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’

#571

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #562

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the other party will be found guilty of disrupting your business

This all sounds quite lucrative for the lawyers and notaries. It remains disruptive, unsettling and expensive, not to mention unnecessary, for everyone else. Depending on which of the EU’s 28 member states’ courts one finds oneself dragged into, what you’re proposing could be years of distraction.

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

#572

Post by Ruthalas » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

marknadal wrote: post #555

headmelted wrote: post #519

So bad is this legislation that it's almost enough to make me change my views on Brexit. It's ludicrous to me that the same body that approved something so user-centric as GDPR could come up with legislation so incredibly hostile to small players as to effectively abolish the open internet by financial attrition. Once this comes in, we'll collectively need to finally start work on that peer-to-peer, onion-layered, en…

Already got you covered! The Internet Archive ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682 ) & notabug.io (a P2P Reddit alternative, pushing terabytes traffic) have already moved to using our decentralized tools ( https://github.com/amark/gun ). Coming up, we're also working on IP masking (onion layering), and we already have an option to do end-to-end encryption (which prevents middlemen from being able to read y…

Is there a particularly good way to follow the progress of these projects?

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

#573

Post by geezerjay » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

virmundi wrote: post #407

phkahler wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service. What exactly is wrong with that? Seriously.

This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas. YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability. They might be able to automate, but it depends on the jurisdiction. For example, the US has fair use laws. A person may copy a segment of a copyrighted work to comment on it. There are territories in the EU where they can't. How does YouTube filter this? If the ne…

> This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.

> YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability

I believe they already did that for some years now.

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

#574

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

How long until the EU ruins the internet so much that the rest of the world just cuts off completely from it, and the EU is left with their own little hyper-legislated enclave net?

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

#575

Post by eli » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #559

zavi wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both GDPR and this were intended to hurt American tech giants. However the people pushing this have very little understanding of how internet works so it would certainly have the opposite effect. The grim reality is that deregulation is the only sure way to help homegrown startups compete against the incumbents but you cannot push for deregulation without losing your entire political base in Europe.

> GDPR [...] were intended to hurt American tech giants. GDPR builds on previous EU privacy regulation, some of which has existed long before the US tech giants. Here's the Council of Europe's Convention number 108, introduced in 1981. https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventio... Hesse, Germany,introduced data protection law in 1970. Sweden introduced national law in 1973. Germany in 1977 and Franc…

That it was built on previous regulations doesn't necessarily disprove that the GDPR was intended to target Facebook & Google.

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

#576

Post by MoBattah » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

servs wrote: post #90

ericdykstra wrote: post #6

UKIP and the Green Party joined forces to prevent Article 13 from getting rammed through without a public discussion. It was a good first step, but here we are, 2 months hence, and it was passed with virtually no amendments to the original text. This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works. Markus Meechum (aka Count Dankula) was at the hearings, and reported that MEPs voting on the…

> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video. That actually isn't legal in many countries and is e.g. why regional wikipedia sites don't show movie posters.

This is just plain stupidity.

Sometimes I feel like the whole world is ruined by ignorant people in power. As for the Internet, it is exclusively being ruined by ignorant actors in positions of state power. All the while, armies of good people make the Internet better every day.

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

#577

Post by closeparen » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

Grumbledour wrote: post #78

As terrible as this is, I am actually even more shocked by this proposal: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/12/europe-to-push-for-one-hou... Having one hour to remove offending content, draconian fines and no, absolutely no exceptions for small content providers would, I think, end the internet as we know it in Europe. I see no way to host any kind of content under such jurisdiction and surely all non European content p…

The pro-GDPR "good riddance" argument applies just as well here: obliterating operations which are too fly-by-night to obey the law is, in fact, the socially desired outcome. The law is the law. We shouldn't exempt small players from internet regulation any more than we should exempt small factories from pollution controls or small automakers from safety rules.

European institutions do no wrong [0]. If a website's conduct is actually okay, there won't be enforcement. If there's enforcement, it won't be that bad. And if it is that bad, the website must deserve it.

[0] https://www.chrisshepherd.org/the-narcissists-prayer/

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

#578

Post by adventured » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

snaky wrote: post #483

bepotts wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand why people keep comparing the culture of American cities and states to European ones. America is one giant country - the EU isn't. The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin. Not every city in America is San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin, but neither one state nor one city is as technologically dysfunction…

> The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin. What about the cultural differences between SF (or Detroit, Seattle, any other big city) with small town America?

What about the cultural differences between London and rural Romania or Hungary? An even larger gap exists there than between SF and rural America, due to the very wide differences in macro national culture, national history and language.

Financially that's also true. The median income in Bulgaria is a few hundred dollars per month. The extreme variance between the countries at the top of the EU and the bottom, is far beyond anything you see in the US between states. There's an eight to ten fold GDP per capita gap between Bulgaria and countries like Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden. In the US, there's close to a two fold gap between Massachusetts or New York and West Virginia or Mississippi.

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

#579

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

geezerjay wrote: post #569

interfixus wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Communists are ideologically against privare property. Historically, not so much.

Be that as it may, I don't get your point. Communists opposing private property, therefore I, as opponent of the "law", must be a communist? Please, I expect better from the HN crowd, although not from the insufferable mr. Rohde, MEP.

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

#580

Post by AnssiH » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

ericdykstra wrote: post #68

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likes of YouTube will be affected the least. They already have aggressive copyright enforcement measures in place, and they can afford to do that. Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.

YouTube, the company, will be fine. They'll just ban any content that triggers their enforcement systems. I'm worried about YouTube, the platform, and the bastion of free exchange of information and ideas that is has been until now. A response-type video or movie review will almost certainly be false-flagged by a system like this. Of course, I agree with you that independent platforms are going to have a rough time.…

I think at least the intent is to avoid smaller businesses being hit too much.

If the PDF (https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copyright_Se...) posted elsewhere in this discussion is accurate, Article 13 paragraph 3 was amended:

> When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remain appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided.

SMEs = Small and Medium-sized enterprises