Article 13 dooms smaller companies and startups, thus further entrenching these big corporations. There was a provision added to Article 13 to protect "small and medium-sized enterprises", but according to the EFF [0] this "protection" is fatally flawed. It only protects them for 3 years, or until they attain 5 million unique visitors, or until they attain annual revenues (not profits) of €10 million.
That's not to mention that the exceptions for not-for-profit services also has been regarded as vague, which could be problematic.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/european-copyright-dir...
Europe tries to catch up to the Silicon Valley startup scene. But stuff like this makes it pretty clear that EU is too retarded.
I don't even see them trying to do this...
Can you elaborate why that is?
We're taking about teenagers here, so it's not always clear to them that they cannot use ripped sprites from other games, or music, or whatever.
Basically I can make the uploader responsible for what they upload.
The secondary problem is that my biggest competitor also has a lot of copyrighted material, so I'm already very careful with that not ending up on my platform.
With this new law, anyone can sue me if there might be some sprite on there that they created. If I was my (non-EU) competitor, I would anonymously upload some of my own content to sue the EU company. Basically I'm a sitting duck.
I'm currently working on my platform alone, so implementing a filter is impossible. Even with a big team it would be impossible, since slightly modified sprites are derived works and so also copyrighted.
But if I'm outside of the EU, I can just block that region (not the biggest one anyway, and after the UK leaves, not a single native English speaking country in there).
If I get a competitor from the EU in the far future, I just do the upload & sue trick.
Oi! Ireland and Malta would have a word with you, mate.
> I can just block that region (not the biggest one anyway
Not the biggest, but the richest.
Of course since I'm just a nobody on a forum what do I know.
It depends on what you mean by rich. From a GDP PPP perspective there are issues on short, medium and long term when compared with other countries. For example: China is richer than the whole of the EU (incl UK). US is almost as rich as the EU. India is 1/2 and Japan 1/4.
*By rich I mean GDP PPP.
Not only does the US have about ~40% of all the millionaires on earth all by itself, its GDP per capita is 77% higher than the EU ($33,700 per capita per the Worldbank 2017 figures; versus $59,700 that year for the US). Its nominal GDP is also about $2 trillion higher, despite having roughly 200 million fewer people.
PPP is a near worthless measurement if you're a business trying to sell goods. It's the absolute last thing you'd rely on to gauge the pricing power in a market for a product or service.
but I agree with you that from a business perspective the US is de facto the place to be.
This kind of behaviour is going to lead us to having two seperate internets.
> Not the biggest one anyway
True, but does it need to be the biggets to be valuable.
> not a single native English speaking country in there
Except there are native english speaking countries in there, and besides, europeans can very often (region dependent) read/write english anyway.
Also, do you just not want to support none english content? What about spanish speaking Americans?
I also think you'll lose many users in other eurasian countries that use an anonymising network and have exit nodes in the EU.
No, EU kind of behavior does, just like China behavior.
> True, but does it need to be the biggets to be valuable.
I have lots of users in US, Australia, New Zealand, various Asian countries, and UK. Focusing on them allows me to skip translations.
> europeans can very often (region dependent) read/write english anyway.
As a European myself (Belgian), I know this very well. The Netherlands and Flanders are probably leading in this. But the bigger countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain prefer translated software. Just look at the dubbed movies they watch.
It's a lose situation anyway for me, there is no question about that.
Pretty scummy behaviour :(
[1] https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Mandate-R...
Only "smaller companies and startups" whose main purpose is "enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity". That's what the document says; how it will actually be enforced is still a mystery, of course.
P. S. I have pointed to that "protection" on a previous comment [0].
Also that link appears to be dead, so I'm not sure what comment you're referring to.
I've vouched for it, hopefully a few other people with enough karma to do so will and it will resurrect itself.
One of my priorities in the next two years is to protect as much of the decentralised Web from the effects of the Copyright Directive, but it's not going to be easy. The large platforms, in their negotiations with the rightsholders who pushed for this directive, will have the explicit intent to turn it into a moat that can limit the growth of competitors, including non-commercial alternatives.
The rightsholders see even the smallest platform as a lawless environment that has no redeeming features, and worse than the now-regulated giants. Without active and co-ordinated lobbying by decentralised Net advocates, they will paint these alternatives as a "new generation of Pirate Bays", just as they did with YouTube and its predecessors.
https://www.politico.eu/pro/germany-weighs-in-on-copyright-w...
So, what happened to that? ^
Parliament wanted:
> Apply the law to platforms that “optimise and promote” significant amounts of user-uploaded works and are not small businesses (turnover below €10M and less than 50 employees)
According to: https://juliareda.eu/2018/10/copyright-trilogue-positions/
---
Upload filters must be installed by everyone except those services which fit all three of the following extremely narrow criteria:
* Available to the public for less than 3 years
* Annual turnover below €10 million
* Fewer than 5 million unique monthly visitors
The "5 million unique monthly visitors" point is concerning too, because that term is not clearly defined.
The entire attitude that I should "regain [my] freedom" seems condescending. I don't want to use a P2P alternative to YouTube or Reddit, because 99% of the content is on Reddit/YouTube.
I'm well aware that YouTube collects and sells my personal data, I just don't care.
The idea that legislation is good because it forcefully restricts my choices (indirectly, by harming YouTube), thus preventing me from harming myself seems to be a form of unneeded parenting/hand-holding/babying that I'm not a fan of.
That's the catholic and lutheran authoritarian mindset that is deep ingrained into the minds of EU politicians and large parts of Europe itself, that's what they mean with "democracy". They don't really trust people and their individuality.
Just check the backgrounds of the politicians who voted in favor, you'll find that most have this religious background and distrust in people and are easily manipulated by others "higher up the chain", like those cultural snobs in Paris.
That might change once everybody gets forced off Reddit/Youtube. The best-case scenario here is suddenly starting to look like revival of the distributed, non-profit internet in Europe. If that's the case, I can live with losing Youtube.
Wouldn't the killer feature of these P2P platforms (admittedly, none of which I've ever used) be to have a 'transparent bridge' to the mainstream platforms? I.e., like SciHub, almost transparently pirate content from their original source? Do any of them have it?
1) The legislation in question has nothing to do with protecting individuals privacy.
2) The solutions you offer are essentially not productized, they are not usable to normal people.
3) There is absolutely nothing wrong with companies making money.
This legislation is not being driven by Google and Facebook, it's being drive by Der Spiegel, Le Figaro, The Times etc..
It's also being driven by scared EU legislators who think that all their surpluses are going to American companies, it's a very weak hand to play, the 'strong hand' would be to have exceptional firms in Europe, doing things there.
If Google were a Germany company, this legislation would not exist. Surely German media firms would still want it, but since the surpluses from the situation would remain in the EU, then legislators would be less assertive about it, to the point wherein I think it would fail.
Instead of this legislation, we need:
1) Some tighter privacy rules that actually do affect G and FB
2) Taxation rules for the 20th century - ironically, this is an EU problem as they have Ireland/Netherlands/Luxembourg as their own loopholes
3) Stronger local entities, particularly in Europe to create a balance, that would lead to less motivation for political interference.
I take issue when people use the word profit to mean some evil, shameful thing. Youtube has amazing content and tools, and I'm sure a lot of their profit is re-invested in the platform. I doubt these other platforms come close in terms of functionality and UX. Peertube site design looks like it's from 2005. I know that might not be indicative of their core features, but first impressions are important, and this does not bode well.
There's a reason mainstream users never flock to these decentralized platforms: they don't have the fit and finish of a commercial venture.
You left out the "by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy, and having a persuasive (addictive) design in order to glue you to the screen so they can maximize their ad revenue, dismissing any human cost those practices entail" part. I don't associate the word profit with a bad connotation univocally; that's only an assumption on your end.
But yeah, Facebook tries to make Facebook a site you want to visit. Youtube wants you to watch YouTube. Should they try to make sites that aren't engaging?
Maximising ad revenue also seems not terrible for users? A week ago I saw an ad for some pants, and I'm wearing them now. I spent ages walking around town looking for pants I liked. Hopefully next week they start showing me shoes. IMO advertisers and these platforms tend to have incentives pretty closely aligned with their users'.
(Dunno about selling data. I thought that had stopped happening, and I don't like the idea.)
Sure, the internet mammoths of today make their profit tat way, but this legislation is probably going to be around for a very long time. Platforms of the future might find other ways to make a profit. (Or they might not, because legislation of this sort makes it much harder for a new platform to rise and challenge the mammoths)
"Member States shall provide that, in respect of new online content-sharing service providers the services of which have been available to the public in the Union for less than three years and which have an annual turnover below EUR 10 million, calculated in accordance with Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC 20 , the conditions under the liability regime set out in paragraph 4 are limited to compliance with point (a) of paragraph 4 and to acting expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice, to disable access to the notified works or other subject matter or to remove those works or other subject matter from their websites.
Where the average number of monthly unique visitors of such service providers exceeds 5 million, calculated on the basis of the previous calendar year, they shall also demonstrate that they have made best efforts to prevent further uploads of the notified works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided relevant and necessary information."
Paragraph 4 says this:
"4. If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have: (a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and (b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event (c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b)."
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think this is quite illustrative. Anyhow, do you have an example of a small content-sharing service provider that would be affected? I'm sincerely curious. This is a personal opinion, but I don't think any content-sharing platform should profit from copyright infringement; I don't think forums or other kind of communities the main goal of which isn't to profit from that activity would be affected.
That is not a requirement to fall under Article 13! Are you maybe mistaking "copyright-protected material" for "copyright-INFRINGING material"? Every creative text and photo is "copyrighted material", so this covers any for-profit UGC platform.
MEP Reda proposed making the above change in the text, that proposal was rejected. So the broad coverage is intentional.
/s
How ironic.
if those communities are aiming for a break even at best, would those as well be considered "for profit", though?
Even an LLC or INC that loses money is a "for profit" company. Most VC funded startups fall into this category where they lose money each year with the goal of eventually turning a profit.
For now, but where will it stop (or will it)? Another commentor pointed out that even small services running ads to pay for hosting could be considered "for-profit". Maybe not now, but it's just a matter of when. First they came for the platforms run by big corporations...
If those small services' main purpose is "enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity", then they are turning a profit from copyright infringement, whether it is to pay for their hosting or not, so they will be targeted, as the document establishes. That's my take on it, at least, but I think it is quite clear.
Many of the cases out there involved people sharing on a large scale. Examples like The Pirate Bay or Sci-Hub or Aaron Swartz, which involve distribution of large amounts of content to large numbers of people.
The smaller the platform, the less anyone will care about it, even if it is distributing a little bit of copyrighted content. Small scale copyright violation is so widespread, and the benefits of fighting individual cases of it so small, that there's simply no value to taking it on and they aren't bothering.
ISPs will be forced into doing more of this if piracy becomes large scale decentralized, which it will.
Copyright enforcement is about ambulance chasing. Small time channels, like game streamers, who happen to have captured a game that has a music soundtrack, have received DMCA takedown requests.
What we're witnessing here is a misplaced "I hate big tech, so therefore I support anything I perceive as targeting them" resulting in collateral damage that makes every one else's life harder, benefiting mostly rent-seeking big publishers.
The decentralization-will-fix-it cryptoanarchy workaround is a pipe dream. Every so often people imagine an unbreakable piracy distributed darknet will circumvent laws and make piracy safe and convenient for everyone, but the reality is, as soon as it becomes the dominant form, the powers that be will turn their attention to it, and the attempts to crack down on it will be far far more invasive and surveillance heavy.
Just ask Napster, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa, Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, all of which were brought down by injunctions.
All of those were commercial outings trying to make money out of their proprietary piracy client software, the open source versions are still around, and even very old networks like ed2k is still up and running. The current 'dominant form' is bittorrent, and from what I can tell it is doing just fine.
Left out of this discussion is simply some Chinese company, like Douyin/Tiktok just hosting a Youtube competitor, and hoisting a giant middle finger to the EU. The EU will have to erect their own great firewall to stop it.
And yes, the networks that survived are small, and not making money, which is the correct outcome for a network built on wide-scale abuse of copyright. Your response backs up my point, about how the media goes after large scale infringers, rather than worrying about small-time offenses.
That the over-policing of copyright will cast a chilling effect on independent media creation, that it will affect fair use and transformative works, and that the EU copyright laws will cause all online providers to err on the side of false positives. If you think automated takedowns, de-monetization, and capricious account bans are bad now, just wait until platforms are put in the untenable position of facing either huge fines for under policing, or lesser punishments for over policing.
I already told you that distributed networks have been taken down by concerted government action. Torrent sites have been shutdown. People have been charged during the Napster-era for hundreds of thousands of $$$ for songs on their hard drive. Here, how does this back up your point: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...
As I pointed out, my ISP, Comcast, is already deep packet scanning network traffic and automatically flagging what it things are pirate activity.
You continually confuse real piracy, like someone uploading a whole movie or album, duped from pristine original source -- what I'd call bootleg copies, with stuff like a kid uploading a dance video to a backing track and going viral. Do you really think someone singing karaoke or dancing to a 30 year old song means that person should have their video taken down?
Even song covers, some girl or guy practicing singing, and and playing music on their own piano or guitar, gets taken down. I think that's absurd, especially for music decades old that was released before the singer was born. Artists being sued for sampling or chord sequences, against, a travesty. I've a big fan of Kirby Ferguson's _Everything is a Remix_, which points out that some of the biggest complainers of infringement of their work, are in fact, thieves themselves.
If YouTube becomes too hard for Europeans to publish on, because it turns into a hyper-curated nanny state, my point is, people may turn to TikTok, Bilibili, or others which will happily host the same content, but whose government cares little about helping to enforce foreign government ideas about IP. The end result of this law will be that it will be ineffectual in reducing piracy, but will be very effectual in casting a chilling effect on actual indie producers, and make it incredibly hard for competitors to YouTube start up in Europe.
Limit copyright to 14 years, the original duration (28 with renewable). That was the law for the first 180 years of copyright. Given the hyper-speed of internet time, if anything, copyright duration should be SHORTER not the century long disaster it is now. If you limited copyright to a much shorter term, I might be convinced to buy into your overly restrictionist stance, but as it is, lifetime+ copyright + orwellian enforcement mechanisms is a bridge too far.
Also, you do realize that most of the people concerned about losing the most money to copyright infringement are big international media companies and guilds, like Disney, or MPAA, RIAA, GEMA, etc and that you're essentially defending Disney Corp's right, whether you realize it or not, to block Star Wars parodies and fan films. Or GEMA's right to block your daughter's violin cover. Unless you think algorithm filters are going to magically determine 'fair use' between a kid cover, or a fan film, and a true bootleg, the end result is going to be platforms over-filtering.
I'll also point out that Max Schrems, whose strongly campaigns for GPDR and against Google and Facebook, actually is vehemently against Article 13, and backs mine and EFF's position.
But even if it plays a restrictive tune, what if we use /robots.txt to explicitly tell if the website or specific contents can be freely indexed & linked to?
It smells like an opportunity to reboot the Web in a less centralized fashion.
try convincing _anyone_ who isn't already on one of those platforms to switch. It's nice on-paper to say "don't like? don't use" but it's not going to happen.
Well, if that's true, then the big question becomes what counts as for-profit. Do you need to be incorporated? What about a blog that has some ads to pay for server costs? Will Europeans be able to upload to Youtube as long as they turn monetisation off?
If being non-profit is the big way out, then that goes a long way to mitigate the damage from this. Although it still sucks for small content creators who do want to monetize their own creations but lack the resources to create their own platform.
Youtube is the target of this law and as they earn money with your video, they have to comply with European law, if they want to be active in Europe.
Wikipedia probably stands alone as a not-for-profit (as do, incidentally, government-sponsored services - so in the UK, BBC should be fine for any liability, but Sky would be screwed, for instance.)
And then there is the question how "for profit" is defined.
It was always the excuse that 'only the big bad capitalists' will be hurt by this, but its simply not the case and has always been a false premise.
You want to regain your freedom? Use not-for-profit, decentralized platforms instead. You can use Mastodon [0] instead of Twitter, PeerTube [1] instead of YouTube, Aether [2] instead of reddit, etcetera. Other interesting P2P projects are DAT's Beaker Browser [3], and ZeroNet [4]. None of those will have problems with Article 13.
[0] https://mastodon.social [1] https://joinpeertube.org [2] https://getaether.net [3] https://beakerbrowser.com/ [4] https://zeronet.io/
EDIT: "Such [content-sharing] services should not include services that have a main purpose other than that of enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity." This is from page 62 of the document wherein Article 13/17 is to be found.