> I just can’t believe that the EU ... actually ... tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because...

This is generally how government works! But it's even worse than usual in the EU, since it's an unaccountable transnational mega-bureaucracy; MEPs are not directly elected, they are appointed by their political party after proportional representation votes (which haven't had turnout higher than 50% since 1994).

You think Congress is beholden to lobbyists now? Imagine how bad it'd be if state representatives could get "re-elected" each term without ever having to put their record to a public vote!

Actually not 100% true with the MEPs because it's up to each individual member state.

I think in Bulgaria you had to vote for a political party and a person from it. Then add proportianl representation and the ppl with the most votes in each party will go into the EP based on their respective % of the total votes. (idk if this makes sense as it might sound a bit confusing)

It's confusing on purpose.

It's not confusing on purpose. Coordinating law, economy and movement of people across 28 countries is just fucking complex.

I think the EU understands perfectly fine. It is the Internet that doesn't understand how copyright works. Most countries don't have comprehensive fair use. Copyright rules and e.g. quotation rights are fairly 'weak' exceptions. Various people and organization, like Lawrence Lessig and the Pirate Party, have advocated for reform. Companies like Google and Facebook have instead basically made it their business to abuse copyright, which especially online most people seem happy with. Unfortunately reality tends to catch up with you and 2018 is turning out to be the year when grace period on how to operate the Internet is running out.

I downvoted you because linking and showing a few sentences does not mean a company's business is to "abuse copyright."

According to what? Because as I said, as far as I know, many European countries have a limited right to quote something. If the law is written to let people quote other people under specific conditions and one entity uses that to quote everyone then that is, whether you like copyright or not, an abuse of copyright. The reasonable position here is either something like what the EU wants or to reform copyright to allow this kind of use, not "Google has such a large legal team that they can get away with it until they don't".

I can't really find any good summary, but this sparse wikipedia article will give you an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote

Google shows a lot more than a link and increasingly is tailored to answer your question and prevent you from going to the site that provided the information in the first place.

> is tailored to answer your question

In the US, factual information can not be copyrighted.

I believe it can in the EU, although I might be misrepresenting their official stance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that the EU allows you to copyright databases. I'm sure EU residents can correct me if I'm missing some kind of subtlety.

At least in the US though, there is nothing remotely illegal about looking up a fact on a website and then giving it to someone else directly, even if that diverts traffic away from the original site. Copyright was never intended to cover stuff like that.

> It is the Internet that doesn't understand how copyright works.

I agree.

The vast majority of the world disagrees with copyright. They participate in violations on an everyday basis. Many of them possibly hundreds of times per day.

Essentially, we have a distributed proof that your "copyright" is damage to be routed around. Nonsense. Piffle.

Lawmakers will not win this fight except by enslaving their population. People _do not want_ this. Empirically, provably, visibly.

To give an example of this: around 10 years ago I was co-running a website on a fairly narrow topic. One that most of the time is not relevant but every once in a while gets popular.

We happened to have some recent news stories related to the topic plus a very relevant, recent photo.

This was reused (without asking) by a major news outlet. The photo especially bumped their views numbers.

When we enquired about their use of our content, they said they were quoting and, after further prodding, that they could pay us a nominal fee.

Notice a problem with that?

We had to: 1. Be aware that our content is being used, 2. Be the side that is active in seeking renumeration, 3. Try to fight a major news organisation if we wanted a real cut of their ad revenue.

How do you do this if you are small?

Changing the balance and the burden is definitely a move to the right direction, in this case.

The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work. I could understand it when they were new and their market was still developing, today however they've grown too strong, I feel.

> The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work.

This seems like a cultural difference between copyright proponents and critics (both in the US and EU). To me, this criticism is meaningless. I think that the whole point of modern society is to allow people to make money off of other people's work.

I think there some people who look at a business being built off of other's work, and they say, "By default, we should be suspicious of this with a few exceptions. Unless the public good is enormous (arguably search engines still qualify there), if I make something, only I should profit from it."

Other people look at those businesses and say, "By default, this is the system working completely as intended. Unless the public harm is enormous, if you make something, other people should be able to make things with it."

It's worth noting that in the example you bring up, the news outlet wasn't doing anything with linking or user generated content. Their editorial board just stole your photo. You'd be in the exact same position after this law, because they weren't doing anything that would pass your photo through an upload filter, and they (probably) weren't directly linking to the photo on your site.

Given that the example you list is very clearly something that is not fair use, it seems to me like an even bigger jump than normal to move from "sometimes people steal stuff" to "Google in specific is stealing stuff."

And you expect everybody to remember which site one should visit.

And how does one find new sites in the first place.

Unpopular opinion, especially among technophiles, but I agree.

People will now go for news to Google. Google doesn't hire a single journalist and will happily cash in all the ad money. It is not sustainable.

What will happen is that the publishers will make an agreement with Google and Co, cementing their monopoly and making it impossible for challengers such as DuckDuckGo to compete with them.

From the sound of things, the proposal is designed to make this more difficult to do, since that's effectively what already happened in Germany and Spain.

> Recital 32 suggests that (1) anyone who wants to link to the news has to have a separate, commercial license; and (2) news companies can't waive this right, even through Creative Commons licenses and other tools for granting blanket permission.

Unless they're enforcing across-the-board licenses with standard fees though, it's difficult for me to imagine how you would force a publisher not to enter into some kind of special agreement, so I don't know how extensive these kinds of restrictions can actually get in practice.

If that could fall only on those who had an active role, however minor, in lobbying for this, than yes, it sounds like justice.

But there will be too much collateral.