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The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

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131–140 of 181 posts

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#131
post #121

As usual with upcoming legislation, FUD predominates in the conversation. A reasonable person may be used to parties with vested interests to exaggerate or misrepresent facts, but it's unfortunate when parties from whom you may not expect a clear bias continue to perpetuate uncertainty and doubt. Article 13 states that the measures to seek rightholder approval for user-submitted content "shall be effective and propor…

OK could you point to anything that outlines actual criteria for classification because the language you included from Article 13 in your comment is not restrictive in any manner.

Original text [1], changed by amendments [2]. Relevant definition:

Amendment 150, Proposal for a directive, Article 2 – paragraph 1 – point 4b (new):

> 'online content sharing service provider' means a provider of an information society service one of the main purposes of which is to store and give access to the public to a significant amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users, which the service optimises and promotes for profit making purposes. Microenterprises and small-sized enterprises within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and services acting in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned, such as educational or scientific repositories, shall not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive. Providers of cloud services for individual use which do not provide direct access to the public, open source software developing platforms, and online market places whose main activity is online retail of physical goods, should not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive;

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... [2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&langua...

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#132
post #122
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads. I’m more concerned about the way copyright itself may need to change to work sensibly with this — according to several UK lawyers I’ve talked to, under UK law any work is copyrighted the moment it is put down in a fixed medium. For example, this comment, the moment it i…

> That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads. This is likely very naive of me to ask but is it actually O(n*m)? I don't know how the fingerprinting works but if it's anything like a hash I don't see why it couldn't be closer to O(n+m) since you only have to hash each copyrighted video once and then compare O(m) u…

Hm, good point. I was thinking of the case of manual checking, but good point nonetheless.

Of course, the checksum would have to be invariant to pitch shift, rotation, horizontal flipping, framing, clipping, and length changes — all of which I know have been used to evade copyright filters on YouTube. (Also must resist mild noise audio or visual noise, mild convolution filters, and probably hue shifting, but I don’t know if those have been used by pirates yet)

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you planning to run your own T1 lines to the backbone when you're building your own datacenter to host one video? We don't "need" them, sure, but we live in a society. We're supposed to be able to delegate work to others who specialize in doing it.

T1 lines provide a scant 1.544 Mbps of bandwidth. No one is doing any amount of video over T1 lines in 2018.

Thanks, that was a dumb mistake on my part... And a mistake I wouldn’t make if I could rely on a third party to build and run a datacenter for me. I’m not interested in building a datacenter.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#134
post #9

I'm a lot less worried about the "link tax" clauses than the copyright liability clause. Not because the link tax is a good idea but because it's a spectacular own goal that is mainly going to hurt the idiots who lobbied for it. Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging: 1) Implementing youtube-style conten…

> Back to that multi-milion content ID system: it sucks. It sucks really badly. It over-reports infringement left right and center.

I literally built my own video sharing platform to get around it: http://brother.ly

Fuck YouTube and everyone who works for YouTube.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#135
I think YouTube has a angle here, just cut off You Tube from the entire European community in order not to suffer fines. I mean Google already had to leave China and Russia, is Europe next ? Of course, Europeans will all find "backdoors" to get access, but then it's not You Tubes problem. This issue is really all about revenue and who get's to keep what$$$.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#136
post #6

Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to c…

It's a shame that google, the internet's largest advertising company, has done so little to help this. Instead of addressing the problem the hard way by talking to advertisers and, you know, using people skills, they approach it through engineering ways that push the problem to someone else: AMP, Lighthouse, speed-based pagerank, etc. Google is perpetuating this problem by whining about it but not actually addressing it any meaningful way.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#137

The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will sur…

Google is very much more than an aggregator. They've invented a proprietary standard (AMP) which they then strong-arm publishers to use, and is only beneficial to publishers when hosted on google's platform. They're forcing publishers to give up their content in order to play the game. I hope the US FTC+DOJ is paying attention.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#138
post #65
post #9

I'm a lot less worried about the "link tax" clauses than the copyright liability clause. Not because the link tax is a good idea but because it's a spectacular own goal that is mainly going to hurt the idiots who lobbied for it. Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging: 1) Implementing youtube-style conten…

Where you see disasters, I see business oportunities.

People making money off of a disaster doesn't make it less disastrous. People can make money off of everything, including wars.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work. Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? Why pretend it's anything else but Google directly paying for the news? Side point, if news subscriptions were reasonably priced (upfront pricing, and billed monthly instead of this odd weekly nonsense), they would probab…

> Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? That sounds sensible enough to me. As an example, Canada taxed blank CDs and CDR drives and distributed the revenue to their music industry.

I suppose my sarcasm wasn't indicated well enough. Google doesn't have any special duty to fund the news, anymore than Zuckerberg does personally, or George Soros, or any other financier. You can't just go around and demand someone pays for something you think is important.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#140
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, according to the new regulations, anything that a user uploads must be pre-screened for copyright violations before being made public.

This makes complete sense to me. There is no reason that posting content to a platform that millions of people could see should be free or instant. Other publishing platforms take responsibility for their content, and it costs them money that Google isn't spending, because it would rather spend it on legal on the back end. I wonder if any platform has ever created a moderation system that can acheive this scale. I im…

> There is no reason that posting content to a platform that millions of people could see should be free or instant.

So if someone is on a particular platform, such as the one we're currently using, and they post a base64 encoded image, or article, or whatever...

...you really want every possible comment screened, paid for, or be delayed in some manner so someone or something can check that the data is legit?

That can't work; sure you could probably figure a way to work around the base64 encoding and automate things, but what happens if people start using other more difficult encoding systems to publish such content in text-only forums?

Yes, this is reducto-ad-absurdum territory - but these kinds of directives would have to apply to every kind of user-generated and posted content system, including mostly or wholly text-only boards like this one.

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