EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’ • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

mrep wrote: post #517

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…

> But the EU, as a whole, is the world's biggest market What metric are you using because the EUs GDP is about 700 billion less than the US and going to drop even more when the UK leaves. US GDP: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2018/01/weodata/weor... EU GDP: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2018/01/weodata/weor...

[deleted]

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

#562

Post by zaarn » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #536

zaarn wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> if you get dragged to court because you got the email at 1AM and you were asleep, then you're not guilty of anything Getting dragged to court is disruptive, unsettling and expensive.

And the other party will be found guilty of disrupting your business by having you get into court for complaints without legal grounds.

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

#563

Post by zaarn » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #558

zaarn wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> No it doesn't > No judge will put up a fine for that. You're contradicting yourself...you have to go to court to get charges dropped by a judge.

No I'm not. No sane lawyer will even recommend dragging you to court for that because the judge will like fine the suer and find the sued party not guilty. No legal department I know would stand behind such a decision, it would be absolutely stupid to drag anyone to court. And most likely the Judge would even have the suing party pay for your expenses and damages incurred by such charges.

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

#564

Post by strictnein » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #527

sircastor wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't Web 1.0 only user content?

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

> it was limited to a very small and weird collection of “users”

Agreed. It was a much better place.

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

#565

Post by geezerjay » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

syn0byte wrote: post #520

vkou wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Optimize for the little guy so there can be growth. "Better for everyone" is stasis because "everyone" includes all the people that already have disproportional slices of pie.

To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.

In this scenario, I'm not sure if society should encourage little mom and pop scrapers to spawn while leaving the people who actually created the content with any way to protect their work.

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

#566

Post by dmix » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #563

dmix wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it doesn't > No judge will put up a fine for that. You're contradicting yourself...you have to go to court to get charges dropped by a judge.

No I'm not. No sane lawyer will even recommend dragging you to court for that because the judge will like fine the suer and find the sued party not guilty. No legal department I know would stand behind such a decision, it would be absolutely stupid to drag anyone to court. And most likely the Judge would even have the suing party pay for your expenses and damages incurred by such charges.

They don't need to drag you to court. They fine you using the new EU law, then you refuse to pay and you essentially decide to go to court instead of paying. Even if the company decides to drop the complaint in response either way you have to put a significant amount of effort to get to that point. Merely because you got an email at night.

This could happen 100x (or even thousands) for any mid-sized content platform. Most of these things are automated these days.

Besides there's no guarantee the parties will automatically act rationally and drop the claims of infringement before threatening court, merely because you claim you were sleeping. And you specifically said a judge won't pursue it, but even that is a maybe.

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

#567

Post by icegore » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

What about Dark Net? How is it going to be controlled?

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

#568

Post by newswhere » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:00 PM UTC

I'm not surprised that people that believed GDPR was good legislation would approve this law. The EU is simply not that important, internet businesses should simply not do business there.

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

#569

Post by geezerjay » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

interfixus wrote: post #524

sebst wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Considering that communists are historically against private property and their usage as a means of production, eventhough the statement is very loaded and inflamatory it still is somewhat appropriate when addressing critics who are against the use of intellectual (private) property as a mean of production.

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

#570

Post by adventured » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

bepotts wrote: post #379

zmmmmm wrote: post #235

This is such a great outcome for Google, they could not have gotten such a good outcome if they had bribed the legislators directly. They've essentially enshrined the infrastructure Google has already as a legal requirement for the bare minimum threshold to host a web site now. Google can sit back and stop worrying about there ever being competition from Europe now.

US tech giants haven't worried about competition coming from Europe for awhile now. They worry about competition coming from either within the country or China.

The two biggest problems US tech giants have, are fines-as-taxation from the EU and France increasingly pushing for the idea of a restricted competition zone for the EU (a poor attempt at how China incubated its own tech giants by walling everything off). Germany is dramatically more globalist economically (an export giant), so most of the EU's regressive insular ideas will come from France in their style of protectionism.

A distant third problem are US regulators, which are slowly moving forward with targeting the tech giants (which now has both sides of the political machine looking at them, for different reasons). The giants no doubt feel like they can massage that situation better, as it's their home turf. They're invasive aliens as far as the EU is concerned.