EU Copyright Directive Has Been Made Even More Stupid, And Some Are Still Trying To Make It Even Worse
from the yet-it-moves-forward dept
So yesterday, we noted that Article 13 was back on thanks to an apparent "compromise" between the French and the Germans as to whether or not small internet platforms would be exempted from Article 13. France was pushing for no exemption and that the same rules apply to everyone, while Germany demanded some protections for smaller companies (those making less than €20 million per year). We knew, according to the reports coming out of Brussels, that France had won, but now the details have come out and it's worse than we thought.
The new plan does have an "exception" for small companies, but it is so ridiculous as to be non-existent. To qualify, a company has to be:
- Less than 3 years old
- Have less than €10 million in revenue
- Have less than 5 million uniques per month
Upload filters required
- Discussion boards on commercial sites, such as the Ars Technica or Heise.de forums (older than 3 years)
- Patreon, a platform with the sole purpose of helping authors get paid (fails to meet any of the three criteria)
- Niche social networks like GetReeled, a platform for anglers (well below 5 million users, but older than 3 years)
- Small European competitors to larger US brands like Wykop, a Polish news sharing platform similar to Reddit (well below €10 million turnover, but may reach 5 million visitors and is older than 3 years)
And, yes, it would also likely apply to our comments as well. We don't make €10 million per year, nor do we have 5 million monthly uniques... but we are way older than 3 years old. Even for the tiny number of companies who do qualify for the exception, the text of the directive still demands that they make "best efforts" to license the works. In other words, the whole thing sets up a shotgun negotiation where any platform will be required to license all content, which means that license holders can set any rate they want, and if you don't license, they can accuse you of violating the law. This is madness:
On top of that, even the smallest and newest platforms, which do meet all three criteria, must still demonstrate they have undertaken “best efforts” to obtain licenses from rightholders such as record labels, book publishers and stock photo databases for anything their users might possibly post or upload – an impossible task. In practice, all sites and apps where users may share content will likely be forced to accept any license a rightholder offers them, no matter how bad the terms, and no matter whether they actually want that rightholder’s copyrighted material to be available on their platform, to avoid the massive legal risk of coming in conflict with Article 13.
Hey, and it gets even worse. Whereas in the older draft, it at least required copyright holders to tell platforms what was infringing, that's now been removed:
If you can't see that, it shows that the draft of the text has removed the notice requirement for copyright holders to alert platforms to any infringing material, directly removing the phrase "for which the rightsholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information or submitted a notice..." In other words, copyright holders don't even have to alert the platforms any more -- and platforms might still be deemed liable for any infringing content appearing on their platform. Even if they don't know about it. Which is insane.
Later on, the draft also removes a phrase that requires the copyright holders to work with the platforms, because that's apparently too much of a burden for the copyright holders:
I do wonder if this will get Hollywood and the legacy recording industries back on board.
However, here's the incredible bit. Despite Article 13 now being demonstrably even more ridiculous, the MEP in charge of pushing it forward, Axel Voss, is complaining that it's not idiotic enough yet. In response to this draft from the EU Council (which is expected to be approved on Friday), Voss stated:
“What France and Germany have agreed is a new safe harbor for small platforms, able to exist beyond what we already have today. It’s something we can’t accept,” Axel Voss said at a conference in the European Parliament.
Are you fucking kidding me? He's saying even that tiny, useless safe harbor that will apply to basically no one is too much?
Voss and the entertainment industry are going for broke here. They recognize this is their last best chance to really fundamentally change the internet. It is an attempt to completely wreck its intended purpose as a communications medium and turn it into a broadcast medium of licensed content controlled by gatekeepers (the legacy companies who used to control movies, music, news and books). Don't let them get away with this. Tell the EU Parliament that this is completely and totally unacceptable. EU Parliamentary elections are coming up in a few months, and any MEP should be told over and over and over again that voting to destroy the internet in this way means that they no longer deserve their job in the EU Parliament.
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Filed Under: article 11, article 13, axel voss, censorship, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, eu council, eu parliament, intermediary liability, licensing, safe harbors, upload filters
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Just time to turn off the Internet in the EU. Let them build their own.
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Sure, sure. I guess we Europeans will have to take the World Wide Web with us, though, since it was invented at CERN. Have fun with Gopher and Telnet!
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CERN invented the HTTP protocol, and specified the HTML language as a derivative subset of SGML, which was invented by IBM. But the Web itself? There's a strong case to be made that that was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and by Nestcape, two American organizations that, together, invented the concept of the Web browser as we know it. Without their work to make it accessible to ordinary people, HTTP would never have moved much beyond the highly-specialized research purposes that CERN developed it for.
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I saw marketing for hypertext-linked electronic books as far back as 1992. A law firm was really excited about publishing such a book on law, with hyperlinks to citations and other statutes. I always thought of the web as a hybrid of hyperlinking and the internet, not its own invention.
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Actually it was invented by Shiva Ayyadurai~.
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I'm surprised he has not yet sued the entire internet for infringing upon his creation.
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"Without their work to make it accessible to ordinary people, HTTP would never have moved much"
Nor would it have if territorial idiocy split it up so that its components can only be used in the place it was invented.
I wish people would stop this stupidity, it's a bad argument to begin with, even before you get into the nitty gritty of arguing that the web should be American as well because reasons. Why you people can't accept that the whole thing is ultimately a collaborative effort, and insist on wanting to destroy the whole thing so that you can claim a piece of virtual land, is beyond me.
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Agreed. It's also supposed to be decentralised and distributed but increasing centralisation is making it easier to create choke-points and therefore control over entire regions. Not okay.
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"Supposed to" is an incredibly subjective term here. That was the original intent of the ARPANet, for a very specific purpose: spreading valuable information around to ensure that it would survive a Russian nuclear strike because there was a Cold War going on. According to Wikipedia, "The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 (1991)," which means that that purpose stopped being valid before the basic protocol of the Web was even created!
Decentralized, non-hierarchical social systems have never been stable over a long term, at least not much beyond the scale of a single-digit number of people. Throughout history, centralization has always won out in the end. (I'm not claiming that that's good or that's bad, only that it's true.) So it should come as no surprise that the Web went down that same route, almost from the very beginning.
The heavy dominance of Amazon, Google, and Facebook over the Web may be a fairly recent phenomenon, but centralization has been with us all along. Before the current crop of tech leaders we had others. Remember in the pre-Google era, when every other website was hosted on Geocities, Yahoo dominated search, and the majority of emails were handled by either Yahoo Mail or Hotmail? Not much has changed other than the names.
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But how will you operate the WWW with Articles 11 and 13 in place? Even a website host would be required to have upload filters they cannot afford.
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If this passes in Europe, it will arrive in the US and all other countries via the next trade treaty. So the Internet will be turned of world wide, and Google will shutter as they will have nothing to Index other than companies doing business over the Internet.
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How will that work exactly? Why would America agree to that? Plus, Congress makes Copyright law, not Trade Agreements, and if Net Neutrality showed anything, Democrats will most definitely oppose.
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"Congress makes Copyright law, not Trade Agreements"
There have been Techdirt articles in the past how one way corporations attempt to ratchet up copyright law in this country is to play a big part in getting a provision into a treaty that the US then ratifies, and then congress is "forced" to pass laws to make our copyright laws match the terms of the treaty so that we don't become in violation of it.
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One plus side of the era of Trumpism is that he isn't real bigly on treaties (also here).
We saw that early on with the TPP.
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Again, I can't see Congress agreeing to this, especially the Senate, since they are the guys who make treaties. I say this because they tried this before with SOPA and failed in humiliation. I believe that the House has a say too, and with Democrats in control, I cant see them going along with this. They are more attuned to us than Republicans.
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Perhaps, but during the TPP debacle Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility and effectively ceded it to the USTR. This was on Obama's watch and it's one of the issues I have with his administration.
Treaty negotiations are insanely secretive. Those in favour of making them in principle tend to take a "Don't worry your pretty little head about it, dearie" approach to addressing our concerns (I'm looking at you, Noah Smith!). They also dismiss those of us who have concerns as being anti-trade.
Unless you are willing to push back against politicians afraid of a bit of name-calling and sneaky lobbyists anxious to restrict our rights you're pretty much screwed. If you trust Congress not to rubber-stamp this crap you'd better be prepared to contact your Critter and explain why it's not anti-trade to protect our digital rights. Be polite, be detailed, and be willing to answer questions.
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iF gOOgLe hAs tO pAy mUsiCiAnS iT wiLL bReAk tHe iNtErNeT
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This comment is the reason why this will pass. (The article also does a good job at pissing off Europeans). Americans seem not to get that there's no policy maker in the world happy with having your companies taking over the Internet. Economies of scale are on your side but you can be sure that everything will be done to reverse that. Chinese did a great job so far, while Europeans the poorest possible. If you think it's about copyright, you are either naive or stupid. It's about control over social semiotics. Any single bit of it. No country will survive if it lets that control slip away in the hands of foreign powers. The absurdity of the particular norm is irrelevant, these are steps of a process where countries regain control over the Internet after having relinquish it at an early stage when they where in need of (foreign) private parties setting up the access infrastructure and the hosting applications.
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...so the EU will regain control of the internet by making it financially impossible for any company other than the currently established American giants to remain in operation?
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FTFY: "if you don't license" AND HOST CONTENT.
Somehow, you ALWAYS leave out key point.
Teh internets was/is not made so that grifters can get rich off the work of others.
If don't want the risk, don't host content!
As there's no guarantee of getting rich from MAKING content, why should society allow "business models" that practically guarantee income for merely hosting stolen content? -- Stealing is crime to be suppressed.
By the way, didn't you claim 'bout month ago that this was going to die? WRONG AGAIN.
And NO, I'm not to blame for GOOGLE being advantaged with this: the EU and unaccounted "European Parliament" was founded for promoting globalist corporations, NO surprise.
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Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" AND HOST CONTENT.
Makes perfect sense - If you love corporate rights. Under this, corporations get a new right to inspect all your uploads before they go live.
Support strong copyright - love corporate power!
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Re: Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" AND HOST CONTENT.
Masnick "supports copyright" is one of Techdirt's many claims.
So, IF true then Masnick loves "corporate power".
If false, then Masnick / Techdirt has been lying all this time.
Which is it "Gary"?
By the way, your new tactic of repeated assertions on this line is fine with me: shows Techdirt is against copyright, besides infected with low-talent sloganeering fanboys.
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Re: Re: Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" AND H
They always had that right: this supposedly requires it.
Also, the "infected that I wrote should be "infested": I don't want to imply that Techdirt is otherwise healthy.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" A
Hi Blue.
Please be advised that I'm ignoring everything you say, because your past behavior indicates you aren't interested in actual discussion, just repeatedly hammering your opinions into a keyboard over and over.
Have a nice day.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" A
Frosted butts
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Re: Re: Re: Troll
TD supports fair copyright - I don't speak for TD, I'm just a plebe. I think "Fair" copyright is maybe five years, tops, with only registered works. No automatic registration of all printed materials.
This "Blue" guy however really seems to love copyright, I was addressing me comments toward him since strong copyright means more corporate rights. Whomever "Blue" is gets hardon over big, strong copyright because it gives corporations power over him. And Blue loves to be dominated.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Troll
Five years is an awfully short period of time to put something into the public domain. Even twenty years is brief. Thirty-five is probably better, as that's when copyright reverts to a musical artist in many scenarios. Even patents have longer protections.
Unregistered works should still be protected, and the ability to sue for damages over them is greatly restricted.
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Five years is an awfully short period of time to put something into the public domain. Even twenty years is brief. Thirty-five is probably better, as that's when copyright reverts to a musical artist in many scenarios. Even patents have longer protections.
You're basing this opinion on...? Back in the day, 28 years tops was sufficient.
Unregistered works should still be protected, and the ability to sue for damages over them is greatly restricted.
Are you aware that your "Wish you were here" postcards to Aunt Alicia are automatically copyrighted? Orphan works licencing is a massive problem. Register or go without. If it's valuable it's worth registering. If it's not, it's not.
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Re: Re: Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" AND HOST CONT
May I suggest you take a course in syllogism, because your leaps of logic are illogical in the extreme. I don't have very high hopes of it though, since your ranting is becoming more and more unhinged.
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Re: FTFY: "if you don't license" AND HOST CONTENT.
Oh, making a website with user-generated content on the internet is guaranteed income?
Who knew it was so easy?
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It sounds like a fine directive if what you're trying to do is kill all web hosting in the EU.
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Including Wikipedia, Github, Gitlab, and all the open science and preprint sites out there.
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But you're not a site hosted in Europe, you don't live in Europe, and you're not subject to EU law. So you don't have to abide by this nonsense.
Just because they say they rule the internet worldwide, doesn't mean they actually do.
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Would still have to take it to their courts, which would be prohibitively expensive, and possibly be required to block IP addresses entering from the EU.
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Why? What are they going to do, invade California? Ok, dude.
“Law, without power, is brute farce.”
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I point you to the recent cases of the lawyer for Facebook who had court documents seized by the UK while he was on vacation, and to the recent Hauwei executive arrest in Canada.
I also point you to the more historical arrest of Kim Dotcom over MegaUploads piracy.
Remember, at least on paper, the U.S. and E.U. are still allies who will respond to extradition requests from each other. Even if TechDirt would win in a court fight (and I believe they would) it would be a repeat of the "I Invented Email" drama, sapping their resources.
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Double Criminality Law and Legal Definition
(Via Wikipedia: Double Criminality.)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ...extradition requests...
The law doesn´t seem to apply in the Kim Dotcom case though.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ...extradition requests...
You didn't follow the New Zealand proceedings closely enough. See the Ars Technica coverage by Tim Lee (July 5, 2018)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ...extradition requests...
With two more points to consider:
Not to say that he didn't do something illegal by US law. Only that what he might have actually done didn't qualify to the level of "seriousness" required for extradition.
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Extradition only applies to criminal cases. This new EU law is not a criminal matter. No one would be arrested and jailed under this law for not properly filtering user uploads.
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I would beg to differ! Just not in the way you're thinking...
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I'd like to believe that but after Dotcom anything is possible.
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The safest and cheapest option for any hobbyist or small business that has any sort of forums/user generated content, is to simply geo-block all EU countries from getting to any user generated content. The easiest way is to simply geoblock those countries from your entire website.
I might be able to ignore any litigation in the EU but I'm not sure what sort of agreements my home country (or the country where my servers are kept, which is different) have with regards to passing on any verdict and hence costs to me if I ignore an EU court order. So, ban all of the EU is the simplest option.
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No, if the EU wants to block access to TechDirt (or any other non-compliant American site), then it's free to do so, but they don't have the authority to shift that burden to TechDirt to do their work for them.
Bottom line-- no EU law supersedes American law when it comes to American websites hosted in America by Americans. There are serious 1st Amendment implications with this entire concept and the American government itself couldn't get away with imposing it on its own citizens without running afoul of the Bill of Rights. The EU government certainly can't do to Americans what the American government can't even do.
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Such site blocking can circumvented with Tor, Proxy, or VPN.
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And people will use VPNs in places like Asia or Australia, not in the USA or the EU.
Using a VPN for this puropose does not violate either US or EU laws.
When Eurovision had the rights to the Olympics from 2002 through 2012 and had the rights to the ISU Grand Prix Figure Skating series from 2008 through 2011, I did not break any laws using a VPN to bypass geo restrictions to watch the Grand Prix events on Eurovision.
So, an EU person who uses an Australia based VPN, for example, to bypass any blocks on EU addresses connecting, would be breaking EU, US, or Australian laws.
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Get rich quick
This is a great get rich quick piece of legislation. All we have to do is wait for it to pass, mass post tons of stuff on a private server to gain automatic copyright, then script posting that same content to every EU website and claim damages.
And while I may have missed it, the EU Parliament doesn’t appear to be exempted, so start with them.
The best part is that it doesn’t even need to be meaningful content, you can just script parts of public domain literature together to get new copyright protected content automatically.
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Do you have employees or servers in Europe? If not... what are they going to do about it?
This is the point where Techdirt needs to start pushing for a SPEECH Act counterpart to shield US entities from nonsense like this.
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Unfortunately, such a thing isn't simple.
Much of the same logic that would apply to U.S. sites hosting content that violates E.U. copyright law, applies equally well to China (or New Zealand, or Finland, et cetera) hosting content that violates U.S. copyright law.
It would take a lot of legal finesse to come up with a reasonable law that protects U.S. websites without making it uselessly hypocritical to demand that other countries enforce U.S. copyrights. I'm not suggesting it's impossible, just that it would need levels of foresight and grasp of the concepts that are sadly not often seen in politicians debating modern copyright law. (Citations: Article 13 and The Complete Works of Ajit Pai.)
It also would do little to prevent a fracturing of the internet. If sites hosted in the US and not specifically directed at the EU were immune to EU laws, I have little doubt that a large number of EU sites (the ones with enough funds to stay alive at all) would simply relocate to the US, or other nations with similar laws. The only way I believe the EU would be able to respond, assuming they wouldn't take the more intelligent path of backing down, would be to demand that these foreign, infringing websites are made unavailable in the EU.
And from there, it's only a few stumbles down the stairs from "Google News is unavailable in Spain" to "copyright filters block half the internet in Russia" to "if you want a website in China, you need to host the servers in China". At that stage, I don't think it's unfair to suggest that the EU wouldn't have the Internet so much as it would have a Europe-wide LAN.
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If it ends up that way, then the EU only has itself to blame. They made their bed with this ridiculous legislation. If they don't like it, it'd be a simple matter to repeal it.
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Get in on the Gravy Train Quickly!
I am an impoverished content creator and cannot afford a domain name, But I've set up a site at 6.6.6.666 containing my creations. It contains 13 pictures and two videos of my pet cat, along with several other highly-desirable images; the lyrics of my new-age rap song about pet cats, with guitar chords superposed; a patented recipe for organic cat litter, and my chemical analysis of its decomposition rate; a 17-page mystery novel about a cute cat detective; and my licensing terms. (The license does not identify any of that content, it merely indicates that the site contains images, music, videos, literary and scientific work.)
I will license the possibility of any of this created content being uploaded on your server by users, for the low low sum of $10.00 per month or $100.00 per year, retroactive to the date I stole my first kitten. Since it is always possible that someone (myself if nobody else!--as historians of CDA 230 takedown notices know well) will upload this content to your website, and since no possible filter can detect this material (indeed, I have no incentive to allow any filter to detect it!) you are automatically liable unless you pay up now.
This isn't normal insane. This is wannabe-tyrant, 'kill them all and let God sort it out' evil.
This all has nothing, less than nothing, to do with piracy. It will not affect piracy in the least because ... Techdirt--and many other flagrant violators of my eternal proprietorial rights to the fruits of my creativity and their unrelated economic activity--AREN'T BASED IN THE EUROPEAN SOVIET-FASCIST UNION!
It's not surprising that this whole idea comes from the only country in the world where the Bolsheviks and the Nazis came together to form a united party.
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Re: Get in on the Gravy Train Quickly!
And it is US corporations pushing this fascism, knowing if they get this in Europe they can use trade treaties to take it world wide.
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Re: Get in on the Gravy Train Quickly!
For Chinese users, you should include a recipe for Moo Goo Gai Cat.
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A search engine doesn't host content, and would be very valuable as a portal that points people to creator websites that host and market their own content.
UGC is large-scale pilfering that has proven more profitable than any other business model on the internet. It should not get greater consideration than copyright enforcement, which is what the article seems to support weakening.
If this became the rule in the US I would not be impacted: I write a short film, film it, upload it to my site, Google indexes it, sends me traffic, they put ads on the search results, and we all make money.
YouTube would have to become very diligent but the courts will likely reward that as well.
I don't see the problem with this but I'm not an "internet maximalist."
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Cite your evidence, as the bulk of content on the Internet is original content.
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"A search engine doesn't host content"
This is technically incorrect under current definitions, as the "link tax" debate shows. Thumbnails, URLs, text content gathered from the page, all are given redirect links by Google that are cached on their servers, even on the rare occasions where the data itself is not cached.
What's more, DMCA notices can target mere links to infringing content, so there's no reason why Google would not be affected by these laws as well, and potentially no longer be able to reliably provide these search services.
Anyone could claim your website is infringing on their content and get Google to remove it, and even if you're 100% in the clear, Google won't do anything (as they already don't!) because losing any single fight would result in astronomical penalties against Google, and those risks outweigh their benefits.
Additionally, if you allow users to submit comments on your site, or post reviews, or create accounts with text fields or custom profile pictures, you would be affected directly. Even if you used a third-party service like Facebook or Disqus and merely displayed them on your site.
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Then I allow Google or any other portal to link to my content. Opt-in search. As long as it benefits me I would do it.
Search engines should be opt-in anyway for this reason.
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You have the power to keep Google from scraping your website. Its called the robots.txt file and it has been around for a couple decades by now.
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I also have the power to pay my employees minimum wage, but if my competitors can hire illegals at half the cost, that option won't help much.
Piracy destroys the market value of creative works. Look at today's music.
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Where are you looking? Jamendo for one has music for all tastes available.
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Not on par with anything from the era where musicians actually got paid. Music production has become a hobby or marketing tool. Once upon a time, it was the main product.
The videos for 1980s and 1990s music on YouTube have comments from today's generation about how lousy the music offerings are. Telling yourself that free music is equal to justify a position on copyright doesn't make it so.
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Just to comment - you've gone from whining that you can't employ staff competent enough to manage a basic text file to whining that music today sucks and you're right because you found some kids that agree with you. Oh, and the only differential has to be money, there's nothing else that happened in the last 40 years that can possibly have made a difference, it's the fact that musicians no longer have millions to waste of hookers and blow!
Do you actually read back what you write and think it's a good set of arguments?
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So your are not prepared to put in a bit of effort to find music to your tastes, think that amateurs cannot produce music of quality, and only seek out opinions that you agree with. Seems that you have a problem, and rather than there being no good music on the Internet.
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Or perhaps your competition are innovative and can make the same job for half the cost. Which have zero relevance to what TipMN wrote about robots.txt
It's disingenuous to complain that someone can come to your site and read what you publicly publish on it, especially since you do have a choice to tell them to bugger off.
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"You have the power to keep Google from scraping your website. "
---- to which you replied: "I also have the power to pay my employees minimum wage, but if my competitors can hire illegals at half the cost, that option won't help much."
Not the same at all - I would criticize your logic, but there is none.
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His logic is the typical corporate one - they should be free to exploit their staff and customers as much as possible because all their friends will be doing the same. But, the moment they cut too much and their own bad decisions lead to losses, they should get a free bailput from someone else.
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All music ever created can be had for a song
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You misunderstand. You wouldn't be allowed to opt-in. (You're already allowed to opt-out.) Google would be the one making the legally-important decisions here.
Your content is accused of not properly licensing content from someone. What content? Well, you're not sure, you were never actually told. They sent their complaint to Google, not to you. This complaint alleges that Google is hosting content infringing on their rights without licensing it. The link to your website, or cached content of your website, is presented as one piece of this content. Google is faced with either paying whatever licensing fees this company demands, removing the link to your site, or fighting the complaint in court.
What's more, Google could be liable anyway, if it's decided they didn't make a "best effort" to obtain a license for the content. What counts as a "best effort", and when did they have to take it? It's quite cloudy.
Now, on top of this, it doesn't even have to be something you actually infringed. We already see this in DMCA abuse, where it's nearly impossible to sort out legitimate claims from bogus claims.
All of this is moot, of course, if Google's newly-legally-mandated filters scan your website, find something that might potentially be copyright-infringing, and thus prevent it from being displayed in search results, regardless of whether you want to be included.
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The EU does not have the power to charge anyone a licensing fee for MY content. Get real.
If I license it to Google on my own, it's licensed and non-infringing.
How desperate are the anti-copyright supporters getting? Sheesh.
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Your attempt to give Google a license will most likely get lost in the pile of such attempts that they are ignoring. And even if someone glances at it, what makes you think they will get someone to do the due diligence necessary before accepting such a license.
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"A search engine doesn't host content"
"This is technically incorrect under current definitions, as the "link tax" debate shows."
Technically, it is correct.
Use of the root word "technical" implies that stupid laws have no affect upon the technical details involved in these silly disputes. Engineers are not about to change their vernacular just appease some money grubbing get rich quick scheme.
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YouTube would have to become very diligent but the courts will likely reward that as well.
I don't even remember the time when YouTube was rewarded for their existing diligence.
You know, like pointing out that Viacom couldn't sue them for content Viacom themselves uploaded.
The hell are you smoking, John Smith?
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Not "John Smith." More than one person can disagree with you.
You're kind of obsessed with the internet it would seem. My pity.
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You're obsessed with a website you claim nobody reads.
Rational people can tell the difference between supporting a website, and absolutely detesting a website and posting there anyway. Very few would consider the latter to be sane.
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And who are we identifying as today Mr Smith?
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It's been fun, but the party's over - get the fuck out...
Have fun with your mini-eudiotnet that is all you'll get to have.
Everywhere else can have the real internet.
Too bad you haven't kicked your Eudiots in Charge in the balls hard enough to knock some sense into them.
Please continue to try, it may eventually help.
If nothing else, it will cull them from the gene-pool.
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I've posted thousands of copyrightable items online. Now, I do copyright research first, and some of the websites I where do their own research. But those websites are all nonprofit: their purpose is to benefit humanity, and if I named them it would be trivial to find a mountain of testimony that each one fulfils that purpose.
I could have set up several websites of my own (having managed websites, I know how much work it is, and how much it costs.) But which is more useful to people--to Google for a title, scroll past all the amazon and eBay listings for selling it, all the librarything and pinterest catalog entries of people that have it but are neither selling nor posting it, all the random allusions in history books and encyclopedias, all the breathless reviews in personal blogs, all the post-the-dictionary-to-capture-search-click spam sites, all the russian/ukrainian/nigerian/whatever genuinely-copyright-infringing-archive-with-malware ... to get to my low-ranking but authoritative legally-downloadable copy (bearing in mind that 100.00% of the people in the world looking for information on medieval literature or commercial applications of flourescence or baroque music or cycad fossils do not know me from Adam's housecat videos.)
... OR ... to go to an archive site, well-known for its scrupulous legality, rigorous editing, and malware-free file formats, and take advantage of its site-search and library-cataloging features--where you can freely download material uploaded by me and a few dozen/hundred/thousand other people whose competence and honesty are known (to the website admins, at least, although not to the general public.)
There's no comparison--the archive site is infinitely more useful to the general public, as well as 99.9% more efficient for the contributors (since the website need only be designed and administered once.)
But would you suppose that a site would be safe from the proposed law, if it was so careful not to even think about infringing? HA! (1) Copyright laws are so different in different countries: what is public-domain here is still a monopoly there, what is fair use here is infringing there. (2) Licensing is so complex that it is seldom really understood even by its owners: what is controlled by one commercial-monopolist here is often controlled by a completely-different corporate entity there, what was legally uploaded by its controlling-corporation one day is often denounced as piracy the next (by a different agent of the same corporation!) (3) In the absence of a mandatory central rights-registration service such as the U.S. Library of Congress used to run, many entities either do not know what rights they have, or regularly claim rights they do not have. (4) For the RIAA/MPAA, knowingly-false claims ARE the business model, comprising well over 99% of all claims. And even for less-dishonest organizations, false claims are not unusual.
In the U.S. under current law, even scrupulously-honest sites, even after checking each uploaded item after consultation with experts in copyright law, regularly receive (invalid) claims of copyright infringement; and so regularly incur additional legal costs. Without a combination of strong protection for innocent parties, and due processes designed not to impose huge costs on innocent parties, these sites WOULD BE PRICED OUT OF EXISTANCE.
It is worth emphasizing: this is not speculation, this is what is already happening regularly.
So now, what SHOULD anyone see wrong with the EU proposal? Anyone, even a party like the RIAA/MPAA can make a single false copyright infringement claim (which they do about once a SECOND in the U.S.), WITHOUT telling the accused what content is infringing. Lawyers for the accused cannot send a simple reply giving their evidence that the item is public domain; they don't know what item is involved. They cannot take the item down (as for CDA 230 takedown notices in the U.S.) because ditto. Their only options are to take the license on whatever iniquitous terms are offered, or go offline.
In short, anyone in the world can use this law to force any EU website to choose one of these two options--pay extortion, or die.
What's could possibly be wrong with that?
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I have never had copyright issues other than with my work being stolen by a rather large number of people who made an even larger amount of money from doing so. I support Article 11/13 in that it would stop these pirates in their trcks.
My post, however, showed that Article 13 would not destroy my site, and would allow it to be indexed by search engines at no risk of an infringement lawsuit (opt-in).
It would change, not destroy, the internet, in my opinion for the better. I do recognize that there are many fine people on both sides of this debate.
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Citation needed, as that implies commercial infringement.
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Just substitute "others have had their work infringed" if you're hung up on that.
Infringement definitely harmed my revenue and enhanced the revenue of the pirates by literally destroying the e-book market for the entire niche. Literally every book in the genre was pirated (my titles and author credits were even altered so the work didn't appear to be mine), with the pirated copies sold for pennies in order to collect names that were passed along to an internet-marketing syndicate that made almost $100 million from this crime, and the internet-marketers ran high-level scams that cost their targets about $10,000-15,000 a clip. I was never obsessed with money (turned down many invitations to join the marketing syndicate) but those who are have been stealing from everyone. This is only a fraction of what goes on with the major piracy websites.
Anything that puts a stop to this is just fine with me, and I don't really care which big internet companies it puts out of business. If they can't comply with copyright law, they don't deserve to exist. Perfect 10's cases were a gift to the intermediaries: Visa knowingly processed the sale of pirated goods and was found not to be vicariously infringing because "some other payment processor could have done it" (thus not "controlling" the infringing activity, right). Google linked to the same images in their image search and was not vicariously liable because they didn't host the content. The only thing the court didn't side with big tech on is the search cache, which you might have noticed disappeared without fanfare. Ever wonder why? They were forced to.
The EU isn't buying the American precedents which made all this piracy possible, and is doing what the American courts should have done. Insults from a shitsite like this really don't accomplish much, as they are often made by people who have not only never been pirated, but never created a single work that was worth buying OR stealing. They're parasites who have cost the government a boatload of money. We had to bail ourselves out in 2009 in part because of tax revenue lost.
When someone steals my work they're also stealing the taxes on purchases not made. Eliminate piracy and these people definitely WILL buy what they made such an effort to find and steal. People find substantial value in books (and music) and do not want to do without it. No "new business model" is needed, just laws that make stealing much more difficult, and punished much more severely.
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numbnuts you want the firing squad to enforce copyright, tried and failed
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Infringement definitely harmed my revenue and enhanced the revenue of the pirates by literally destroying the e-book market for the entire niche. Literally every book in the genre was pirated (my titles and author credits were even altered so the work didn't appear to be mine)
Translation: I refuse to provide citations.
What you're stating is an example of commercial infringement, not the kind of infringement the RIAA loves to sue the public for. Replacing titles and credits is not what The Pirate Bay does, or people would be downloading The Pirate Bay Photoshop or Megaupload Illustrator.
But of course, I wouldn't hold my breath for you to state court cases where you actually pursue damages from the "people" that did this to you. Because citations aren't your thing, like the police investigations you have against other users of this website.
Your bluff's been called so many times, the phone lines are engaged!
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"Literally every book in the genre was pirated (my titles and author credits were even altered so the work didn't appear to be mine)"
Those are 2 completely different things.
"the pirated copies sold for pennies in order to collect names that were passed along to an internet-marketing syndicate that made almost $100 million from this crime"
A crime that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the discussion here, although it does explain your obsession with a single type of book over and about all other published literature.
You may have lost money, but it has NOTHING . to do with the type of piracy you rail against here.
"Eliminate piracy and these people definitely WILL buy what they made such an effort to find and steal"
Flat out and demonstrably false, but cling to that fantasy if you need to.
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Short-sightedness is another bad excuse for a failed business.
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Oh Jhon boy you are an impressively bad liar.
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I'm afraid that it will stop a lot of other things too, but you are more concerned with your stuff to even consider the ramifications for everyone else.
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If piracy is a consequence of the "other stuff" then good riddance to that other stuff, which never should have existed in the first place.
How did the internet survive all the policing requirements for child porn and now revenge porn?
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You are kind of stupid. Other stuff means ANY other type of business on the internet. The effect of article 13 will mean for example that any tax revenue gained from a possible uptick in media content sales will only cover be a fraction of the loss of taxes due to the economic hit other types of businesses will take.
You are so focused on your pet peeve that you'll figuratively speaking will walk over dead people to get what you want.
Because IT'S FUCKING OBVIOUS IT'S ILLEGAL, THERE ARE NO GRAY ZONES, NO FAIR USE!
How can you be this stupid?!
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To quote Nina Paley, "Copyright is brain damage".
You'd think that with their reputation in the shitter, copyright advocates would have taken steps to dispel that suggestion, but they keep proving it to be true.
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Why do you need to restrict people for 120 YEARS or more from creating, publishing, or even viewing identical or similar concepts and ideas? Let that sink in for a minute -- entire generations will be born and DIE while your works still remain only consumable in rented form. While that may be great if you want to be a mini-king / tyrant, for the rest of us it's unacceptable in the extreme.
Copyright was a balance between competing interests. This insane "beg for permission to read / watch / etc." for MULTIPLE GENERATIONS worth of time means regular people will increasingly turn to piracy and ignore the insane laws as a matter of course, depriving you of income as you have already seen. But no, you want more control.
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." A quote from authors that are either very old or DEAD now, yet I will be long dead, and my children dead, before it can be safely written agai nunder these new laws.
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I'm fine with a thirty-five year limit on copyright. Even twenty works.
Governments like the tax revenue from all that purchasing. It's not the artists driving this, or even the publishers (who wouldn't have the power if government didn't get taxes).
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A EU Website can avoid being sued by simply blocking all uploads, or have a small amount of images that are known to be in the public domain, or created by the owners of the website. Of course this would mean the internet in europe will be mostly text
or websites mostly run by big corporations. So the copyright owners dont need to tell you ,that you are hosting
infringing content, they can simply wait til they find something
and sue you . And they could say a small website will 1000 euro license fee per year to license one song or one photo . This law is designed by someone who does not care at all about small creators, artists , or does not care if the internet is broken . i Presume websites like patreon.com would make all their users sign
a document ,we allow patreon.com to show clips or images from our work in order to use the service .
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Here's an idea..
I know a surefire way to get these bozos to back down...
Simply find your local EU Parliament rep and say to them...
"You DO realize that Article 13 will officially destroy one of the most beloved spectacles in history, right? That Article 13 will make it impossible for the Eurovision Song Contest to exist? Do you want to be responsible for destroying a 64 year tradition of beloved and ballyhooed pop pablum every spring? The ESC Fan community will eat you alive, you know...after all, you've destroyed their reason for existence? "
OK, I'm being flip, but I'm also being totally serious - it DOES make this particular show kind of impossible, because fans all over the world share the music and get people interested, and if the music can't be shared with the rest of the world for fear of reprisals, they're not going to do it anymore, and Eurovision basically will dry up and blow away without the massive fan community out there...it's grown massive in size since the internet came along, and there's no going backwards now...so maybe it's time to hit these EU ninnies where it hurts...let the fan community go after them...I GUARANTEE you Article 13 will disappear overnight if these fans realize what's at stake...and let the EU Parliament have it right between the teeth...
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Re: Here's an idea..
Also, the French are well known for getting truculent when the government annoys them, and destroying the Internet would be very annoying.
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regardless of anything else, the thing that needs to be found out, more than anything else is who is throwing money at Voss, how much and why. i suspect it's the entertainment industries, obviously, because they have been after controlling the Internet since it actually dawned on them that could make even more fortunes from it by charging people to use it, by charging people to upload and download after charging them to have access in the first place, and having almost no outlay! profit from almost the word go! and in typical entertainment industries fashion, they dont give a flyin' fuck who or what is damaged or by how much and to what extent, as long as they, the industries, get exactly what they want! what they have done up to now has never ever been about money. it's always been laying the foundations, with threats and punishments, backed up by politicians, security services, courts, judges etc to get to this stage, taking the Internet away from everyone and having these industries only able to use it. i think one of the first people to look at is former French President, Sarkosy and his actress wife!
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Look up what Ron "230" Wyden's wife does (or did) for a living.
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The little man behind the curtain....
Here's the problem in a nutshell. What the middle-men/gatekeepers are looking for is to offload the risk portion of the age-old business formula of risk versus benefit - you don't do something if the risks (costs) outweigh the potential benefits.
By setting up ISPs and indexers as a quasi-police force (unpaid by anyone, let alone the public), they will be able to unilaterally control the entire internet, from stem to stern, at no cost to them at all. Not even a shred of accountability, because... laws!
I don't have a car analogy handy, but I think the next best thing might be:
This is a business model that only a 90-Day Wonder (aka a Harvard MBA) could love. For the rest of us, all that jabberwocky about hard work will pay off is now shorn of its trappings, laid bare for all to see as the lie it will become.
Good think I'm on the tail end of this go-round in life. I'm not giving any more advice to my grandsons, what I've already told them is pretty much null-and-void in today's world.
Sorry, but I can't take the credit for thinking this up, I'm merely paraphrasing that which I've read elsewhere. (But I'll be hornswoggled if I can find it anymore! That'll teach me to not bookmark things right away....)
sumgai
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Re: The little man behind the curtain....
Except the ISPs have chosen to become a GANG LEADER instead and are the major enablers of piracy, which this legislation seeks to halt.
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Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain....
You know what else "enables piracy", electricity! If we cut off electricity there will be ZERO online piracy!!!
Dumb ass.. ISP's has nothing to do with this, they aren't even directly impacted by article 13.
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Re: Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain....
My spelling filter changed "intermediaries."
Your rudeness filter changed your manners.
Namecalling is very foolish in this age. You can't back it up with anything (the implication is that the speaker could turn violent), and responding in kind only multiplies the original error.
ISPs, intermediaries, or anything that connects to piracy, enables it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain....
Stating my opinion of how I think of you because of your stupid statements has zero to do with violence and I don't have to back it up since it's MY opinion of you. If you are reasoning that violence is needed to back up an opinion I feel sorry for you.
Lets see:
1) Computer manufacturers
2) Printing equipment manufacturers
3) Network equipment manufacturers
4) Cable manufacturers
5) Stores selling the above equipment
6) Schools teaching students computer science
All of the above is necessary for a functioning internet which means they are all intermediaries and enablers of piracy according to your reasoning.
Have you any idea how unhinged you appear to be?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain....
ISPs, intermediaries, or anything that connects to piracy, enables it.
Aside from the above, you can apply this argument to literally any other crime.
Robbery: for robbery to occur, the robber must travel to the spot. So if they use a car, the car enables the robbery. So let's go after the people that made the car! All car manufacturers must equip their cars to determine if the car is about to be used to transport someone for the purpose of committing a robbery, and alert authorities and refuse to move, and somehow prevent the user from just walking. Any failure will incur a ruinous fine.
Murder: If someone commits murder with a kitchen knife, well, the knife enabled the murder. Let's go after the manufacturers of the kitchen knife! All knives must now detect if they are going to be used for a murder, alert authorities, and dull the blade while simultaneously preventing themselves from being used to harm or murder with blunt-force trauma.
I invite others to iterate on this.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain....
I got a recursion error and now I can't do anything at all.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain...
I said to iterate! Iterate! If you're going to use recursion, make sure you have a hard exit to the recursion loop!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The little man behind the curtain....
Bitch please you call people names all the time.
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"Except the ISPs have chosen to become a GANG LEADER instead and are the major enablers of piracy, which this legislation seeks to halt."
Not unlike those who build and maintain roads, this is a good analogy from a third party perspective.
On the humorous side - the Internet has been likened to a super highway and that received much ridicule, some of which was very funny.
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You know, if I was an evil man
I'd start building a list of websites that are native European, and when this goes into affect, start posting posting a ton of content to those sites via TOR. Since filters are so shitty, a bet a ton will get thru whatever they have in place, and when half the native websites go down, maybe THEN they will listen.
<only about half kidding>
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Re: You know, if I was an evil man
Why stop there? Find someone who is late-stage terminally ill and judgment-proof to just bomb the internet with defamation against the desired target?
The lies will live a lot longer than the targets will.
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*I was three-quarter kidding.
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Re: You know, if I was an evil man
A lot of technology geeks live in the EU, and this will seriously annoy them. There abilities make black hat hackers look unskilled.....
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Goverment's abilities make those experts look like toddlers.
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Except that the experts they employ will be amongst the annoyed.
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You do know that "government" consists of people, who often have their own morals and will not do everything they're told, right?
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Re: You know, if I was an evil man
Well, yeah... Why deface a website when it's so much easier to use the law to kick them off the net...
Then post images of "This site can't be reached" on 4chan for lol's.
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'If we can't control it, destroy it.'
EU Parliamentary elections are coming up in a few months, and any MEP should be told over and over and over again that voting to destroy the internet in this way means that they no longer deserve their job in the EU Parliament.
While that would certainly be a good start, given this has been going on for a good while now and it's not only not been rightly killed off but the idiots pushing it keep trying to make it worse I'm thinking simply calling/emailing a MEP alone isn't going to cut it, and it's going to take another round of mass protests to make it really clear that the public isn't happy with a bunch of stupid and/or paid tools trying to cripple the internet and hand it over to the parasitic gatekeepers.
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One popular figure skating forum, GoldenSkate, is in Canada, and has no presence in Europe, there is no way that E.U. law can apply to GoldenSkate, since their offices are in Canada and their servers are in the United States.
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You may think that,..but between trade laws and whatnot, it may not matter. You'll end up having to block anyone from the EU from accessing your content!
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I remember back in 2017, as Trump's disaster of a presidency was beginning, news sites and pundits started declaring Germany and France, Merkel and Macron, the new "Leaders of the free world". Turns out there's corruption and incompetence all over the place. Just because people or organizations look on the outside to be more competent and interested in the welfare of citizens than Trump & his administration, doesn't necessarily mean that they are.
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So far Trump's Presidency has been great! So many like you that have TDS. You poor snowflake. Trump has done more good in the 2 years of office then the hell Obama put this country through in 8. Now that was a disaster.
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Funny thing - I see people claim these things a lot, but when pushed never seem to be able to provide specifics and in fact undermine their own arguments when they do. Are you one of those people, or one of the rare specimens who can back up his own claims?
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Trump has done more good in the 2 years of office then the hell Obama put this country through in 8. Now that was a disaster.
Please provide examples. Be specific.
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Satire right?
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We beat up the smart kids in school. Think that might have consequences? Biff Tannen was based on Trump.
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Considering that you're now asking the smart kids to bend over backwards and make up tech solutions for you because you can't afford your thirty-seventh solid gold Humvee?
Yeah, I'm inclined to think you fucked it up...
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Not asking them anything. Just telling them how to avoid prison or having their beloved internet "destroyed."
Producers of content pirated by said "smart kids" are the smarter kids btw.
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Ah, so that's why all your performance rights organizations are staffed with conmen and you have to rely on the likes of Paul Hansmeier to defend your pornography.
Hansmeier in particular is getting his ass kicked in the courts. One of many glorious heroes of copyright.
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You act as tho you were in charge of something ... what might that be?
Why would someone accused of infringement be subject to jail time for a civil offense?
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"We beat up the smart kids in school."
You admitting to assault? Did you invest your ill gotten lunch money? The very smart successfully avoided bullies.
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Mike Masnick just hates it when copyright law is enforced.
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[asserts facts not in evidence]
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