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European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

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Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#51

Post by briandear »

ggm wrote: post #7
nannePOPI wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

GDPR is not about stopping the spread of free information. its about personal data. You are completely mis-characterising the nature of the GDPR legislation. Regulators are not enemies. Regulators are the enemies of established companies, and operate in favour of civil society as civil servants: they are subject to oversight, and are imposed to create oversight over entities who are not equilibriating in favour of wi…

> operate in favour of civil society as civil servants: they are subject to oversight..

Subject to oversight? Have you EVER heard of a French civil servant being fired? It's as rare as a baseball game in Paris.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#52

Post by mattsfrey »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #39
mattsfrey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I look at it is it will constrain the ability to deliver news to those who can afford to produce original content, which will be larger outlets with more resources. This allows a vastly smaller group to control the narrative. 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 go…

> How will this effect google or facebook 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 o…

Facebook _users_ do. I highly doubt they are going to try and enforce this on google search results, that would be absurd, and if so it will just hurt the publishers for not getting hits. Where is it detailed that this is aimed at google/fb ?

Despite your condescending rebuttal I actually am disagreeing with your position. I don't think this is good for democracy in that having the cash to produce original content imposes no responsibility and this legislation would stifle third party analysis and criticism of their reporting. Making these arguments and then adding a "but yeah in general I'm not in favor" doesn't shield you from criticism.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#53

Post by whatshisface »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #31
mattsfrey wrote: post #2

"The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the "link tax" proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss's latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to." "...tha…

That's a strange interpretation, and I say it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith. 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 o…

Appearing 10 minutes later on AP would have nothing to do with the link tax, as AP would be able to paraphrase your results. In fact, it's currently Google that favors the smaller investigator (over what the situation would be without Google): the smaller page would get a pagerank boost from all of the very important websites linking to it. Without Google, AP would have traffic from people who check it manually and nobody else would get anything. Being the first to publish comes with a small advantage in Google's world and no advantage outside.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#54

Post by syrrim »

Cyph0n wrote: post #32
vatueil wrote: post #22

There was a previous discussion based on a similar article from Creative Commons a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16810999 c3o (Christopher Clay), who works in the EU Parliament according to his profile, posted several informative comments including one explaining the backstory behind the proposed legislation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16812099 > The back story of the law may shed so…

This dude seems to think that it's a dick measuring contest, when it reality it boils down to a cost-benefit analysis. If Google thinks it will lose money, it will shut down the service.

It is a dick measuring contest to a degree. Google is large enough to be effectively a monopoly, and so can think of these laws as being targeted at them. The way they respond to these laws affects the way other nations set up their own laws. Even if they lost money in spain by closing there, they would close anyways if they thought they would gain across the globe.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#55

Post by balfirevic »

GW150914 wrote: post #42
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you won’t be impacted, but your protection is via selective enforcement. You won’t be in compliance with the law, but the government will lack the resources or determination to punish you. Until that changes. This is fundamentally dangerous. Once we are all lawbreakers all the time, it creates a powerful tool for oppression and using the law to harass and silence political opponents.

It’s not that slippery slopes don’t exist, but when the only argument against something is the supposed harm that it may lead to via a slippery slope, it’s suspicious and unconvincing. This thread is full of people saying that this is a step on the road to tyranny, and may end there, that’s true, but the arguments don’t seem to really support the claims. If this really matters to you, and you care about doing more th…

This is not a slippery slope argument. Situation where the only thing protecting you from unreasonable law is selective enforcement is already bad, no further sliding down the slope needed.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#56

Post by stickfigure »

toyg wrote: post #36
Cyph0n wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dude seems to think that it's a dick measuring contest, when it reality it boils down to a cost-benefit analysis. If Google thinks it will lose money, it will shut down the service.

This was mentioned in the other thread as well - and it's a scenario that publishers would love, as it puts them back in control of "news portals".

Except that it won't. All the news portals/aggregators will simply move out of the EU.

And then the EU can try to escalate by blocking non-EU news sites. Boy is that going to be an interesting day.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#57

Post by greggman »

I'm guessing this is an unpopular idea but is it possible we just don't need as many journalists? I 100% Agree that journalism is important but before the internet, for the most post, every news paper needed people to cover every story they wanted to run. Even if they took a story from the AP or Ruters they still needed someone to dig that up. Now, there is no reason why the AP and Rutere can't just publish their content themselves to the entire world. Similaly a local newspaper doesn't need to pay someone to cover the world news. We don't need every major news paper from every country to have reporters in every other country as they can just use someone else's reporting.

I'm guessing your first thought to that is we need multiple voices and points of view and I don't disagree. I'm just pointing out that in 1975 you probably had 2-5 reporters from Sweden in NYC, 5-15 from Germany, 5-15 from France, 4-7 from Italy, 2-3 from Spain, 5-15 from the UK, 3-4 from Ireland etc etc. Add up all the major countries and their might have been 400+ NYC foreign correspondents. Do we need all 400 or has the internet made it so we only need 10-20? Apply that concept everywhere, even to local papers and it seems like the biggest hit to journalism isn't Google, it's the internet itself. Just like a few wheat harvesting machine replace hundreds of workers the world has changed to one where far less journalists can do the work of what used to take many more?

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#58

Post by nitwit005 »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #31
mattsfrey wrote: post #2

"The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the "link tax" proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss's latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to." "...tha…

That's a strange interpretation, and I say it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith. 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 o…

> spend a year finding corruption, write it up in a day, 10 minutes later it's on AP.

That's not exactly an internet related phenomenon.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#59

Post by dbasedweeb »

balfirevic wrote: post #55
GW150914 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that slippery slopes don’t exist, but when the only argument against something is the supposed harm that it may lead to via a slippery slope, it’s suspicious and unconvincing. This thread is full of people saying that this is a step on the road to tyranny, and may end there, that’s true, but the arguments don’t seem to really support the claims. If this really matters to you, and you care about doing more th…

This is not a slippery slope argument. Situation where the only thing protecting you from unreasonable law is selective enforcement is already bad, no further sliding down the slope needed.

Selective enforcement if you’re in the EU, otherwise who is enforcing it? For the billions of us not in the EU, these arguments are weak as hell.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#60

Post by dbasedweeb »

xoa wrote: post #33
dbasedweeb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s a huge “if” and assumes that by 2030 the A/V standard won’t grow as well? I hope you’re right, but past performed is not a guarantee of future gains.

> but past performed is not a guarantee of future gains 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 dou…

You’re thinking in terms of one big screen, but by 2030 maybe it’s VR that rules the day? What does 16K per eyeball look like? How about a movie with a dozen perspectives in the file? There are loads of foreseeable ways to blow up file sizes in a dozen years.
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