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European Parliament approves copyright reform

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Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#471

Post by mcv »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #256
stronglikedan wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Article 13 only affects for-profit platforms that host and share copyrighted material. For now, but where will it stop (or will it)? Another commentor pointed out that even small services running ads to pay for hosting could be considered "for-profit". Maybe not now, but it's just a matter of when. First they came for the platforms run by big corporations...

Copyright enforcement has always been about going after big abuses. With some incredibly rare exceptions, generally speaking, nobody has ever been at serious risk for sending one copy of a movie or music CD to a friend. There is too much sharing and too many individual parties to chase after every way people technically violate copyright law. Many of the cases out there involved people sharing on a large scale. Examp…

10-15 years ago there were a lot of stories about teenagers getting sued for ridiculous sums for sharing a song.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#472

Post by fock »

mcv wrote: post #441
Funes- wrote: post #76

This will be an unpopular perspective on the matter, so you have been warned: Article 13 only affects for-profit platforms that host and share copyrighted material. These platforms are run by big corporations that turn a huge profit by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy, and having a persuasive (addictive) design in order to glue you to the screen so they can maximize their ad revenue, dismissi…

"Such [content-sharing] services should not include services that have a main purpose other than that of enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity." Well, if that's true, then the big question becomes what counts as for-profit. Do you need to be incorporated? What about a blog that has some ads to pay for server costs? Will…

If it's your own blog, you are basically responsible for your own stuff. If you document where you got your assets from, I think every court will give you a pass, if someone wants to get you with the laws resulting from this directive (though the existing copyright-laws still apply to you).

Youtube is the target of this law and as they earn money with your video, they have to comply with European law, if they want to be active in Europe.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#473

Post by nickcotter »

Shivetya wrote: post #425
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.

American here. Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system? For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.

Just to clarify - all European Parliament elections (not member state elections) have to use proportional representation. What exact type they use varies.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#474

Post by ABCLAW »

koonsolo wrote: post #337
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's weird to me is: Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse. Why are they so concerned with copyright protections?

Because politicians are stupid. If you look at the pros and cons of this law, Europe has nothing to gain. Not for the people, not for the companies. This is a law that works to mainly serve the big copyright holders, and in a second degree, impacts the big tech multinationals (=read US companies) less than the smaller ones. It makes no sense at all. Especially since all member states will have their own law. "Does ou…

This isn't a law that serves multinationals; quite the opposite.

The proportionality requirement in the text of Art. 13 is more onerous to larger corporations. If you're a tiny blog with a banner ad or two, you're not getting slapped off the internet for having a comments field, because it isn't proportional to require cost and complexity increases of multiple orders of magnitude to police your comments section. Unless someone comes up with Compliance.ly & Co. which does the work for you at a price-point that is reasonable, in which case we've just opened up a new industry which hopefully results in Content ID going the way of the Dodo.

After some litigation occurs in which the boundaries of proportionality are set, we'll be in a better position to analyze the impact of this law.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#475

Post by Carpetsmoker »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #104
isostatic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU Parliament, who we vote for every 5 years (and have elections coming up), vote for a law. You don't like said law, therefore it's undemocratic? The way the parliament is elected is quite fair - it gives a little more power to people in smaller countries, but that's not unusual (UK westminster constituencies vary from 22k to 120k. U.S. congress areas are more even, ranging from 500k to 1 million). There's an ar…

To make my point a bit clearer: I am almost convinced now that "representative democracy" shouldn't count as a "democracy" just because the population can vote who they get ####ed by. It only works as long as the representatives see it as their duty to represent the will of the voters accurately, which I'm starting to believe is an antithesis to human behavior, and thus will never be the norm. I'm not saying that Eur…

The Brexit affair can hardly be called "democratic". The topic of the referendum was a vague question without any specifics, and it was a slim majority, while also disenfranchising a vast number of people.

A democratic approach would be to conclude that a 1.8% majority is in the error margin, and then carefully listen to both sides and try to work out something that many people on both sides can live with. That way you can get a solution that appeases 70&, 80%, or more. That's real democracy, in my book.

It's not an easy path though, especially not in the face of what I call "chest-beating politics". The Brexiteers have not proven to be especially easy to compromise with on pretty much any issue.

There are many better ways to enact more direct democracy, by the way. For example, you can have a randomly chosen subset of people (maybe 50, or 100) vote on every proposed laws, more or less the same as jury duty. The difference with a general referendum is that these people will actually get the time to properly inform themselves and have good-faith discussions (instead of idiotic Boris Johnson spectacle bullshit "discussions").

There are many variables you can tweak, and other possible systems as well. Reading up on e.g. Athenian Democracy might be a good start, if you're not already familiar with it.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#476

Post by aequitas »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #242

So anybody can now shut down any website in the EU that allows uploading of images or text or video or audio?

They can't because you won't be allowed to upload anything that doesn't pass the content filter, or anything at all for that matter.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#477

Post by trickstra »

zaarn wrote: post #262
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…

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.

where can I get the lists of names and how they voted for this specific bill?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#478

Post by tachyonbeam »

gpm wrote: post #411
_bxg1 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than VPNs and Tor (which can be blocked), how would people circumvent the fact that the pipes are still owned by the same players? We can't physically lay out "another internet". Maybe there's potential in radio mesh networking, but the wires we have are the wires we get. As depressing as it feels right now, I think the only real option is to continue pushing in the democratic channels we have. Governments can…

Even if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet it wouldn't matter with respect to things like this. It would still be subject to the same laws. The same applies to radio mesh networking.

What if, you had a worldwide mesh network of internet satellites, too many of them to take down...?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#479

Post by TomMarius »

lagadu wrote: post #253
TomMarius wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the representatives have a moral and lawful obligation to act in the interest of the people they represent; that is the principle that is holding representative democracy together. They did not do that this time and that is why it feels anti-democratic.

> They did not do that this time Because you decided they didn't? Elections are coming up pretty soon, if they really didn't then the vast majority of them are getting voted out in what will surely be the greatest upheaval in the history of the EU; which of course won't happen because hundreds of millions of us do feel that we're being correctly represented. protip: just because you got outvoted, it doesn't mean that…

> Elections are coming up pretty soon, if they really didn't then the vast majority of them are getting voted out in what will surely be the greatest upheaval in the history of the EU; which of course won't happen because hundreds of millions of us do feel that we're being correctly represented.

Hundreds of millions? Surely not. I am sure that there isn't even one hundred million EU citizens that know and/or understand what this is, let alone feel good about it. That's why nothing will change, I agree on that with you, but that changes nothing about how bad and wrong this is.

> Because you decided they didn't?

No. It's because every trustworthy organisation that cares about open Internet actually says (contrary to their usual silence) that this is alarming and have done everything they could to stop this. I really don't understand why you don't listen to them, I see no logical reason not to - everything they (e.g. Wikipedia) say is true and objective. There is a middle ground that we could try to find.

On top of that, every single author/content creator I know is against it and says that their work is doomed because their platform won't accept it or will end. Because of how much of that content is educational, this is definitely something that goes directly against interests of every EU citizen, much more than any copyright-related bullshit.

In this case, foreign corporate interests (EU produces a minority of worldwide content) were more valuable to our representatives (that we can't even choose because our country is too small - we have less than 3% of the EP) than our own interests, and that's why I don't think democracy is working, not because I got outvoted. On top of that, in this case, my country is caught in the middle of a German-France political deal that we can do nothing about (again, less than 3% seats in the EP). It is literally against all interests of all citizens of my country, approved to serve German/French interests - that is totally undemocratic. There literally is not a single subject (person, company, etc) that would benefit from this in my country - every content creator here is small.

Protip: Just that it suits you doesn't mean that hundreds of millions of people are happy with it, especially if most nonprofit AND commercial players agree it's wrong.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#480

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ivolimmen wrote: post #463
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…

Your platform needs to make at least x million a year and have userbase of x million and exist for at least x years. Only then the filtering is mandatory...

Where does it say that, could you cite the legislation in this please?
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