European Commission Starts Legal Action Against 23 EU Countries Over Copyright Rules (reuters.com) 37
France, Spain, Italy and 20 other EU countries may be taken to court for their tardiness in enacting landmark EU copyright rules into national law, the European Commission said on Monday as it asked the group to explain the delays. From a report: The copyright rules, adopted two years ago, aim to ensure a level playing field between the European Union's trillion-euro creative industries and online platforms such as Google, owned by Alphabet, and Facebook. Some of Europe's artists and broadcasters, however, are still not happy, in particular over the interpretation of a key provision, Article 17, which is intended to force sharing platforms such as YouTube and Instagram to filter copyrighted content.
The Commission said it had sent letters of formal notice, the first step of its infringement proceedings, to the countries group asking for explanations. The deadline for enacting the EU rules was June 7. The other countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia and Slovakia.
The Commission said it had sent letters of formal notice, the first step of its infringement proceedings, to the countries group asking for explanations. The deadline for enacting the EU rules was June 7. The other countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia and Slovakia.
23 of 27.. (Score:5, Insightful)
that is quite many.
Re:23 of 27.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be more interested which are the 4 countries that value IP lawyers higher than their citizens.
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Italy, France, Germany and The Netherlands.
Re:23 of 27.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:23 of 27.. (Score:4)
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I apologize.
Truth be told, the article is as badly written as it could.
The Commission said it had sent letters of formal notice, the first step of its infringement proceedings, to the countries group asking for explanations. The deadline for enacting the EU rules was June 7.
The other countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia and Slovakia.
They have two months to respond to the Commission or receive a warning, known as a reasoned opinion. The next step is a referral to the EU's top court in Luxembourg.
The EU executive also said it had asked France, Spain and 19 other EU countries to explain why they missed a June 7 deadline to enact separate copyright rules for online transmission of radio and TV programmes.
The other countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia.
Twice there's a paragraph saying "the other countries are [blah-blah]", both paragraphs contain a slightly different list, none of which is a full list of all the infringing countries. Not once is there a full list of countries, therefore I was a bit thrown away and looked at the last paragraph.
Once again, my apologies for failing to properly Sherlock Holmes the article data.
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I'd be more interested which are the 4 countries that value IP lawyers higher than their citizens.
Not 4. German and the Netherlands already had very strong IP laws and adopting the provisions in the EU presented no change for its citizens. I don't know enough about Hungary and Malta to comment on them.
But it's would be similar to say adopting this law in the USA and depreciating the DMCA. That would have citizens dancing in the streets. Whether something is good or bad for citizens depends on the current state of those citizens.
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Thanks for the cynical evil laugh I got from that one!
Sometimes the EU is the embodiment of stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
This is such a case. Because these rules essentially force "upload filters", basically killing most content because it cannot be automatically verified. These rules will either get ignored or they will do an incredible amount of damage. Stupid.
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basically killing most content because it cannot be automatically verified.
Yeah, that's the intent, to limit user input. Only established media outlets will be permitted to upload approved material
These rules will either get ignored or they will do an incredible amount of damage.
I like to believe that will incentivize circumvention and anti-tracking protection, but the ISP still controls everything
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Interesting, but I have a bad feeling that there are unintended consequences built into some of the laws crafted on EU level - most of the legislators there are quite a bit "off track" from reality.
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Interesting, but I have a bad feeling that there are unintended consequences built into some of the laws crafted on EU level - most of the legislators there are quite a bit "off track" from reality.
Make that "utterly disconnected". Another area where that can be seen nicely is that actual experts have to explain time and again to these morons that no, you cannot have "secure" cryptography that has backdoors and that if you outlaw secure cryptography, only criminals will have it. I am by now deeply convinced that the type of person that wants to make laws is fundamentally defective and cannot perceive actual reality with any useful degree of accuracy.
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These sites already have upload filters. That ship sailed long ago. Try uploading some copyrighted video to YouTube and you will find it instantly gets flagged by their automated content recognition system.
Germany's implementation of these rules actually makes it easier for content creators. They are proposing that the creator can tick a box that says "this material is copyright but covered by fair use", at which point the upload is allowed and the copyright holder can review it later. If there is a dispute
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"this material is copyright but covered by fair use"
That statement makes little sense since everything created by humans in European countries is covered by copyright. You could manage with just "I claim fair use" and nothing else. Well, it gets actually complicated since AFAIK there's no internationally recognized fair use, only reciprocity recognized by Berne convention, so for example in the US, US-style fair use would apply even to foreign works.
What are you going to do? (Score:2)
Maybe because the law is fundamentally flawed? (Score:5, Interesting)
How is it that Europe's government is so broken that four countries can force their will on 23 countries? Really, it should be pretty clear that if such an overwhelming majority of countries think that this is a bad idea, it's a bad idea.
Article 17 is a terrible idea. Why? Because copyright filtering doesn't work. I'm on the board of directors of a chamber orchestra in the Monterey Bay area, and we've been doing our concerts online during the pandemic. Invariably, we get multiple bogus copyright claims from various groups, and the last time, Facebook actually muted part of our concert because it thought we were playing another ensemble's performance of a public domain work.
And this is not unusual. The number of scammers trying to fraudulently monetize content is staggering. It has gotten to the point where the content industry has basically gotten exactly what they want — destroying the Internet as a means for independent musicians to make content available to the masses, thus forcing everyone to go through them so that they can make unearned profits on the backs of starving musicians.
If that sounds like the sort of reality you want to force on everyone, then by all means, sign article 17 into law. If you're tired of a small cabal of powerful special interests controlling the world of modern music, write your MPs and demand that they eliminate article 17.
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Thanks for the insight!
If YouTubers resorting to placing Copyright claims on their own videos so that they they are guaranteed to get partial advertising money when a bogus copyright claim is filed isn't proof of a broken system then I don't know what is.
There is a decent video called: YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is. [youtube.com]
Re:Maybe because the law is fundamentally flawed? (Score:5, Informative)
How is it that Europe's government is so broken that four countries can force their will on 23 countries?
While I agree with your criticism of the directive itself, it's incorrect to state that 4 countries are "forcing" anything. The directive in question was approved by 19 State Members and rejected by 6 [wikipedia.org].
Re:Maybe because the law is fundamentally flawed? (Score:4, Informative)
How is it that Europe's government is so broken that four countries can force their will on 23 countries? Really, it should be pretty clear that if such an overwhelming majority of countries think that this is a bad idea, it's a bad idea.
Your concept of "Europe's government" is totally flawed. To begin with, there is no "Europe's government".
The number of countries threatened with legal action in this instance is in no way, shape or form an indication of a political majority being overridden by a minority.
Quite naturally, the copyright reform in question was passed, in the shape of an EU Directive, by a majority in both the European Council, which represents national governments, as well as a majority in the European parliament.
That means that most of the states now being reprimaneded for not implementing the directive voted for it in the first place.
You can think of a directive as a kind of meta-law that member states have to translate to their national legislation, but with considerable freedom how to actually implement it.
Note that I'm not commenting on the merits of this legislation here. I don't agree with it. But to suggest that it was foisted upon the majority by a small minority is ludicrous.
Re: Maybe because the law is fundamentally flawed? (Score:4, Informative)
No "Europe government" ? Europe has an executive power, a parliament, a judicial power, a central bank, ... It has a constitution (that changed name to be forced onto France that rejected in a popular vote). It has a police. It even has an anthem. The only thing missing is an army... But it's on the way, Germany really wants to get hands on those sweets french nuclear warheads.
A non-democratic government (as eveywhere the people were asked in popular vote rejected it) but a government.
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The GP's point is that these are made up through equal representation of the member states. Unlike say you or me who are 1 of millions having their lives decided by representatives who make up an infinitesimal minority of the population the EU "government's" executive power is distributed equally among all members of the EU. I.e. no one decides anything on their behalf.
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Re:Maybe because the law is fundamentally flawed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Article 17 is a terrible idea. Why? Because copyright filtering doesn't work. I'm on the board of directors of a chamber orchestra in the Monterey Bay area, and we've been doing our concerts online during the pandemic. Invariably, we get multiple bogus copyright claims from various groups, and the last time, Facebook actually muted part of our concert because it thought we were playing another ensemble's performance of a public domain work.
In an ironic turn of events, some game company (I think it was Blizzard, off the top of my head) had their game convention, and they hired metallica to play and stream it live. The twitch stream muted and blocked the sound, and inserted some really cheesy music instead.
Content filtering is going to constantly hit false positive, especially in something like classical music where the idea instrumentation and sounds tend to stay the same, and repertoire is often repeated, but I wonder if this may not be by design, in order to encourage people to avoid this altogether and generate new content.
Re:Maybe because the law is fundamentally flawed? (Score:4, Insightful)
In an ironic turn of events, some game company (I think it was Blizzard, off the top of my head) had their game convention, and they hired metallica to play and stream it live. The twitch stream muted and blocked the sound, and inserted some really cheesy music instead.
I think you meant "karmic". Couldn't have been a more perfect choice of band [wikipedia.org] to get burned by content ID systems, given that they're the band that basically got us this mess.
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How is it that Europe's government is so broken that four countries can force their will on 23 countries?
It isn't and they can't. That's not how any of this works. 4 Countries haven't forced anything. This comes down to 23 countries agreeing to something and then changing their mind, or dragging their feet.
Stop. This. Shit! Copyright is a crime! (Score:1, Informative)
"Copyright" means nothing more than legalized monopolism, legalized artificial scarcity and legalized racketeering to use creative people to steal from everyone else and censor all the things!
Creative works have turned into endless remakes and rehashes since its rise to power! The most creative time known, was a time without copyright! (That time when Germany was called "land of thinkers and poets".)
It is the direct enemy of all creativity!
It only exists, to keep a dead "industry" alive. The industry of med
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Everyone who supports it [Copyright], or allows it to exist, is a thief and a criminal and has no place in a human society.
That means that the following people are thieves and criminals with no place in a human society:
Linus Torvalds
Richard Stallman
Randal Munroe
Theo de Raadt
Thomas Bushnell
Ian Murdock
Elton John
Stan Lee
Michael Jackson
David Bowie
Hayao Miyazaki
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Weird Al Yankovic.
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The music artists listed would have had no trouble making money via concerts and merchandise and other than that copyright that ends after 20 years would likely suffice. Current copyright lengths go completely against the purpose of copyright - to encourage the creation of new works.