In 2016 I stopped accepting freelance work with an internet explorer or edge requirement.
In 2018 I'm considering rejecting clients with an Eu requirement.
EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen the debate and some politician said that big platforms should be stopped. Which is why I thought that why not work on creating an environment that supports competition rise from the EU? But yeah, it shouldn't matter where new players come from, however I think a Chinese startup will laugh at GDPR and upload filters.
They won't laugh at the lack of revenue from European advertisers. No one cares what people use for free. This is about money.
This is ends up being effectively a tariff, though - if fewer advertising platforms can take European customers, then that allows those platforms to raise their prices for those customers, essentially meaning that European businesses end up paying more for advertising than their competitors from elsewhere.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government. The vote that occurred today was by the EU parliament, which is entirely elected. The directive was prepared inside the JURI committee, which also exists entirely out of elected representatives. Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic…
> Also, you can't have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive. Why?
It's sort of like arbitrage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage
If, for instance, the left side of your single digital market has a copyright duration of 70 years after the death of the artist, and the right side has 90 years instead, then in effect, it's 70 years even on the right side because anyone can just go to the left side, trade copies of the expired works without paying licensing fees, then come back to the right side with those copies (because it's a single market).
So in effect, the regulation of the whole market is the weakest regulation of any part of it.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's going to work like jaywalking - it's illegal, but I've done it, and it's fine as long as it doesn't cause a bigger issue, and as long as enforcer isn't overzealous. It's true though, that it's a weapon waiting to be used for political reasons, and the perspective of that happening is no good for anybody.
No individuals or companies can gain money from suing you for jaywalking. This is different.
Funnily enough, jaywalking laws originated due to lobbying by the car industry.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#805>However, those backing these provisions say the arguments above are the result of scaremongering by big US tech companies, eager to keep control of the web’s biggest platforms. This is the most hilarious quote in the article. The only thing this will do is entrench massive players like Google and Facebook who already have these systems in place. I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone could support this law while ha…
Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use?
I was doing a web development gig in a southern US state back in 1998, and the manager was completely of the mindset that you had to ask permission to link somewhere. For some people who don't get it, this is their natural mindset.
For other people, the whole point is to work against free speech and fair use, in order to control the public.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Here's an example: What about movie review channels like Wisecrack, Film Theorist, Cinema Sins, Filmjoy etc.? While discussing movies, they naturally have to show excerpts: short clips of the movie that relate to their explanations. Those guys are absolutely "creating something". And if anything, they're driving more people to watch those movies. A five-minute analysis of a movie is usually not a valid substitute for watching the actual movie.
I imagine that many of these channels will become unavailable in the EU in the near future. Time to get a US-based VPN.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#807* Honest Government Ad | Article 13 (Internet Censorship Bill) - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ZkydX0FPw
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use? They do, and free speech and fair use are important issues to them.
> They do, and free speech and fair use are important issues to them. The German law that is related to what US citizens call "copyright law" (Urheberrechtsgesetz) (note that I use this careful formulation, since Urheberrecht and copyright are based on different ideas) has no concept of "fair use". Also, traditionally, in Germany, there is culturally a different understanding of what US citizens call "free speech" (f…
As much as this may annoy Angela Merkel, Germany and the EU are not the same thing. We're talking about EU legislation, and translating and relating that to German, French, British, Italian, Romanian, etc. law will always result in awkward translations that are not quite spot on. We are not lawyers, this isn't a court, and we can afford a bit of imprecision to get the point across with finitely many words, can't we?
Germany has "Urheberrecht" and "Verwertungsrecht", neither of which is exactly copyright, even though that's the most practical translation of either. German law may not have fair use, but it does have §51 UrHG "Zitate", which serves the same purpose, at least in the context of reporting on news articles.
> So free speech in the US sense is no important issue for these politicians
The Eurocrats do not want free speech to establish itself in the EU. That's very important to them.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#809As bonkers as this may seem, I suspect it will fall flat on it's face the second it's put before a court. For example, someone defends their right to use the title or quote from an article from some other news gathering organisation. Someone will need to convince a judge that it's OK for The Sunday Times, or Der Spiegel to do that, but it's not OK for Reddit or Hacker News to do that. And eventually, someone will nee…
My 5c here. Maybe they just don't have much to do, so they need to justify their salaries, and they need to have some presence in the WWW to let us know that they are out there.
Hmmm. I'm not so sure. The EU parliament is usually pretty savvy on civil rights and freedom issues like this. I'm genuinely surprised that this law passed.
However, it's hard to fathom the EU parliament sometimes because it's such a broad and diverse bunch of people and interests forced into such a small political space.
If someone asked me to play devils advocate for this decision, I'd probably appeal to people's fear of foreign disinformation campaigns and the impact they're having on western democracies. I could probably cobble together a semi-compelling argument about how Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, have inadvertently handed the enemies of the west the most powerful propaganda tool in all of human history, and those enemies are using it to great effect. Or how marketing companies have convinced millions of parents worldwide to not vaccinate their children through the internet. Or how organisations like Monsanto astroturf the web and misquote or misrepresent scientific reports or news articles to make it seem like Greenpeace promote and advocate using DDT.
I'd then go on to argue that information can and must be free to share, but nefarious misinformation should not be free from punishment nor protected by law. And so, the age of anonymous and unaccountable publishing platforms must come to an end. If they don't want to be held accountable for the content they publish, then that's fine. But that just means we restrict the type of content they're allowed to publish. After all, we have advertising standards that the press and broadcasters adhere to. We have rules around when and how "traditional" media can report on politics. So the Youtubes, Twitters, Reddits, and Facebooks of the world can either fall in line with those rules, or carry on as they are but simply refrain from anything that could be perceived as advertising or political reporting... which is pretty much everything except dick picks I think.
Now, I'm pretending to defend this law. Don't assume I believe any of what I just said. I actually think this law abhorrent. And while I do have concerns about the unrestrained power and influence of the web, I don't think this law is the answer to my concerns. But if I put my mind to selling this law to people who don't know as much about the web as I do, I think this kind of argument would be effective. On some people at least. And MEP's aren't technical people. They're political people. And I think it would be pretty easy to scare them into backing this law whilst appealing to their sense of justice, fairness, and honesty.
Re: EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making the paper producer liable for what someone writes on it.
using your analogy, youtube would be the paper maker and most importantly, the newspaper that publishes those words. rightly, they're going after the newspaper. it's disingenuous to suggest youtube only makes tools for video content distribution whilst omitting the fact that they are the only consumers of those tools.
Do you think that if I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Times that included plagiarised content, that they could, should and would detect that prior to publishing?