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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’

#621

Post by h91wka »

JoeSmithson wrote: post #591
h91wka wrote: post #489

This is wrong on more levels than it seems from the first glance: 1) I've witnessed creeping internet censorship starting just like this: first it's something as innocuous as "let's protect creators" or "let's protect children from harmful content", then 6 years later you can't criticize the government. They've just created a legal framework for massive automated censorship, and also Overton window was moved. I expec…

Where have you witnessed creeping internet censorship starting like this? (Not disputing, I'd just be interested to study it)

Russia. The first bill was passed around 2012. There is one key difference, though. As Russian government generally lacks influence on Western tech companies, they chose to target ISPs, while the EU law in question goes after hosting providers.

It is significant because while network-level filtering is potentially more destructive, the agency in charge of enforcement of the russian law (Roskomnadzor) stumbled upon cryptography (who could have thought!). Their IP-level filters don't work for TLS, so the only option they are left with is all-or-nothing block by IP. This kind of censorship lacks subtlety, therefore big companies have some room for negotiation (small ones get banned without any questions asked).

The EU law doesn't even bother with networks, it threatens companies directly. And the EU market is large, so tech giants won't just shrug, they'll probably choose to comply.

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

#622

Post by paulddraper »

geezerjay wrote: post #590
merb wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well google in the end can just shutdown google news.

> well google in the end can just shutdown google news. That's the expected (and fair) outcome. To be fair, why should a multinational be entitled to profit from unauthirized access and distribution of third-party content while the content creators are left with the bill of creating it?

> unauthirized access and distribution of third-party content

Are you referring to wholesale reproduction of the content?

Or hyperlinks and short excerpts?

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

#623

Post by towelr34dy »

lossolo wrote: post #612
JoeSmithson wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have you witnessed creeping internet censorship starting like this? (Not disputing, I'd just be interested to study it)

I don't really understand why this comment is downvoted? OP wrote he is not disputing but want to study it. What's wrong with that? I am curious also and would like to know.

Because we live in an era of increased authoritarianism.

And the reality for those of us that don't like it is that authoritarianism doesn't appear from nowhere. It appears because of the prevailing attitude of large segments of the population.

This means that criticism towards authority is generally received with skepticism and a very high evidence standard is used to judge the 'correctness' or the 'paranoia/conspiracy' of the claim. This while simultaneously accepting authority claims with little questioning and zero, even negative demand for evidence.

I would agree the down voting is uncalled for given the good nature of the question. But given the previous explanation, I'm not surprised by it.

Edit: spelling

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

#624

Post by snaky »

kragen wrote: post #554
vorticalbox wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they have to comply with the law too.

Well, of course the law applies to them too. But what happens in the instances that they don't comply? Laws are enforced by incentive structures, such as punishment. Who gets punished or otherwise incentivized to make PeerTube comply with the law, and what effect will that have on the functioning of PeerTube?

That's EU after all. They will mass punish everybody, then try to ban traffic.

> “Thousands of Swedes have received threatening letters from law firms which accuse them of illegal downloading. They are asked to pay a sum of money, ranging from a couple of thousand Swedish Kronors up to several thousand, to avoid being brought to justice,” Bahnhof Communicator Carolina Lindahl notes.

> “During 2018 the extortion business has increased dramatically. The numbers have already exceeded last year’s figures even though four months still remain.”

> This year to date, 49 separate court cases have been filed requesting ISPs to disclose the personal details of the account holders behind 35,711 IP-addresses. As the chart below shows, that’s already more than the two previous years combined.

> Also, the number of targeted people exceeds that of all US and Canadian file-sharing cases in 2018, which is quite extraordinary.

https://torrentfreak.com/more-than-35000-pirates-targeted-in...

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

#625

Post by Vektorweg »

donatj wrote: post #546
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…

> 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 GDPR arguably hurts small players most. Mismanagement of a single users data could cost the farm. It greatly increased the cost for small businesses to do business in Europe.

Only increased potential cost. It is absolutely unlikely that the EU will fine huge sums for small transgressions, or even fine at all.

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

#626

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kragen wrote: post #554
vorticalbox wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they have to comply with the law too.

Well, of course the law applies to them too. But what happens in the instances that they don't comply? Laws are enforced by incentive structures, such as punishment. Who gets punished or otherwise incentivized to make PeerTube comply with the law, and what effect will that have on the functioning of PeerTube?

There are three main ways to do P2P content distribution. One is like BitTorrent, where you only host the content you yourself wanted. This has obvious privacy issues. Anyone can tell what you read/view based on what you host.

The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.

The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.

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

#627

Post by bambataa »

pwned1 wrote: post #609
Milner08 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the EU would be the lesser of two evils here. If we leave it up to the UK Government and Mrs May we will have it far worse. She has tried several times to ban WhatsApp and encryption in general. I wouldn't put anything like this past her.

You have the ability to vote Teresa May out of office and change UK laws through your member of parliament. The European Commission, the European Council, and the Council of the European Union are entirely undemocratic, and the European Parliament is democratic only in name. There's no serious argument that the EU is in any way responsive to voters.

I’ve never understood the argument that the Councils are undemocratic. They are made up of leaders elected by each state. Do you also think that the UK Cabinet is entirely undemocratic and that individual ministers should be elected to each role?

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

#628

Post by lossolo »

h91wka wrote: post #621
JoeSmithson wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have you witnessed creeping internet censorship starting like this? (Not disputing, I'd just be interested to study it)

Russia. The first bill was passed around 2012. There is one key difference, though. As Russian government generally lacks influence on Western tech companies, they chose to target ISPs, while the EU law in question goes after hosting providers. It is significant because while network-level filtering is potentially more destructive, the agency in charge of enforcement of the russian law (Roskomnadzor) stumbled upon cr…

Russian Federation was never like western democracies. It began long time before 2012 in Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003, because he wanted to oppose current status-quo in politics. State media are propaganda machines for the state a lot longer too. You can't really compare EU bill to Russia situation, they are at totally different level. The bill you are mentioning was just introduced to keep up with modern media censorship in Russia. Papers and TV were censored a long time ago.

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

#629

Post by dancek »

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…

Note that Nils Torvalds voted against the directive today.

My source is the Finnish tech magazine Mikrobitti [1] which gives a link to the vote results [2, p.38]. I'm sure someone will eventually post a more readable list of who voted what.

[1] https://www.mikrobitti.fi/uutiset/mb/4a70c290-cc01-4789-b0e2...

[2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...

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

#630

Post by orclev »

h91wka wrote: post #621
JoeSmithson wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have you witnessed creeping internet censorship starting like this? (Not disputing, I'd just be interested to study it)

Russia. The first bill was passed around 2012. There is one key difference, though. As Russian government generally lacks influence on Western tech companies, they chose to target ISPs, while the EU law in question goes after hosting providers. It is significant because while network-level filtering is potentially more destructive, the agency in charge of enforcement of the russian law (Roskomnadzor) stumbled upon cr…

If it was just censorship maybe, but this is also trying to tax them on essentially all content they link to. No way is google taking this one sitting down, if it actually goes into effect expect first google, then probably others (Facebook almost certainly) to slap blanket bans on all of EU with a nice little landing page helpfully explaining exactly what everyone should complain about to their local EU representative.
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