European Parliament approves copyright reform • Hacker News Board

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#551

Post by nnq » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

i6tjvo wrote: post #483

zaarn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU Elections are coming up. Vote for the pirate faction in your country or check who voted what and only vote for those parties that voted against A13 or if there are none, parties that are vocal against A13. Same goes for your countries own election cycle.

Let's be honest here, I have much bigger fish to fry. I like a free Internet, but it's low on my list of concerns, way below affordable housing, much stricter control of my country's borders, better support for entrepreneurs, more security and better police, etc. I'm not going to vote for a "pirate party" as if that was the most important thing in my life.

...then you're free to enjoy the "advantages" of "stricter borders" together with messed up copy right laws that will stop you from creating and sharing on open platform websites, you deserve them both :)

Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia: if you think anything referencing technologies like "upload filters" (their simple EXISTENCE!) is about anything then enabling tools of totalitarian mass control of sheeple.

In a normal open society people are free to put whatever they want up online. Now if someone else realizes afterwards that it violates their copyright, they can ask for it to be taken down in a certain interval of time, and if you or the platform don't agree about this, you proceed to settle the dispute in court. Even DMCA and such kind of work this way: after something ends up online you can solicit it to go down!

Same with people: you allow people in, and if they do illegal stuff (this may include whatever your laws want to say, including staying too much without holding a job or creating a business, whatever, write it in your laws) you kick them out or throw them in jail.

If go the other way, it's easy for the "Overton window" to slide over you and you'll go from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until you can prove innocence (or racial purity or whatever)" in a jiffy...

Once you're talking "walls" and "upload filters" you're on the path to some kind of fascism or natzysm, regardless of how you call it, and whether it's state or corporate powered (yeah, Google and Facebook will be more than happy making profits selling "upload filters" or "border control people screening technologies" just as well, they don't care where the $ comes from)...

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#552

Post by isostatic » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

artiscode wrote: post #91

Sad, sad day. I remember having discussions with my 14 year old son regarding articles 11 and 13. He said it would be impossible for these articles to come through, as people are clearly against it. He then called me a pessimist and naysayer. I wish he was right.

> people are clearly against it

Which people? People in his peer group on youtube sure. The world is a big place. I can see 5 people from my seat here on this train, I suspect not a single one has any idea what article 11 or 13 are, not would they care.

Now it's possible pressure groups could argue that they should vote one way or another in a vote on the subject -- i.e. google could turn people against it, or murdoch could turn people for it, but your statement that "people are clearly against it" is quite simply false.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#553

Post by toyg » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

Roxo wrote: post #492

rmind wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the EU which is the problem. It is the reluctance of the political establishment (both within the countries and across the EU) to acknowledge the opposition to such laws.

The non-democratic EU is not the problem? The people having the real power in the EU are not elected (the European Commission).

> The people having the real power in the EU are not elected (the European Commission).

Sigh, how many times do we have to confute this lie?

The real power is in the European Council, aka national governments assembled.

That's the body that sets the agenda. The Commission takes its marching orders from the Council, then goes to the Parliament to figure out what it will accept.

The Commission is a smokescreen, it's your national governments who desperately wanted this. They pushed and pushed until they got it, because it benefits the national press -- whose support they need for re-election. Commissioners don't care, their jobs have different rules.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#554

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #520

golergka wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With structures such as EU, the distance between the voter and decision-making center gets longer, and voter's influence smaller. Exiting these structures, just as limiting the power of any central or federal government in favour of moving this power to lower-level elected authorities (such as states in US or Russia) decreases this distance.

This is fine in theory, with a big caveat. Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters). The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (…

It's really the opposite. These large entities are created by centralized governments.

If you have a small business that only operates in New York, they don't care what the law in California is, it doesn't affect them. Walmart and Amazon care, because it does. And what they want is for the law to be the same everywhere, and for that law to be the one that benefits them. So they get that law passed by the central government. Then they take over everywhere because a) all the laws are the same, so there is no opportunity for a local business to carve out a local niche, b) the laws being the same increases economies of scale and lowers compliance costs for huge companies that operate everywhere but has no advantage for companies that only operate locally, so it increases the scale advantage of being large, and c) larger entities are the ones large enough to have a voice in the central government, whereas local entities have a stronger voice in local governments, so the laws that do get passed centrally are the ones that benefit the large players over the smaller ones.

We also have really bad central policies like the federal tax laws that make it so that when companies return profits to shareholders they pay heavy taxes but companies that retain the profits or use them to buy other companies do not, which naturally promotes mergers and consolidation and hoarding cash which then becomes a lobbying piggybank for huge companies.

So your theory is that we need a large government to rein in large entities. But the large government is already owned by the large entities. It isn't reining them in, and it won't. But the smaller governments could do so locally if they weren't being preempted at the federal level -- good luck being a huge conglomerate when every state is passing laws to give their local businesses a different advantage over you.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#555

Post by friedman23 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #536

koonsolo wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, when one of my users uploads copyrighted material, I can take it down when I see it. Or when I get a complaint (DMCA takedown). We're taking about teenagers here, so it's not always clear to them that they cannot use ripped sprites from other games, or music, or whatever. Basically I can make the uploader responsible for what they upload. The secondary problem is that my biggest competitor also has a lot o…

> after the UK leaves, not a single native English speaking country in there Oi! Ireland and Malta would have a word with you, mate. > I can just block that region (not the biggest one anyway Not the biggest, but the richest.

Europe is not that valuable a market for advertising platforms. There is a reason why companies choose to monetize the US first before even attempting to monetize internationally and that is because US advertising revenue per impression is almost 3x what you can get in Europe.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#556

Post by toyg » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #550

atq2119 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fine in theory, with a big caveat. Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters). The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (…

This argument has solid logic, but I don't agree with underlying view of the world. The governments of the world can, and do force tech companies to do whatever they want in terms of privacy, security and other stuff. GDPR and Article 13, Net Neutrality, censorship and privacy issues in Russia and China... The only pushback I've seen by corporations is by PR and lobbying, and in the end, politicians seem to do whatev…

What you list were all continent-sized efforts.

Look at what happened when people tried to introduce Linux in the public sector in early 2000s at regional level - Microsoft promptly bought up anyone who could be bought, country by country, with discounts and (likely) bribes.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#557

Post by sc11 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

rmind wrote: post #348

montenegrohugo wrote: post #241

A big part of the problem is that there is no single entity that defends the citizens interest in this instance. You have the Disney's of the world heavily lobbying to pass reforms like these, but who protests against it? - Online signatures? Gets laughed out of the room. They could be fake, they don't mean anything, they are paid, etc.. - Voting? Voting cycles are too long and voting decisions cannot be made on a si…

Realistically: 1. Establishing and consolidating a strong lobbying organisation. There are some NGOs and other interested parties (e.g. companies like Google or supporting organisations like Wikipedia), but they are not united. A united body brings coordination and single, quite more substantial, budget. Then you can efficiently deploy: 1) lawyers 2) accredited lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels 3) public relatio…

EDRi[1] attempts what you describe in your first point. It's an association of European NGOs to unite efforts on a European level, with an office in Brussels. They recently funded travel costs for citizens to go to Brussels to talk to MEPs about this directive, for example.

[1] https://edri.org/about/

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#558

Post by koonsolo » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

ABCLAW wrote: post #527

fhrow4484 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When reading comments like this it feels like: there's no ambitious startup in Europe to become one of the large companies. Because now a startup has less than 3 years to add this content filtering, which provided as a service or not, is going to cost €€€. Do you think Spotify would be able to grow if it was created on March 27 2019 instead of 2008? A successful Content filtering as a service (compliance.ly & co. In…

>Because now a startup has less than 3 years to add this content filtering, which provided as a service or not, is going to cost €€€. Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important. The articles, as written, are interesting because they already mention a ton of the balancing considerations. All of those are completely absent in these conversat…

> Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important.

In practice, it will all be up to the judge:

1. Was your AI filter adequate enough to properly filter the content

2. If not, how high can the fine be?

There is 1 easy solution to all of this: incorporate outside of the EU.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#559

Post by mbell » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

jaabe wrote: post #321

I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion, but I’m actually fine with more equality in copyright legislation. These “disastrous” copyright laws already apply to you and me, and if you think they don’t, then just try hosting a top 1 music video on your personal domain. Where the laws don’t apply is if your service is to host user content and you have the size to circumvent justice. YouTube makes a lot of money off…

This a false analogy. If a company places copyrighted material on their servers they would be equally culpable. Many companies have been sued / shutdown over this just as an individual would. This issue is about a third party (a user), not the company itself, placing copyrighted material on the companies servers.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#560

Post by philpem » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #451

dredmorbius wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no consequence for filing unsubstantiated claims. There is consequence for failing to honour substantiated ones.

It's probably fraud, but yeah, still no consequences for large media corp execs who are personally responsible for that fraud.

The DMCA has a similar provision (from memory it's something like "filing a false claim is considered perjury").

I've never, ever heard of a single charge being filed under that clause -- but I've heard of tons of instances of DMCA being abused. On this statement, I'd love to be proven wrong!