European Commission Gives Final Seal of Approval To Copyright Law Overhaul (variety.com) 182
The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, has approved a long-gestating major reform to copyright law, which had already been passed by the European Parliament last month. From a report: The overhaul contains two controversial provisions that will make online platforms liable for illegal uploading of copyright-protected content on their sites, as well as force Google, Facebook and other digital companies to pay publishers for press articles they post online. "With today's agreement, we are making copyright rules fit for the digital age. Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong rights for users and responsibility for platforms," said European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, six countries -- Italy, Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Poland and the Netherlands -- voted again the reform.
Block them all (Score:5, Insightful)
If the entire EU is blocked from accessing all content on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and every other social media and news site, they'll get the hint and re-think these ridiculous polices.
Re:Block them all (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh?
Nobody's blocking anything.
News sites have lobbied for years to get this law passed, hoping Google (et al) will start paying for the privilege of linking to their copy-pasted stories.
What will happen in reality is:
a) Google will stop linking to those sites.
b) The sites will disappear from the Internet.
c) Karma.
I can't wait.
Re: (Score:1)
User-agent: *
Disallow: *
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If the entire EU is blocked from accessing all content on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and every other social media and news site, they'll get the hint and re-think these ridiculous polices.
If the EU is blocked from doing this the company executives will get a very unkind hint from shareholders about activism and cutting off the largest western customer base in the world.
It pays when you're angry at someone to shot them, not yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
Block everyone that passed the law?
Re: (Score:2)
If the entire EU is blocked from accessing all content on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and every other social media and news site...
...they'd be much better off. People would stop wasting their time on all that garbage.
Re: (Score:3)
*yawn*
This stupid troll comes up every single time there is an article about the EU on /. - literally every time. I should have an answer on a shortcut. Don't you guys ever learn anything?
If Google, FB, Twitter or whatever you have were to leave the EU, or block the EU or whatever, the first thing that's going to happen is that their stocks take such a massive nosedive, you'll think it's the dot-com-crash all over again, just in fast-forward.
The EU is a larger market than the USA. With more people and more
Re: (Score:2)
China has an export-oriented economy and a restricted market, especially for Internet companies. That's why I don't consider them in this case, but yes, just to be entirely precise I should've mentioned it.
Re: (Score:2)
an entity that contributed absolutely nothing to the internet
are you talking about strictly the EU government? Because then what you're saying is true for pretty much every country in the world.
Or are you talking about the people of Europe? In such case, omg are you wrong. Such a huge percentage of contributors to Free Software projects are from Europe. So much of the brains in all those "American" Internet companies were actually hired out of Europe. And a ton of Internet companies are in Europe. Just not the big Facebooks and Googles.
Because fascist europeans -
ahh.... the true colours appear
Re: (Score:2)
Good riddance.
Re:Block them all (Score:4, Insightful)
The US doesn't give a flying fuck about either because the goddam citizens are interested in more important things like Farmville.
The US doesn't give an F.F. because the government is still largely in the hands of the party-organization swamp creatures. They are currently largely controlled by the media conglomerates, and don't give a Rat's Ass about what the citizens think.
The big fight here is to drain that swamp, and has been for several cycles. That's what the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus were about. That's why Trump was elected. And that's why trump is flamed 24/7 in the media.
Of course people in Europe have NO IDEA that is what's going on here. Because they get their ideas about what's going on here from the media.
How convenient.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Honestly, anyone who legitimately thought Trump would 'drain the swamp' deserves a slap upside the head. Of all the things he promised, that was the most laughable.
Re:Block them all (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
"How many of those high level investigators on the Mueller team have been fired? Strok, Page, McCabe, etc. ." ARE YOU RETARDED LOL? They were fired for a prima facie POTENTIAL IMPRESSION of conflict of interest.
If you're going to accuse someone of being retarded, you ought to at least get your facts straight. McCabe was fired after an internal Inspector General investigation determined that he lied to investigators. That's PERJURY to the rest of us. You and I would be indicted just like Michael Flynn if it had happened to us. As for Peter Strzok (correct spelling by the way) and Lisa Page... We'll let the Barr investigation run its course before making any definitive judgments.
Re: (Score:2)
Bring it on, you socialist racist. That is, if you're willing to leave you're mother's basement.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
How will this work ? You want to publish your own photo on a big site, how do you demonstrate that you are the copyright holder ?
Re: (Score:3)
Uh, duh. AI checks all the photos and puts them in the blockchain which it stores in the cloud to provide a scalable platform which will allow synergistic end-to-end copyright notification.
I thought that would be obvious, no?
Re: Block them all (Score:2)
Mod parent up. Classic.
Re: Block them all (Score:2)
Mod parent up
Business Model (Score:1)
First, the Internet doesn't owe anyone a living. If you can't make money on the Internet, then don't be on the Internet.
Second, there's the example of Randall Munroe and his xkcd comic [wikipedia.org]. He allows free use of all his webcomic, and the quality of his content has allowed his survival by other means.
Re: (Score:2)
As a content provider my self (photographer)
I'm sure the thought of people providing you advertising, access to customers and then paying you as well gives you a massive stiffy.
Re:Block them all (Score:5, Interesting)
As a content provider my self (photographer), it's disheartening to see my work pop up on social media in numbers without end and I only get compensation from the tiny Internet real estate that I initially did business with.
What value would you put on a "wow, that's neat" *clicks share button* repost of one of your photos on instafacetwit? And how many of those reposters do you expect to pay it?
Re:Block them all (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Block them all (Score:5, Insightful)
>As a content provider my self (photographer), it's disheartening to see my work pop up on social media in numbers without end and I only get compensation from the tiny Internet real estate that I initially did business with.
Mate, none of those people sharing your images on social media would have paid you to do that anyway. You realise that, right? Nothing, as such, not even the *opportunity* to make money from those images, has been lost in that respect.
One problem with IP law and the mentality that can surround it is that it gives some people the false impression that creative cultural expression is exactly the same as tangible material property. And it isn't.
I'm not saying that commercial operations should be free to use any image as they see fit without financial and legal obligations to the coyright holder, but I am saying that to expect people who use non-licensed copyrighted material casually on social media the same as if they should have paid for a license, is ridiculous.
European law, with this new copyright law, as well as others such as the so-called 'right to be forgotten' law, has shown itself to still hold to a pre-digital, pre-internet mentality. Copyright is not fit for the modern age, and laws such as the one just passed are, if anything, a step backward.
Stuckists stamping around in their sabots. Except this time, it's not the working classes calling a halt to the new age, it's the establishment and factory owners (which is why it's succeeding and will probably get a lot worse).
Re: (Score:3)
No one is forcing you to give away anything. That is what your bi-weekly retention is for. You can walk away any time you want and keep all your ideas.
Re: (Score:2)
No one is forcing you to give away anything.
Of course there are people and things forcing it. One such thing is called "starvation risk". Another is called "foreclosure risk". And then there are the big users of those two things, called "politicians" and "capitalists", who then employ a third thing called "buying laws" so as to make it all work pretty well in their own favor. But they're nice, and let you take home the breadcrumbs.
Re: Block them all (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's because "dorks in the states" have this idea that users should be able to upload content without having it have to be curated first. The copyright law requires sites to actively filter -- no more "take down content found to be infringing," the new regulations are "make sure no one CAN post anything deemed to be under copyright." Expect any sort of fair use, which yes, does exist, to disappear, because businesses can't afford to police any of that.
Re: (Score:2)
> because businesses can't afford to police any of that.
Because there is no way to check if anything is under copyright, I don't see how these businesses can actually legally allow user-posted content. The biggies will do it anyway (allow user-posted content), because they have billion-dollar legal budgets and agreements with some large content creators already, and can afford to see how this mess will actually work out in court. No one else will try, so there will be a lot of geo-blocking of the EU.
Re: (Score:2)
As member of the "consumer" group: we don't give a fuck about your "great" content.
If you don't care about, don't use it. Everyone's cool.
But if you do want to use it, then you do care about it.
Re: (Score:2)
It also means jack if someone uploads your photo to an American, Chinese, or Russian site.
But every site is a multinational now. The big boys are not content to operate only in the US, or China, or Europe. They want to operate EVERYWHERE, so they have to follow everyone's laws.
Re: Block them all (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Any chance that you could redirect the EU addresses to VPN-providers in the US?
Thanks from across the pond.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno. We researched this when implemented a year ago and decided the best way to handle was just disavow entire countries we don't want to do business with. I believe redirecting that traffic to a VPN provider would be in some way acknowledging support or service to them and then make us fall under the compliance directives.
If I wanted to be under EU rules, I'd go back and live there (was stationed there for several years on business as Schengen expat) and pay 50% taxes again. No thanks
Funny thing IIRC t
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you plan to go to the EU you should be fine. The US don't even extradite war criminals, so... no, wait, this is about copyright.
You're right, better be safe than sorry.
One step forward one step back (Score:3)
The whole adjustment to force Google etc to provide compensation for article snippets seems fair. If the companies don't want to agree to a fair price, don't include them.
However, the whole illegal uploading part seems, well...... extraordinarily draconian.
Re:One step forward one step back (Score:4, Funny)
However, the whole illegal uploading part seems, well...... extraordinarily draconian.
2 words: Kim Dotcom
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I have no idea how that got modded 'Funny'. It's exactly not funny.
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine Google will happily give 100% of their earnings from showing those snippets to news publishers.
Unfortunately for them, there are no ads on Google News, so that earning is $0.
Guess it's time (Score:3)
to start sending millions of takedown notices to EU government websites for copyright violations.
Time for anonymized services to be free and easy. (Score:1, Informative)
... and everywhere.
And then rapidly become a basic part of normal browsers, used by default. Not just for end users, but also hosting content.
Culture flows through free expression. People refer to well-produced works. Places like Youtube are already becoming nearly useless for sharing basic culture because of laws like this - seemingly any reference to a popular work is becoming forbidden - or just random information since anything can be claimed by almost anyone.
So - the answer isn't to not share cultur
Re: (Score:3)
One of the biggest issues on this is how compliance is demanded.
I assume this will be like the DMCA where there isn't any real deterrent for false claims.
Big companies can afford to hire people to validate the requests to ensure they aren't claiming things that aren't theirs.
Startup projects will simply honor all requests without validation as they don't have the time or money to do validation.
Even youtube run by one of the largest companies runs by a honor request then check only if someone disputes policy
Re: (Score:2)
What YouTube will do is easy to figure out. If you're on their A-List, whatever you say is gospel and will be removed immediately. If you're not, any of your content that was removed stays removed.
Why do you think they'd change anything?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think I insinuated that youtube would change anything. I was using them as an example of the chilling effects seen by abuse of the DMCA and suggesting that other companies would be adopting similar or even more user untrusting policies.
User untrusting as in anyone makes a claim no matter how baseless and the content is removed automatically by machine trusting the accuser while the person who posted the content must defend themselves and prove they actually own it.
Like the recent EFF twitter debacle
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Why do you think you get the whole picture that way?
I'm actually willing to cut them some slack and accept that they honestly believe what they're writing. Never attribute to malice and all that. The devil's in the details, though, because of how companies will (have to) react to it.
Saying it does not affect end users is very ... let's say naive. Because with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the like, end users ARE content creators that are dependent on those targeted by the directive. Now, the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Copyright legislations are applied everywhere (like it or not) except online.
That's just wrong. The law might exist everywhere in theory, but in practice nobody bothers to enforce it.
I've not heard of any pen maker that verifies whether the pen they sold will be used to copy a book. Neither does printer or camera makers. In fact, I even recall a lot of CD, DVD and Video Cassette piracy before BitTorrent became a thing.
If anything, laws are better enforced now. Copyrighted content on YouTube has a much bigger chance of being taken down than DVDs passed to friends.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Thats what sets the EU apart with the new laws. A link tax. Political reporting and control over content.
Who can say what and when.
Who has their "art". "review", "politics" removed by an EU gov for political reasons.
Who in the EU can report an image, comment, link, news item for removal?
A side of politics? NATO? A think tank? NGO? University? A worker for some pa
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I don't know who's more naive, the European Parliament or you...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Here's the problem with the directive - and almost every legislation related to the Internet of the past 20 years - there are some well-meaning intentions behind it (and some nonsense, and a lot of hidden agenda). But it is all being done by people without a clue who are advised by lobbyists with agendas and companies to serve. Large companies. Small companies can't afford full-time lobbyists and lobster dinners.
Their intent is to reduce the power of Internet Giants such as Google and Facebook who - let's b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you that it is certainly not a coincidence that so many people reached so many other people so easily using the exact social media platforms that would be affected by this.
I don't see the need of these filters which you are talking about. Is your site not caring about the copyright of the uploaded material now and do you want to defend that position?!
The upload filters are introduced indirectly. The word doesn't appear in the directive - but if your reaction time is one hour at any day and time of day, then unless you are an Internet giant with a 24/7 copyright infringement checking office, there is absolutely no way except upload filtering that you can guarantee you will
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My home country of Germany has this bastard thing called "Abmahnung". Basically, if you violate the (civil) law, any lawyer can send you a cease-and-desist letter and you even have to pay him for his troubles. A certain subset of parasit... er, lawyers, discovered that the Internet is great for rapidly checking details of formal compliance for large numbers of online sites and generating a lot of such letters in a short time with minimal effort - but full bill.
For decades, the government has done little to
Re: (Score:2)
I am confused by their claim:
combined with
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Some help to understand all this better (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I am not defending anyone.
No, you're not; try harder next time. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Contrast that with the political views from many EU nations on the use of language, who can publish, what publication will cost and a link tax.
That police can interview a person over their publication, use of language, a meme, cartoon. That such publication can be stopped and has to be removed.
The USA has the protection of freedom of speech.
EU nations have taxes and laws over who can publish and what they
Clear rules? (Score:2)
Jean-Claude, are you drunk again?
If anything this made the whole mess even worse since now nobody knows what to do. Neither do the various EU countries that don't even know how to adapt this in any sensible way into their laws, nor do companies that don't have any idea how to comply with them, nor do the users who are pretty much preparing to simply ignore it by using VPN services.
Re: (Score:2)
When nobody knows what to do, lawyers make bank. Lawyers run the EU and all modern states.
If you have servers in reach of the EU, get them out now. Fuck them.
EU beams back to the brutish past (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:EU beams back to the brutish past (Score:5, Insightful)
The world is. Not just Europe. Everyone is scrambling to put the genie back into the bottle because the very last thing governments want is people being able to talk to each other and organize unsupervised.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? You think they watch what happened in northern Africa and don't start to worry?
Naive much?
Re: (Score:3)
This is the same highly mature and sophisticated culture that resulted in regular wars at about 20-30 year intervals like a bunch of squabbling children, halted only when they were tightly controlled from the outside and their toys were taken away. So expecting reasonable decision-making is asking too much.
Presumably (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Ha... ...haha... ...hahaha... ...hahahahaaaaaa!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I want to be paid also! (Score:2)
My blog is indexed in Google. My stuff is copyrighted. Where's my money?
Re: (Score:2)
The payment is based on number of times the link to your content was accessed. Google will cut you a check once you get enough clicks that they can round the owed value up to one cent.
Retweets? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Will hurt EU in the end. (Score:4, Informative)
Two countries, Germany and Spain, already tried to pull this stunt before. Germany was first, and Google retaliated by making companies sign a thing stating that if Google was to host those snippets they would do it licence free. Spain didn't like that so they made sure Google couldn't do that in their country. Google was like fine, guess what, we aren't hosting your news snippets at all. Spain complained, tried to take Google to court and told the judges that Google wasn't being fair, because them not hosting such content was hurting tons of business. Courts told Spain Google don't have to do business with anyone they don't want to do business with. In the end news companies in Spain were losing far far more money by not having their content hosted because Google wouldn't pay for license vs going license free.
Punish Google for "illegal" uploads? (Score:2, Interesting)
The EU politicians are idiots, of course, and YouTube has long since had copyright detection where your video will be blocked from viewing if YT's algorithms think your video has protected content.
As far as ne
At least we can see who (Score:4, Insightful)
6 countries said no. What if they continue? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Italy, Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Poland and the Netherlands voted no. This law needs to be written into the laws of each EU country. What if those six countries simply didn't write laws implementing that, or did write laws implementing those two sections but half-assed it by making the burden of proof high and/or the punishment low?
EU member states pushing back against idiocy out of Brussels is exactly why the EU wants their own standing military. The EU is rapidly becoming a Western version of the old USSR.
If they remain on this path, it's not out of the realm of possibility that at some point the EU and the rest of the West may end up in a 'cold war'-esque standoff, possibly even resulting in non-EU Western thermonuclear-tipped ICBMs being additionally targeted at the EU as well as Russia, N. Korea, and China.
Strat
Voted what? (Score:2)
It would appear msmash is drunk again.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If they're smart, they will.
Since it does not matter where I put my server within the EU (if I want to put it inside the EU for whatever reason), take a wild guess where I'd put it...
Re: (Score:2)
If there's still room between the servers of Amazon, MS and Facebook, sure.
Re: (Score:2)
Finland has the power to declare war, Rhode Island doesn't. Finland also has the power to block a lot of EU actions that require unanimous consent, whereas nothing in the USA except for changing senate representation requires unanimous consent of states.
While both the USA and EU are fundamentally undemocratic structures, I'd much rather see the USA reform into a more EU-like structure because the EU does provide significantly more autonomy. Not to mention an escape hatch (article 50).
Re: (Score:1)
> Even better - add filters requiring all EU Facebook, Twitter, etc, users to add a credit card to their accounts
> and when they post a link to an EU based news source, the poster much pay the article fee directly (as it should be).
That's an interesting solution which I did not think of. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the "you must filter out content under copyright even though it is impossible to know what content is under copyright".
About the only solution to that problem that I can think of, is to