Copyright Industries Reveal Their Ultimate Goal: An Internet Where Everything Online Requires A License From Them
from the now-would-be-a-good-time-to-stop-it-happening dept
Yesterday, Mike took apart an extraordinarily weak attempt by the UK's music collection society, PRS for Music, to counter what it claimed were "myths" about the deeply-harmful Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive. On the same day, the Guardian published a letter from the PRS and related organizations entitled "How the EU can make the internet play fair with musicians". It is essentially a condensed version of the "myth-busting" article, and repeats many of the same fallacious arguments. It also contains some extremely telling passages that are worth highlighting for the insights that they provide into the copyright industries' thinking and ultimate goal. Here is the main thrust of the letter:
This is not about censorship of the internet, as the likes of Google and Facebook would have you believe. The primary focus of this legislation is concerned with whether or not the internet functions as a fair and efficient marketplace -- and currently it doesn't.
Once again, there is no attempt to demonstrate that Article 13 is not about censorship, merely an assertion that it isn't, together with the usual claim that it's all being orchestrated by big US Internet companies. The fact that over two-thirds of a million people have signed an online petition calling for the "censorship machine" of Article 13 to be stopped rather punctures that tired argument.
More interesting is the second sentence, which essentially confirms that for the recording industry, the Copyright Directive -- and, indeed, the Internet itself -- is purely about getting as much money as possible. There is no sense that there are other important aspects -- like encouraging ordinary people to express themselves, and to be creative for the sheer joy of creating, or in order to amuse and engage with friends and strangers. The fact that all these non-commercial uses will be adversely affected by Article 13 is irrelevant to the recording industry, which seems to believe that making a profit takes precedence over everything else. However, even if they choose to ignore this side of the Internet, the signatories of the letter are well-aware that there is a huge backlash against the proposed law precisely because it is a threat to this kind of everyday online use. Attempting to counter this, they go on:
It is important to recognise that article 13 of the proposed EU copyright directive imposes no obligation on users. The obligations relate only to platforms and rightsholders. Contrary to some sensationalist headlines, internet memes will not be affected, as they are already covered by exceptions to copyright, and nothing in the proposed article will allow rightsholders to block the use of them.
Techdirt pointed out yesterday why the first part of that is intellectually dishonest. The Copyright Directive won't impose obligations on users directly, but on the platforms that people use, which amounts to the same thing in practice. The letter then trots out the claim that Internet memes will not be affected, and specifically says this is because they are already covered by EU exceptions to copyright.
This is simply not true. Article 5 of the EU's 2001 Directive on the "harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society" lays down that "Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations", including "for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche". However, that is optional, not compulsory. In fact, nineteen EU Member States -- including the EU's most populous country, Germany -- have chosen not to provide an exception for parody. Even assuming that memes would be covered by parody exceptions -- by no means guaranteed -- they are in any case illegal in 19 EU nations.
Licensing is not an option here. There are many diverse sources for the material used in memes, most of which have no kind of organization that could give a license. The only way for online companies to comply with Article 13 would be to block all memes using any kind of pre-existing material in those 19 countries without a parody exception. Worse: because it will be hard to apply different censorship rules for each EU nation, it is likely that the upload filters will block all such memes in the whole EU, erring on the side of caution. It will then be up to the person whose meme has been censored to appeal against that decision, using an as-yet undefined appeals mechanism. The chilling effect this "guilty until proven innocent" approach will have on memes and much else is clear.
The blatant misinformation about whether memes would be blocked is bad enough. But in many ways, the most shocking phrase in the letter is the following:
Actually, article 13 makes it easier for users to create, post and share content online, as it requires platforms to get licences, and rightsholders to ensure these licences cover the acts of all individual users acting in a non-commercial capacity.
There, in black and white, is the end-game that the recording industry is seeking: that every online act of individual users, even the non-commercial ones, on the major platforms must be licensed. But the desire to control the online world, and to dictate who may do what there, is not limited to the recording companies: it's what all the copyright industries want. That can be seen in Article 11 of the Copyright Directive -- the so-called "snippet tax" -- which will require licensing for the use by online sites of even small excerpts of news material.
It's also at the root of the core problem with Article 3 of the proposed EU law. This section deals with the important new field of text and data mining (TDM), which takes existing texts and data, and seeks to extract new information by collating them and analyzing them using powerful computers. The current Copyright Directive text allows TDM to be carried out freely by non-profit research organisations, on material to which they have lawful access. However, companies must pay publishers for a new, additional, license to carry out TDM, even on material they have already licensed for traditional uses like reading. That short-sighted double-licensing approach pretty much guarantees that AI startups, which typically require frictionless access to large amounts of training data, won't choose to set up shop in the EU. But the publishing industry never cares about the collateral damage it inflicts, provided it attains its purely selfish goals.
Although it's rather breathtaking to see the copyright world openly admit that its ultimate aim is to turn the Internet into a space where everything is licensed, we shouldn't be surprised. Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about the first stages of the EU's revision of its copyright law. One preliminary initiative was called "Licences for Europe", and its stated aim was to "explore the potential and limits of innovative licensing and technological solutions in making EU copyright law and practice fit for the digital age". What we are seeing now in the proposed Copyright Directive is simply a fulfillment of these ambitions, long-cherished by the copyright industries. If you aren't happy about that, now would be a good time to tell the EU Parliament to Save Your Internet. It may be your last chance.
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Filed Under: article 13, broadcast, copyright, copyright directive, eu, eu copyright directive, intermediary liability, license
Reader Comments
The First Word
“MArketplace
"This is not about censorship of the internet, as the likes of Google and Facebook would have you believe. The primary focus of this legislation is concerned with whether or not the internet functions as a fair and efficient marketplace -- and currently it doesn't."The internet functioning as a fair and efficient market place is the wrong outlook. The internet is not a Market place, it is an Information source more akin to a Library than a store. But like most modern libraries it does have a commercial side like the Libraries Coffee Shop, Gift Shop, and Sales of books/DVD's/CD's that have been removed from circulation.
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Changing to fit
Instead, it means changing the internet to conform to restrictive and out of date copyright laws.
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Also known as "surveillance." The vast majority of "data mining" is composed of spying on people for one reason or another.
Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing? Discouraging privatized surveillance is a laudable goal, even if it's not specifically the intent of this law.
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Also known as "surveillance." The vast majority of "data mining" is composed of spying on people for one reason or another.
That's not even remotely close to accurate. Text and data-mining is incredibly useful for nearly every service you rely on.
Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing? Discouraging privatized surveillance is a laudable goal, even if it's not specifically the intent of this law.
It's not privatized surveillance. It's not about surveilling people, it's about being able to do useful research.
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Thousands of musicians have spoken up in support of this bill. You, on the other hand, shill for the billionaires at the giant tech monopolies.
You’re pure scum.
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Personally, and professionally (I’m a copyright attorney) I think that preserving the ability of people to post material as they wish, even if it might infringe, is more important than ensuring that musicians get paid, have control over their work, or are otherwise happy. If we can manage both, great, but I won’t hesitate for a second to prioritize the public interest ahead of authors as a special class.
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Oh please. You are so full of shit.
Well, that's compelling.
Thousands of musicians have spoken up in support of this bill.
I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Lots of musicians have also spoken out against the bill -- in part because it would harm most of the platforms they use, including Bandcamp, Kickstarter and the like.
Besides, the comment you're referring to is a discussion about Article 3, about text and data mining. I'm not sure what that has to do with musicians, but please, enlighten me.
You, on the other hand, shill for the billionaires at the giant tech monopolies.
Also not true. I have been, and remain, highly critical of the giant tech companies. But, really if you want to shill for giant tech monopolies, you should SUPPORT the EU Copyright Directive. Google and Facebook can probably afford to deal with it. Everyone else cannot. So you'd lock them in as your only choice and make them more powerful.
How is that going to help your thousands of musicians?
You’re pure scum.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how stupid and inaccurate.
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That would be the thousands contracted to labels, but what about the millions who publish on the Internet and do not want a contract with the labels, or to send more money there way.
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That's all? Sounds like a very small minority, then.
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But, those musicians are certainly not being paid by major corporations to control what they're saying by the people who own them, right? No, I'm sure they're all pure innocent independent artists with no corporate puppetry, while anyone who opposes this shit has to be paid off and can't have their own opinion.
The lack of self awareness in your arguments is not surprising, but fortunately everyone knows what an idiot looks like here.
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You present "surveilling people" and "being able to do useful research" as mutually exclusive when I'd conjecture that there is an enormous overlap between the two.
FYI I am not a shill for Mason Wheeler. I was just put on alarm by your use of the phrase "lawful access" which I've previously, exclusively seen in the context of surveillance.
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IMHO your erroneous differentiation of these 'actions' according to their claimed 'intent' is a major shortcoming Mike= When these 'research' datasets are leaked, stolen, sold, or CC'd to the applicable gov agency- the claimed intent of collection/use becomes irrelevant. Data has no conscience. The reductio ad absurdum for this erroneous differentiation is: all spying is fine so long as it's unintentional by the people who initiate it.
At some point the cognitive dissonance between the concepts of 'intent' and 'potential' in this context should have become completely palpable. Why hasn't it become so for you?
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Elsevier will love this law, as they can tax any efforts by academics to better index and catalog academic papers? Also, just how much will they charge to provide poorer results to academic libraries so that papers can be found?
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Internet Sales Tax Per Post
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Re: Internet Sales Tax Per Post
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But they cited the Commission's draft instead of the one that's going to a vote on Thursday. This raises one big question for me: How do they not know what is being voted on? Do they simply not follow their own proposals' progress or are they deliberately attempting to mislead people?
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Licensing the content is already necessary
Licensing the content has always been necessary. If your pirate operators fail to do this, they can be sued. If you publish content that has not been licensed, you're doing copyright infringement.
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Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
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Therefore, everything is a derivative work, and the license collection agency should be able to collect a fee for the use of the work, and someone somewhere probably has the rights to the original work, (or will claim to a la Happy Birthday) and thus . . . PAY ME!!!!!!!
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Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
Under that logic, anyone who creates any kind of original content and uploads it to the Internet counts as a copyright infringer because they failed to license their content first.
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You didn't get the memo that said that fair use was pretty much useless. It's only for situations where you _accidentally_ remember quotes from existing works and fail to filter them out while writing your own book. I.e. it doesnt apply if the amount of copied content is larger than 10 words or so.
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Explain this: Common practise in writing books is to add quotation marks, quotes, quotemarks, speech marks etc in situation where the content in your book isn't your own content, but it comes from someone elses work. I.e. if you travelled around the country and collected wisdom from different people, your book should mark those places which you didn't invent yourself with the quote marks. And it's common rule that the amount of quotes should be limited in such way that they'd at least come from different sources, instead of all coming from the same source material. This quotemarks are a way for book writers to indicate to the reader that it wasn't original content, but the author collected the quotes from the people who he met while travelling the country.
Quote marks usually have the feature that the borrowed content length should be limited to only few words.
Now if you didn't even mark the borrowed content with quote marks, it should all be original content, and copied content amount is very limited by copyright laws.
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None of the ‘rules’ you’re suggesting exist. In particular, I’d love to know whether you think that in fictional works, the dialog inside quote marks is actually contributed by a person other than the author.
Fair use is for uses of copyrighted works that would otherwise be infringing, but which cannot be prohibited lest copyright fail in its mission to promote the progress of science.
It has been held to include things like copying entire works without attribution or ‘quote marks’ under the right circumstances, eg time shifting and space shifting.
At best you’re merely ignorant and should try to educate yourself before making pronouncements as you did. More likely you’re a troll.
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Guess there has been people around in 1800's or 1700's who did not understand why books are being written. If he didn't travel the world and collect wisdom, he would be staying in his home and expecting us to publish his random crazy writings, he obviously does not understand how much it actually cost to publish anything.
It's just not worth the effort to publish works which didn't spend significant amount of effort in collecting the wisdom.
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You didn’t answer the (implied) question.
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The whole fiction genre is broken because the authors just wrote whatever they invented while staying in their homes.
I.e. the answer is that fictional works are doing it wrong.
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Of all the dumb bullshit I have ever read here, this damn near tops the pile.
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The purpose for the author to write fiction is at least one of: entertaining themselves and/or entertaining their audience.
I know there are authors who write fiction because they enjoy it, and if no one else on the planet enjoyed it, they'd still write.
There are also authors who write fiction purely for profit.... but their audiance is paying to be entertained so if they are not entertaining people are not really going to buy their books
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They are like Seasoning, like the "lead" that Makes my Paint chips so "very" VERY delicious. Or like The "traps" taht I have Hidden throughout my HOUSE to protect "me" from the VOICES I "sometimes" Hear. Stop it "Voices"! Be "quiet"!
Every Nation eats the Paint chips it Deserves!
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Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
Do you have a citation for this claim, other than the voices in your head? Because I'm pretty sure that's not what the law says.
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> Do you have a citation for this claim, Because I'm pretty sure that's not what the law says.
They did teach this rule to us in university when writing our master's thesis. So the context is our first professional work done to a company that hires new university students fresh from the university.
Obviously the law might have slightly less strict standards than what is required from people attending university probably because the accuracy level required in university are not suitable for _everyone_.
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Plagiarism is about honesty because who needs dishonest information. If you presented one of Shakespeare’s sonnets as your original work that would be plagiarism but not copyright infringement, since his works are in the public domain.
On the other hand if you quoted a work so extensively that it could not be considered fair use but you used quotation marks and cited your source properly (see, eg, Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 US 539 (1985)), then you may have infringed a copyright but you didn’t plagiarize.
In any event the advice you claim to have gotten is wrong in numerous respects. In actual fact, fair use is no defense against claims of plagiarism, fair use is not limited to uses of only small parts of a work, and fair use is not required to be in the context of quotations. That, and your bizarre statements about writing, and that you come off as arguing dishonestly, are why we’re making fun of you.
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Copyright infringement is just more serious version of plagiarism. I.e. when you copy someone elses work and include it to your own work and then publish the result in marketplace, it's called copyright infringement. This is also very near to claiming that you made the work, even though it was copied from someone elses work.
Basically "copying" in copyright laws is one version of "claiming you made the work, even though it isn't true (because it was copied from someone elses work)"
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Apparently there is no such thing as public domain.
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This is handled so that authors will make revised more fresh versions of the work, which means there'll be another 70 years of copyright protection.
Basically public domain is not an issue in anything that has a market value.
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Once again - absolute, verifiable industrial grade bullshit that can be disproven with the tiniest application of thought, or even a quick search on the very platform you're using to lie.
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The fact that you have to go back at least 500 years to make your point here kind of validates the other side of the argument.
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I was responding to the idea:
By pointing a few works that have been in the public domain for a long times, and which still have market value without their being a copyright holder.
As to Disney, where would they have been if the Brothers Grimm had not collected and published in book form all those folk tales that were and still are in the public domain.
Those works are not just noise, but rather well known works that are still inspiring new tellings of the same stories. The fact that you can recognize the names says that they are still relevant to culture and story telling.
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according to those who benefit from its demise.
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That's not copyright infringement. It's plagiarism,. Two totally different things.
"Basically "copying" in copyright laws is one version of "claiming you made the work, even though it isn't true (because it was copied from someone elses work)""
Except it's not. If you put up a pirated copy of the new Pixar movie, you're not claiming you made it. You're not replacing the original copy or claiming authorship. But, you are committing copyright infringement. One term applies, the other completely does not!
You seriously need to learn that actual definitions of the words you use, because you're spewing nonsense according to them now.
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The publishing -operation is not allowed if you didn't make it yourself. So when you publish, you're (implicitly) claiming you're the owner, i.e. the original author of the material.
The claim that you made it yourself is a required element before you're allowed to publish the material.
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Yes they are, under section 230 and fair use rules.
Is it tiring being this wrong?
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If that's the basis of your arguments, then no wonder they're so faulty.
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I didn't base my work on someone elses intellectual property.
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No, but you're completely ignorant of the law you're trying to claim does things that it doesn't. Maybe you should look for citations, and work out what things say in the real world for a change.
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> No, but you're completely ignorant of the law you're trying to claim does things that it doesn't.
If the whole world follows these legal rules, detecting the rules that are being followed should be trivial for anyone who is actually doing any work..
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Darwin had a theory that different parts of world have slightly different variants of the stuff.
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Let's go back to the beginning. You claimed fair use means something that it literally doesn't mean, and you're too afraid to either a) admit it or b) educate yourself on what it actually says. Why spend the time acting the fool when you can be honest?
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Well, you're just trying to push your local version of the laws to everyone.
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Well, you're just trying to push your local version of the laws to everyone.
How else do you think we got Life + 70 years to be the global standard?
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There are obviously other limits that software developers need to follow than just intellectual property issues. For example, common operation of multiplication has some unwanted property that it's inverse/factoring the integers is significantly more difficult to calculate than multiplication itself.
Work amount issues are one such thing, if even computers have problems calculating inverse of multiplication, less efficient humans have significant problems with the efficiency of the activity.
Intellectual property cannot force humans to do activities that are impossible for humans to perform.
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Intellectual property cannot force humans to do activities that are impossible for humans to perform.
Like scan millions of hours of content just to make sure Fox or Disney isn't magically being harmed?
Too late. IP law according to the standards that rightsholders demand is impossible. They can't even police their own shit and have to demand YouTube do it on their behalf, but here you are making excuses for their shitty algorithms. Fuck that.
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Why do you think that going to the area which has impossible problems is actually legal? If large companies cannot do these impossible tasks, why do you think normal end user can do that? When google offers these services to end users, the end users are required to do the operations which are supposedly impossible to perform.
Do you have any idea how big problem this filtering is for the end users responsibility, if even large companies cannot do it?
> IP law according to the standards that rightsholders demand is impossible
Well, maybe google shouldnt go to the area that has impossible problems.
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YouTube on the other hand gets at least 500 hour of video posted every minute. Users generally know whether they are posting infringing content, while YouTube has a massive task to scan it, and currently only detect music/sound that matches content registered with ContentID.
Just for comparison, Hollywood produces around 500 films a year. I cannot find any figures for TV production, but across all stations it is not going to be more that a few hundred hours of content a day. The output from self publishers exceeds the legacy out by a large margin, as within an hour or two, they will have posted more new content than Hollywood and the Studios produce in a year. So why are laws being proposed which will potentially cut off most of the videos being made in favour of industries who refuse to adapt to easy fast distribution of content, by forcing platforms to police what their users are doing, and to the detriment of the majority of those users.
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These are the wrong users. I'm not talking about users who post the videos. The end users in previous messages meant the users who _watch_ the videos. They're not allowed to watch the video if it's infringing someone's rights, and they're required to stop using services if there is infringing content in the service. So if google cannot check the videos for infringement, then it's the 8 year old kids who watch youtube videos (and possibly are just learning about copyright laws)...
Google claims the task is impossible, but fails to mention that they just passed to buck to children.
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And you wonder why nobody takes you seriously.
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Yes. This is likely to stop the activity a little before the kids gets absolutely mandatory requirement to solve RSA problem, which started the thread. Their kids area is like only 3 steps away from the RSA and if the kids do copyright infringement, they're going towards those annoying problems without any knoeledge of the math required to even avoid the problematic parts.
Given that RSA is just a rectangle where you just jump from the area to the side length, even the kids see the problem solved all the time for small numbers. But RSA might be a small surprise.
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That's even dumber than your previous claim, by an order of magnitude. How the hell are viewers meant to know whether or not a certain platform has bought rights or not?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
I think his argument could be expressed in somewhat more rigorous form as something like:
For copyrighted content to be viewed legally by an end user, a license is required.
Until a license check has been performed, it is not only impossible to know whether or not a license has been granted, but even impossible to know whether or not any given content is copyrighted.
Therefore, before any given content is viewed by an end user, a license check must be performed.
If the platforms don't do that license checking, it must be the responsibility of the end user(s) who want to view the content.
As people in these discussions have repeatedly argued, doing that license checking at the scale of these platforms is impossible.
And then he apparently tries to use that as a supporting element in a deeper argument, which is something like:
In order for the platforms' business to be legal, the license checking must be done.
In order for the platforms' business to be successful, it must operate at such a scale that the license checking cannot be done.
Therefore, the platforms' business cannot be both legal and successful.
He seems to insist that the thing which must need to change is the platforms' business (model) - that since doing what they're trying to do is not possible without breaking the law, they are trying to do the impossible, and therefore they (and anyone else who tries the same thing) should and must either fail or be shut down.
Some people in this debate would probably argue that the thing which must need to change is the idea that the responsibility for performing a license check must lie on either the platform or the end user.
Other people in this debate - and this would probably include me - would probably argue that the thing which must need to change is the need for a license (to do what these platforms do) in the first place. (Whether by a change in licensor business practices, or a change in copyright law, or the abolition of copyright law, or something else.)
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To be fair, it seems reasonable to argue that it's just as impossible for the rightsholders to police every upload (anywhere, across the entire Internet) for possible infringement, and that the result when they've tried to do that is the type of draconian over-enforcement we complain about.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
All the internet has really done is open up several things - visibility of just how many people share works, the ability to share with more people than you previously had access to and unbundling (e.g. if you want a song, you can just buy that song, you don't have to buy the overpriced album with filler surrounding the track you want).
I can understand the freakouts over these, but the answer is certainly not to place the burden on the people least able to make accurate censorship just because the work passes through their platform. Especially when the solutions are designed to further entrench major corporations at the expense of independent artists.
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This is handled so that the damage awards for infringement are in 300k dollars scale. This way rightowners do not need to sue everyone who infringes, but they can just pick few bad apples and then assume that the community which is responsible for infringement will help the chosen person to cover the costs.
We call this "reverse lottery", i.e. rightowners pick a winner and place a damage award to him and expect him to handle the money collection from his community/fellow pirates.
Of course if this chosen person is rejected from the community after he was sued, then that one person has significant problems with money. But that's to be expected when doing copyright infringement.
Unfortunately, while the law expects this to happen, we have never seen fellow pirates to hand over the money to the accused/sued pirate. So it might not be working system.
It mainly works better if the pirate organisation is large enough that they already got the money from their "pirate customers".
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Or, as in this reality already happens, they just pick the nearest handy target with big pockets who happen to be in the way, not people who are actually guilty of anything. Hence the need for section 230 protections, safe harbours, fair use and so on.
Meanwhile, also in reality, this does absolutely nothing to stop the majority of infringement. Because you're not addressing the root causes of piracy, it never stops, and you either end up playing the game of whack a mole with the many thousands of pirate sources that pop up all the time, or you end up attacking people who have done nothing wrong and chill innovation in other areas for fear of being shut down before they have had a chance at success.
Your ignorance of the real world is, as even, astounding, as is your support of things proven to have the opposite effect to the one you claim to be attempting.
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This cuts the funding from criminal organisations, and thus will stop the activity.
This is exact same theory than what police use to confiscate cars/equipment if they detect serious crimes happening.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
The activity from criminal organisations, which is very little of it. It also stops a huge amount of legitimate activity because they start getting sued when other people use their platform for activities over which they have no control.
This may be your misunderstanding, once again assuming I'm talking to a person and not someone pretending to lack common sense
The vast majority of piracy is not committed by criminal gangs, it's committed by ordinary people who have no other connection to each other. It is committed by them for reasons that have nothing to do with profit.
It is also impossible to create a tool that cannot be used for illegal purposes. Therefore, holding the tool responsible will shut down more legal than illegal activity.
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This just means that the mechanism how they communicate the pirate material, i.e. transfer the products to each other, needs to be investigated. If the ordinary people are doing piracy, they need the following elements before piracy is possible:
1) technology which enables piracy
2) lack of morals from the person
3) insufficient ways of detecting illegal activity
4) community of like-minded pirates
5) source of products to pirate
6) environment that doesnt care about fixing problems
7) access to gadgets(like cameras) and tools to obtain material to pirate
8) division of labor between pirates
9) breaking of DRM or access control schemes
10) computer hardware
11) means of communication between piracy group members
12) arrangement of copy parties
13) sales channels which accept pirate material
If piracy group is to be stopped, all the elements that enable the illegal activity needs to be attacked.
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Back in the early 90s, I could phone someone whose number I could see in the back of a newspaper and get them to deliver a pirated VHS tape. Sometimes this would be from an otherwise legitimate video store.
By your standards, that means we should have been attacking all telephone service, the postal service, the roads and vehicles used to deliver, VHS tapes, VCRs, any store that offered VHS rentals and the free press. I somehow imagine that would have been worse than the potential revenue loss from the pirated tape (which, tbh I only ever did regarding banned "video nasties" that weren't available legally, but that's another story).
Do you see why you're a raging moron yet, or just getting very silly with your trolling (since nobody can honestly be this stupid)?
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Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
If you publish content that has not been licensed, you can be sued for nominal copyright infringement. Whether you were actually infringing depends on whether the copying is covered by fair use/fair dealing or other legal limitations on copyright, but most people cannot afford to fight the recording industry in court, so they pay the industry's ransom instead, and the industry continues to reap the benefits of pretending that fair use doesn't even exist, including promulgating the myth that every use of their recordings is necessarily copyright infringement.
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Re: Licensing the content is already necessary
Agreed. But that's for the users/publishers to properly license, not the platform; and if not properly licensed or otherwise exempted (fair use, parody, etc.), it is the user/publisher that should be sued, not the platform. What Article 13 appears to be saying on behalf of rightsholders is "We want you, the platform, to pay for a blanket license to our content just in case your users upload something that needs it."
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If only you realised how wrong your statements actually are, and how opposed to reality, you might end up have a real conversation. You do seem to try sometimes, but the basis of your arguments are always so skewed from the truth, you end up looking like a fool, despite the number of times you're corrected.
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Considering there is content unavailable at any price despite demand and customers ready to pay you... perhaps y'all misunderstand what a marketplace is.
"Actually, article 13 makes it easier for users to create, post and share content online, as it requires platforms to get licences, and rightsholders to ensure these licences cover the acts of all individual users acting in a non-commercial capacity."
Big tech companies have money, we want it, so this is our way of getting it. Copyright is only to benefit large corporations and 'rights' societies that only seem to exist to fill their own coffers while artists have to run GoFundMe's when they get sick despite having created beloved things. We want the right to demand payment for everything & keep control over everything & make sure only expressions that profit us or support us appear online.
TL;DR
We're assholes, please pay us more or we'll take away Grumpy Cat.
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We're assholes, please pay us more or we'll take away Grumpy Cat.
umm they want you to pay AND to take away grumpy cat as well... unless of course grumpy cat pays as well nad over and over and over...
It's the mafia business plan, your options are pay us or pay us.
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Amusing games we humans play against one another.
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The death of the EU
If the EU doesn't stop this immediately its days are counted: It's insanity to imagine that the citizens of Europe would ever tolerate such tyranny and interference into the open internet! We're taring down the whole Union if that's what it takes to escape this joke of a dictatorship and take back our freedom. They are literally signing their own death sentence and don't even realize it.
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@ "Yesterday, Mike took apart an extraordinarily weak attempt"
That's the only kind he dares attack, and failed anyway.
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Re: @ "Yesterday, Mike took apart an extraordinarily weak attempt"
Methinks you need another hobby. The dopamine rush you get for "being right" isn't healthy if you don't argue how you're right.
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You Had Me At Hello
"The primary focus of this legislation is concerned with whether or not the internet functions as a fair and efficient marketplace"
Is that really what the people of Europe want from their Internet? A "fair and efficient marketplace". People want the Internet to give them communications, information, access to infinite sites and information, and also to entertain them. No citizens would mention "Fair and efficient marketplace" on their wishlist, only profiteers and businesses would.
There's nothing wrong with businesses wanting a "fair and efficient marketplace" of the Internet, but it's not right for their needs to over-rule and dominate what the citizenry actually wants.
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Re: You Had Me At Hello
"The primary focus of this legislation is concerned with whether or not the internet functions as a fair and efficient marketplace"
and suspect the author meant:
"The primary focus of this legislation is to make sure I get as much kickbacks as possible"
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Re: You Had Me At Hello
It is mindboggling just how much knowledge is shared for free and it has helped me more times than I can count, which in turn inspires me to share my knowledge when I can.
That is what saddens me most because as you wrote, the copyright industry would very much like that THEY control how and from whom we learn.
That blog post that someone wrote on a specific subject is also available in a book where the author is paid per word and thus is explained in as long-drawn and convoluted way as possible for $79.99.
In this example, I don't even have to wonder which would benefit society the most, but I am pretty sure that the "fair and efficient marketplace" would get that blog post shut down.
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Re: You Had Me At Hello
Its a oligarchy. We in Europe DON want europe, we want to keep our national borders. Despite EU-nationalists.
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HOW long
How many nations REALLY let anyone speak?
The only reason TRUMP won is because he SAID, things that OTHERS wished to hear.(even tho he cant do much about them)
Incomplete answers to Many problems..
There USEd to be many groups in this country with THINGS to say..Most got BOUGHT OUT or Broken up..
Many were Blackballed publicly, derided into Obscurity..
There is a control Factor here..and WHO OWNS IT.
NOW for the internet..ITS REALLY PUBLIC..
Everyone can have a SAY..
Even Trolls..
Even the Dumb
Even the idiots..
Even those that KNOW BETTER then to say anything..
YOU MAY have freedom of speech, but we DONT have freedom of an OPEN FORUM..no one is listening..except those that DONT WANT YOU TO HEAR IT..or see it..
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fair use and fair dealing
Could it be that such a parody couldn't exist without fair use?
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Myabe it's time to kill copyright then
Now, copyright's only purpose is to aid major corporations control others and as a mere side effect, it enables Libre Software to exist. The corporations hate this side effect and implemented potential "solutions" to the "bug" in the TPP, which is being adopted by various nations as we speak.This EU insanity is obvious just one of many crowning moments for them, and it's what they've been waiting for all along. At first these corporations where scared of the Internet, but now they aren't, because they've nearly succeeded in "taming the wild west" that was the Internet.
The only way we can stop this is by completely revoking copyright from these shitheads, make copyright illegal, make drm illegal etc. There will still be incentive to create as there will always be demand for content, and people are usually too lazy to go to third party sources.
Look at the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien couldn't get copyright in America when he published it because of the restrictions on foreign works, as such an unauthorized version was published close to the time the authorized version was. However, the unauthorized version wasn't as good as the authorized one and Tolkien made a big stink about it and told people to buy the authorized one instead. In the end, sales of the Lord of The Rings were better than they had originally been because of the awareness that the unauthorized version created.
Or look at the various studies that have been done that show that pirates actually spend *more* on media than those that don't pirate anything. Piracy is actually good for business if all you care about is selling media. Of course, copyright isn't about that. It's about power. As such we should take it back and end copyright. Things won't be as dire as the media groups claim it will be without it, Artists may even profit off of it if they play their cards right. The only ones that need worry are the assholes wrapping their hands around our throats via copyright, and I say fuck 'em to hell.
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Re: Myabe it's time to kill copyright then
The story seems to be written in darker times, when world war II was still fresh in people's minds. It talks about the war, and what darkness these smallest hobbits can encounter when the large world goes full swing against the peace they love.
> sales of the Lord of The Rings were better than they had originally been because of the awareness that the unauthorized version created.
What does this awareness help, if the original author is not prepared to sell his book on that market? Is he going to sell the book to another publisher who promises to start competing against the illegal copies?
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Re: Re: Myabe it's time to kill copyright then
Every publisher is competing against illegal copies, yet there are many successful publishing companies.
Strange how you skipped over the parts of the comment you're responding to that explained this and why, and went straight to rambling on about the content, which has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
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Abolish Copyright
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MArketplace
The internet functioning as a fair and efficient market place is the wrong outlook. The internet is not a Market place, it is an Information source more akin to a Library than a store. But like most modern libraries it does have a commercial side like the Libraries Coffee Shop, Gift Shop, and Sales of books/DVD's/CD's that have been removed from circulation.
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We will do it anyway
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Intelectual property is nonesense
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Media Companies
Kinda the same as folks crying about the massive salaries of sports figures while continuing to buy expensive tickets to the arena games.
Hell, sheeple, if you're gonna roll over, quit whining about it. You have the power for change in your wallet.
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