Live data from Hacker News

EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

theverge.com

481–490 of 1001 posts

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#481
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likes of YouTube will be affected the least. They already have aggressive copyright enforcement measures in place, and they can afford to do that. Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.

Yes, the Googles and Facebooks of the future will be affected the most. This is consolidation of power, finally locking down the Free Internet just as we've done with every other industry. Stripping the power to change from the small. And what are we doing about it?

> And what are we doing about it?

Make our own content and host it ourselves?

This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services. If everyone self-hosted and was accountable for their own content there would be no scope for such legislation. All HN would hold would be linked-lists of URLs, no actual comment content.

Imagine a decentralised, federated HN where each comment originated from its owner's site.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#482
post #343

Oh yeah good luck trying to stop library genesis/scihub/PirateBay with that. Meanwhile everyone else doing business legally will have to suffer while the perpetrators go free. We already have lots of tools to block user access from the EU, time to upgrade them! The EU fail to understand that the internet is inherently free and you can’t regulate it well (unless you’re a dictatorship in China, but you have bigger issu…

This is the real bummer, IMO. It's not even like they're reaching the sites that truly, genuinely don't give a fuck about copyright. The big sites have long implemented all of this, anyway. It's basically just more bureaucracy if you're running a start-up or mid-sized company and want to do things by the book. Something to worry about, something to fear. I genuinely wonder if copyright holders will make a single cent…

> I genuinely wonder if copyright holders will make a single cent off this.

What’s to wonder about? Of course they won’t.

At best nothing will change. At worst people start removing links and contents driving them traffic in fear of link-taxes and fines. Not to mention large-scale exclusion/filtering for EU users and content platforms.

They are almost certainly guaranteed loss.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This continent is a mess in terms of IT, with a few exceptions (London, Berlin, Dublin, some spots in Eastern Europe). So... pretty much like the US (with a few exceptions like Silicon Valley or Austin, Tx)?

I honestly don't understand why people keep comparing the culture of American cities and states to European ones. America is one giant country - the EU isn't. The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin. Not every city in America is San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin, but neither one state nor one city is as technologically dysfunction…

> The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin.

What about the cultural differences between SF (or Detroit, Seattle, any other big city) with small town America?

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#484
post #460

A comment from someone who has actually read the article: https://np.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/9ely8y/why_the_w... For example: ...the EFF argue that the idea of what constitutes a link is not fully defined. I'm not sure what they're talking about. Recitals 31-36 set out the concepts in article 11, fairly clearly. They make it clear that what is being protected is substantial or harmful copying of significant…

The article itself reference the acts of linking and hyperlinking without any words about "significant portions of the text". I would like to see some support to the claim that "what is being protected is substantial or harmful copying of significant portions of the text". In particular, the phrase "This protection does not extend to acts of hyperlinking which do not constitute communication to the public." It is all…

I assume it means linking on your intranet is not prohibited.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas. YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability. They might be able to automate, but it depends on the jurisdiction. For example, the US has fair use laws. A person may copy a segment of a copyrighted work to comment on it. There are territories in the EU where they can't. How does YouTube filter this? If the ne…

> This can have a chilling affect on content creation It in no way prevents anyone from creating content and publishing it on their own website. You make it sound like the youtubes of this world are necessary for content creation.

You can sell your farm fresh strawberries in the backwoods of Alabama, doesn't mean you'll get any traffic that'll grow your business/platform/identity.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but wouldn't cutting 500 million of the wealthiest customers from your solution have a pretty significant business impact?

> Yeah, but wouldn't cutting 500 million of the wealthiest customers from your solution have a pretty significant business impact? It seems likely that large internet businesses will probably pay to comply with GDPR. Many small businesses, whose customers are often mostly regional anyhow, may decide that it's just not worth the cost of compliance.

Complying with the GDPR is not really a cost thing, unless you count loss of revenue from not squeezing everything you can out of user data.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#487
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's looking more and more like your money isn't worth the compliance cost to companies to obtain your money.

Not that I agree with this copyright directive, it's horrible and I intend to find out which of my representatives supported it such that I can do something about it. But the EU, as a whole, is the world's biggest market and it is a common market in spite of legal and cultural differences between countries. So that's pretty naive. And if companies think the "compliance cost" is too big, that's fine, it means they are…

That's very feasible actually. If someone think YouTube is indispensable, China proved it wrong.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#488

Copyright is a contract between two groups where a copyright holder dictates the terms under which their material may be used or duplicated. If the receiving party to that material violates those terms (say they've received a movie screener for an unreleased film and leaked it), they are in violation of that contract and should pay the fees dictated in their contract. To argue that all parties everywhere should be fo…

>To argue that all parties everywhere should be forced subsidize the enforcement and policing of that contract is outrageous, economically unsound, and violates liberty.

And if the contract is violated and the violator taken to court and the court rules against them and they refuse to pay restitution? Without the potential of government violence brought to bear, there is no point in contracts in the first place (except in the general sense of an agreement that includes 'go against me and I won't associate with you again'). But, however, if there is no government violence to be rendered applicable in any case, that does open the opportunity for the violated to employ violence directly. However, it also puts each individual in charge of insuring themselves against appropriation of their own property by means of said violence. So, at a minimum, such a position wants to establish the collective garnishment of funding for 'police services' to protect such rights, yet this is fundamentally in favor of those who have a greater quantity of property to protect, as the owners of such will (as history shows) that they should be required to reimburse no more than any other member of the collective, and if they do, then they are entitled to greater service, leading, again, to the same asymmetrical form of society, where all are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

#489
This is wrong on more levels than it seems from the first glance:

1) I've witnessed creeping internet censorship starting just like this: first it's something as innocuous as "let's protect creators" or "let's protect children from harmful content", then 6 years later you can't criticize the government. They've just created a legal framework for massive automated censorship, and also Overton window was moved. I expect this to happen as soon as this law is backed up with the technical means.

2) People in power are uncomfortable with the current state of the internet, that is a true p2p platform for communication. Can't have that! We just got moved one step closer towards their vision of the Internet, that is nothing more than TV + storefront.

Post reply on HN