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European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

bbc.com

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Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#91

Post by ar0 »

indigochill wrote: post #9

If I may play the devil's advocate for a moment here, isn't this a boon for decentralizing media? If third-party publishers like YouTube are crippled, perhaps there's more room for self-hosting your content, enabling you to build your brand on your own terms rather than YouTube's? Perhaps it's time to stop outsourcing the publication of our content to third-parties and host it ourselves, especially now that granularl…

I don't think that running your own cloud server is a feasible strategy for most people who put hobbyist content out on the Internet. You are over-estimating the technical abilities of many people here, I believe.

So the next best thing to achieve decentralization is federation: what Mastodon (joinmastodon.org) and to a lesser extent PeerTube are successfully implementing. This means most people will still entrust their content to third-parties, but there will be a lot of these third-parties which federate among each other and you can pick e.g. the Mastodon server of your local hackerspace or the PeerTube of your university to publish content.

And this is why these proposed new EU rules are so horrible: because they won't "punish" Google or YouTube so much (after all, they already have a lot of licensing arrangements and automatic content filters in place) but they will kill off your local hackerspace's Mastodon instance: because they now either would have to pay a lot to a) lawyers, b) content ID providers, c) link licensing services or face lawsuits.

So in my opinion these laws are actually horrible for decentralizing media...

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#92

Post by tomp »

sampo wrote: post #56
hesk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law was basically made at the publisher’s behest to get Google to pay them. So far, it has spectularly backfired. In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated. In Spain, they went a bit further and wrote into the law that Google had to list news sites in their index. So Google News shut down in Spain. Law…

So Google gets licenses to link to new sites for free, but smaller companies and private people's website cannot link to news sites?

I thought the newest reincarnation prevents such licences (i.e. it makes it impossible to waive the right to linking fee)?

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#93

Post by akoncius »

sqdbps wrote: post #33

A Couple of things: Mainstream news outlets on this side of the atlantic didn't do much reporting on this vote which might signal tacit support on their part (at least for the link payment portion of this thing which is frankly the sillies part) and that should shape everyone's understanding of their coverage of tech companies in general. Second, it's hard not to notice that much of what the EU does is trying to hurt…

> Second it's hard not to notice that much of what the EU does is try to hurt US tech companies

I totally understand what you are saying, but on the other hand: maybe a lot of US tech companies do unethical/bad things? Antitrust cases must be based on something, so it's not just tariff on tech company products, it's more like a fine for bad behaviour.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#94

Post by laumars »

dekrg wrote: post #72
hesk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law was basically made at the publisher’s behest to get Google to pay them. So far, it has spectularly backfired. In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated. In Spain, they went a bit further and wrote into the law that Google had to list news sites in their index. So Google News shut down in Spain. Law…

Laws don't work like that. It you think any law was defeated you very mistaken about how laws and government bureaucracy works. The law still applies and all that happened is that Google gets a free license and everyone who is not Google has to pay licensing fees.

While your point is true, the GP was talking from the perspective of Google vs the publishers. I guess "defeated" probably wasn't a wise description but I think his / her general point is still valid.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#95

Post by ahartmetz »

ahartmetz wrote: post #70
merinowool wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten me please, as I don't believe the reasons for passing it are genuine.

Lobbyists don't usually hand over money. Usually they are just good at appearing trustworthy and, uh, explaining the positions of their clients in terms that politicians understand. Therefore, their explainees think they are doing genuinely good things.

By the way, I saw a honest-to-god lobbyist at a panel discusssion once. He was wearing a sort of relaxed suit and had a slight punk vibe with slightly messy hair. The personality-free banker look wouldn't win trust so easily when speaking for business interests. Those people really know what they are doing.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#97

Post by throwaway77384 »

VMG wrote: post #25

I'm excited about this. This will boost VPN, Tor and other technologies that protect users from inane regulations. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp...

I am also excited about this. I believe there is a small chance that this will result in us getting a bit of the 'old internet' pre-eternal September back.

I would love to go back to an internet that's harder to access, with a higher ratio of noobs to more experienced technology users. Everything was so much more fun back then.

I have in fact begun to resent the internet over the last 10 years or so...and my usage has dropped to like one or two websites that could be called communities. This being one of them.

The rest is now purely utilitarian. Online banking and courses.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#98

Post by hammock »

ahel wrote: post #60
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.

> All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though. Like this one.

@jumpcrisscross if ernesth was from the EU though, would his comment count as an EU publication?

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#99

Post by bluecalm »

EU has long proven record of making laws targeting specific big players and not caring about smaller local businesses and specifically not caring about promoting competition. VAT MOSS disaster didn't generate that much discussion because the ones hurt were busy selling their sweaters on Etsy and didn't have time to take it to the streets.

I just hope with this one we can get some mechanism where you waive your fees/licensing in the html header and then your stuff is freely linked by the engines. Old media will fight for their licenses and fees and die there as sites will just stop aggregating from them. That would be great outcome, they are pretty useless anyway and they give a lot of power to morons currently residing in EU structures. With some luck it can become a win-win. I just hope bloggers and small publishers won't need to run circles just to get their stuff indexed and linked.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#100

Post by Filligree »

merinowool wrote: post #76
merinowool wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten me please, as I don't believe the reasons for passing it are genuine.

Surely they don't hand over cash, I didn't mean that, but they give benefits by different means.

The main benefit they give is to explain technical concepts in terms the politicians understand.

Sometimes that's a "benefit", but that's when calling them yourself helps the most.

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