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European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

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Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#61

Post by tynpeddler »

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…

Your entire position revolves around shackling google to serve the political interests of Brussels, to the point where Brussels wants to mandate a business model to the very people they claim to be helping. It's even weirder because Google is not a competitor to the newspapers, so going after them is nonsensical. It's not a compelling position and it brings to mind the old fable of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#62

Post by jochung »

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…

Democracy is in danger because publishers, large and small, lack the discipline and expertise to produce objective, quality reporting, and give a voice to people with something interesting to say.

Nobody forced them to chase clickbait or spend their days sourcing stories from Twitter and Tumblr. That's all on them.

And before you think that's an exaggeration, I'm talking about one of my (European) country's major national papers whose daily front page now consists of breathless American political drama, hashtags and gender politics. It's ridiculous, the children are running the show, the writing is atrocious, and their world view is about as sophisticated as a first year pol-sci major who's never held a real job.

Get those people to shut up and we'll be far better off. I look forward to their tears. If their content was worth it, they wouldn't be struggling.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#63

Post by paxys »

dbasedweeb wrote: post #59
balfirevic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is enforced no matter where in the world you are, as long as your site is accessible to EU citizens. And you will be surprised by how much jurisdiction European courts can have. A monetary judgement can be collected from any American company via UFMJRA, for example (http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Foreign%20M...).

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#64

Post by paxys »

codazoda wrote: post #6

The news industry is already in trouble. This seems like it could backfire in a way that news services might automatically be de-listed from many services and simply lose ALL of their traffic. Seems like it's meant to save them but could sink them by accident.

This has been done in the past, and publishers always cave after seeing a massive drop in traffic. This new law makes it so that they can't allow Google to use their snippets for free even if they wanted to.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#65

Post by Tomte »

briandear wrote: post #47
IAmEveryone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith The same EU that regulated the shape of cucumbers? They regulated shapes of bananas. The EU also launched a kettle and toaster crackdown after the Brexit vote. [1] -- but hid those plans until after the vote. This is also the EU that hid plans to ban high powered kettles and toasters until after the Brexit vote so they wouldn't fuel the Leave campaign…

Ah, the old banana myth. How the EU forced banana producers to only produce or sell bananas with the right curvature.

Only... that‘s not true. The EU defined quality classes for all kinds of products. And in the case of bananas these included curvature.

Producers could still sell whatever curved bananas they liked. At whatever price they liked. They just couldn‘t claim it conformed to this specific quality class.

Because free trade includes regulations like that. Traders want to establish a baseline what‘s acceptable to most of them and not specify every product detail in every shipment.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#66

Post by dbasedweeb »

paxys wrote: post #63
dbasedweeb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is enforced no matter where in the world you are, as long as your site is accessible to EU citizens. And you will be surprised by how much jurisdiction European courts can have. A monetary judgement can be collected from any American company via UFMJRA, for example ( http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Foreign%20M... ).

We’re not talking about a company, we’re talking about a fetish forum without a scrap of money changing hands. Who is enforcing GDPR there exactly? EU paratroopers? Not to mention that most people don’t live in the EU or America, so again, who’s enforcing this on our hypothetical non-business?

It’s really hardcore levels of bullshit being employed in this thread to make a big scary mountain out of a molehill.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#67

Post by TeMPOraL »

ubernostrum wrote: post #38
IAmEveryone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If a newspaper in a town of 1,000 people was devoting half a year of a reporter's work to a single investigation, that newspaper was already going to fail as a business. Even if every link to the eventual story required the linker to pay €100, because in that case people would just refuse to link. There is nothing good about link taxes. And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Meanwhil…

> Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying on rich people who don't mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos and the Washington Post), and that we're trending back that way. Anyone who can't find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what.

I'm not sure it can (or should) be any other way. If you try to run journalism as a for-profit business, you end up with ads and clickbait. Good journalism is like medicine - very important, and very unable to bring in profit.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

Tomte wrote: post #65
briandear wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith The same EU that regulated the shape of cucumbers? They regulated shapes of bananas. The EU also launched a kettle and toaster crackdown after the Brexit vote. [1] -- but hid those plans until after the vote. This is also the EU that hid plans to ban high powered kettles and toasters until after the Brexit vote so they wouldn't fuel the Leave campaign…

Ah, the old banana myth. How the EU forced banana producers to only produce or sell bananas with the right curvature. Only... that‘s not true. The EU defined quality classes for all kinds of products. And in the case of bananas these included curvature. Producers could still sell whatever curved bananas they liked. At whatever price they liked. They just couldn‘t claim it conformed to this specific quality class. Bec…

Yup. The usual bullshit spun by British tabloids, that somehow then gets reprinted as facts on continental Europe. There were plenty of other similar cases regarding classification and quality classes of seafood, water, juices, etc.

People seem to be so desperate to believe the government is this big, incompetent force of evil that they'll uncritically accept any story that confirms that belief.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

nannePOPI wrote: post #25
ggm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You must have a really short memory to say that "regulators are not enemies". Just look at any history book, tell me what you find. Since English is not my first language, it tires me to write in it, so I'll give a little example that will destroy the "GDPR protects privacy" once and for all. If I make a website with a comment system, or maybe a forum, I need to reveal to the world my identity otherwise the EU will g…

> You must have a really short memory to say that "regulators are not enemies". Just look at any history book, tell me what you find.

A bumpy ride from early agriculture, where people died of sickness and war all the time, to the relatively stable modern era of great wonders we all take for granted - hot water, long-lasting food of greater variety than even kings had just a hundred years ago, of powerful medicine and safe surgeries, of wash machines and air travel and the Internet.

All of that built on accumulation of knowledge and stabilization of societies, in which regulators always played a crucial role.

The history books do not paint the picture that "regulators are enemies". You just have to focus less on kings and wars, and more on how a society looked and lived in any given era, and why.

Re: European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

destructaball wrote: post #27
mattsfrey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cookie regs seem largely a moot effort given the pervasiveness of cookie usage, GDPR though I think is actually a generally good idea. The "nightmare scenario" that certain articles have detailed might be overburdening for companies, but in general having the right to be forgotten and know how your data is being distributed are large advancements in personal data rights. This new reg to me is just bewildering how…

On something of a tangent I suspect that large parts of the GDPR will be comparably moot. Many companies including Twillo and Delta have rolled out their tracking controls behind feature flags. If you decide that you'd rather not be tracked they make you stare at a spinner for ~100 seconds while your privacy settings are "being applied". Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.

> Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.

To some extent, this risks running afoul of GDPR and getting hit with a big fine. But no doubt companies will try to find the sweet spot of being as annoying as possible while still being technically compliant.

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