It often is. Because by its nature, copyright is about restricting information flow, and therefore it naturally can conflict with free speech, especially when copyright maximalists go overboard with it (which they always do).

So any kind of abusive copyright initiative should always be a suspect as attack on free speech. And this case is a very obvious example.

It's not abusive to point out that finding full episodes of copyrighted shows in their entirety has been trivial and that YouTube benefits significantly from distributing stolen content.

The reality is, tech companies have had over a decade to demonstrate that they could behave themselves, manage their own platforms, and balance the needs of both content creators and the public.

They failed, and it's time for the party to end.

Example: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/GeoHot/

Public should not tolerate such kind of garbage, especially when corrupt politicians lie through their teeth about the consequences of such kind of laws.

Automated content filtering fails to meet the requirements of the EU article, so it will disproportionately impact large companies which rely on those systems, rather than smaller ones which use human moderation teams.

Automated content filtering is a required part of the requirements. It is not enough. But neither is human moderation.

Besides. If human moderation would cost less than filtering, big companies would choose that alternative. Instead, they are now able to sell filter access to small companies. So money flows from small to big companies.

Because the costs are onerous to everyone and it's not worth spending ten billion dollars in compliance costs to destroy competitors who were only costing you a billion dollars in revenue to begin with and are very useful to have around to fend off antitrust inquiries.

And if it won't negatively impact small tech companies then why are so many small tech companies against it?

> Automated content filtering fails to meet the requirements of the EU article, so it will disproportionately impact large companies which rely on those systems, rather than smaller ones which use human moderation teams.

Hardly anything disproportionately impacts large entities. If a small entity can do something, the large entity can just do the same thing more times, and then optimize any parts of it that are susceptible to economies of scale.

And converting something you can do to something you have to do will always disproportionately impact small entities. What happens when your moderator goes on vacation? If you're YouTube you have a million more of them, if you're a single person business the moderator is you and now you can never take a vacation from it, even when you're about to burn out.

And you can't just have moderators anymore, now you need moderators who know how to make their moderation comply with the new law. Even assuming the cost of training a moderator is the same, now the larger company has the advantage again because they're using full-time moderators instead of spending the founder's time to learn how to do it themselves even though they only spend 10% of their day doing moderation. And then spend 10% of their day doing that when it used to be 3% because now there are more rules to comply with.

The way you make a requirement disproportionately impact large companies is by only applying it to large companies, say ones with a billion in revenue or more. But they haven't done that.

That's an additional garbage to Article 13, which is a censorship law (upload filters). Above I commented on Article 11 when talking about obsolete industries trying to leech their more successful rivals.

If you want more in depth review of this, check Techdirt articles on the topic: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=article+11

But I doubt you would - since you simply will say "it's not that". I see no point in arguing then.

Additionally, "legacy news" are losing money because tech companies are shifting profits from ads on those news sites to their own platforms. Here's a chart showing how Google has shifted the ad revenue balance since 2004: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1055606344559063040

Essentially, it used to be that Google provided a real service to these news companies, by providing an ad network where both news organizations and Google could profit. But over time, they've shifted their ad revenue away from the model that requires they share it to ads that they alone profit from. This has slowly but surely bled journalism dry.

Linking is not infringing anything, and should not be taxable. All this "massive theft" whining is complete bunk.

It might be financially challenging for large, abusive platforms which are heavily built on pirating copyrighted content, but it shouldn't be much of a challenge for ordinary websites, blogs, and smaller sharing platforms. Consider that a personal website may have the site owner bother to moderate the comments manually. A small business may have to hire a moderator or two. YouTube may need to hire 10,000 people and may have problems.

So basically the people who voted for this law disagree with you.

This is a farce. They already have this. The automated system decides to spit out a false positive, then you appeal to a "human" who has neither the time nor the expertise to make a reasonable determination so they just rubber stamp whatever the automated system said and its incorrect determination stands.

It looks to me like the "edge cases" constitute the majority.