'll continue to dig our own graves while China and the US laughs.
Nobody knows yet what will and will not be GDPR PII. The law handwaved like crazy and they haven't even finished hiring all the officials who will interpret it.
The focus of growth has always been on Asia afair (I can only speak for what I witnessed since the 70ies), ... first Japan, India & Tiger countries, later China. Even Brazil and LATAM for a long time had more focus then backward and technophobic Europe. It's not just demography because an old person in Asia will embrace new ideas and tech (my japanese father in law is 90ies and still excited over a new iPhone while my parents already gave up on anything digital in their 50ies - "just too hard they say")
Alternatively, with a little lobbying and a few tweaks, any 'platform' deemed not to be implementing sufficiently advanced filtering could be subject to ISP-level blocking / filtering.
Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.
The fact that they only know how to tear down and not to build will make it futile.
At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.
How. They are the ones who have the lawyers to protect themselves. It's the small platforms that will suffer, and creating startups in the user-generated content will be too risky.
The strategy is legal, political and economic harmonisation. It does this by passing vague legislation that requires its own court to interpret. Everything else, literally everything, is secondary. And so a nation state is born.
yes, this could be called the "anti-google act" of 2019 ... google is basically the only company it applies to. facebook has never been a major venue for piracy (afaik?) so i don't think it even affects them much.
however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it.
google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.
No, FAANG will not be targeted. Even GDPR which would have been able to piss of facebook was not used to attack them. Only small companies have been attacked because of GDPR violations. Inoffically they have told people they will not attack the big ones because they have enough lawyers so an attack on e.g. facebook will be too time consuming.
Following a number of important amendments being made to the Copyright Directive since July, the proposal was put to a plenary vote in September, which over 60% of MEPs supported. During further negotiations between Parliament, the Council (EU Member States) and the European Commission, any remaining shortcomings can be addressed.
I am in favour of a balanced Copyright Directive that allows for a free and fair internet, and also ensures the fair remuneration of creators, artists, publishers and journalists who create important jobs, growth and innovation in the EU.
With regard to a stronger right for press publishers, Article 11 allows for:
• Fair remuneration for journalists and press publishers for the use of their articles.
• Financially independent press (independent from platforms).
• Quality journalism.
• Journalists to get a share of the press publishers' remuneration.
Private use of press articles is allowed.
Hyperlinking is allowed.
With regard to the value gap, Article 13 allows for:
• Platforms to take more responsibility for the content on their websites.
• Fair remuneration for European right holders (artists, musicians, authors etc.) from the platforms that use their works.
• Platforms to conclude licenses with the right holders.
• Right holders and platforms to find a practical solution to bring copyright and liability in a better balance.
The scope of Article 13 has been limited to those platforms which infringe the most copyright.
Platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Netflix, eBay, Wikipedia, dating-platforms, software developing platforms, blogs, private homepages, dropbox etc. do not fall under Article 13.
Copyright rules need to reflect the new realities and business models of the 21st century, particularly the rise of digital media. Press publishers and other content producers should receive a fair share for the use of their content on the internet. Currently, most generated revenue goes to the platforms and aggregators, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube.
It is of course a priority that the Internet remains a platform where free speech prevails. The rules will only affect platforms that explicitly make profit from copyrighted works. Private individuals can continue to share content on the internet for non-commercial purpose. Platforms such as universities, scientific databases and online encyclopaedias, which are not dealing with copyright content as their primary purpose, will all be exempt from the new rules.
The GDPR has already resulted in quite a few websites simply refusing to serve the EU. Will this clinch it? Will the EU be cut off form the internet due to over-regulation that no one wants to put themselves at risk over?
I think calling GDPR over-regulation is extremely suspect. The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data. Clear communication, consent, control over your own data and data protection principles. Things that should be self-evident but we have been failing with forever, and something that has become an extremely widespread widespread in an online society. The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand - but there was a clear need for such a law and codifying reasonable privacy principles. I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Article 13 is fundamentally different from the GDPR. The fundamental problem is that I think (and most people hopefully do) user privacy is an ethical good, and I don't believe (much of) copyright law is an ethical good. If you fundamentally believe copyright must be defended vigilantly Article 13 is not an unreasonable consequence at all - I just don't agree with that premise one bit.
Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too. But for Article 13, the laws are only in the interest of big corporations. I don't care about those.
There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.
Besides, there is also a cost to me: the never-ending pop-ups and acceptance dialogues, inability to access information in a straightforward manner for those that choose to block, etc.
What is the percentage of users who actively control their privacy as a result of GDPR (and still happily use the website)? What is the percentage of badly -behaving businesses who will be prosecuted?
> There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.
Indeed - the lack of this cost of business was causing (1) reckless and (2) (deeply) unethical behaviour to become rampant [0]. I think it was fair to say it was not acceptable anymore, and I think the GDPR does a good job of formalizing rules of basic common sense about personal data protection. There's really nothing in the GDPR that I can point to that is overbearing, although of course many businesses do implement unnecessarily overbearing UX on top of it.
Processing personal data should be a risk to business, and I think some basic rule of law was warranted for this risk to be clear to business.
I'm not saying there is no cost to regulation. But the cost needs to be proportional to the good it achieves and I think the GDPR does that quite well. Article 13 - in my opinion - clearly will not.
You can avoid the burden of GDPR entirely if you simply don't collect user data, and you can avoid most of it if you only collect data that you actually need.
> I think calling GDPR over-regulation is extremely suspect.
I don't. I find it an egregious example of over-regulation. I think not recognizing the obviously large scope of such regulation is extremely suspect.
> The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data
By what measure do you define "good job"?
> The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand
I admit being this kind of spoiled. But it's ridiculous to say that's the only reason. There are measured ways to go about things and to so blatantly say that this is the only reason one might view it as over-regulation (despite real reasons such as size and scope and ineffectiveness of predecessors/enforcement) destroys our ability to have real conversations about the many alternative ways to solve some of the problems we have. Such a black-and-white absolutist view is harmful.
> I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Can't speak for all, but for many, it's because they recognize the difference between what would be ideal and what would actually happen. Large anti-company (especially against companies that users prefer to use) laws have a chance to be frowned upon, despite ridiculous promises/optimism/naivete by the hopeful.
> Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too.
These are not how chilling effects work. You don't get to say "well, if they choose not to do business where a law is, they must not be able to uphold that law". There are compliance costs/risks. The amount of assumptions concerning this topic, whether assumptions that the law is good or assumptions that those disagreeing with it are of a certain ilk, need to stop. You only hurt your cause discussing things in this manner.
I'd like to point out that you're responding to me as if you assume I have no to little experience with this law and its consequences for organizations. That's not a reasonable assumption - my post is speaking from organizational experience. You're not talking to some outsider of all of this.
If you have specific problems with GDPR or that it goes too far, I'd like to know what those specific aspects are. In my view, there's some basic rules on how to deal with personal data that the GDPR codifies, and it does that surprisingly (for the EU) reasonably. It starts from simple principles of citizen rights and ethical behaviour and writes a complete rulebook on how to apply them - that's my definition of a good job.
It might be difficult for business to adapt to actually now considering processing personal data a risk. But that by itself does not make GDPR "overregulation" - that just makes it a difficult regulation change to process. I won't shed a tear about business having a difficult time going through that process - I'm incredibly happy that they are forced to consider processing personal data a risk, because it is.
Also note I specifically said "Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR" - not "Companies that are not sure they can comply with GDPR yet". There's a reasonable difference, I agree. But, yes, if you find that your business intrinsically cannot comply with GDPR or you don't want to - it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.
GDPR caused some non EU media businesses to preemptively block EU users because their primary readership is not in the EU and their primary business model is abusing their users in ways that GDPR restricts.
GDPR did not really change the media landscape in the EU. Business as usual here. Mostly companies went through a brief period where they had to consult lawyers and expensive agencies on how to cover their asses. Mostly good things have started happening after that. Some companies that were doing technically unacceptable things under pre-GDPR legislation have now grudgingly stopped doing those things.
The only thing I've noticed is even more website popups about cookies that make it hard to anything but give the go-ahead to all the cookies, but I'm not sure whether that is a result of GDPR.
That's pre-GDPR (barely), and the original idea was that users should be able to opt out of cookie tracking. But instead most web sites just added that super-annoying (particularly when it covers the whole page) pop-up giving you one option: Accept cookies or else. That was not the intention of the regulation at all. So far I've seen only a single web site that actually gave you the option to not use cookies (yes/no, not just yes).
I’ve seen a lot that give you yes/no options. Some of them tell you that you can’t use the site, sorry, when you click no, but I’ve noticed many let me continue on anyway.
Of course, I’ve seen even more that give you only an accept option... that, or as sibling commenter said yes/wilderness of options.
Yes, it's normally websites run by "good people" (some non-commercial organisation) that let you easily say yes/no. Media websites implement the dark pattern of Yes/[wilderness of options page].
This is pre-GDPR, but it feels like since GDPR there's been a real uptick in this.
I suspect that this is mostly the results of the all or nothing being the easier to implement solution. I've seen several websites that do a offer a more advanced tool where you can opt-out of some cookies (3rd party tracking mostly) but still use the main site.
now you should be free and bold to click the disagree / refuse / no-cookies button and get the experience you expect.
because if the tracking/ad/shit/any cookies are not fundamentally required for the page to show, then denying you the usage of the site is a violation of your privacy (because you can't give selective consent to specific data uses)
sure, a lot of sites throw up the ugly banner, but now you can click fuck cookies, because fuck cookies if you only want to read a fucking HTML page with pictures. they can still make stats about your visit and aggregate them, but tracking cookies are absurd. (they can filter out repeated visits by looking at IP addresses and browser fingerprinting and/or they can ask you nicely to help them get better stats, but now they have to unbundle that from the ad tracking purpose.)
>now you should be free and bold to click the disagree / refuse / no-cookies button and get the experience you expect.
This button doesn't exist in 90% of cases. Websites tend to dump you into a complex, deliberately tedious to edit options UI rather than providing a "No" button.
yeah, then those sites are not compliant at all. just yesterday on a news site there was just an accept button. it was sort of cute, that it was very stark colored floating on the bottom of the page, so it allowed the reader to view the article, but there was no refuse option. (at least for my browsing sample these are becoming a rarity.)
It’s too early to say how GDPR has impacted the landscape as no significant enforcement has happened.
Their are major complaints outstanding against Google, Facebook & the IAB that will define how online publishers can be funded once they are litigated.
I've so far only noticed the blocking on (tabloid) US news sites which when visited with a VPN are full of trackers and overflowing with ads. It didn't feel like a loss to me but would be curious to know if there are services which people feel they really needed/wanted but now can't access w/out VPN?
The Chicago Tribune is not a tabloid, and it blocks EU visitors now, nor are many TV stations that now block people from outside the US. Even a VPN doesn't always solve the problem, unfortunately. It's also very annoying that Google News still shows links from those sites even though you can't actually visit them.
I was actually searching for this very example but incorrectly remembered it as LA Times (but it was the Chicago Tribune). Not sure if this is a loss to people in the EU if the CT would go dark for them. Maybe annoying to expats but not sure if anyone here would cry over them. This might have in fact been the reason why they didn't bother with compliance in the first place (no subscribers/reader from EU)?
Instapaper was a sort of nice utility that blocked EU users after May last year. Fortunately there are alternatives, some of them arguably superior (pinboard?).
Businesses cannot afford it and no, it is not happening. Also, abusing GDPR is one thing, how about all these companies start to pay VAT and taxes on sales originated from EU.
Business currently just state they comply with GDPR, but really they don't.
All these big blanket OK consent buttons we see on landing pages have already been shown in court do not constitute informed and freely given consent. The real impact has het to come, hopefully after some stiff fines are handed.
And you are right: I also wonder about enabling large scale VAT dodging by sites like aliexpress.
I assume you'd be happy for EU businesses to reciprocate and pay US sales taxes on goods & services sold into the US?
Even if you are, I'm not actually sure that would be better for anyone involved. Seems like it would essentially stop or severely diminish online commerce between US/EU as too much hassle.
no it doesn't. facebook was always pretty good at asking for permission. it showed you that so and so app will have access to this and that. and people blindly clicked it, because they wanted the maffia wars, the mob wars, the farmville, the latest zinga shitclick time waster to one up their friends in imaginary internet point games. (I tried them too, then luckily the fad wore off.)
FB has to show who they sell data to, that's the new part basically. They will probably show a long list of random companies. It'll look a bit scary, people will get accustomed to it. (FB will find a dark pattern that minimizes the attrition due to any permission/consent step in their money machine.)
But that is the thing. The regulation is still in effect, even after they gave the permission.
The identifiable information still has to be encrypted. They still need to specify exactly where the information will go and why. And if a new company wants to access the data or even wants to use the provided Information for something new, Facebook has to ask permission again.
Once again telling the user why that company needs permission and why as well.
It's doubtful that the current blanket prompt is enough. But it remains to be seen wherever the law will be enforced and it's of course possible,that nothing will change and regulator's never act on the law
FB will have to do the aggregation themselves, and then the sell the aggregated data. no PII. and they are doing that, allowing targeting and stopped the messaging legacy APIs, now if an app wants to read your messages it has to ask for permission. (I don't even know if there is such a permission anymore.)
That said, I hope the EU courts will look at them the first time they fuck up. (And that might be right now. But so far I'm not aware of any recent FB data/privacy abuse.)
Agreed, it's a way over the top. However, I would like the EU, or the US, to tell Facebook to get their data collection and reselling under control. The GDPR should have taken care of that issue, but until someone drag Facebook to count over a GDPR violation and wins, nothing is going to change.
But it's in a website's favor to serve as many consumers as possible, won't any group that isn't willing to conform to EU standards be out competed by those that do?
If a few major sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook decide to not service EU any longer, I think it won't take long before that regulation is rolled back.
This has the potential of being a blessing in the disguise since these barriers will not hold for decentralized alternatives where there is no obvious platform operator to hold responsible.
only the centralized public trackers are "affected". and the fact that they are still around and kicking, and distributed decentralized anonymous reputation-market systems are pretty empty shows that that policing is rather weak (otherwise people would move toward the "policing resistant" networks)
Bloody hell that's rather terrifying. After GDPR I was thinking Europe would be the bastion of the internet, now it looks like it's time to decentralise the internet completely. Which is going to surely have it's own issues I'm sure.
Therein lies the problem of regulating something like the internet. It’s impossible for regulating bodies to find the perfect balance and then just stop.
I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers, especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be important for the EU to be able to vote for representatives regardless of your primary jurisdiction.
Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.
Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
I find that unlikely to believe. Yes, the de-facto working languages in Bruxelles are English and French, but chances are everyone knows both (or even English better). If you send material to MEPs of any country, they will be able to read it if they want - there are dedicated translation services, as you might imagine in an org working with dozens of different ethnicities.
Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.
In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).
Correct - this proposal is coming from the EPP, the largest party in the EU parliament. Predictably, most of their MEPs will just blindly vote for it along party lines. Language barriers are crucial in terms of their constituency universe (plus the older demographic skew). Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English and this issue is nowhere near their radars.
> Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English
That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.
Language barriers are overplayed. If they were so important then EU institutions would simply not work...
Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy.
The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).
This is the reason that all proposals to the EU are translated to the native language of every nation. As of writing this the documents are available in 24 languages.
> adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.
We already have a common language that's widely known across Europe (English), it just doesn't have the reach that the native language does.
Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
It's quite different. The UK hasn't sent police to stop the Scottish referendum and beat up voters and the EU has not sought the extradition of Nigel Farage.
I believe the poster was meaning that the UK press is insular and doesn't report on wider European issues like the Spanish press and not commenting on Catalonia or making a comparison with Scotland.
Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage.
It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
True, but Ireland is less than 5M, 13 seats in the EU parliament. They are not seen as a competition to anyone. The UK is 66M with 73 seats in the parliament, member of G7 and one of the most important economies in the EU.
Surely the case for English as a working language is now stronger. Previously it could have been seen as unfair to use one member state's language over another...
However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.
English is a second language for me and compared to many other languages it's comparatively very simple, or at least you can start to understand and speak it at very basic level incredibly quickly. The biggest issue with English is completely inconsistent and illogical pronunciation, you can have two words that have the same spelling but different meaning depending on how they are pronounced - read and read for example. But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
> But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
Yet it's the language with
- the most available teaching services
- the most available free teaching resources
- highest percent of use-cases in the world
- easiest methods of finding a training companion anywhere in the world
It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.
>English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.
German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).
There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.
I spoke German and Italian before learning English, and English didn't seem that terribly hard. Most words have the same stem as latin or germanic languages so it's easy to remember the vocabulary. The grammar isn't very complex. And there aren't special letters in the alphabet.
Only the pronounciation is complex, because things are often spoken differently than how they are written.
You basically spoke the two languages English is made of, so naturally it was easy to remember the vocabulary for you. Special letters in the alphabet is only hard when you're trying to write the words, but English spelling being mostly unrelated to pronunciation is a major source of pain for learners. Tenses are formed irregularly, much of the language is phrasal verbs which there's no way around learning, and since English is basically two languages you have double the difficulty because words only relate to their half.
On the other hand you don't need to worry about cases, gender etc with English, as it jettisoned those features. No need to memorise what gender a table is, or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.
Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.
English is indeed one of the simplest languages to learn, as is Mandarin. English, Mandarin, and Latin are the standard examples for the theory in linguistics that simplicity in a language is caused by absorbing a large number of speakers who had to learn as adults.
I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of picking up a highly tonal language like Mandarin, if only exposed to the 44 phonemes of English well into adulthood...
I don't think this will happen, but if this is actually made into a liability then this would create a rather interesting situation where a platform could be sued for blocking fair use content and miss-identified content.
I think the net result would probably be a rapid increase of the "451 Not Available For Legal Reasons" errors which have appeared post-GDPR.
That and a load of innovative start-ups simply setting up overseas instead of inside Europe, and perhaps major sites simply preventing any kind of contribution from European users.
After all, there's no A13 clause which says that if your US site allows uploads, your European one also has to?
I've already tried e-mailing the MEPs, it doesn't work. If you do get a response it goes in the lines of sorry mate, but you're wrong, here's why blah blah; our party consensus is that we're doing the right thing by voting for this controversial measure. Good luck with that.
That doesn't mean that contacting MEPs "doesn't work", you can't expect them to change their opinion immediately based on receiving one email from one of their constituents.
Use handwritten snail mail; generally the less effort a communication medium takes the less the politicians pay attention. Though with how many of them are on board you may want to start researching up on their opponents for the next election
EDIT: Intending to provide a more useful response now, here are links from the post above to the articles[1] and recitals[2] of the current negotiations. I'm seeing relevant platform liability language in the row labeled 239. While marked for continued discussion, the proposed language is concerning to me:
"Licensing agreements which are concluded by online content sharing service providers
with right holders for the acts of communication referred to in paragraph 1...,
shall cover the liability for works uploaded by the users of such online content sharing services
in line with the terms and conditions set out in the licensing agreement,
provided that such users do not act for commercial purposes."
I'd love to see a "cliff's notes" summary of what A13 means as it is right now.
Something like the "Doorstep EU" app does for Brexit-related news -- an actual, thought-out summary which links to authoritative reference material.
TBH it's not clear what it entails. Plus i m not sure which one is the latest directive.
More importantly i have never, ever heard of any local IT unions or societies being involved in the process of legislating these laws (same thing for GDPR). I don't believe this law will change things radically in europe, although i m a little worried with all this predatory lawmaking against US companies. The main issue remains that europe produces very little online (No european-superheroes memes? big whoop)
It's unclear to me what "internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of ... works uploaded by their users" really means. It presumably applies to Facebook. It presumably doesn't apply to e-mail. But if I had a social networking service that had no advertising and was only accessible to its paying users, would the law apply to it? What if postings were encrypted and could only be read by users that had requested access to them? Would the company running the service be expected to either backdoor the encryption or create bogus accounts and request access from those bogus accounts in order to monitor postings that might contain infringing content?
> Licenses that platforms take out cover uploads by their users, as long as they act non-commercially or “don’t generate significant revenues”
Am I reading correctly that when you have a forum (e.g. Discourse) which is non-commercial i.e. for an open community, that any users uploading stuff or quoting article sections are exempt from this regulation (even though the forum is hosted on Discourse servers on a paid plan)?
If huge content distribution platforms like YouTube and Facebook are not viable anymore, it might put a renewed wind in the sails of self-hosting systems. Getting the Internet back to it's distributed nature would make it more resilient.
youtube does not rely on infringing content anymore. at least, 100% of the channels i follow are by makers who try to make fair use of copyrighted stuff or using public domain of historic stuff .
> the sails of self-hosting systems
Self-hosted content is pointless if there are no watercoolers to chat about it.
So usenet is dead, right?
90%, usenet ISPs are a download server pretenting to be a mail server so they can claim safe harbour. If they are responsible for auditing their content, presumably this isn't viable anymore...
I am curious about other interpretations of the impact this law will have. Would it encourage the development of more peer-to-peer sharing networks, which lack a central space to upload?
I wish we had the kind of concerted effort that the copyright lobby is able to launch, but focused on issues that reduce the net benefit of these platform more than copyright infringement: hate speech or intentional misinformation.
The popularity of modern streaming services combined with the shortage of IP addresses and subsequent spread of carrier-grade NAT will make it a bit difficult for regular P2P networks to make a come-back. I can, however, imagine this will have result in a small boost for self-hosted content.
I can imagine someone writing a TOR-based eMule client or something along those lines but it won't be anywhere near as common as it was back in the days; ease of use has always been an important factor and today we actually do have commercial alternatives in place this time.
As I see it, the main impact will be for social networks and other sites that allow user uploads. There's an actual chance the people behind the law simply don't understand that what they're asking isn't possible, and that many politicians think we just need to solve this with blockchains and machine learning (because that's apparently how to fix everything nowadays). In the real world, however, I really see no way to comply with that law without mass-monitoring and very far-reaching automatic censorship of uploaded content.
Maybe that is the point. We need services not products, and maybe limiting the viability of traditional centralised (risk, data, prestation) products could allow a new category of distributed (risk, data,...) services to fill in the need.
Maybe not encourage, but it will increase the incentives for those to pursue other options if complying will get increasingly more expensive. Though I doubt traditional corporations will be able to take advantage of it since they will be tied by the rules to continue their advantage in the status quo.
I have a software product. People resell it on marketplaces. They make €30~50,000 per year from doing this. When I contact the marketplaces they hide behind safe harbour - yes, they suspend the user account but the same user will register the next day under a different name and keep the same practice. The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the author to the platform so abuse like this is not repeated.
> The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the author to the platform
How is the platform going to know what's legally published and what isn't? In some cases I suppose you can work with an industry, like YouTube's Content ID for music, however even with Google's resources Content ID still has severe glitches[1] (should they be legally responsible for false positives too?). Otherwise what, hire an army of mechanical turks to manually review every single thing that's uploaded?
At best I think under this kind of system you're going to get a stagnant landscape where only corporate giants with deep pockets and/or industry connections can create new innovative products. There's going to be no more upstart Instagrams, Snapchats, Soundclouds, whatever if the company can get sued into oblivion if some rando takes a pic or uploads a snippet of copyrighted material.
> I have a software product. People resell it on marketplaces.
Can you elaborate on why this is occurring in an illegal fashion? UsedSoft v Oracle [1] and Aleksandrs Ranks and Jurijs Vasiļevičs [2] seem to broadly suggest that reselling used software is legal.
This wil change nothing that is not already in effect for most sites. Try to upload a movie to Youtube, it will be removed. But only when the owner/author complains or some automatic filter is triggered.
There is also too much content to check and enforce it all.
YouTube has stated that if this passes, "EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times" – i.e. despite all the overblocking and mistakes, still too much slips through ContentID for them to take the risk of direct liability. https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/11/i-support-go...
In all likelihood, EU users will just end up using VPN-type services to bypass the blocks... rather than talking to their MEPs.
(I don't blame them to be fair, I've gone down the MEP route - they replied with a form letter to the effect of "this is party policy and I'll support it because it's for your own good, and I'm not discussing it further")
Not most sites. In fact, youtube is somewhat the exception; they developed censoring capabilities only because their size made them too big of a target to dodge legal pressure.
There are bazillions of other sites who don’t (and often can’t) police anything of what they host unless they are threatened with litigation.
yeah, youtube is already there, but with the amount of copyright system abuse there are, I personally dont want others to become like youtube in regards to copyright/legality.
What strikes me as odd is that most of these efforts are driven by the EU. Are other unions and nations not seeing the need for these things? It reminded me of GDPR.
What if an internet platform requires encryption of every upload? And other internet platform stores keys for such uploads, and decryption happens on user's computer.
It won't happen any time soon I'm afraid. I want to leave the eu because I don't believe in big centralized countries making decisions for hundreds of millions of people. I like decentralization.
Just look on all the big countries of the world, they all kind of suck. There is simply no way for ordinary citizens to have any effect on EU because of it's size alone. Almost all my countries MEPs voted no to Article 13 but it still got passed.
I don't want Germany and France to control Sweden (which is the country I'm from).
That's why more and more people feel resentment towards their states and the EU. This is a blatant corruption and this is only going to get worse. There should be an investigation of all the people involved, money traced even for distant family members and acquaintances. If any shady behaviour is discovered then the justice should be dispensed. Any politician that abuses his position to serve company interest in exchange for money should receive a capital punishment as a deterrent
what if they post from outside of the EU, or the platform is not in the EU? that would mean these laws don't apply? seems a bit useless law considering what the internet is... besides that it's prone to trolls getting companies fined. stupid idea for on the internet if you ask me.
The EU is going to regulate themeselves to the dark ages by simply creating an environment that is too antagonistic and costly to capitalism compared to other parts of the world. The regulations around capital raising for a fund in the EU is aweful. You’re better off being based in the US and simply invest in EU startups.
As much as I like GDPR, I have no idea why would this law be any good. Perhaps I'm not seeing something here - can anyone explain how this law is good for society?
Your startup idea was to host large amounts of copyrighted material for profit, without checking who had the rights to distribute that material?
In some parts of the EU that's already illegal. Not just a civil tort for which you can be sued, but an actual criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted.
> Your startup idea was to host large amounts of copyrighted material for profit, without checking who had the rights to distribute that material?
of course not don't be silly.
but so far liability was on the uploader, when the police comes knocking you gave out user data and that was it. see, for example, the jsfiddle constant issue with illegal content: https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-part-5
people miss here that any user generated content could be part of a copyright. even text if they are lyrics. there's NO user platform that's safe.
"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"
That's actually a lot of limitation. From my understanding: "organise and promote" means it is not simple hosting, and "in order to make a profit" excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons and "large amounts" most likely excludes smaller websites like fan sites, and "uploaded by their users" exclude search engines.
It is clearly meant to target a form of abuse that is much too common in the "internet as we know it". It is mostly apparent in sites like PornHub. They live by monetizing content they don't have the rights for, and they use their status as a platform as a way to stay legal. I think YouTube admitted that in the early days, they voluntarily turned a blind eye to copyright infringement as a way to grow ahead of their competition.
It is unfair to legitimate companies who do their best to make sure their content really is original or properly licensed.
And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet.
As for the potential for abuse, remember that the article isn't finished, it has yet to be completed, ratified, and tried. Public debate is important and we shall not let everything pass, but IMHO, the spirit is good.