This is a good illustration of EU legislative structure:<p>> The legislation was voted through by a majority of EU ministers just a few minutes ago, despite opposition from Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden.<p>Nonetheless, those countries will have no choice but to implement national laws to comply with the EU directive: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francovich_v_Italy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francovich_v_Italy</a><p>> Francovich v Italy (1991) C-6/90 was a decision of the European Court of Justice which established that European Union member states could be liable to pay compensation to individuals who suffered a loss by reason of the member state's failure to transpose an EU directive into national law. This principle is sometimes known as the principle of state liability or "the rule in Francovich" in European Union law.<p>Indeed, EU members lack the sovereignty even of U.S. states. The US federal government can pass laws directly binding on the citizens of every state, but cannot compel state governments to pass and enforce particular laws. The EU can do both (the former through regulations, the latter through directives). In the US, the inability of the federal government to hijack state legislative and enforcement machinery to its own ends is seen as an important measure of accountability—you can always blame state legislators for state laws. (You see this in the areas of drug and immigration law. Sanctuary cities can exist because the federal government cannot force state organs to enforce federal law. Likewise, legalized marijuana at the state level.)
I fear this may end up being the end of full Youtube access for Europeans. Youtube must either have a license with all possible rights holders, which is everybody, or content uploaded by Europeans must be checked by impossible filters, and I suppose content uploaded from elsewhere must be checked by those same filters before it can be shown to Europeans. So basically we're only going to get corporate content from Youtube.<p>A small consolation is that it may also kill Facebook in the EU, giving more room for smaller, open source, distributed social networks like Diaspora, Mastodon and Friendica. If it's true that this only holds for profit-driven sites, as someone claimed in an earlier discussion about this.
I am 90% this means nothing and I disagree this won't affect big companies and will only affect small startups like some of the other comments here.<p>The law basically says that the company has to try it's best to prevent copyrighted material. If you're a small company, you can put together some simple algorithm and claim that's all you can really do. Big shots like youtube have the capital to be proactive and pay for things like real people to monitor claims. They're at a bigger risk for not doing enough.<p>Either way, the bar would be high enough that I don't think anyone is really going to be affected by this.
The interesting bits of article 17 which was 13 from the actual document [0]:<p>>If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:<p>>(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and<p>>(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event<p>>(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b).<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2018-0245-AM-271-271_EN.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2018-0245-A...</a>
This marks the end of user generated content in Europe, as it is pretty much impossible to comply with the demand to filter all content at the behest of the copyright cartel.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out legally. I wonder if from nation to nation if enforcement actually gets even more absurd than the actual law would indicate. It seems like the member states laws could leave lots of wiggle room / confusion.
but the question is how will they enforce this?
let's say there are X units of content that based on the directive should not be available to Europeans through platform Y.<p>How will they know? unless someone reports the content its impossible for any EU system to catch that.