Although the GDPR has a couple of issues in relation with freedom of press, this case shows that the rules are working as intended. Credit rating agencies are of a fairly dubious nature, and their business practices often harm people with very little legal recourse. To a large extend, the GDPR can help to reign in those dubious practices, as most of the grounds under the GDPR that allows a company to process personal information are lacking. Since they have no direct relationship with the individuals they collect information about, they cannot justify it with 'needed to fulfil contract'; they most certainly lack 'freely given permission'; and with most agencies, there is also no 'legal obligation' to keep the information. I also don't think 'required to protect own significant interest' applies here. The only problem with the GDPR in this respect is that regulators in several countries are rather slow to act...
The role of the court only comes into sight when somebody has a proper case to be made, for example, when an beginning artist is repeatedly blocked on various platforms due to legally mandated filters (or filters that can be considered legally mandated under the doctrine of "measures having equivalent effect")
If the EU parliament approves article 13, we will first have to wait for national implementations that have this effect, and then see this traverse through one of the national court system. So we will only know in about four or five years.
It is a bit of cross-posting, but again: If I were to argue for author's rights, to replace copyright, but mostly in the same vein, only that such an author's right would be non-transferable (except by succession to heirs) and with a strict 5-year limit on exclusive licenses, all with the purpose of strengthening the position of authors against those of publishers, would you support me? If not, then please don't pretend to speak for authors (which I do not name creators, BTW).
If I were to argue for author's rights, to replace copyright, but mostly in the same vein, only that such an author's right would be non-transferable (except by succession to heirs) and with a strict 5-year limit on exclusive licenses, all with the purpose of strengthening the position of authors against those of publishers, would you support me? If not, then please don't pretend to speak for authors.
Talked to one populist MEP about this. His reasoning for voting against was different from both. Much of the favorite music of his followers is actually not made by the large labels, but by smaller bands (using national languages), who also suffer from the current take-down regime on the large platforms; similarly, a lot of the news sources favored by his followers already suffer from restrictions and thus are harder to find in the news groups -- which he (rightly) considered a form of censorship.
Re: Re: Populist parties who actually keep faith with the people
The populists in France, unfortunately, support article 13 and 11; the populists in The Netherlands are against it. I didn't check the remainder, but lobbying focus should also go to these MEP's.
It would make more sense to attack the GDPR on this horrible legal outcome: Google must remove sanctioned docter from search engine -- hereby undermining the safety of medicine.
Jeroen Hellingman (profile), 18 Jan 2019 @ 12:49am
Another instance of companies abusing the GDPR name
If anything, the GDPR would require the opposite: since there is no legitimation for sharing the information of the return with the original purchaser, it would be illegal to inform him under the GDPR. This is just a misguided tactic of some traders who do not want to take back goods sold.
Wasn't the old mantra that the internet sees censorship as a system failure and will try to route around it?
Article 11 and 13 provide an opportunity to reinvigorate the decentralized nature of the Internet that has been lost with the raise of the internet giants as Google and Facebook, and my message to traditional publishers in this regard will be "be careful what you wish for"
Article 11 will be relatively easy to work around. Publishing parties that wish to have their snippets displayed with search results simply set up a "snippet server"; the search engine will only return pointers to those snippets, and the end-user's browser will retrieve them, directly from the server under control of the publisher. A few safeguards may be needed to stop rogue publishers from gaming the system, by using cryptographic hashes of the content, but after that, those publisher who want snippets in search results can have them, pulled directly from own their service. Search engines only need to provide the address of the server and the hash, the browser will retrieve the rest, and compose a view indistinguishable from the current search results. Search engines can provide a further service of summarizing articles and uploading snippets to those servers, and even provide completely configured servers as docker images or something similar. Publishers who do not want this can simply not participate and become irrelevant.
Working around article 13 may take a little more time. Here the idea is that we do not need the giants to build a social network. Already we see a rapidly growing market for NAS devices. Such devices are actually much more than just a NAS. They can also run web services. It is fairly easy to envision running software on these that provide functionality the likes of LinkedIn or Facebook provide today, but then without much of the privacy concerns or advertising overload. I envision within a few years, small NAS devices will emerge with a "Facebook-in-a-box" application configured ready-to-go. Key features will be privacy and ease-of-use. Owners can add friends and control their access, software can pull together "walls" from the servers of all friends they have access to, and friend-of-friend items can be copied (if so configured) to create the same experience without a central server. Legally, owners of such NAS boxes/servers will of course remain fully liable for copyright infringement (as they are today when they post on social networks), but since there is no intermediary (except of course the ISP's, who cannot see the data, as everything will be end-to-end encrypted), intermediary liability is not an issue. Sharing memes, holiday pictures and funny cat movies will remain possible without any filter, and a thing going viral will now not just involve sharing a link, but the physical copying of files between connected people. As NAS with several terabytes can be had for a couple of hundred dollars or euros, and such as NAS boxes have many great features beyond sharing holiday pictures, I give them a great future.
Of course, such a fully decentralized social network will quickly be found to be perfectly tailored to also share copyrighted materials between friends. Given six degrees of separation, popular stuff will continue to spread fairly rapidly and many authors will be happy with it. but the stream of revenue publishers now get from Facebook and YouTube will dry up.
Can you please preserve this page as evidence for future legal proceedings. This is a document to help courts establish the intention of the EP with this directive: NO NEW OBLIGATIONS; all the words apparently to the contrary in article 13 and 11 are just meaningless blah blah blah to be ignored.
Looking at this incredible mess with utter disgust. Sometimes I think some parties are deliberately steering this towards an article that will be so bad, the European Court of Justice will have scrap it -- in fact that is my last straw of hope at this time, to see them scrap Article 11 and 13 as in violation of multple Human Rights as guarantied by the ECHR -- as they did with equally idiotic compulasory retention policies two years ago.
One of the problems here is that both articles grossly reduce the value of copyrights held by smaller authors, and utterly distort the playing-field in favour of current publishing cartel. In that respect, they are extremely anti-copyright and anti-creativity.
We currently see a widely carried aversion against the internet giants, and the result is that we see significant support for extremely stupid laws justified by the "need" to limit those giants, but in fact harmful for all innovation. It is as if people and law-makers think: does it harm Google or Facebook, then it is okay, damn it the consequences.
Another factor is the idiotic idea that "more IP" = "more innovation," whereas in practice, there is an optimal level of protection against freeloaders, and any more protection will actually go against innovation, and we are way beyond that level. The rediculous scope of IP laws in Europa, and the horrible national patchwork make it hard to grow. Once you're big enough to pay for a couple of 100 employees to deal with it, you can manage.
I would love it if you could give that presentation to a group of current MEP's. Should I raise the idea with some Dutch MEP's?
No matter how stupid the trends are, I think the emergence of those internet molochs is a disturbing trend; they become single points of failure in the internet, and allow the concentration of far too much power in a few hands. However, the way to deal with these is via antitrust law, and by redesigning international tax treaties, such that income generated in one jurisdiction can be taxed in that jurisdiction, irrespective of the locations of head-offices, etc. I love to point at this little article by Steven Pemberton, already 10 years old, but still very relevant: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/vandf/2008.03-website.html
In some respect, the disaster-in-making called the new EU copyright directive might promote this, as it will open up a market for NAS-like devices that can provide many of the services Facebook and Youtube currently provide, but in a far more decentralised way. They can interconnect with friends and family using strong encryption, and even use micro SD cards to exchange data (128GB can an awful lot of holiday snaps). The problem is, they are harder to run, and require an up-front investment.
Interesting approach that will put copyright infringment criteria on its head! Or will it? I don't think so.
How fast can I have a computer generate sequences of musical notes (an area where copying even a very short sequence can be considered infringing). Lets give it a try and generate several petabytes of tunes.
Publish the entire generated set.
Then "validate" the generated note sequences against the actual tune you want to re-use.
Got a hit: bingo, go ahead: claim independent creation.
I am afraid a judge will pierce through it easily, as an essential part of the creative effort is in selecting what elements to keep and use (copyright on photographs rely a lot on that aspect), so the infringement will happen because of the validation, which cannot be considered "independent" in any way.
(BTW, in case discussed in the article, there is very little similarity, so from that point of view, no infringement should be found.)
But wait, didn't you publish that huge generated set of sequences?
Now wait until somebody publishes a new tune afterwards that matches with one of the sequences. Sue for infringment. Again, I think that won't fly unless you cannot proof actual infringment, unless you can somehow demonstrate the accussed actually used your huge publication to copy the tune from. (Similarly, Google doesn't have copyrights of photographs taken from any street because of streetview...)
Re: Re: The Wild West days are OVER. So too the non-corporate!
What you propose here is a severe form of taking, that is taking away the right from people to do with what they create as they wish. That is exactly a growing problem in the EU. What you can better agitate against is the growing inequality between authors and publishers, which allow the latter to take more from the former than they should -- but solving this by taking away rights from authors is counterproductive.
So, to be save, an ISP simply has to have a repeat infringer policies that says that it will terminate a customer when it has collected at least three final convictions for copyright infringement using the ISP's infrastructure. When a copyright holder starts knocking on the door, just send them away with a "get your convictions first, then our repeat infringer policy will jump in."
There are several significant problems with the GDPR, one is its serious conflict with freedom of press, and the other is its general vagueness, which means a lot of what it actually means still has to be established by the courts. With regard to the latter, you see a lot of panic with various parties, restricting things where you can fully justify processing data under the GDPR, and on the other hand, parties who totally ignore the GDPR. A number of US sites even completely block whoever they deem coming from the EU: I find myself using Tor far more than before.
I think the case mentioned in this article shouldn't be attributed to the GDPR. If services would treat data more as a toxic asset (see Bruce Schneier's blog), much less of it would be available to leak. Sites need to get over their hoarding mentality. Then, if sites would take account security more serious, the second part of this problem would be less of an issue. Just keep data on people's devices (or use a cloud storage of their choice for that purpose, making sure access codes always remain at the user's end of the line) will greatly reduce the information Spotify would hold and thus can leak.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It does not say: The Government of France ..., so no violation of the First Amendment.
On the post: GDPR Penalties Prove Why Compliance Isn't Enough—And Why Companies Need Clarity
Works as designed
Although the GDPR has a couple of issues in relation with freedom of press, this case shows that the rules are working as intended. Credit rating agencies are of a fairly dubious nature, and their business practices often harm people with very little legal recourse. To a large extend, the GDPR can help to reign in those dubious practices, as most of the grounds under the GDPR that allows a company to process personal information are lacking. Since they have no direct relationship with the individuals they collect information about, they cannot justify it with 'needed to fulfil contract'; they most certainly lack 'freely given permission'; and with most agencies, there is also no 'legal obligation' to keep the information. I also don't think 'required to protect own significant interest' applies here. The only problem with the GDPR in this respect is that regulators in several countries are rather slow to act...
On the post: Top EU Court Rules Public Interest Is More Important Than Protection Of Commercial Interests
Re: Protect Public Interest? Yeah right.
The role of the court only comes into sight when somebody has a proper case to be made, for example, when an beginning artist is repeatedly blocked on various platforms due to legally mandated filters (or filters that can be considered legally mandated under the doctrine of "measures having equivalent effect")
If the EU parliament approves article 13, we will first have to wait for national implementations that have this effect, and then see this traverse through one of the national court system. So we will only know in about four or five years.
On the post: Top EU Court Rules Public Interest Is More Important Than Protection Of Commercial Interests
Would you support author's rights?
It is a bit of cross-posting, but again: If I were to argue for author's rights, to replace copyright, but mostly in the same vein, only that such an author's right would be non-transferable (except by succession to heirs) and with a strict 5-year limit on exclusive licenses, all with the purpose of strengthening the position of authors against those of publishers, would you support me? If not, then please don't pretend to speak for authors (which I do not name creators, BTW).
On the post: 170 Years Of German Publishers Demanding Special Copyrights For The Press Because Of New Technology
Would you support Author's rights
If I were to argue for author's rights, to replace copyright, but mostly in the same vein, only that such an author's right would be non-transferable (except by succession to heirs) and with a strict 5-year limit on exclusive licenses, all with the purpose of strengthening the position of authors against those of publishers, would you support me? If not, then please don't pretend to speak for authors.
On the post: Clash Of EU's Poorly Thought Out Laws: German Data Protection Commissioner Warns That Article 13 Might Violate GDPR
Re: Irrelevant...
In the United States, approximately 9 billion chickens are killed for their flesh each year... but that is not the subject today.
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
Re:
Talked to one populist MEP about this. His reasoning for voting against was different from both. Much of the favorite music of his followers is actually not made by the large labels, but by smaller bands (using national languages), who also suffer from the current take-down regime on the large platforms; similarly, a lot of the news sources favored by his followers already suffer from restrictions and thus are harder to find in the news groups -- which he (rightly) considered a form of censorship.
On the post: Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive
Re: Re: Populist parties who actually keep faith with the people
The populists in France, unfortunately, support article 13 and 11; the populists in The Netherlands are against it. I didn't check the remainder, but lobbying focus should also go to these MEP's.
On the post: How The GDPR Is Still Ruining Christmas
https://www.trouw.nl/home/google-moet-berispte-arts-verwijderen-uit-zoekmachine~a1fb7f03/ (in Dutch)
On the post: How The GDPR Is Still Ruining Christmas
Another instance of companies abusing the GDPR name
On the post: Google Shows What Google News Looks Like If Article 11 Passes In The EU Copyright Directive
A Blessing in Disguise...
Article 11 and 13 provide an opportunity to reinvigorate the decentralized nature of the Internet that has been lost with the raise of the internet giants as Google and Facebook, and my message to traditional publishers in this regard will be "be careful what you wish for"
Article 11 will be relatively easy to work around. Publishing parties that wish to have their snippets displayed with search results simply set up a "snippet server"; the search engine will only return pointers to those snippets, and the end-user's browser will retrieve them, directly from the server under control of the publisher. A few safeguards may be needed to stop rogue publishers from gaming the system, by using cryptographic hashes of the content, but after that, those publisher who want snippets in search results can have them, pulled directly from own their service. Search engines only need to provide the address of the server and the hash, the browser will retrieve the rest, and compose a view indistinguishable from the current search results. Search engines can provide a further service of summarizing articles and uploading snippets to those servers, and even provide completely configured servers as docker images or something similar. Publishers who do not want this can simply not participate and become irrelevant.
Working around article 13 may take a little more time. Here the idea is that we do not need the giants to build a social network. Already we see a rapidly growing market for NAS devices. Such devices are actually much more than just a NAS. They can also run web services. It is fairly easy to envision running software on these that provide functionality the likes of LinkedIn or Facebook provide today, but then without much of the privacy concerns or advertising overload. I envision within a few years, small NAS devices will emerge with a "Facebook-in-a-box" application configured ready-to-go. Key features will be privacy and ease-of-use. Owners can add friends and control their access, software can pull together "walls" from the servers of all friends they have access to, and friend-of-friend items can be copied (if so configured) to create the same experience without a central server. Legally, owners of such NAS boxes/servers will of course remain fully liable for copyright infringement (as they are today when they post on social networks), but since there is no intermediary (except of course the ISP's, who cannot see the data, as everything will be end-to-end encrypted), intermediary liability is not an issue. Sharing memes, holiday pictures and funny cat movies will remain possible without any filter, and a thing going viral will now not just involve sharing a link, but the physical copying of files between connected people. As NAS with several terabytes can be had for a couple of hundred dollars or euros, and such as NAS boxes have many great features beyond sharing holiday pictures, I give them a great future.
Of course, such a fully decentralized social network will quickly be found to be perfectly tailored to also share copyrighted materials between friends. Given six degrees of separation, popular stuff will continue to spread fairly rapidly and many authors will be happy with it. but the stream of revenue publishers now get from Facebook and YouTube will dry up.
So maybe we should thank the EP for this...
On the post: EU Parliament Puts Out Utter Nonsense Defending Copyright Directive
On the post: Pooey Puitton Proactively Sues The Shit Out Of Louis Vuitton
I guess, the attack here is the best defence.
On the post: Latest EU Copyright Proposal: Block Everything, Never Make Mistakes, But Don't Use Upload Filters
One of the problems here is that both articles grossly reduce the value of copyrights held by smaller authors, and utterly distort the playing-field in favour of current publishing cartel. In that respect, they are extremely anti-copyright and anti-creativity.
On the post: Why Europe Will Never Build Its Own Digital Giants
We need your presentation at the EP.
Another factor is the idiotic idea that "more IP" = "more innovation," whereas in practice, there is an optimal level of protection against freeloaders, and any more protection will actually go against innovation, and we are way beyond that level. The rediculous scope of IP laws in Europa, and the horrible national patchwork make it hard to grow. Once you're big enough to pay for a couple of 100 employees to deal with it, you can manage.
I would love it if you could give that presentation to a group of current MEP's. Should I raise the idea with some Dutch MEP's?
No matter how stupid the trends are, I think the emergence of those internet molochs is a disturbing trend; they become single points of failure in the internet, and allow the concentration of far too much power in a few hands. However, the way to deal with these is via antitrust law, and by redesigning international tax treaties, such that income generated in one jurisdiction can be taxed in that jurisdiction, irrespective of the locations of head-offices, etc. I love to point at this little article by Steven Pemberton, already 10 years old, but still very relevant: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/vandf/2008.03-website.html
In some respect, the disaster-in-making called the new EU copyright directive might promote this, as it will open up a market for NAS-like devices that can provide many of the services Facebook and Youtube currently provide, but in a far more decentralised way. They can interconnect with friends and family using strong encryption, and even use micro SD cards to exchange data (128GB can an awful lot of holiday snaps). The problem is, they are harder to run, and require an up-front investment.
On the post: Art, AI & Infringement: A Copyright Conundrum
How fast can I have a computer generate sequences of musical notes (an area where copying even a very short sequence can be considered infringing). Lets give it a try and generate several petabytes of tunes.
Publish the entire generated set.
Then "validate" the generated note sequences against the actual tune you want to re-use.
Got a hit: bingo, go ahead: claim independent creation.
I am afraid a judge will pierce through it easily, as an essential part of the creative effort is in selecting what elements to keep and use (copyright on photographs rely a lot on that aspect), so the infringement will happen because of the validation, which cannot be considered "independent" in any way.
(BTW, in case discussed in the article, there is very little similarity, so from that point of view, no infringement should be found.)
But wait, didn't you publish that huge generated set of sequences?
Now wait until somebody publishes a new tune afterwards that matches with one of the sequences. Sue for infringment. Again, I think that won't fly unless you cannot proof actual infringment, unless you can somehow demonstrate the accussed actually used your huge publication to copy the tune from. (Similarly, Google doesn't have copyrights of photographs taken from any street because of streetview...)
On the post: Did France Just Make It Effectively Impossible To Use Twitter?
Re: Re: The Wild West days are OVER. So too the non-corporate!
On the post: Court Shoots Down Record Label's Attempt To Expand The Definition Of 'Vicarious' Infringement
On the post: Unintended Consequences: How The GDPR Can Undermine Privacy
I think the case mentioned in this article shouldn't be attributed to the GDPR. If services would treat data more as a toxic asset (see Bruce Schneier's blog), much less of it would be available to leak. Sites need to get over their hoarding mentality. Then, if sites would take account security more serious, the second part of this problem would be less of an issue. Just keep data on people's devices (or use a cloud storage of their choice for that purpose, making sure access codes always remain at the user's end of the line) will greatly reduce the information Spotify would hold and thus can leak.
On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet
Re: Re:
On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: First amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It does not say: The Government of France ..., so no violation of the First Amendment.
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