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European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

bbc.com

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Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#151
post #107

As a EU citizen I have always been (and still am) a strong advocate for the European Union. I think the founding of the European Union was one of the greatest things that could ever happen to European citizens. I full heartedly believe this institution played a major role in retaining the piece after World War 2. The concept of open borders in (most of) Europe is something I would never want to miss. But seeing the l…

> I full heartedly believe this institution played a major role in retaining the piece after World War 2

I think you are getting the UN/NATO and EU confused, friend.

The rest of your post is spot on.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#152
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second it's hard not to notice that much of what the EU does is try to hurt US tech companies These are European laws designed to regulate industry inside the EU. If an American company decides to do business in the EU they're subject to the same rules as any business already operating inside the EU. So claiming this is designed to hurt US tech companies is quite a reach. If you feel American tech companies are bei…

That's a dishonest argument, yeah these laws theoretically apply to everyone but they were designed specifically for and disportionately affect US companies. As for the "gaming the system" argument that doesn't comport with really either since these laws were introduced after the fact.

They disproportionally affect US companies because US companies happen to make up the majority of this market of news-aggregators that have no own content but make money off of the content of media companies.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's just not link, it's show a snippet (and potentially a title) (or you can link and replace every snippet with 'censored by the EU' or something - might be a good strategy for raising awareness)

Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site? A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.

This isn't true if you realize what sort of "snippets" they are trying to deal with. Google has been scraping content for Knowledge Graph, and offering up "the answers" so that users don't click through any links. So Google rips off other companies' content, and has basically said "if you don't like it, feel free to block Google with robots.txt and get delisted from search".

So Google has left the option that sites either give Google their content for free, and go out of business, or get delisted from search entirely, and go out of business.

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... is a pretty good example of why this is happening.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#154

This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate. So I guess this is bad. --goes and reads article-- > Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved. What the fucking FUCK? Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the wor…

> Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web?

It's absolute madness.

Some people say that you can't solve political problems with technology but at this point it seems to me that politicians are ruining the web and there is no stopping them by political means. So it will have to be a technological solution. We need strong anonymization and strong decentralization to become the default.

The rules that are being put in place here are very dangerous to democracy. It limits the dissemination of information. You don't need to believe that there is any "evil" intent (I don't think there is, I think it's just greed on the part of businesses and lack of understanding on the part of the politicians) to see that once these limitations come into effect it becomes easier to lie to people and to control them.

We are setting ourselves up for fascist governments to be able to rise and it seems that most people don't even care :(

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#156
post #136
post #107

As a EU citizen I have always been (and still am) a strong advocate for the European Union. I think the founding of the European Union was one of the greatest things that could ever happen to European citizens. I full heartedly believe this institution played a major role in retaining the piece after World War 2. The concept of open borders in (most of) Europe is something I would never want to miss. But seeing the l…

I'm sorry but this is just not a credible story. The current day EU simply did not exist for most of Post-WW, so it can absolutely not have been a reason why there was no war. I am in favor of things like free movement of goods and services. I also in favor working together on things like European Space Agency. However these sudo-democratic want-be centralized state is totally against the history of European has alre…

>However these sudo-democratic want-be centralized state is totally against the history of European has already caused a endless serious of disaster and mismanagement.

How is the EU particularly undemocratic? I'm Austrian and most of the European branches map relatively well to our own federal structure. (Nationalrat -> European parliament, Government -> Commission, Bundesrat -> Council(although that one has more power))

The reason for stupid laws like this one is that conservative parties are currently dominating the European Parliament and national governments, so a direct result of people voting.

And I don't see how being in Switzerland will save you from any of this since this law will almost certainly also apply to Switzerland if it comes into effect. Only difference being that you don't have any say on the matter.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#157
So, saying this goes into effect, what are the real consequences going to be? If I'm hosting outside the EU, do I have to deal with this Article 13 nonsense?

It's a little funny, we just went through a cycle where people were moving their datacenters off of US territory because of NSA revelations, often to Europe. Are we going to see a backswing now, as EU regulations get more and more onerous (not to mention it keeps coming out that everyone and their brother was doing the same tapping as the NSA did...)?

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#158

Honestly, I think it might be better if these old news companies die off, and clear space for a newer generation that understands the internet better. We have 20 years years of anecdata now. The old news publishers will never make it online. They see their financials problems as being cause by a moral failing in society: " People do not value quality, and won't pay for it " or somesuch. They see the solutions as lega…

>Honestly, I think it might be better if these old news companies die off, and clear space for a newer generation that understands the internet better. We have 20 years years of anecdata now.

The internet isn't some hip new technology only the young people understand. You act as if old media companies must still use rotary phones and manual typewriters, but these companies have changed with the decades and have adapted to the internet like everyone else. They understand the internet perfectly well, they just disagree with you about how they should use it.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#159

If I may play the devil's advocate for a moment here, isn't this a boon for decentralizing media? If third-party publishers like YouTube are crippled, perhaps there's more room for self-hosting your content, enabling you to build your brand on your own terms rather than YouTube's? Perhaps it's time to stop outsourcing the publication of our content to third-parties and host it ourselves, especially now that granularl…

> perhaps there's more room for self-hosting your content

You still need to drive traffic to your content. That's the entire point of places like YouTube: discovery. The fact they host and process your video content as well just makes it that much easier for users. Hosting it yourself won't get you any "eyeballs", so I think you're confusing two different things.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#160

So in the case of this link does that mean that HN would have to pay the BBC or filter the link out?

Yes. The legislation is a direct attack on sites like HN and Reddit that have no content of their own but get all the traffic (and ad money, if HN had ads).
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