Re:The text of Article 13 and the EU Copyright Directive has...
by ocdtrekkie on Thursday February 14, 2019 @11:08AM
(#19162944)
Here's a recent example of how safe harbor protects criminal enterprises: https://twitter.com/nicoduck/status/1091814851184377856
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.
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.