European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

The EU is worried about publishers both big and small. Currently, investing half a year's worth of a journalist's work into investigations is a rather bad business decision, because everyone can freely reuse the facts you uncovered: spend a year finding corruption, write it up in a day, 10 minutes later it's on AP.

Ther 'inalienable' is to ensure you're not pressured into giving those rights away by a stronger actor such as Google. The principle is the same that makes it impossible for you to agree to buy something new without warranty.

Your idea also doesn't make much sense because the current crisis of journalism has hit smaller publishers hardest. The New York Times will survive. The Bodunken Tribune is probably long dead already. And the major players for centralization are obviously Google and Facebook, the two largest targets of this legislation.

All this DOES NOT mean I believe this proposal to be a good idea! I think it's too much beaurocracy for too little effect, plus probably unintended consequences.

But it's hard to completely disregard the true motivation and ascribe malice.

Yes, but to your question regarding A/V standards, that works both ways. While past performance often isn't a great predictor, human biological specs are a decent predictor for the near future. If we take 8k as the current bleeding edge (given actual beyond-the-lab 8k screens exist, albeit at horrendous bleeding edge pricing), we're somewhere around one more doubling (quadrupling of pixels) away from the point where the number of image elements will literally exceed the number of retina in a human eye. Now yeah, the human eye jitters around a fair amount, and maybe there'd be some value in peripheral vision coverage too in theory, but even taking all of that into consideration to be very conservative we're still rapidly approaching the point where our display tech can exceed the limits of human visual acuity, at which point it's reasonable to predict that we will in fact be "done" when it comes to A/V standards (post-human seems farther away then 2030). And even that is getting into heavily diminishing returns territory.

It really does make for something interesting to think about, similar to that of audio where we've already been "done" for a long time now. We've lived in an era where a significant amount of innovation and money flowing around and such came out of a lot of work to ever more closely match our synthetic light outputs to the input capabilities of our vision systems. But that's not a forever thing, our vision system is such a powerful part of our senses that it's been a very hard target, but there is in fact a hard physical limit there. When it's reached, and there will be no more video format changes ever again, and no more screen changes ever again, no more chances to sell "remastered" and "updated" versions of older visual products, etc., it may make for some real changes in the industry.

And to GP's point, the theoretical limits of information storage in matter do seem to be a lot farther beyond the theoretical end of information requirements necessary to match a human's AV. Optimistically for all parties though, the music scene seems to have done alright through that transition so far, on both the production/industry and consumer side (where we enjoy near universal DRM free high quality competition). Granted, that was after a lot of very ugly thrashing...

How will this effect google or facebook at all?

Anyone with a blog looking to quote a news outlet and provide commentary is now mandatorily taxed? How do you NOT see this as bad? What good can come of it at all?

Google and Facebook show titles and quotes of linked articles. This legislation is specifically aimed at them. Noncommercial actors (bloggers etc) are supposed to be exempt.

> How do you NOT see this as bad?

It is extremely frustrating how people on HN apparently have no ability to acknowledge a valid argument for a position they oppose. Read the last two paragraphs of my post again. It clearly states, in rule-braking all-caps even, that I do not support this legislation.

> What good can come of it at all?

It will shift (as you note) money from those reprinting news to those producing original content. The former is cheap, commoditized, and in no danger. The latter is fundamental for a functioning democracy.