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Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

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Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#61

Post by pjc50 »

doh wrote: post #56
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be “balancing”? The entire premise of copiright is just wrong to begin with. Here we have this perfectly anti-rival public good produced. But of course anti-rival just doesn’t work that well with free market economics, you know with the externalities and all. And since we just can’t imagine any other form of work allocation schemes than the free market, what to do?! Naturally the most obvious thing,…

I'm sorry but I don't think I follow. You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? I do believe that correct attribution and fair compensation is vital to get quality content. These proposals are not the answer though.

People do deserve to be paid for their work, but at what "deadweight" cost to the rest of us?

Rights collection these days works by media suppression: almost all the effort is put into preventing people from getting it, destroying copies etc. Given free reign they would put a lock on every technological system to ensure prices stay high and media inconvenient.

Netflix and Spotify (and I think iTunes etc) only exist because piracy drove the media companies to negotiate.

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#62

Post by andybak »

openbasic wrote: post #39
suckerburg wrote: post #35

EU builds a good reputation after setting a good standard with GDPR, some politicians started talking about copying it which made me happy. Now I'm scared again wondering what would happen if they go through with this and politicians everywhere start copying it.

Good reputation for what? Government interference in the free web? GDPR was just the first step. Open your eyes.

Ah, that peculiarly American sentiment where the word "government" is always followed by "interference" and never by "protection" or similar.

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#63

Post by strken »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #57
nnash wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should a car company from China have to comply to US safety regulations when selling cars to US citizens? In your example, the car company is implicitly selling to a foreign country. When it comes to software/websites, a user from a foreign country is incidentally served rather than implicitly.

Which part of the ip is hard to decode? If you don't like how a country's laws are shaped, then stop selling there. You can't have your pie and eat it too. Either you obey the market laws and sell or you don't. If someone is using a VPN to get around your geo ban, then I think that's the user's implicit choice.

IP addresses aren't country codes, in the same way that phone numbers aren't permanent unique identifiers. If you block IP ranges, you'll let some European users through, and block some non-European users.

Is "at least we tried"-style blocking good enough?

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#64

Post by int_19h »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #57
nnash wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should a car company from China have to comply to US safety regulations when selling cars to US citizens? In your example, the car company is implicitly selling to a foreign country. When it comes to software/websites, a user from a foreign country is incidentally served rather than implicitly.

Which part of the ip is hard to decode? If you don't like how a country's laws are shaped, then stop selling there. You can't have your pie and eat it too. Either you obey the market laws and sell or you don't. If someone is using a VPN to get around your geo ban, then I think that's the user's implicit choice.

Why should the onus of blocking content in some faraway country be on the company publishing it? If you don't want your country's citizens to have access to something, well then, time for a Great Firewall.

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#65

Post by davemp »

petre wrote: post #40
mlinksva wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing ads seems like a better intervention than what is proposed.

But ads are taxed since ad based revenue is subject to tax.

OP is clearly talking about a targeted tax to lower profit margins on ads in order to incentivize developing other monetization schemes.

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#66

Post by doh »

pjc50 wrote: post #61
doh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I don't think I follow. You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? I do believe that correct attribution and fair compensation is vital to get quality content. These proposals are not the answer though.

People do deserve to be paid for their work, but at what "deadweight" cost to the rest of us? Rights collection these days works by media suppression: almost all the effort is put into preventing people from getting it, destroying copies etc. Given free reign they would put a lock on every technological system to ensure prices stay high and media inconvenient. Netflix and Spotify (and I think iTunes etc) only exist b…

I do agree with your assessment (although it's more complicated than that).

Historically, rights holders (RH) used to have the upper hand, then the Internet came and took their reign down while giving upper hand to DSPs. Now RHs are trying to tip the scale back where it was.

Neither is a good situation. I definitely do not know what the right solution is, but nor the status quo nor the proposal is any good.

My radical view on this is to try to come up with some kind of compulsory license similar to the one that exists in music in US [0] for all content. The rates could be set up by panel of judges (similarly to US) or put in place arbitrary at lets say 50%.

This way, if creator produces content and decides to distribute it, she can't prevent a platform (DSP) from distributing it, however DSP can't avoid a payment.

Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I'm not seeing many ways out of this mess.

[0] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-licen...

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#67

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

doh wrote: post #56
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be “balancing”? The entire premise of copiright is just wrong to begin with. Here we have this perfectly anti-rival public good produced. But of course anti-rival just doesn’t work that well with free market economics, you know with the externalities and all. And since we just can’t imagine any other form of work allocation schemes than the free market, what to do?! Naturally the most obvious thing,…

I'm sorry but I don't think I follow. You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? I do believe that correct attribution and fair compensation is vital to get quality content. These proposals are not the answer though.

No. I disagree with the notion that copyright is a desirable approach to any problem in this discussion (the economics of anti-rival goods and its producing)

But for the record I don’t believe there is a good answer to your question that spans the entire domain of activities currently covered by copyright. And equally copyright doesn’t have much of role in generating revenue for most of it.

I should add that I also believe there is a large domain of desirable activities outside content creation that suffers in similar ways from our desire to fit everything into our current economic models.

As an illustration, when invited to dinner you might bring a bottle of wine, which is usually appreciated. Yet if you instead brought money of an equal amount as the cost of the bottle the host would probably be offended, and increasing the amount of money would probably do little to alleviate that.

There’s a quality in the effort of buying a bottle of wine here that doesnt fit into a purely economic model of the work performed. Yet you still need time and money to perform it, so limited resources do play a role.

In a similar vein there are lots of activities that requires time and money. Raising a child could be an example. Where the cost is easy to fit into the model, but the value and motivations are qualitively outside the realm of economics.

I think we simply need to recognize that these values are some times public goods, and the costs needs to be covered by other means than direct free market transactions.

Personally I believe that a basic income could be a part of this discussion.

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#68

Post by doh »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #67
doh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I don't think I follow. You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? I do believe that correct attribution and fair compensation is vital to get quality content. These proposals are not the answer though.

No. I disagree with the notion that copyright is a desirable approach to any problem in this discussion (the economics of anti-rival goods and its producing) But for the record I don’t believe there is a good answer to your question that spans the entire domain of activities currently covered by copyright. And equally copyright doesn’t have much of role in generating revenue for most of it. I should add that I also b…

Understood. I don't right answer either. The best I ever came up with I described here [0] but I still may be off significantly. In any way, we do have to find solution and fairly quickly, or we will get stuck with Article 11/13 and similar.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#69

Post by leephillips »

ghaff wrote: post #50
leephillips wrote: post #4

Wikipedia is contributing to the slow death of what could have been, and almost was, a web of independent pages maintained by individuals and groups. I have had a recurring experience of skimming a Wikipedia article, only to get the feeling that the text is familiar - then tracking it down to the book or article that it was lifted from, without attribution. If a "vibrant free web" means routine copyright theft commit…

There's actually an, at least arguable, point in your first sentence before you get to the copyright infringement. And there's a whole round-robin of content (or just "facts") being lifted from Wikipedia to put on other sites and from other sites to be put on Wikipedia that's often hard to sort out. There is a broader point that centralization of content being found by search engines isn't ideal--even if Wikipedia we…

You're right twice. But when I see things on Wikipedia lifted from textbooks published before there was Wikipedia it's not hard to sort out.

As to your second point, I think the combined effect of Wikipedia and Google's popularity-based search ranking is hurting the web. It's not a conspiracy, just a result of the system.

Re: Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibrant free web’

#70

Post by friedman23 »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #58
friedman23 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they want revenue from EU citizens? First of all not all websites make money. Secondly, monetizing the EU is a step that usually occurs very late into the life of a startup. Startups almost always monetize the US first. So if you are a company that owns a website that doesn't make money from the EU and the EU comes up with regulations that adds thousands of dollars in costs and hundreds of thousands of doll…

>Secondly, monetizing the EU is a step that usually occurs very late into the life of a startup. Startups almost always monetize the US first. It's not a matter of what the founder/CEO of a startup chooses here. I will often open links from e.g. New York Times or other US news sites because something happened in New York or there's an interesting opinion piece that I want to read. These sites are profiting from my cl…

> It's not a matter of what the founder/CEO of a startup chooses here. I will often open links from e.g. New York Times or other US news sites because something happened in New York or there's an interesting opinion piece that I want to read. These sites are profiting from my clicks so they have to obey the EU laws

Ok, I don't think you understand how ads work. Your clicks don't make a website money if they are not selling ads in your country. The New York Times is not a startup so your point is irrelevant.

edit: if you are not aware that different countries have different ads markets your probably shouldn't have an opinion on GDPR.

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