Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.
Of course, I agree with you that independent platforms are going to have a rough time. They either have to manually review all content themselves, not allow any user-uploaded content, or pay a company to do this for them.
If the PDF (https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copyright_Se...) posted elsewhere in this discussion is accurate, Article 13 paragraph 3 was amended:
> When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remain appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided.
SMEs = Small and Medium-sized enterprises
The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.
The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.
The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images. I am a big believer in freedom and privacy. I am also a big believer in protecting children. Many people understandably prefer protecting children to seemingly (to them) abstract concepts like freedom. Any technical solution needs a method to remove certain content - and as soon as such a method exists people will want to abuse it for political reasons.
The solution has to be political not technical - somehow we need a political situation where basic freedoms are respected. This can only exist as revisions to countrys' constitutions. Simple laws protecting freedom are too easy to overturn. And we can't carry on resisting re-heated versions of the same stupid law every two years.
It is possible.
> The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images.
This is a fake reason which is only used as a justification for censorship technologies. In practice it's better to allow distribution so that it happens in the open and new images can be discovered sooner and traced back to the perpetrators who created them. If you shut down a distribution network every time you find it then the only ones that exist are the ones you don't know about, which means you have no source of evidence to make cases against unknown active pedophiles.
The FBI had a successful campaign where they quietly seized a distribution server and then continued operating it so they could collect evidence and make cases against those using it. Naturally the headlines were "FBI distributes child pornography" rather than "FBI arrests many child pornographers" as though preventing distribution is somehow more important than arresting the creators and rescuing the children.
> “Thousands of Swedes have received threatening letters from law firms which accuse them of illegal downloading. They are asked to pay a sum of money, ranging from a couple of thousand Swedish Kronors up to several thousand, to avoid being brought to justice,” Bahnhof Communicator Carolina Lindahl notes.
> “During 2018 the extortion business has increased dramatically. The numbers have already exceeded last year’s figures even though four months still remain.”
> This year to date, 49 separate court cases have been filed requesting ISPs to disclose the personal details of the account holders behind 35,711 IP-addresses. As the chart below shows, that’s already more than the two previous years combined.
> Also, the number of targeted people exceeds that of all US and Canadian file-sharing cases in 2018, which is quite extraordinary.
https://torrentfreak.com/more-than-35000-pirates-targeted-in...
To be fair, that hypothetical problem is caused by a broken classifier and not the law. After all, youtube already blocks and removes content like you've described but no one is accusing the classifier of stiffling free speech.
I'm curious how this is supposed to work.
The copyright industry and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no mental model for such forms of distribution. Have you forgotten the panic that ensued fifteen years ago, when the music industry was suing middle schoolers?
(The irony is that the very same platforms these industry lobbyists are whining about only became popular because they killed P2P via the courts.)
Source from legislation: In particular, small and micro enterprises as defined in Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, should be expected to be subject to less burdensome obligations than larger service providers. Therefore, taking into account the state of the art and the availability of technologies and their costs, in specific cases it may not be proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders.
Much as I hate to admit it, the biggest reason US tech companies have been so much more successful than European tech companies is that the US imposes far fewer regulations, which allows companies to use more of their revenue on growth.
This is consolidation of power, finally locking down the Free Internet just as we've done with every other industry. Stripping the power to change from the small.
And what are we doing about it?
PS: Jonathan Strange: Great books and even better TV.
The problem is that 'normal' people don't know how to use most distributed/encrypted/stick-it-to-the-man products, nor do they care.
Make our own content and host it ourselves?
This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services. If everyone self-hosted and was accountable for their own content there would be no scope for such legislation. All HN would hold would be linked-lists of URLs, no actual comment content.
Imagine a decentralised, federated HN where each comment originated from its owner's site.
This type of law encourages that very centralization. Look at the provisions of GDPR, for example. Do you think a two-person startup is going to have the resources to deal with all of its provisions? Or in this case: do you think that a new video-sharing startup is going to have the resources to deal with the more stringent copyright enforcement requirements?
The EU has, in effect, made a Faustian bargain with Google, Facebook and Twitter: if you accept our regulation, we'll ensure that you have no competitors.
GDPR is a bad example, because yes, that's definitely possible. And it should be, if that startup handles personal data.
The only argument you can make at that point is that it's worth the cost, but is it? The damage to privacy of having everyone's data in the hands of conglomerates that are no longer subject to competitive pressure has got to be worse than Mom and Pop occasionally mishandling the information of their two hundred customers. Just having the centralization at all is worse than anything that could happen to any given 0.5% subset of it, because every misuse or compromise is 200 times worse even if they only happen 10% as often.
So what remains for the business part of the startup is to make sure the necessary contracts with all third parties are in place (the pressure-the-conglomerates-part), and to explain it to the users. This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with. The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
> What is everybody complaining about?
I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe. I guess if you don't want to be GDPR compliant due to the effort that's fair, but you should know that there are much worse things ahead for a company.
However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
The expense doesn't come from that. Even if you're doing the right thing in spirit, now you have to compare what you're doing to a complex regulatory framework. That's pure overhead that you pay even if you don't even have to change anything.
> This is annoying, but also not much worse than the typical legalese stuff the CEO has to deal with.
You're saying that this thing that harms small businesses and entrenches incumbents is like the other things that harm small businesses and entrench incumbents. But that's the problem. Each one you add is an incremental burden that moves the margin for how many startups you kill by another kilometer in the wrong direction.
> The data privacy policy of a certain privacy activist reads, in essence: "We store only what we need, and delete it as soon as we can, as long as we are not required by law to store it for any longer." You don't even need a law degree for that, as you shouldn't, because the text should be readable for the end user.
That is a very aspirational privacy policy that also happens to be very strict and trivial to violate unintentionally. And what are the consequences for not following your own very strict privacy policy?
This is why most of the big companies have one that says something to the effect of "we promise to use your data for things we want to do" but then have to be carefully crafted by lawyers to simultaneously minimize liability and hold up under scrutiny.
> I don't know, the GDPR is basically German data privacy law, and it hasn't stopped Berlin from becoming a startup center in Europe.
It's all relative. If Germany has a significant regulatory burden but Greece is a hotbed of corruption, Germany can still do better than Greece. But not as well as it could have done with less overhead.
> However, if you are not _able_ to be GDPR compliant as a small organization, while many of your competitors are, you should absolutely not be entrusted with personal data.
The pretense that complex regulations only cost you if you were previously doing something wrong is empirically false. The cost of complying with the regulation is in addition to the cost of doing the right thing and is still paid by everyone who was doing the right thing already. And it can be enough to destroy a company that was not actually mishandling data but merely had low operating margins.
Explicit opt-ins are only required when you record personally-identifiable information surreptitiously, or share these information with other parties.
I'm sure there are some provisions intended to help out smaller entities. But the compliance cost is the cost of understanding the legislation so you can comply with it. You still have to pay it even if it turns out not to apply at all -- because you can't know that until you go through all of it first.
“copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works”
> Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.
As weird as it sounds, you are wrong. In a short summary:
1. Fair use is a very small exception to some very broad rights.
2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.
3. If you rely on fair use rights, then you might find yourself in trouble.
What's even worse is that right holders can pick and choose who to bust, and they don't need to be consistent about it. So even if they rarely go after small groups, they can still shut down bigger ones.
I have a childhood friend who is now a copyright lawyer and I sometimes jokingly ask him whether something is copyright infringing. Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends. Both sides have arguments so ultimately it's down to the judge." It's just bad law. The only difference between then and now is that now we have the technology to actually enforce it.
The biggest name one so far is the H3H3 trial.[1] One that looks to be settled soon is Akilah Hughes suing Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), where all that Benjamin does is edit together two of Hughes videos with the only original addition being a new title. This is almost certainly going to go in favor of Sargon, yet YouTube's algorithms turned up to the nth degree would almost certainly have blocked it.[2]
If you go outside of YouTube, fair use law in the United States is very broad. Just look at what Richard Prince does with others' art. [3]
edit: added links
1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41037631/youtube-stars...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LMgGBDZbJY
3. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/18/instagram...
Combining them is another, sharing them is another.
We basically have no concept of personal use in our copyright.
[0] if they were broadcast you can record but only for time-shifting, you can only watch once (alone!) and then are obliged to destroy the copy; you aren't allowed to format shift.
The lack of any remaining semblance of balance in copyright between the rights of the demos and media interests shows how badly distorted our Western democracies have become from representing the rights of people in general above the rights of the rich.
Though a price for this is that we pay a special tax on every storage device we purchase.
Not a western democracy, though.
Real problem is the negative incentive to be correct.
The rule penalise you harshly if you serve copyrighted content, but there is nothing if you decide to not serve non-copyrighted content and there is so much content on the internet, that "market pressure" simply isn't going to work. If you are a small publisher of free content, there is a huge risk for content platform to serve your content and no reward if they do.
And that's the best case scenario, where all actors have good intentions. But in the real world we know that large copyright holder are very often bulk claiming bulk content. There is no penalty, so that would be crazy for them no to do it.
The laws is also talking about terrorist content and the need to remove it within 1 hour or risk up to 4% turnover fine ! There is not going to be any manual check done within 1 hour, and anyway the risk is so great you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy.
I fail to see the "good intentions in mind" you mention. MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport. Their field of expertise is the people and public relation. I can believe they are naive with technology (like encryption or monitoring actual capabilities) but I can't accept they are candid about businesses or individual motivations. Any negative consequence of this law is there on purpose.
I don't think so. I think MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress. With the equivalent of a member of the US congress being a member of some national parliament.
My criterium here is how fierce the campaign is to get elected. At the very least here in the Netherlands, the campaign for the European Parliament is nearly an afterthought in the news. It ranks far below the campaign for the German parliament, let alone our national parliament.
What's the salary and expenses package like in a state congress?
"[..] expense payments of €4,416 per month are given to MEPs as a lump sum in addition to their regular pre-tax monthly salary of €8,611. They are not required to provide any proof of how the money is spent"
sources: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/about-meps.html and https://www.politico.eu/article/european-parliament-corrupti...
The fact that MEP compensation is so good, whilst public scrutiny on who gets seats is so lax is even worse.
The directive (Article 13(2b)) requires the service providers to provide an "effective and expeditious" complaint mechanism for unjustified removals with human review, though.
I disagree, no other utility is blamed for the actions of its users, if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider, but if I do something illegal on the internet like piracy its some how my internet providers fault?
I also don't like making excuses for policy makers who "don't understand the internet", its not the 90s, ignorance is no longer an excuse, these people know what the internet is, and they know exactly what they are doing.
The physical equivalent is more like you sending pirated dvd's through the mail to your entire neighborhood. The equivalent law would then require the post office to check all packages upon sending to verify that they contain only content which is not pirated, which for privacy reasons they do in an automated way that sometimes blocks the package with the family movie you're sending to your mom (because your daughter was wearing mickey mouse ears and the automated check thought it was a disney movie).
Oftentimes when you physicalize online legislation it becomes apparent just how invasive and silly it is.
There are absolutely well defined “fair use” exceptions which a stringent filter will block.
> Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is "I don't know, it depends.
This is the only answer a lawyer will basically ever give you.
the first time around? _maybe_
after the enormous backslash and numerous expert opinion pieces decrying the exact problems of the proposal? _hardly_
"He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best. The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It. Eric was standing on: For the Sake of the Children. “Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “Why do it like this?” “I think they’re meant to be good intentions,” said Rincewind. This was a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists. And, while they are of course irredeemably evil, they are not always bad. And so Rincewind stepped off We Are Equal Opportunity Employers and through a wall, which healed up behind him, and into the world."
I disagree. This law was made with the intention of being selectively enforced. This is never a good intention.
Have you read the YouTube terms for original content uploaded by individuals? I'm not so sure doing remixes isn't allowed. If you don't want people doing that to your stuff, keep it off YouTube. I could be wrong, it's been many years since I read their ToS.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
And now we are stuck with upload filters.
Same sad song as it ever was. Keep giving more control to the government and they'll keep ratcheting down the screws on you.
An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government. Centralizing authority only benefits the well connected political class.
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 union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive. I agree that the contents of that directive is lamentable, but the need for one is clear, even for those opposing this particular directive, provided you buy into the notion that single markets should exist at all.
Why?
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.
It's amazing that people never see this issue. Everyone needs to stop making bigger and bigger governments.
Give the government power to take away your rights, that's indeed what it will do.
A law like this can and likely will be selectively enforced since it will be impossible to police every single independent thought published on the internet.
* I appreciate those points may not be in breach of the new legislation per se. But there is a pretty good chance that some content on sites of those style would be in breach. So it's a little like police using a broken tail light as an excuse to stop and search a car.
Europe has a long history of doing such things when confronted with new, disruptive technologies: the effort to license printing presses in various European countries is what eventually led to copyright law as we know it today.
Back then ideas were still believed to be free so the point of copyright law was just a short term reward for the author. A bit like how patents are supposed to work.
I would normally post some citations here (like a famous quote about copyright from one of the British monarchs) but on phone about to drop kids off at school so apologies there.
Unfortunately, the downstream effects will hurt everyone else.
That actually isn't legal in many countries and is e.g. why regional wikipedia sites don't show movie posters.
Sometimes I feel like the whole world is ruined by ignorant people in power. As for the Internet, it is exclusively being ruined by ignorant actors in positions of state power. All the while, armies of good people make the Internet better every day.
What exactly is wrong with that? Seriously.
If the new product was produced in the US and references material from the EU, should YouTube allow the content to go public? According this and GDPR, the EU has the ability to cross territorial boundaries. So YouTube now has to ban such a work in the US even though our legal system allows it.
Essentially, YouTube will have to create a new process where by all content must go past the censors, who are probably people and not machines. Otherwise YouTube will quickly die due to death by a thousand fines. So much for a free and open exchange 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.
Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!
That is exactly what secondary liability does.
This law requires websites to /know/ the copyright to be covered. And that is an impossible task if no false negatives are accepted. Old usenet pirates would use base64 strings to spread contents and there are countless ways to obfuscate to algorithms while remaining human recognizable. Which means to remain safe one needs to not even accept and display text input from users.
Copyright databases would be of no help here given both automatic copyright and the ease of dodging hashes. And a complete set would be massive and hillariously defeat the point by giving any implenter all of the media in the world.
Given that it is inevitable that it will have a bad outcome. Even if it is left to rot on the books it becomes a tool of tyranny via selective enforcement.
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.
How can YouTube check that?
It in no way prevents anyone from creating content and publishing it on their own website.
You make it sound like the youtubes of this world are necessary for content creation.
If you are arguing that massive content consolidation platforms such as Youtube do not have a highly significant impact on content creators as a group though, then I do not know what to say to that.
Put simply, if you're a US (or Australian, or Brazilian, or Japanese, etc) service: tell the EU to go fuck itself. US courts will laugh at their attempts to enforce EU law over US law.
Keep your servers in the US, if that's where you're located. If you have no need to do business in the EU, then you have almost nothing to worry about. The EU's reach largely stops at its borders unless you're operating in their jurisdiction.
For my service as a US operation, EU copyright law is meaningless. I'll continue to allow EU users to sign up, and entirely disregard EU law.
Ultimately the only way the EU can truly enforce their backwards policies against a global Internet, is to set up a Chinese firewall and hold EU persons as captives of that creeping authoritarianism.
In practice, this constitutes the abolition of the "fair use" doctrine on the internet.
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.
This is just a guess but I don't think ISPs are expected to do any form of DPI. The most likely question they will have to answer is "who is this IP address assigned to?" and possibly "who communicated with that IP?". Neither require any form of packet inspection that goes beyond what is needed to perform routing.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag...
Such as what? I hear UKIP demonised a lot, but I genuinely don't know of anything they've done that is bad that wasn't simply political disagreement (wanting to leave the EU) or talking about contentious issues in a clumsy and ham-fisted way (immigration).
Failing to present a coherent, workable programme for how we'd leave the EU and at what cost is leading us to a situation where the government is doing civil contingency planning as if we were going to be hit by a hurricane rather than a self-inflicted disastrous choice.
Disclaimer I am a remainer and dislike UKIP as much as anyone.
And also the entire immigration discussion was some bs considered the non-EU migration is been higher than EU one for decades https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-migration-and-uk/
(For years I tried to be a "sensible Eurosceptic", but recent events have highlighted that the EU is a bastion of sanity compared to our current local politics)
Perhaps if we hadn't been fooling around trying to destroy the project for cooperation across Europe we could have taken part in making this new legislation better?
I guess it comes down to whether you're willing to accept peace and prosperity above less power for the Tories and a few wayward laws. As we get wayward laws already in the UK (we'd get Art.13 anyway if it serves media conglomerates interests), then it comes down to whether you want to buy back greater power for the Tories at a cost of greater UK poverty, and less international cooperation.
So the “Tories” narrative just doesn’t add up.
Many - across Europe - want to leave the EU on principle. The UK is giving the perfect example to everyone that principle is not aligned with reality in this case.
Do we really not have anyone better as a source than the Nazi dog guy? http://www.scotland-judiciary.org.uk/8/1962/PF-v-Mark-Meecha...
(Perhaps someone from Open Rights Group or EDRI?)
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 issue could not, or refused to, explain why they supported the bill. You can see him discussing the result in the immediate aftermath here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISyiTcA6RIw
If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.
Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video. There is more content uploaded to YouTube than can possibly all be manually reviewed. Aggressive automated content filtering to comply with Article 13 would mean that these videos would straight get filtered out.