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

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

#521

Post by cyphar »

cesarb wrote: post #476
cyphar wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%? I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countrie…

> But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i..…

The link you just posted requires me to log in, and I've had this problem with go-nuts and the OCI mailing list in the past. It's strange this doesn't happen to you -- maybe it's a geographically specific thing (I'm connecting from Australia)?

Of course you don't need to login in order to post on the mailing list, but I think that's only one of the three main features of a mailing list (broadcast, subscription, and archival) that I can do without logging in.

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

#522

Post by thirdsun »

undreren wrote: post #147
elaus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany was a pioneer with its "Leistungsschutzrecht" and German publishers indeed wanted to force Google to show their news snippets (and therefore pay for them). Their reasoning was that Google as a monopoly position and therefore they have to show news from all publishers equally.

How would this work in practice? I could easily set up a news company. Would they have to link to my articles as much as other news articles?

Equality really wasn’t what the german publishers had in mind. They wanted Google to pay for being able to show a snippet of their content in News. A ridiculous idea, that was countered by the only sensible answer: Google asked publishers if they wanted to continue to have their content listed in Google News for free or if their content should be removed. Needless to say that almost all of the proponents, including the most vocal publishers, agreed to keep their content indexed, thereby rendering the law useless.

That’s how it worked in practice.

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

#523

Post by zaarn »

dmix wrote: post #498
zaarn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I read on this specific proposal, it's not entirely draconian and has some benefits to the user, since the process also implements transparency requirements and complaint mechanisms. As far as the one-hour-rule goes; if I get an email about taking down content at 01:00AM, then I will naturally be unable to respond for atleast another 5 hours, German courts atleast agree that for such things, it counts when…

> German courts at least agree that for such things This implies that you are going to have to go to court because you got an email at 1am and didn't reply right away...in order to fight off potentially serious fines. Whether it's accurate or not it's still very expensive to prove it's inaccuracy (in time alone, not including financially and stress). This has very serious consequences for small and even medium busine…

>This implies that you are going to have to go to court

No it doesn't, it means that if you get dragged to court because you got the email at 1AM and you were asleep, then you're not guilty of anything.

No judge will put up a fine for that.

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

#524

Post by interfixus »

sebst wrote: post #109
amelius wrote: post #60

I'm worried not so much about the outcome of this decision (which indeed is bad), but more about the whole decision-making process and how often we'll see such uninformed decisionmaking in the future.

I'd rather not call it "uninformed". We pay good amounts of money to parliamentarians, including their personal assistants. It's more like a "bug" in democracy as such. As long as a topic doesn't have widespread attention, it's the lobbyists who make the laws, not the citizens. I am pretty sure there are other bad laws in other very specific areas, we as techies don't have a clue about. As I've written in another com…

Danish MEP Jens Rohde has called opponents of the law "internet communists who do not want creators to be paid for their work".

What's that again you'd rather not call "uninformed"?

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

#525

Post by zavi »

the6threplicant wrote: post #188

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…

News are mostly clickbait cancer anyways, if this is the final nail in their coffin (if Google/Reddit/Facebook stops serving news) so be it. Tech Giants will do just fine under this, just how Chinese tech giants are able to do their own censorship.

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

#527

Post by wrs »

sircastor wrote: post #496
arendtio wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the web without user content... Web 1.0? So much for free speech.

Wasn't Web 1.0 only user content?

Indeed. Of course it was limited to a very small and weird collection of “users”.

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

#528

Post by tluyben2 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #457
bad_user wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I too am an EU citizen, living in the Netherlands. I am also an American citizen and have lived there. Although I generally prefer the Dutch set of laws to the American, Dutch laws stifle innovation. The difference in even simple things like setting up a business, hiring an employee, and ensuring compliance with local laws is insane. Every time I go to America I get requests for random things that either don't exist…

Netherlands has a lot of issues, but setting up a company is not one of them. And taxes are high, but as a company they are good on an EU scale (and going down) and far easier to deal with than in, say, Spain.

I have no clue what you are talking about with those products though; that's the case in many countries. In the south of Spain I pay more for a fridge or a bath than if I import them from the Netherlands. NL is an expensive country for some things. In the US you can get Bengay cream (i have no idea what that is by the way) for 5.84 but university and healthcare can bankrupt you. Give me NL every day as long as that lasts; these consumer products are not fundamentals while education and healthcare are imho.

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

#529

Post by sdfsdfsdff »

antpls wrote: post #181

For the anecdote, Nils Torvalds, the father of Linus, is one of the many authors of this text law. I'm from EU, I had the time to look at the recent amendments about this law, in which they added precisions about the fair use of data, for non-profit and public research. They also precised that this law and the technical implementations should not go against already in-place freedom of speech rights. Hopefully, people…

"Hopefully"? How?

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

#530

Post by gnulinux »

vkou wrote: post #497
dnautics wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think this will eventually come to screw the little guy?

Who is the little guy, and why are we optimizing for him, instead of making the world better for everyone? I mean, I think the link tax is backwards, but a vague emotional appeal to the health of... a mom and pop internet news site...(?) is not the argument I'd use.

Internet is supposed to be THE free platform a mom and pop internet news site can prosper. You are, at this very moment, here in HN, in a mom and pop internet news site.
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