> What’s important to note, though: It’s not “the EU” in general that is to blame – but those who put special interests above fundamental rights who currently hold considerable power. You can change that at the polls! The anti-EU far right is trying to seize this opportunity to promote their narrow-minded nationalist agenda<p>The article describes how German and French financial interests pushed through the biggest BS of a law package to hit internet regulation this side of the Atlantic, despite every objection and protest, even against sensible opinions from their camp, behind closed doors, led mostly by representatives of German political power in the driving seat who were unclear on the details of what they're pushing, despite pushing it and defaming critics. After bungling so many things in relation to policy in the recent few years, I simply do not trust these countries to represent anything that's good for me or my own interests as an EU citizen.<p>Call me crazy, but this does sound like what the "anti-EU far right" takes issue with, more specifically the French-German political control of Europe, beholden to their financial interests. Now I'm not advocating for joining their side, against the EU, by any measure, but it seems to me that people should heed this warning and draw some sensible conclusions in time --- before they find themselves between two terrible extremes and no reasonable way out.
I can spend days and days trying to find a legal copy of an album I can purchase in reasonable quality (read FLAC) so I don’t have to pirate (done in less than a minute). And I often fail, because the content is strictly geo-fenced and incredibly complexly licensed and as a EU-citizen I cannot have those ones and zeros.<p>The system is madness and sometimes impossible to navigate, even for strongly dedicated humans.<p>And here the EU expects that any website which has user uploads should make a “best effort” effort to try to automatically license <i>all the copyright of anything ever</i>.<p>How the fuck can they claim to mean this seriously? No really. Just how do they plan for this to work?
Google should just cut off YouTube and other impacted platforms for 24 hours in the EU with a message telling them that the service is against Article 13. It might sound absurd but it would be effective, and this is the real danger with article 13.
The EFF released a short tweet with additional information <a href="https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1095775278683512832" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1095775278683512832</a><p>If this really applies to everything it's going to drastically change the internet.
I'm liking the "Ban them all and let God sort them out" approach more and more now. It looks like the service restrictions and potential penalties for serving EU customers are going to continue to increase, and we might as well get off at the beginning.
The Hargreaves Report from the UK Gov seemed a more sensible approach to copyright.<p><a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/32563/ipreview-finalreport.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...</a>
This is the best thing for innovation on the decentralized web, the focus on websites in the legal text will force platforms down on the protocol level.
> What’s important to note, though: It’s not “the EU” in general that is to blame – but those who put special interests above fundamental rights who currently hold considerable power.<p>Who's to blame for the general environment of encroaching information "protections" and general government oversight of the internet? You can't out of one side of your mouth decry everyone warning about slippery slopes as though they are nonexistent and then on the other side blame others for taking advantage of said slope you pretended didn't exist. The slope never had to be there. When you can't take the bad with the good of an open internet, this is what you get. Sadly with slippery slopes in either direction (whether or not people acknowledge their existence), hovering in the middle becomes unsustainable.<p>Freedom has consequences, regulations have consequences, many times they are mutually exclusive, so pick and accept said consequences. Only liking the good parts and not liking the bad parts, while convenient to shirk responsibility, ignores that they are often inseparable.
So, if this passes, does it mean we can all go to the sites of the politicians who voted for it and post copyrighted content in their comments and then sue them?
Is EU going to survive all this? Brexit. This absurd regulation. Eurozone debts problems (Italy situation is far from being stable). This could be a hot summer for EU, especially if Euro parliament will be full of EU-hostile MPs.
This is the destruction of the internet.
I don't think there's anything other than lobbying from the European media industry behind this directive.
At least we can assume decentralized systems will get more attention in the future.
Link to the video of the press conference after the bill passed the EU-parlament in July 2018:
<a href="https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/press-conference-on-the-copyright-directive-by-axel-voss-epp-de-rapporteur-virginie-rozire-sd-fr-pervenche-bers-sd-fr-jean-marie-cavada-alde-fr-helga-trpel-greensefa-de_I158421_01-V_rv" rel="nofollow">https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/press-conference-on...</a><p>Somehow, this is doublespeak, somehow it make sense too..
It seems to me like good news on the "Article 11" front, though. The way I'm reading this, "link tax" is pretty much off the table.
Do I understand correctly that leave.eu will be available shortly?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19099150" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19099150</a>
I think the discussion is a bit myopic. Yes, this is horrible news for the new aggregators of content. What about the creators of content? What if authors hodl their copyright (or else be filtered)[1]<p>Who keeps google, facebook and others to share the original content instead of hiding it in favor of the same or worse content taken from big media or publishers? I don't stand by this extremely stupid legislation but before it the net turned into TV.<p>[1] <a href="https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/authors-hodl-your-copyright-or-be-filtered/" rel="nofollow">https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/authors-hod...</a>
of course we are not in EU but how will this effect our ability to even use HN at all if this mentality spreads here.
would it be an offence to post articles from EU resources?<p>{adde} russia is apparently experimenting with some sort of xenophobia net, so if perfected could we even see internet partitioning based on nation of origin and destination, perhaps even internet passport and visa type of procedures complete with excise and inspection procedures to simply use the internet across international borders.
Hopefully this encourages the development of platform that can't be shut down by overreaching governments. There will always be new laws trying to restrict what you can and can't share online - the only true way to prevent this kind of censorship, in my opinion, is to develop platforms that are impossible (or very difficult) to censor. I've heard of lots of different decentralized social media platforms and video platforms being developed, maybe one day those will become mainstream rather than just being used mainly for extreme and illegal content.
IMHO it's not that strange of a proposition to regulate what has been a problem for copyright owners where big multi national companies monetize content that isn't theirs by looking the other way. E.g. I love watching bbc tv program uploads on Youtube but I do see that there may be a few issues with the status quo where apparently this is normal and just the way things work.<p>Misguided or not, this law is trying to fix some things that are broken currently. I think content fingerprinting as a technology is something that could actually provide a way out. The key challenge is coming up with good enough registries for those finger prints and making sure that they are not being abused.<p>My big fear with this law is that it codifies the existing practice of giving a monopoly on this to the defacto copyright monopolists that currently govern royalties in most countries. IMHO the key would be allowing others to run such registries and simply regulating the use of proof where a content owner has to prove that content with a finger print is 1) theirs and 2) their rights were violated. A registry solves that problem and as long as that registry has good processes for managing conflicts, there's nothing wrong with requiring media distributors to do reasonable due diligence in the form of checking some finger prints.<p>What worries is the tone in this discussion and similar discussions regarding e.g. the GDPR last year. In retrospect, the GDPR did not end the internet, probably is an improvement for end users, and is now causing very reasonable politicians elsewhere to consider similar legislation. I'd say that probably they got that one mostly right. There are some cases in the courts currently but mostly that seems to be for the right reasons like e.g. Facebook or Google violating people's privacy on a large scale for profit.<p>I'd say arguing how this law should be improved/fixed is the debate that needs to be happening. Instead we are getting nothing else than people trying to argue that this is some internet ending apocalyptic event based on some blog post they read. I'm seeing a lot of headless chickens and not a whole lot of good argumentation on how to fix this. That feels wrong to me. These things have a habit of coming back until some legislation is passed.<p>Also, people from the US singling out the EU here; the US has quite a bit of history on this front. E.g. the DMCA, software patents, mickey mouse copyright extensions, the whole net neutrality fiasco, etc. Also, there's probably more than a little bit of lobbying going on by US owned media corporations in favor of this. In fact those are probably the same corporations that got us the before mentioned stuff as well.
I 'm curious to see the "industry" that will be set up to police this directive. The gdpr has already created an industry of 'experts', consultants and lawyers who all claim to know the One True Law (though they don't agree), a bunch of agencies etc.
I would happily assist in the destruction of any company that bends the knee to these unelected parasites by complying with their "laws." Helping to perpetuate the illusion that they deserve or possess any legitimate power makes you the enemy.
It's actually a very good thing.<p>It will create a huge opportunity for new decentralized (IPFS-like) tech. that will run circles around this dumb regulation <i>and</i> force incumbent established players (YouTube and the like) to evolve or die.
The possible upside of this may be the decentralization of massive content silos like youtube or facebook, toward federated or self-hosting platforms where the administrators of individual "sites" can better know their users. I can see the "fediverse" (the main public ActivityPub network, notably including most Mastodon users) benefiting from this, for example, since a club/gaming clan/media company could run their own Mastodon instance and be responsible for the things posted using it.