It's the same as, for instance, the phone company. Even when a drug dealer uses the phone to order an assassination, the phone company is not penalized for allowing it - and doesn't even have to return the payments it received from the drug dealer. Nobody expects the phone company to use speech recognition to drop a call when a drug deal is being discussed, or to charge more for the call when it detects music being played in the background.
What "safe harbor" is all about is treating intermediaries as nothing more than intermediaries. The responsibility for content should be on whoever actively posts it, not on someone who just provided the "place" where it was posted.
As for "everything you know and love is going to die": many of us can think of several things we love, which have a good chance of being killed by this. Many small content creators who don't have the resources and/or knowledge to self-host (and even "self-hosting" is suspicious; would renting a VPS be considered self-hosting, or would the VPS vendors be required to police the contents of the VMs they rent, making it non-viable to provide inexpensive servers to the public?). Several of them, on losing their hosting, will simply give up on creating. And that's before considering potential new content which will never see the light of day.
Amazon stole No Starch Press' books, wholesale. They printed fraudulent copies for profit and shipped them from their production facility to unwitting customers. But Amazon likely will face no punishment for this, nor will they have to give up their profits in literally producing and distributing counterfeit goods, because they didn't upload the PDF file, and can blame someone else on the Internet.
Safe harbor protects way more than "intermediaries". It protects businesses which are built around criminal activity. A better example than a "phone company", would be a company which produces encrypted communications hardware specifically geared for and marketed to drug dealers.
I could post all of Harry Potter to HackerNews comments one page at a time and I suppose this site is funded by "big tech" but you have some heavy biases on who this will affect and why they don't want it.
Where every individual can contribute to centralised services
If we had a personally-hosted, contributor-is-owner Internet then there would be no need for 'safe harbor'. You could post all the Harry Potter content to your own website and when it was taken offline no-one else would be affected.
Safe harbor is a magnificent tool for centralising power. Little wonder that the big corps love it.
So you're just wrong about no need for no 'safe harbor' for personally-hosted Internet. You always have to host somewhere or get your connection from someone. And that if that someone isn't as safe harbor they will filter or block you.
If I'm running a hosting company should I be liable if someone posts content in violation of copyright? Even if I'm trying to run an honest business and take appropriate steps to remedy the situation?
If I'm anti-google should I be able to host copyrighted material on their cloud, hoping that they get sued over it?
Eliminating safe harbors seems like a nasty can of worms to open. Especially considering how massively abused any other system (contentid) is.
Once these articles hopefully do pass, after the initial run of tech co panic has passed, we'll find the world has not ended, and companies doing legitimately bad things can be effectively punished.
George Frena ran a BBS service, and some users uploaded Playboy pictures to share, so Playboy sued. The court explicitly wrote,
"It does not matter that Defendant Frena may have been unaware of the copyright infringement. Intent to infringe is not needed to find copyright infringement."
Furthermore, they also found Frena in violation of trademark (because the file names had "Playboy" in them).
Intent is important for criminal copyright law, but you can still be sued up to the wazoo (see the Thomas-Rasset case for the absurd values it can reach) by the copyright holder.
The organizations behind these laws aren't the 'little guy' content creators, it's large rent-seeking publishing guilds that often fuck over artists and creators.
And this results in insane things like their lawyers doing blanket takedown on video game live streamers whose game happened to have some background music that was licensed.
Do you want to live in a world where you have to worry about the licenses in the transitive closure of every bit of content you've ever consumed? Human beings don't have the bandwidth for this amount of bureaucracy, it's like a nightmare Ayn Rand world where everyone must have contractual agreements between each other for microtransactions.
We used to think that the information age would remove bureaucracy and intermediary rent seekers and censors, but nearly 3 decades after the web's creation, here we are headed for a bantustan internet.
Sigh.
There is no "link tax", the law does not require that you pay to link to someone. One of the most incredible marketing angles here is that big tech has managed to rebrand the laws with their own preferred, and loaded terminology, and push that to the point that conversations around the law define it by the term they chose.
However, if you want to steal their value entirely, as Google Search often does with increasing frequency, Google is going to have to pay for it.
This doesn't seem like a compelling use case for onerous regulation that can do far more harm than good.
I personally think anything published on the internet that's not behind a paywall is ripe for forking and summarizing. It may be nice and polite to ask permission, but to me, the raison d'etre of the web, is that it's a communal forest for permissionless innovaton. We all harvest from it, and we should all give back to it, so that the next group of people can benefit from it.
CelebrityNetWorth themselves are guilty of taking data without acknowledgement. They don't list their sources and what information they're republishing, much of which comes from industry trade journals, where beat reporters zealously follow celebrities and publish everything from houses, cars, or other luxury goods they own, to any new publishing, actoring, or singing contracts they've acquired.
The internet should be a resource for everyone on the the planet to harvest, filter, and remix, reinterpret, and republish, and I feel like excessive copyright on these transformations violates that spirit. Not many people may share my position, but I grew up on the internet from the 80s, before large scale commercial activity arrived, back when 'information wants to be free' was the mantra, and I've never really given up on that ideal.
Eventually, lots of people are going to be turning loss NLP AIs on text all over the internet and extracting out Q&A systems. In ten years from now, it won't just be Google's fact box you have to worry about, they'll be tons of these agents around. Europe is still tooling their policy for a pre-AI world.
Tell that to the Spanish people who used to use Google news or the Europeans that are now getting 451 errors on various websites.
I'd say put a 5-7 or 14 year duration on works like the original copyright laws had. These constant extensions are the real absurdity.
As I said in another post, as if late 2016 (the latest article I could find), no analyst could determine if YouTube ever made a profit, and there's some suspicion it still is losing money because Google won't break out its earnings in quarterly reports.
And YouTube one could early at least offers a system that lets content creators takedown content, or monetize it.
In light of this, the Chapter 13 stuff is vast overkill, and quite obviously, regulatory capture.
It needs to die in the EU, and it needs to die here in the US. The apocalyptic language you've seen is merely companies upset that they may have to take on... the same responsibility to follow the law as the rest of us. The idea that the whole Internet is going to be illegal and everything you know and love is going to die is silly, and pretty much every single organization claiming such is funded by big tech.
If these companies want to continue to make money (they do), they'll figure out a way to make it work.