EU Countries Back Copyright Reforms Aimed at Google, Facebook

This is sad and disgusting, our speech is being limited completely unfairly and without our consent and we&#x27;re being told that it&#x27;s a good thing.<p>The fact that they&#x27;re trying to package it as some sort of well-deserved revenge against silicon valley big tech is just tasteless. The EU&#x27;s big gripe against these companies is their tax situation, if they really wanted to change that then they&#x27;d be looking into a unified approach to taxing companies within the EU borders, not hitting the final nail into the coffin of fair use in Europe.<p>I really envy the US for its constitution sometimes.

The final vote hasn&#x27;t happened yet as stated in the article. If you&#x27;re an EU citizen there&#x27;s still time to contact your representatives to ensure they understand the many issues with Article 11 (the link tax, though now it is now more akin to a publisher controlled fee for showing snippets of articles) and Article 13 (the copyright upload filter).<p>I&#x27;ve already e-mailed my representatives and have gotten responses stating that they will not support Article 11 or Article 13 in the upcoming vote (and they have in previous votes voted against this reform).

Let’s be optimistic.<p>This will severely impact social media. It will be censored like never before, and attacking opponents by “reporting” their posts will be more effective than ever. Trolls will have a EU-sanctioned field-day.<p>And what real users are going to bother staying on a platform like that?<p>Maybe this will revitalize hosting of personal websites where there’s no “platform” to censor your free speech?

Huh? If anything, the reform codifies systems like Content ID and makes it horribly expensive to compete with Google and Facebook. And all that to cater to US copyright industry - a fine example of EU shooting itself in the foot.

I have been searching for this but couldn&#x27;t find any answer, let&#x27;s say a company has a generic public platform where people can upload text, images, videos, audio, ... how are they supposed to be able to check for copyright infringment against every single upload?<p>I know that Youtube has its own content id system, but for anyone without YT&#x27;s resouces, is ther any 3rd party service to which you can pass content and get back a yes&#x2F;no answer to &quot;anyone copyrighted this thing?&quot;, if yes, what are the costs? the effectiveness?

What a bullshit title. It is not aimed at Google and Facebook. Those are the companies that have more than enough resources to be compliant. It&#x27;s the small and aspiring companies that are not yet established that would suffer the most from this directive. Googles, Amazons and Facebooks would be just fine, safer then ever since the barrier to entry is bigger and bigger with every new directive.

&quot;‘online content sharing service provider’ means a provider of an information society service whose main or one of the main purposes is to store and give the public access to a large amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes. Providers of services such as not-for profit online encyclopedias, not-for profit educational and scientific repositories, open source software developing and sharing platforms, electronic communication service providers as defined in Directive 2018&#x2F;1972 establishing the European Communications Code, online marketplaces and business-to business cloud services and cloud services which allow users to upload content for their own use shall not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;juliareda.eu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;Art_13_unofficial.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;juliareda.eu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;Art_13_unoff...</a>

They are supposedly aimed at Google and Facebook but have enough range to burn most of other services in the European Internet in the process.

Create. Produce original content. Keep the copyright. Don&#x27;t consume canned content.

Does anyone have a link to the actual law? All I can find are news stories with too little information.

To get an idea of how the European Commission thinks, you really need to read their retracted Medium post: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;cZa14" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;cZa14</a><p>It oozes contempt, is filled with strawman arguments, and makes no effort to disguise its disdain for &quot;the big Californian companies&quot;.<p>Some highlights:<p><i>&gt; Good journalism costs money and without a free press there is no democracy.<p>&gt; Because if creative people don’t get paid, they can’t afford to be creative. No Mon = No Fun<p>&gt; At the moment the balance of power in who gets paid for such royalties resides overwhelmingly with the big Californian companies — who are worth around $1 Trillion.<p>&gt; Are we in a world where ordinary people side with the fire breathing dragon against the knight with a blue and yellow shield? </i>

The response is to offer Google News in europe with snippets from newspapers from Québec, Mexico, Brasil, Saint-Marin...

Hahahahahahaha.<p>No.

This is what I despise about &quot;news&quot;. If this was china or russia or venezuela, etc, the headline would be &quot;China tightens grip on their people&quot; or &quot;International community concerned as China becomes more authoritarian&quot; or &quot;Pro freedom activists protest against China&#x27;s draconian censorship&quot;. It would be spun as something more ominous than &quot;reform&quot;. But reuters being reuters and also a major supporter of censorship, of course spins it in a pro-censorship manner. Also, considering that google and facebook support these &quot;reforms&quot;, how are they &quot;aiming&quot; it at them? These laws will entrench google and facebook and secure their monopoly positions. The biggest beneficiaries of these laws are google and facebook and of course large media companies, like reuters.<p>I wonder what the headline would be if reuters and the news industry was against these &quot;reforms&quot;.

Who is John Galt? The man who decided to stop the engine of the world, and did. I think he&#x27;s about to make an appearance.