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’

#651

Post by headmelted » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

Milner08 wrote: post #541

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…

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.

In fairness I did say almost.

On a side note I do wonder if Amber Rudd passed along the necessary hashtags to Theresa May before taking the fall and hanging up her clipboard.

It's dire all over if the best we can say is we've got the least of all evils. Sadly, that appears to be the case, even with this disastrous legislation.

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

#652

Post by tynpeddler » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #577

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 co…

Potential copyright infringement isn't remotely comparable with pollution and worker safety laws. Speech doesn't compare at all with industrial manufacturing either.

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

#653

Post by brainwad » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

stefano wrote: post #549

brainwad wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we don't. I get my news from public broadcasters. They have the bonus of not pushing the owner's political agenda and being subject to public oversight.

Public broadcasters are always very soft on the party currently in power, since that's basically their boss. You need both public and private news.

Not always true, although they do tend to be soft on their own country. In either case you can solve that just by reading multiple countries' public news.

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

#654

Post by headmelted » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

JoeSmithson wrote: post #596

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.

> She has tried several times to ban WhatsApp What? Did you swallow some fake news or did I miss something massive? --- Downvoters, this is not Reddit. The top Google results for "UK WhatsApp Ban" are all related to this - https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/9521... - which is EU rules causing age requirement to jump from 13 to 16. Is this what you are referring to?

It's based on (nonsensical) comments the then home secretary Amber Rudd made in relation to "banning" end-to-end encryption.

Give the exact quote a Google for a laugh. It really is the most nonsense anyone has ever fit into a single sentence.

Summary: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

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

#655

Post by pwned1 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

ithkuil wrote: post #636

pwned1 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a lot of people across EU is concerned about how democratic is the EU governance, can't we change this without necessary destroying the EU first?

Didn't the people of several EU countries vote against the EU treaty, only to have the rules of the game changed so that it would go into effect anyways?

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

#656

Post by tynpeddler » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

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…

So if ISP's are required to install monitoring software, what does that mean for HTTPS, or other end-to-end encryption schemes, that prevent the ISP from doing packet inspection?

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

#657

Post by pwned1 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

dpwm wrote: post #633

pwned1 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the European Parliament is democratic only in name It was representatives (MEPs) today that chose to vote in favour of this directive. They could have voted differently and rejected the proposal outright. Can you elaborate on how this is a "democratic only in name" institution?

It's democratic on paper, sure. But in reality, does anyone know who their MEP is? Five year terms? Total lack of responsiveness (according to comments on here today), lack of real democratic accountability. Sure, it looks democratic, but in reality it's not. Particularly when the EU Parliament doesn't even initiate legislation, the un-elected European Commission does.

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

#658

Post by pwned1 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #582

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…

GDPR is extremely hostile to discovery in lawsuits. In this sense it does not help the little guy. It's almost tailor made for coverups and protecting the guilty in civil litigation.

I'm wondering if you can elaborate. I haven't heard this argument before.

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

#659

Post by badloginagain » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #638

yspeak wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does decentralization, p2p and encryption change anything? They won't protect you or prevent enforcement. If there are issues they will just tighten the law and increase enforcement mechaniams.

I share your perplexion. At best, these technical solutions will just break off a smaller, "splinter" Internet, unused by the vast majority of users. The average user does not know or care about these things and this isn't likely to change without an effort to properly educate future generations.

Moving from a world wide web to a decentralized, fractured web? Instead of WWW you have FBW (FacebookWeb, GW (GoogleWeb), AW (AppleWeb). What a sad future that would be.

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

#660

Post by adrianN » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

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?

Last time I checked the news companies put their articles online for anyone to read. I don't see how Google isn't authorized to access the content. I'm pretty sure they follow robots.txt. If the news companies can't make money from people reading their articles, maybe they should just stop putting them online.