Here are part of the lyrics of "Enter Sandman" of Metallica:
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to Never—, Neverland
Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take
YCombinator is now in violation of article 13. Some filter should have prevented me from posting this.
Article 13 is bad enough without needing to make up absurd interpretations of it. EU law is enforced on the basis of proportionality, and the wording of the proposed directive already covers that.
There's never going to be some legal obligation to remove something like the quote you just posted.
Furthermore, since it's a directive each member state will need to implement it in a way that's compatible with both the directive and its own laws. The countries in the EU all have some sort of concept that's analogous to "fair use", even if that's not what they call it.
That might be true from the law perspective, but a major objection to copyright filters is that they go beyond the requirements of copyright law and ignores fair use. Youtube filter being a prime example.
If you include the above quoted snippet of the song in a youtube video, the probability that it will receive a copyright claim is close to 100%. Fair use is a legal defense that a person can use in court, but the purpose of copyright filters and thus the purpose of Article 13 is to resolve the issue in favor of the author before it end up in court. Article 13 in practice eliminates fair use.
Article 13 do not require copyright filters to consider fair use. If it did we would likely see a very nuanced discussion since it would force youtube to change their system in order to be compliant, but alas thats not the case.
If HN implemented a copyright filter we should expect from experience that such filter would not consider fair use, nor would it enforce copyright on the basis of proportionality. We could claim that this result is not the fault of article 13, but that is a naive perspective.
Youtube filter is there not only to follow the law, but also to please their advertisers/copyright holders.
Their latest change in the filter made Youtuber life so much worst and Youtube definitively know how they depends on theses Youtubers (and are lucky to have them). Thing is the cash come from advertisers/copyright holders and that's a much bigger issue for them right now.
To me that filter is beyond the requirements of the law, not for the law itself, but for the advertisers/copyright holders.
I could copy an entire blog post here, taking credit myself, instead of referring to it with a link. Would that be "fair use" too, and in which countries?
If that would happen, and the blog owner would sue, to which extend would the proportionality relate to real money? $50, $500, $50000?
Furthermore, since it's a directive each member state will need to implement it in a way that's compatible with both the directive and its own laws. The countries in the EU all have some sort of concept that's analogous to "fair use", even if that's not what they call it.
(which I'll take at face value as true), we have not just one directive, but 28 separate interpretations and enforcements of it because of the number of countries and their respective fair use language?
Yes. That's how it works. See [1] and [2]. Although by the time it'll be enacted it'll likely be 27 interpretations.
It's not worse, just different. The EU has a history of experimenting with directives that later become core EU regulations. E.g. the GDPR existed in one form or another for the last 20 years as privacy and data processing rules the EU directed EU/EEA members to implement.
I do think it is worse because rather than 27 laws (one for each jurisdiction), you have 1 law with 27 interpretations, and unclear jurisdiction.
For instance, What might be treated as fair use in one jurisdiction could be treated as criminal in another.
In the US, while we may have different state laws, copyright and speech are managed at the Federal level, so there is only one hierarchy to navigate. This resolves the jurisdiction issue. I'm not sure the EU has that same capability in this situation. If so, then wouldn't the fair use situation quickly become harmonized?
The EU isn't comparable to the US in this regard, it's a glorified trading and monetary agreement, and it's not a sovereign state.
The EU isn't making serious crimes like murder, arson etc. illegal, that's left to member states. It regulates market policy. Think something closer to NAFTA than the Federal government.
But if you squint hard you can think of EU directives as some sort of equivalent of the Federal government obligating individual states to regulate a certain topic within a given framework, without spelling out exactly how that must be accomplished.
That allows for local experimentation and flexibility. Whether you think that's a good or a bad thing I guess comes down to the philosophical argument of how close rule making should be to the governed.
There is however a legal requirement to get a license- or have a licensing service get the microtransaction necessary to pay to metallica or the lyrics owner his due.
Imagine you have translated it to another language of the EU member states (not the one official for the UK [still], Ireland or Malta)
Yep, the article 13 is beyond dumb.
The big websites participating in the blackout like Wikipedia or some porn sites do have vast access to eyeballs across europe, and would be affected directly and adversely by the new rules. As the lobbying fight has already been mostly won by the local publisher industry, they use their access to those eyeballs to fuel democratic protests of the rule.
I hope they win and that Article 11 and 13 will be removed.
I think this is an important moment in the birth of EU democracy, because it feels to me that one of the first times, there is a big public discussion about an issue and the people at the center aren't national politicians like Merkel or Macron but EU MEPs, namely Voss vs Reda. The EU has rightfully been criticized of not being democratic enough, and this discussion feels like it's very much democratic.
I don't think it's democratic at all. In case of my small country, almost literally no one wants this law - but that doesn't matter, we're a small country. The whole thing feels terribly wrong - 10 million people, the 100% majority of this rather big geographical location that is even separated by mountains on all sides, are just overruled, while they don't even understand the language these politicians are talking in...? Why couldn't we have our own rules regarding copyright, like up until now? Democracy doesn't just mean that there is some voting, it means that the people rule. In my country, our people no longer rule, now the Germans and the French rule our country (because we have less than 2% of votes in the EU parliament) and there is absolutely nothing democratic about that, the polar opposite actually. We're no longer a country, we've been reduced to a lowly region, and you people praise the EU for that while my grandfathers died for us to be sovereign and have a say in our matters. It feels sickening. I truly hope this law passes and it significantly reduces everyone's high opinion of the EU so we can finally talk about fixing this.
The funny/sad thing is that my people had more say over our country during the communist regime than we have today. The Soviets at least accepted bribes.
BTW yes, most people here would rather be poor and sovereign than the EU alternative. And we had no idea this is what we're joining back in 2004, and no one asked us when it changed - in fact, significant pressure that I deem absolutely unethical was made on our politicians to not let our people decide in a referendum.
> Why couldn't we have our own rules regarding copyright, like up until now?
You didn't actually have that up until now either.
> now the Germans and the French rule our country
Citation very much needed, unless you mean nominally German and French companies delegating factories and subsidiaries to your country, in which case, that's the point.
> and you people praise the EU for that while my grandfathers died for us to be sovereign
I think if you'd ask them, they died for their children to have a better life, and not having to fight any more wars. Also, a lot of (great)-grandfathers died in countries that are pretty happy to be in the EU; your appeal to nationalism is pretty offensive here.
> BTW yes, most people here would rather be poor and sovereign than the EU alternative.
Your country can just decide to leave. If the burden of delegating some super-national matters to a larger voluntary body becomes too much, you can just opt-out.
> You didn't actually have that up until now either.
Yes, and we liked it.
> Citation very much needed, unless you mean nominally German and French companies delegating factories and subsidiaries to your country, in which case, that's the point.
See how countries are represented in the EP.
> I think if you'd ask them, they died for their children to have a better life, and not having to fight any more wars. Also, a lot of (great)-grandfathers died in countries that are pretty happy to be in the EU; your appeal to nationalism is pretty offensive here.
You know what, I actually asked them. Our nation maintains a project called "memory of the nation" that collects inputs like this from as many important and ordinary people of past times as possible, from various sources such as chronicles, personal diaries, letters, books, court hearings etc as well as actual conversations with them.
It is exactly what I said it is, please don't try to school me on my own nation. Our grandfathers died because they wanted us to be sovereign. Please don't try to change their (well documented) message. The whole thing by itself has nothing to do with nationalism! It is the fact that the western nations have been the oppressors of our people and the (provably) 300+-year old understanding of the whole nation (and its literature, songs, art...) that in order to be free at our homes, the country has to be sovereign - because our ideas about politics and what freedom is are different than yours.
> Your country can just decide to leave. If the burden of delegating some super-national matters to a larger voluntary body becomes too much, you can just opt-out.
It can not. The EU has just shown everyone that it will absolutely and purposefully destroy anyone that tries and severe all their international ties to a state roughly equivalent to the Cold War. On top of that, our country is economically tightly tied to Germany and France and their investors - whatever our citizens want, these foreign investors will work against it, and now their governments (that will naturally protect and help their citizens as much as possible) have the power to override our laws directly, the last thing they lacked.
The Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, or, in short the "Copyright directive" was from 2001. You adhered to that on joining in 2004.
The current proposal build on and extends that, so, in conclusion, you didn't actually have that up until now.
> See how countries are represented in the EP.
Fortunately another poster did your homework for you: "In the countries with 10 million population, you have roughly 500k people per MEP. In Germany & France, it's 850k."
But regardless, MEPs are part of European parties, which, to exist, need to represent a cross section of EU countries. EU matters are sometimes instigated by countries, but signed off on by international political blocks. There are anti-EU parties for you to vote on.
> On top of that, our country is economically tightly tied to Germany and France and their investors
A terrible thing that, employment and economic stability. Fortunately, you can elect a government that throws them out, together with the EU, and nationalise all their property and do it your way. Venezuela did exactly that, and you could join them in their glorious ascent to complete sovereignity.
> The EU has just shown everyone that it will absolutely and purposefully destroy anyone
Citation needed, and I sure hope you're not thinking of "Brexit" as some sort of example here.
> The whole thing by itself has nothing to do with nationalism!
Except for the "our people" and the "noble blood of our forebears" and the "insidious foreign influences" bits.
> A terrible thing that, employment and economic stability. Fortunately, you can elect a government that throws them out, together with the EU, and nationalise all their property and do it your way. Venezuela did exactly that, and you could join them in their glorious ascent to complete sovereignity.
But we don't want to be a country that nationalises stuff. The point is on the exact opposite of the political scale. We (the citizens) didn't want to sell it away dirt cheap in the first place.
> Fortunately another poster did your homework for you: "In the countries with 10 million population, you have roughly 500k people per MEP. In Germany & France, it's 850k."
How are German and French citizens relevant to the laws of my country, why do they have a say about it in a vote? I don't want to vote about Germany either.
> Except for the "our people" and the "noble blood of our forebears" and the "insidious foreign influences" bits.
Nothing noble about it. There is nothing wrong with cherishing your heritage, especially in case of people just a generation or two away. ;-)
Are you denying history? Our national history has undeniably significantly shaped our whole culture - movies, theatre, language, literature, music, art, ways of parenting and education and so on... Basically the whole Czech culture is build on top of the fight against foreign oppression and the will to gain sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Revival
Our people == citizens, nothing else. When I say nation, I mean people with common cultural background and in most cases citizenship. I don't care about immigrants, economical migrants and even refugees and I support helping them in any way possible, BTW - they're free to live with us, by our rules (or their, if they're citizens already).
Obviously a political and economic union will impose laws on its member states. Your country, holding 2% of the votes, being able to overrule the entire union wouldn't be very democratic either.
It sounds like you want to have the cake and eat it too. Get the benefits of the union but be able to refuse the laws it imposes. If the EU decides on a law, that the majority of the union agrees on but your country doesn't, then your country has the option to leave the union.
Your country might not agree with these laws, other countries might not agree with laws regarding the environment, or human rights, etc. But the union as a whole agrees on them and if you want to benefit from the union then you have to follow.
I absolutely don't think an economic union (our citizens did not vote in a referendum to join a political union, that was forced on us) needs to impose such laws (environment, human rights) not regarding international trade between member states and third state policies. It should impose treaties regarding export and import between member states, and maybe provide a civil court.
Whatever the EU is, it's not an "economic union" for at least a decade. We don't want any of that cake, as you say - you forced that upon us, I was talking about that in my previous comment.
And no, our country doesn't have an option to leave. Germans bought key state corporations from the corrupt post-revolution government and they won't let us (the people) do it, on top of that it has been proved that the EU will try to take revenge by all means and not wanting to be in the EU means they will destroy you. So much for the "friendship among nations" goal - paid friendship is not friendship.
I don't think the Art 13 legislation will last in its current form. But whatever form it does take, if your country was "independent", I wouldn't be surprised if it signed up to harmonize anyway as part of a trade deal.
Your real enemy is globalization and modern conveniences of globally cheap goods, and globally high quality goods being available for you to purchase and manufacture and export. The alternatives are somewhere on a sliding scale between Norway / Switzerland to North Korea. The closer you are geographically to Europe, the more you'd need to be like North Korea to maintain the kind of independence you think you want, because the game theoretics of inter-nation competition demand that competitors follow international rules.
Hmm, I'd like to see future where most [high quality] goods are produced locally - thanks to robots and AI. That's why I'd like the country to stay independent and of course automation and IT/tech/knowledge-based export economy is the only way it'd work in the long term for such country.
For that we need our citizens to be as free in doing business as possible, and for the whole thing to be as easy as possible. The EU is directly influencing our economical growth and technological and societal progression in this way.
Coincidentally, I am also from a 10 million country surrounded by mountains... and I feel the need to say a few words.
What sovereignty are you talking about? The one we had before WW2, right before we were occupied by Germans? Or after WW2, that brief moment before we were controlled and later even occupied by Russians? That sovereignty is an illusion, especially in today's interconnected world. We can either be small and be controlled by the big ones or be a small part of a big one. Is EU perfect? Certainly not. We can talk about reforms. But despite all shortcomings, I would still say that being part of the EU is the best era of our history.
And saying that people had more say over our country during the communist regime than we have today... that contradicts my experience and this is the sentiment I would like to express in the strongest possible terms.
And I would not be so sure about what "most people here would rather..." - if I might share my position on this: I voted yes to join the EU in order to get roughly what I got and I would not change my vote.
Just my $0.02 - article 13 is not about what Germans and French want, it is about what powerful lobbies want - being outside of EU would not save us from something like that despite what majority of the country wants - the fact is that we were not overruled; check the stances of our representatives (https://saveyourinternet.eu/cz) - unless there is some other mountains-surrounded country I do not know about, most of our MEPs voted for the article 13.
In the countries with 10 million population, you have roughly 500k people per MEP. In Germany & France, it's 850k.
If you add up the seats of the 6 countries with roughly 10 million people, you get 126. If you add up the seats of Germany and France, you get 175. So the small countries are definitely not irrelevant. Can a single country decide on a matter on their own? No. But with 28 (soon 27) states, requiring consent of every single country would render the EU unable to take actions on issues.
This is fair representation in matters that an economical union should decide, but it is not fair representation when the EU became a political union - almost no German lives in the country and yet German citizens have more control over it than Czech citizens do. The EU does not need to regulate everything, or even most things. The Czech Republic tries to promote distributed multi-level government (so only people living in a given area have say over it) and the EU goes directly against it.
The copryight directive is about unifying copyright law and rules in the EU. It's about making it easier to offer services to all EU citizens. If the EU doesn't regulate some area, naturally countries will have different rules, making inner EU trade in that matter difficult.
The countries of the EU, including Germany, can't survive on their own in a world where there's the USA, China and India. We need a strong entity that protects european values world-wide.
Also, this isn't a new thing either. Think of Charles IV. a czech ruler of the HRE which included both today's Germany and today's Czech republic.
Charles IV. provided Bohemia with multi-hundred year long significant power over the HRE and sovereignty in everything but name inside the HRE, while making Bohemia a large and major power (but we're not expandish anymore today, so that "large" part is usually not even commonly known). That is the major reason why we universally think of him as "The Father of the homeland" (Otec vlasti) in the Czech Republic.
Then the Habsburgs gradually took that away from us and that made us angry in a poetic way in the 1770's, which has caused the Czech National Revival and has formed all of contemporary Czech culture.
I agree. It actually demonstrates nicely that there is a European community, that isn't organizing itself via the media, but through social media like reddit and twitter (and partially facebook). r/europe, for example, is a surprisingly influential entity with lots of AMAs with proponents and opponents of Article 13. And many less interesting meme chains as well...
Just wrote some emails to politicians and demanded that they stop messing with Wikipedia and enable it again. I could do it myself (content is still there, just a css issue), but I'm too lazy.
As an EU citizen, I hope large portions of the internet will just block us. A couple of days without YouTube, Wikipedia and other services would create sufficient outrage to put pressure on the EU for introducing these idiotic laws.
I mean, GDPR is bad enough for start ups, but Article 13?
Article 13 is terrible not because it’s terrible for start-ups, it’s terrible because it’s terrible for people.
I’m pretty close to the rough-end of GDPR in my current job, but it represents real benefits for millions of people. If you asked them what’s a reasonable way to treat their data, I believe the GDPR is close-ish to what a lot of Europeans would want. Or, at least a shift in the right direction.
Article 13 on the other hand is what you get if you ask rights-holders groups what they want, and poses a direct threat to freedom of expression for millions of Europeans.
If you asked them what’s a reasonable way to treat their data, I believe the GDPR is close-ish to what a lot of Europeans would want.
I'm pretty sure that if you asked people whether they would prefer to pay for Facebook and Google with cash or by sharing data for ad targeting, most would choose the latter. The GDPR specifically forbids that option.
Article 13 on the other hand is what you get if you ask rights-holders groups what they want, and poses a direct threat to freedom of expression for millions of Europeans.
And it demonstrates the impossibility of having a powerful bureaucracy that does only the things that you want.
I had absolutely no issue getting my family members to pay for an account at diasp.eu when google+ shut down.
They were rather happy to do so since one of its selling points is that they do not track users for advertising. Do not underestimate the general publics tracking/advertising fatigue.
Forgive me but doesn't that mean they were actually using google+ in the first place? Which seems.... unlikely? Or at least incredible outliers.
You won't get the majority of people on Facebook to pay for the service after you've been giving it to them for "free" for 10 years, you'd maybe convert 10% if that, at which point what use is facebook with most of the users gone?
It's difficult to ask for users to pay for a service that was always free, indeed, furthermore facebook is not growing its user base anymore.
But a competitor can emerge by providing an alternative service, for a fee, marketing it as "the service that doesn't spy on you".
Now, sure, that will be a niche service, and social networks can't be niche services. The protonmail of facebook or twitter will probably never emerge.
We were all using google+ to share images. Some of them are on facebook (my mother and sister in particular), but the rest of my extended family is not there. But we were all on G+, I told them if they wanted to see baby pictures you have to sign up.
I couldn't care less about anyone outside my family, if they want to contact me they can email or call me by phone.
For semi-private file sharing (ie family-wide, not worldwide), paying services are great. If you want as big of a circle of "friends" as possible, you are in a "winner-takes-all" situation, and being free helps to be the winner.
My understanding of the GDPR (did a course on it for work) is that it allows data sharing for advertising to named companies, but holds you and the advertiser responsible for ensuring that no-one else gets your data without permission and for letting you know if any such data breach occurs.
But I agree with you on the principle that bureaucracy very seldom does only the things I want.
> I'm pretty sure that if you asked people whether they would prefer to pay for Facebook and Google with cash or by sharing data for ad targeting, most would choose the latter. The GDPR specifically forbids that option.
Permission must be freely given in order to be valid. It is not freely given, if access to a service requires the permission and that permission is not strictly necessary for the service.
However I believe it is good that such option is forbidden, after all the years of abuse of user data at the hands of Google, Facebook and other advertisement companies. Note that ads can still be shown without all the creepy targeting, and ads could still be used to pay for the service, without stealing user data (yes, I call it stealing, because these companies go to great lengths to trick the user into giving the permission). It remains to be shown if ads without tracking could be sustainable to keep services free.
Well since you can't make sharing of personal data a prerequisite for using a service unless it can be shown that data is actually necessary for the operation of the service it could be argued that this follows.
That's not quite accurate. The law allows you to legitimately ask for permission to share the data for advertising purposes, but you have to be transparent with the details, and the advertiser has to have the same safeguards on the data as your company (they aren't allowed to re-sell it without the original company's knowledge, for example).
That's not fully accurate either. All that you wrote is true, but user's permission must be freely given - this means access to the service cannot be restricted if user refuses to give permission (as long as that permission isn't strictly required to provide the service itself, but then probably permission is not the right basis for processing data).
Sorry, I had assumed the question was for a source on "The GDPR specifically forbids that option.", I didn't give the source, but an argument why it follows from the rules of the GDPR.
If you provide a free service which is only accessible after you give permission to data processing, then that permission is not freely given and thus invalid (as long as such processing is not strictly necessary to provide the service) - see Article 7 and Recital 43.
> I'm pretty sure that if you asked people whether they would prefer to pay for Facebook and Google with cash or by sharing data for ad targeting, most would choose the latter. The GDPR specifically forbids that option.
First, it's important to distinguish between the types of lawful bases with which you are processing data. For example, if you were to provide a service of targeting ads to people, you do not need consent to collect the data you need to target your ads: because you are simply fulfilling the contract. One of the problems with the current Facebooks and Googles of the world is that they assume you don't want targeted ads. I think this is an enormous mistake. Sign me up for targeted ads! I want them! I will freely give you information so that I can get targeted ads! In reality, the Faebooks of and Googles of the world are not offering targeted ads. They are offering indiscriminate ads and also selling your data. This is incredibly important to understand.
Next, even if we decide to offer a service and ask for consent for collection of non-related information, there is nothing stopping us from paying for that collection (as far as I can tell). The law states that consent must be "freely given", however this "freely given" means that you can't threaten consequences for non-consent. There is no provision for thanking your customers.
In other words, I'm pretty sure you can charge $5 a month for a service and then give $5 a month worth of credit as a thank you for being able to use your data. (Note: I tried to find some kind of verification of this, but was unable to find a discussion of it either way. I would be grateful for some evidence even if it contradicts my thesis ;-) )
However, there are massive caveats. First you must inform the customers what you are doing with their data and who your are sending it to. Second you must allow them to withdraw their consent. If they withdraw their consent then you must also do everything in your power to notify the downstream data processors to also stop using that data.
And I think that's the real reason you don't see the Facebooks and Googles of the world trying this. They don't want to work with the data in a trackable way. They want to do whatever the heck they want with your data forever. They don't want to inform you that they've sent your data to an organisation that you might disapprove of. They don't want to allow you to cancel your consent without cancelling your service and also do whatever is necessary to stop the downstream processor from using your data if you object.
There is usually a lot of vitriol here when we discuss GDPR however usually this is a result of distilling the argument down to an either/or situation. Either the company is an abusive monster or the law is trying to remove a legitimate business model. It overlooks the idea that there are serious problems with the way this business model works right now and the law attempts to improve that situation in ways that are both useful and frustrating.
Edit: At the risk of bringing the wrath of the EU down upon my employer, I just realised that we offer a 25 GBP voucher for agreeing to sign up to our newsletter. So, there is at least 1 company who does this and I really don't think there is anything wrong with it.
Dudeo, people are just going to sign up, get their money back for their data, then ask you to delete the data right away. You have to still provide the service, just now for free.
> I'm pretty sure that if you asked people whether they would prefer to pay for Facebook and Google with cash or by sharing data for ad targeting, most would choose the latter. The GDPR specifically forbids that option.
Yes, in the same way (as an exaggerated example) it forbids people selling their organs for profit or jobs with no salary etc
But the parent is right, this is not only about companies, this has a direct impact on users and freedom of expression
> I'm pretty sure that if you asked people whether they would prefer to pay for Facebook and Google with cash or by sharing data for ad targeting
They would chose not to have Google and Facebook. The basic principals of capitalism that products are something people want or need. Surveillance capitalism gets around this by exploiting the fact that an average citizen does know nothing about data collection and its scale and the implications for their privacy. GDPR is trying to fix this and also the fuck all attitude to security that most companies have.
> ... pay for Facebook and Google... by sharing data for ad targeting... The GDPR specifically forbids that option.
All I can say is that this is not my lived experience of Google and Facebook in the EU. This is also not those companies’ interpretation of that law (nor a common one).
There are real arguments against the burden the GDPR puts on companies who hold/process significant PII (which I am sympathetic to), but this is not one of them.
> ... powerful bureaucracy that does only the things that you want.
The same could be said of any democracy. My point is that there is no democratic basis for Article 13. It’s only getting support because IP law is too boring and abstract for most people to get worked up about.
> Article 13 is terrible not because it’s terrible for start-ups, it’s terrible because it’s terrible for people.
the two aren't mutually exclusive and Europe is right now in a deep growth slump also caused by middle class not moving into entrepreneurship due all the red tape and inefficiencies around having to deal with the particularities of every European state, with the EU aggregating without unifying a mess of regional particularities (i.e. vatmoss)
we desperately need the EU to cater both to the individual and the small business interests working out the kinks of the common market.
VAT and a vast majority of the laws surrounding commerce at least are simple and have been abstracted away by various platforms ages ago. I invite you to read up on the subject and revise your stance (your premise may or may not be true, I will not claim to know either way) based on something that is actually true.
VAT is very far from simple across the EU and there have been recent changes for online shopping (depending on the amount/turnover per year if might be necessary to charge VAT based on the buyer residence instead of company registration)
Another instance in most EU countries tips (in restaurants/bars) should be subject of VAT, not in the UK for instance.
Different exceptions for deductibles like water for employees (but not coffee and so on)
I think it all depends on how far you want to stretch the definition of "simple". I run a sole proprietorship and don't have to worry about national VAT until I cross a certain threshold. However, if I do business with customers in another EU state, I immediately need to account for VAT and report it.
Add to that mistranslated directives (!), misinformed and uncooperative tax officials and you quickly realize that both "ease of doing business" and the single market are all a bunch of baloney. If I ever launch a B2C service, you can bet your ass I won't be aiming it at the EU market. I'll leave that for when I can afford an expert to handle all the bureaucratic nonsense that doing business in the EU involves.
GDPR was never intended to be "good for startups". Just like pro-climate policies are never intended to be good for the economy.
GDPR was intended to be good for peoples privacy. Pro-climate policies are meant to be good for the climate.
Somethings gotta give. People are generally more important than startups. Climate is generally more important than economy. Because without people, there are no startups. And without climate, there is no economy, people, or startups.
So who is benefiting from this article 13? The copyright holders.
Not the people, not the startups, not the EU companies.
There are things to be said about GDPR and climate, but not so much about article 13. It's just retarded and insane. These people have totally no clue.
"Artificial intelligence can recognize faces today, filter out preferences and even park independently. It should be easy to distinguish between original and parody." - Says the Germany's equivalent to the RIAA
this is the standard of current debate: "people are more important than ...". Well done! Well done! I guess that does give carte blanch to any and all regulations that can be said to be "for the people", so all of them. Wow, nobody though about this before, really good. You are a master philospher, Sir! Pay no mind though to the people who had arranged themselves in mutually beneficial relations that these regulations hinder or destroy because they are not real people. Only those persons who need their PII "protected" (not from the state of course) are really real anyway.
Idiots like this fool are also running the EU, my god was the internet a great place before his ilk got here.
The thing to do here is to read everything this person has said and to take in the bigger picture of what they are trying to say. Focusing on the details like this is doing yourself a disservice, because it makes it look like you don't have the skills they taught you in school.
I think eikxyz means that pro-climate policies are not designed to allow quick profits; they will actually constrain some actors in the economy. They also may help to ensure the survival of the economy itself, so that at least some economic actors can still function.
GDPR and Article 13 (in The Directive on Copyright) are totally different and unrelated things.
I happen to be a small business owner in the EU and I have many customers who are the same. We all have registered with the ICO (UK) for something like £60 pa and filled in a short questionnaire. We have read the clear guidance on what records to keep and what to not keep - it's not rocket science. That is GDPR for most small businesses. Now, if your business is predicated on building profiles on people or pestering them on the phone or flogging ads etc then I can't help you there - it may be a pain.
Now Article 13: It is designed to try and make the likes of YouTube responsible for not carrying copyrighted works by putting the onus back on them. I believe they hide behind carrier status. I understand that A13 looks a bit like an anti-meme effort but it isn't because that is generally covered by parody or reasonable use regulations.
In the end, are you really sure you want the world to block us?
Unless someone has some work of their own, that other people start to use and make money off it. Then that one wants copyright. Then its no longer information flying free for everyone.
In a world where everyone has a copying machine in their pocket more powerful than anything built by mankind ever before, the economic value of a copy is zero.
Copyright is a power grab around that fact. It wouldn't matter as much if they didn't extend it to a duration of two lifetimes.
> Copyright is a dinosaur of an idea that belongs in the annals of history and out of the present.
Then don't copyright the content you make, just release it out into the public domain. Be the change you want to see.
But let's be honest, the people most vocal against Article 13 are those who want to leech other people's creations for free. Not those people actually creating the content.
> the people most vocal against Article 13 are those who want to leech other people's creations for free.
Why would such people be at all concerned about Article 13? Torrent sites and swarms have been in flagrant disregard of the law since forever, one more law isn't going to change much. Likewise the other popular pirate mechanism, the old "upload an archive with the content to Mega or similar" technique, already frequently uses encrypted archives to make sure only people coming through the right channel (often an ad laden website + several even more ad laden URL shorteners) get access to the content, making a filter requirement ineffectual there as well.
Torrents aren't really good for small things that quickly change like news whereas websites like reddit are and I'm pretty sure the people who are pushing for articles 11 and 13 are news agencies. Here is my thought process:
News agencies know they are using dark patterns to skirt by GDPR while still using targeted advertising but since they know the fines will eventually start hitting, they want to move to paywalls. However, A paywall for a news company is practically useless as any major story one makes gets linked to and paraphrased by dozens of other news agencies within minutes. Users won't pay for a news website when they can get practically the same stories only slightly delayed at a free one that just paraphrases and links back to the original. Article 11 solves that problem and article 13 is to prevent 1 user who does pay for a website from copying the entire article and pasting it in a comment (I see that and archive/outline links all the time here and on reddit).
What's more, since there is only one collecting society for each type of media (which is always the case afaik), German law allows the collecting society to just assume that all works in existence are made by their members.
When someone plays music at an event, the collecting society will try to collect royalties from them, even if it's just CC or public-domain music, and the organiser is guilty until proven innocent.
> I understand that A13 looks a bit like an anti-meme effort but it isn't because that is generally covered by parody or reasonable use regulations.
That's exactly the problem. Stuff of that is protected, and with good reason. But upload filter that would be mandated by article 13 can't detect that fair use. By enforcing them for all platforms like Youtube all of this will vanish from the european internet.
This is why A13 requires the platform to have an actual human being revise the decision if something is wrongfully blocked. I think it's in chapter 4 or 8 of the article IIRC.
Wow, so not only do you have to spend millions of dollars to create an automated filter (YouTube reportedly spent 60), you also have to spend $X on humans to review false positive claims and $Y on copyright infringement cases in which your automated filter wasn't good enough. Talk about barriers to entry.
You don't and can't know this and it is obvious because you are speculating about a future fact. It would help all of us if you couched it as such so that no reader can be deluded into thinking you have based your arguments on the kind of certainty that they seem to be based on.
We can predict some things with a reasonable amount of certainty. For example, if companies have one high-risk high-cost option (relying on sophisticated solutions able to distinguish edge cases like fair use) and low-risk low-cost option (blocking everything that is suspicious), we can expect them to chose the later.
> In the end, are you really sure you want the world to block us?
Well this is a double edge sword. EU still produces something like 20% of the global GDP and if a company can ignore such a market than let it be. There will be many alternative projects spawn to fill the market need (if there is a real one, not talking about surveillance capitalism products here). Is this that bad for the EU? I don't think so.
GDPR regulates companies processing personal identifiable information, if your startup can't comply with that it shouldn't exist for the same reasons that a food startup that can't comply with food safety regulations shouldn't exist.
Article 13 is straight up impossible to implement.
most startups can and will. but it basically adds up the requirement of lawyering up to every startup that wants to operate here de facto annihilating the possibility for single man operations to bootstrap an idea cashless.
there's no avoiding gdpr. how do you do presales without? it's not just about the trackers. every information is impacted from prospect contacts book to hiring, all that information requires consent and a public policy and a dpo.
and someone has to write that policy and someone has to be your dpo. and that's operating costs that a garage level startup will not be able to sustain.
Of course you are correct that the things you have just mentioned require some knowledge of the laws governing personal information. I just dispute the notion that this is required or even healthy.
If you are of the position that the popular extremely invasive form of "marketing" is something that absolutely has to happen, then what I say will never apply to you. Especially as it pertains to it being self-evident that you're not violating anyone's rights.
GDPR is just fine, if you've got your shit together and has some actual benefits for users, like being able to request all my saved data and its deletion. And of course disallowing websites handing my data to every possible ad network without my consent.
my 2 cents: A few days of outrage will do absolutely nothing to stop or change the law. AFAICT, many the EU bureaucrats and politicians fervently believe that they are doing the right thing here, even if it's clearly bonkers.
It's like Brexit that way.
Also: as said elsewhere, article 13 is probably all good news for YouTube, so I doubt that they do anything deeply confrontational. Plus, even if they did, they would just be portrayed as evil lobbying/scheming bastards arm twisting the EU into giving them what they want.
> as said elsewhere, article 13 is probably all good news for YouTube
This part is not clear to me. On one hand they are big enough to prevent copyrighted material being published. They could also offer filtering services to smaller parties.
But on the other hand, YouTube is still full of copyrighted material. You can find basically any videoclip, cd-rip, or anything else on there. There are even entire movie rips on there, that regularly get deleted.
Do they currently pay some big license owner a fee for this? I don't think so (but I'm not sure).
So if this article 13 passes, YouTube will have to remove all of this material. Not only that, but they have to prevent such material being published in the first place. Or somehow make sure that a certain videoclip/cd-rip is payed off to the proper license owner.
I'm not sure if it's even possible for YouTube to make such a filter, without having either a lot of false negatives or positives.
Copyright law is already hideously draconian (in the US especially). Every fucking time the copyright cartels push for more power, more control, more leeway, they get it. It's been going on for a century or more, which is why we end up with ridiculous copyright terms like Life of Author + 70 years.
The last thing I want is to give even more power to these obsolete middlemen to act as gatekeepers of information and culture.
I'm not totally against copyright as an idea, but I'm certainly against the form of it we have now.
It is interesting to me that only four of them are protesting—German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak—by blacking out their sites on 21 March 2019 in opposition to the proposed EU Copyright Directive.
Why is it that other EU Wikipedia language editions like French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish not joining in the protests? Did they come up with a different conclusion on the potential impact of the new copyright directive? Can people who know about the politics of other EU language Wikipedia comment whether they had discussed of joining this black out?
I support their point of view and agree with their protest, but one reason against this could be the potential politicizing and weaponisation of Wikipedia. Do you want one of the largest collectives of human information to take sides (in any debate) and selectively remove its service?
I think I would prefer a banner or a landing page more as it doesn't introduce any barrier to the information they provide.
Because it is expected that they are as neutral as possible. People should advocate for encyclopedias, but they should not have opinions themselves. That impression can be argued to be wrong, of course.
As each Wikipedia project is independant, there's not really any cross-wiki communication and the guidelines can vary quite a bit.
But I would not have supported this, I just don't believe these kind of a stunts are effective, just annoying to users. Everybody already has copyright-directive-warning-fatigue. If you must you can put up a banner.
> Everybody already has copyright-directive-warning-fatigue.
If that is you experience, I think you might be living in a bit of a bubble (as we all do, arguably). Anecdotally, I know quite a few people who seem to be pretty unaware of the whole discussion.
This law was strongly pushed by the "Axel Springer" company. This company is so evil that there are even browser extensions to just block their websites (see Axel Springer Blocker in chrome extension store)
AFAIK my country's EU representatives are against, so Wikipedia in the Netherlands might not see a need as rallying citizens doesn't change a thing without a clear call to action.
Shame that the CTA of e.g. the German Wikipedia is so weak: "Kontaktieren sie ihre Abgeordneten " (translted: contact your representative) which links to https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/de/home.
Besides the site being super slow right now, I couldn't even figure out how to actually find _my_ representative. Is my representative the one of the city where I live? How can I search by city? Is this even by city? Doesn't seem so. So now I have a list of 96 random people. Which ones can actually influence this? Or which one actually need their opinion changed?
I also wouldn't really know how to contact them - just send an email and write that I hate that the make so bad politics that Wikipedia had to shut down their site in protest?
Or just use a script as a bookmark:
javascript:(function(){ document.getElementById("centralNotice").outerHTML = ""; document.getElementsByClassName("mw-parser-output")[0].className = "";})();
I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't remove the content completely, using 302-redirects. I'm using uBlock origin, and the whole website looks like a mess.
It doesn't even show the "call-to-action" banner, which is required for Average Joe to understand why Wikipedia looks the way it looks.
Making content providers liable about the content they publish seems to me essential to have an healthy internet: I don't understand all the problem about censorship; Am I missing something?
If I anonymously upload copyrighted material to YouTube, I can sue YouTube. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Pinterest, Imgur, Instagram, ... .
I'm building a platform where anyone can make a game and share it. If someone names his game "Zelda" or "Tetris", I can get sued. If my competitor uploads his own material to my site, they can sue me.
Theses platforms should have "automated filters that detect copyrighted material, and make a distinction between original and parody". If you know of such system, please tell me.
Staying in Europe with a user content platform makes no sense.
> Theses platforms should have "automated filters that detect copyrighted material, and make a distinction between original and parody". If you know of such system, please tell me.
That's the whole point in this useless proposed jurisdiction. Such automated filters cannot exist and will never exist. We don't have strong AI which is trained to detect copyright violations, and there never will be one. Such a system would first to know what a protectable work is (in all possible formats). Then it would have to detect violations (in all possible formats). And then it needs to be available to all internet platforms which allows user content, such as e. g. Wikipedia, hackernews or reddit. This is even impossible to implement for Facebook or Google. So why changing a perfectly fine copyright law to something not implementable?
Everybody needs to geoblock EU clients, even every little block with a comments section.
If the user is anonymous, so as copyright holder, or target of harassment or whatever I can't know who is the creator of the content, it makes perfectly sense for me that you, as host of the content are liable of the content itself. I don't see anything strange about it.
You own small a grocery store, and as an altruistic service to the community you provide a public bulletin board at the store entrance. Town residents can use this to share public messages and advertisements. Someone with no relation to you anonymously pins a poster with copyrighted images to the bulletin board at the entrance.
You originally had no idea the images were not the property of the creator of the poster (how could you?), but as soon as you are made aware of the problem you remove the poster in a timely manner.
Does it make perfect sense to you that I (owner of the images) can now successfully sue you (the owner of the store and provider of the bulletin board service) for copyright infringement, and have you pay damages to me as compensation for the time the poster was visible at the bulletin board?
More importantly, do you think making the store owner vulnerable to litigation is 1. in line with how similar laws usually work? 2. a fair administration of justice? 3. a net benefit to the town and society at large?
The problem is that the new law punishes the platform for hosting the content even when they didn't know they were hosting it. This creates a chilling effect, as they will need to review and block preventatively any dubious content.
Previously it was enough that they removed the content when they were notified about it; this didn't create such huge chilling effect for most content.
It means that what you are doing now, posting a comment using a throwaway, will be impossible.
As no public platform will take this risk and users don't want to pay the extra money the platform needs to build or buy the impossible content filters it would need.
Yes, but currently content providers are making money (not in case of wikipedia, I know) over content that could be against the law (it could be hate speech, harassment, copyright infringement or whatever). For example how are online content providers any difference from traditional newspapers, where the director is accountable for all content published in the newspaper?
I believe that people should be responsible for what they do, not for what other people do. That is the key difference between the traditional media and platforms - traditional newspapers are under your control, written by your employees, you are able to read all the articles before you publish them etc. A platform is something you create for other people to use it. If we accept that platforms should be responsible for what their users do, where do we draw the line? If I slander you over the phone, should phone company be responsible for it? Using your argument, they made money on that slanderous call so they should be, is that right?
The flaw in your reasoning is in "user generated content". Newspapers are not user generated, while lots of websites (like this one) are. That's why safe harbor conditions exist, allowing sites like these to have free and meaningful discussion, without the threat of massive fines or lawsuits because a single user may do something irresponsible.
If content providers in the online medium are to be the same to traditional providers like newspapers internet as we know it won't be any longer and we will have just that, online traditional newspapers.
Making money by breaking the law should not be allowed I agree. But currently these laws (copyright) are more due for a refactoring than the medium (internet) itself. As these laws are not well balanced between all parties involved, especially with all the possibilities in the current age.
Re Article 11 foundation states for-profit information aggregators will be restricted to snippets. This is good for liberating information as it will help increase the breadth of useful search results for original content.
Re Article 13 and placing increased pressure against the DCMA, you'll probably stop seeing so many 1080p movies on YouTube (hence NewPipe) when you search for "x264 YIFY". That sucks.
What specifically should one ask them to vote against? I'm sure they have a lot on their plate, so what's a good way to make it easy for them to understand which vote this is about?
I cannot scroll the white-on-black text at all in MobileSafari. Although I “should” be using the mobile site, this edge case should still be accounted for.
Why they disagree with censorship? Its a great firewall with the enforcement being pushed to every last person running a website. Its a totalitarian grasp for the control of the internet as a whole. The protection fee for publishing houses is just an added bonus for a few corrupt institutions on their deathbed.
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to Never—, Neverland
Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take
These are the lyrics of Metallica "Enter Sandman".
YCombinator can now get sued because they didn't filter out my post. They unlawfully published copyrighted material.
Without this law, I would be liable. With this law, YCombinator is liable too.
This is false.
A13 Chapter 5[1] explicitly allows posts like yours:
The cooperation between online content service providers and rightholders shall not result in the prevention of the availability of works or other subject matter uploaded by users which do not infringe copyright and related rights, including where such works or subject matter are
covered by an exception or limitation.
Member States shall ensure that users in all Member States are able to rely on the following existing exceptions and limitations when uploading and making available content generated by users on online content sharing services:
a) quotation, criticism, review, b) use for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche.
It would however forbid you to post that lyrics without any commentary or some sort of relection.
Here are the lyrics to Enter Sandman by Metallica:
Say your prayers, little one
Don't forget, my son
To include everyone
I tuck you in, warm within
Keep you free from sin
Until the sandman he comes
[Pre-Chorus]
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
[Chorus]
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to never never-land
[Verse 2]
Something's wrong, shut the light
Heavy thoughts tonight
And they aren't of Snow White
Dreams of war
Dreams of liars
Dreams of dragons fire
And of things that will bite, yeah
[Pre-Chorus]
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
[Chorus]
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to Never Never-land
[Guitar Solo]
[Interlude]
Now I lay me down to sleep
(Now I lay me down to sleep)
Pray the lord my soul to keep
(Pray the lord my soul to keep)
And
If I die before I wake
(If I die before I wake)
Pray the lord my soul to take
(Pray the lord my soul to take)
[Bridge]
Hush, little baby, don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
It's just the beast under your bed
In your closet, in your head
[Chorus]
Exit light
Enter night
Grain of sand
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We're off to Never Never-land
[Interlude]
Come on people
Hey yeah, oh oh yeah
[Outro]
We're off to never never-land
Take my hand
We're off to never never-land
Take my hand
We're off to never never-land
It's good big well known brands like Wikipedia are doing something but seeing the language list (German, Czech, Slovak, Danish) only German is in the top 3 of languages spoken in EU (except English, which will not count in near future anyway). There is missing Swedish and French, and given how French are into protesting, it's sad they didn't join this initiative.
It must have been ten years ago now that I first listened to Richard Stallman's talk called "Copyright vs Community". It's a really enlightening talk and makes it clear how much worse copyright has become over the years. It makes me incredibly sad to see it now regressing even further.
We're already at a point where copyright severely restricts our ability to share our own culture. A couple of years ago we lost what was, by far, the greatest music collection ever put together. Meticulously maintained by people who love music, but destroyed by people who love money. It pains me that people can't even put up YouTube videos with certain music in the background. People can't record their actual lives because parts of their life are owned by other people.
Copyright belongs in the day of the printing press. It has long out stayed its welcome.
The EU started as a union to promote freedom of movement, peace and trade inside Europe. Since then, it has grown to be an oversized bureaucracy that restricts the freedoms of European citizens. Everyone who criticize it is immediately labelled as a right winger.
I am not sure why you are being down-voted. I know people have a distaste for political insights in general here, but it seems apt to have comments like these on an article about protesting a governing body. Why is German Wikipedia having to have a blackout? They are unhappy with the EU restricting their freedoms.
What are you talking about? I don't necessarily support the view of the commenter, but it basically has 3 parts: States what the organization was, what it has become, and why criticism is a point of contention. For someone who knows little about the EU, it's exactly a starting point for discussion. An article like this invites opinions - does one agree with the action of Wikipedia or not? It's a comment - it does not express 'EU Bad' and does what a comment does - it comments. Now, the further discussion can be about whether one agrees with the position put forth. Every comment on here doesn't need to be some essay explaining an opinion - a succinct opinion that invites discussion is actually healthy.
I also don't see the link to the topic at hand: It's not the (debatable) "oversized bureaucracy" that has drafted and works on passing Article 13: It is national governments (see the French / German "deal" on this topic) and the European Parliament (and particularly the EPP) that are the source of Article 13 and the frustration that lead to this blackout.
" It's not the (debatable) "oversized bureaucracy" that has drafted and works on passing Article 13: "
Article 13 is 100% an EU law.
Pointing to the fact that maybe it's really just in the interest of specific French and German entities really only serves to highlight possible existential issues of legitimacy of that body politic.
Also, the fact that Wikipedia and other entities have to take such drastic action, never before seen, leaves no doubt as to how out of touch and unrealistic this legislation is.
Together with the $1.5B in fines today, and of course recent special French taxation legislation intended to get around the fact they view Ireland/Ducth systems as 'havens' ... well it would seem there are indeed some existential problems.
A 'winning' position would be to have something like Google based and operated on the Continent somewhere, generating real returns and exports as well.
All of this is good for discussion, but ultimately they're moves of players with a weak hand.
If long term conditions were set appropriately, the tables would be turned and the problem would be Trump threats on imports (as he does with Volkswagen). Those are 'good problems' to have.
> I downvoted it because the comment has no substance besides "EU bad". It adds nothing of value to the discussion.
A pretty unfair characterization. I found value in of itself, even if that value was merely "this opinion exists"
> Explain why the EU is an "oversized bureaucracy".
In order to explain why you must define how big a bureaucracy must be in order to be considered oversized. Unless two parties can agree on some ground level items, you can't hope to have a productive conversation in good faith.
I am assuming you are at least starting from the position that the EU is indeed a bureaucracy? If not, then allow me to at least explain why I believe it to be so: the EU is very formal and rigid in it's mode of action. It loves process, and it loves sticking to it. It's full of, ironically, idealistic technocrats.
It is, in theory, "oversized" because of the mere principle that bureaucratic processes can have sweeping changes that affect every member. (as an aside: often times without those members having been able to sufficiently voice their opinion, concerns, or have proper representation, thus also making it undemocratic in my opinion. Representation is democratically elected, but it is unbalanced, and all votes don't have equal influence)
Many political thinkers believe the EU should have never expanded beyond Western and Northern Europe, because, among numerous other reasons, the economies and cultures were too different. Indeed, the members that typically have the most grievances with the EU body are those neglected eastern European states, or those of the Mediterranean, namely Greece. In fact one could argue the Euro in of itself brought many of Greece's financial problems onto itself, much less the unfair-to-Greece trade mandates of the EU, but that's a story for another day.
All of this to say, there is plenty of reasoning to argue either way that the EU is "too big" or "just right", but ultimately you have to define what "too big" is, and agree on what you believe the function of governments should be.
It loves process, and it loves sticking to it. It's full of, ironically, idealistic technocrats.
I used to believe that, but the problem is, there's a lot of evidence that the EU is a more classic style of bureaucracy - it sticks to rules when they work in the favour of what the bureaucracy wants, and tears them up the moment the rules would work against them.
There are lots of examples of this in action. The eurozone bailouts. The reclassification of low Irish taxes as a "state subsidy". The ECJ ruling that Article 50 can be unilaterally revoked, even though it says clearly in the treaty that revoking it requires unanimity amongst members. The way Selmayr was elevated to GS of the Commission. The way the Commission changes its mind about whether countries have "equivalent" financial regulations even when no regulations have changed, because they want to impose trade sanctions on those countries as part of unrelated negotiations. There are many more like this.
What's amazing is how flagrant and open it is. The people who ultimately wield the power in the EU simply void the rules publicly and noisily, because they know nothing will happen to them at all. It's very much not a technocratic body, it's entirely and completely political in nature.
> Explain why the EU is an "oversized bureaucracy".
Well if it wasn't then it would be a collection of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels
But that's not what the EU Parliament is, as much as there are issues with it, both people pushing for Art 13 and people against it there were elected.
Sure, the historical reason was to end conflict between neighbors, piggybacking off the already formed connections between European Steel and Coal community.
But indeed, parent's comment was codified in the "four freedoms" explicitly laid out in the early 90s: movement of goods, services, people and money. But even as early as the 1960s, most union members stopped strictly enforcing custom laws with respect to trade, and it was well known border enforcement was extremely relaxed, especially when it came to labor movement. Only the '73 Oil crisis forced some members to crack down on migrant workers, but again, by the time that was resolved, the EU was back to the status quo.
I do not think calling his comment factually incorrect is warranted, but more fair to say it is a more modern take.
> And in the 60s, and 70s...re-read my comment. It is clear you are being intellectually dishonest, and no point in continuing this discussion with you.
Okay, firstly, calm down.
Secondly, I missed that part of your post the first time I read it.
Either I didn't read it thoroughly because I'm at work and my attention is divided (for which I apologise); or you edited your own comment before you replied to me, in an attempt to discredit what I'm saying.
As I'm not as uncharitable as your are in interpreting the intent of other people's posts, I'll assume the mistake was on my part and you are not just a troll.
I'd appreciate it if you extended the same courtesy.
Duly noted. It has been extended it. It wasn't a long comment. Edits were made within the first few minutes, but they were clarifying edits, the content remained the same. Either way, I will chalk this up to a big misunderstanding.
Regarding being labelled a right winger: not necessarily the case. The most left-wing political party in Sweden are against the EU, the Euro, and have a long term goal for Sweden to exit the EU. They "criticize EU for prioritizing the European single market's interest over the environment, public health, worker and consumer interests" [0]
I think this is great, but I think it would be funnier to just replace all the words with Klingon. That way, things would look like they work, but upon closer inspection, not actually work. The effect would be frustration, and could be made worse if done for a random amount of time.
Whoever voted me down on this should understand the regulation and why my response was stated as it was. ( for reference, a good critique of the law is here [0]. )
My main issue is that the offenders are basically no longer really in trouble, but the networks (google, FB, reddit, et al) now are. (yes, that's a simplification, but bear with me).
This is akin to punishing the telephone company whenever someone makes a call on their network as part of a crime.
So, at first glance, everything is normal, until it isn't. Hence my comment about replacing the text on a page with Klingon instead - it looks fine, right up until it doesn't. This mirrors the effect of the law - something looks fine, right up until it's determined to be illegal, and then you are f'ed.
So if you disagree with me, then fine, but at least understand why my comment is there - it is supposed to be insidious, because the law is insidious.
Exit light Enter night Take my hand We're off to Never—, Neverland Now I lay me down to sleep Pray the Lord my soul to keep If I die before I wake Pray the Lord my soul to take
YCombinator is now in violation of article 13. Some filter should have prevented me from posting this.
That is what article 13 is about.
There's never going to be some legal obligation to remove something like the quote you just posted.
Furthermore, since it's a directive each member state will need to implement it in a way that's compatible with both the directive and its own laws. The countries in the EU all have some sort of concept that's analogous to "fair use", even if that's not what they call it.
If you include the above quoted snippet of the song in a youtube video, the probability that it will receive a copyright claim is close to 100%. Fair use is a legal defense that a person can use in court, but the purpose of copyright filters and thus the purpose of Article 13 is to resolve the issue in favor of the author before it end up in court. Article 13 in practice eliminates fair use.
Article 13 do not require copyright filters to consider fair use. If it did we would likely see a very nuanced discussion since it would force youtube to change their system in order to be compliant, but alas thats not the case.
If HN implemented a copyright filter we should expect from experience that such filter would not consider fair use, nor would it enforce copyright on the basis of proportionality. We could claim that this result is not the fault of article 13, but that is a naive perspective.
Youtube filter is there not only to follow the law, but also to please their advertisers/copyright holders.
Their latest change in the filter made Youtuber life so much worst and Youtube definitively know how they depends on theses Youtubers (and are lucky to have them). Thing is the cash come from advertisers/copyright holders and that's a much bigger issue for them right now.
To me that filter is beyond the requirements of the law, not for the law itself, but for the advertisers/copyright holders.
If that would happen, and the blog owner would sue, to which extend would the proportionality relate to real money? $50, $500, $50000?
According to your statement:
(which I'll take at face value as true), we have not just one directive, but 28 separate interpretations and enforcements of it because of the number of countries and their respective fair use language?That's actually even worse!
It's not worse, just different. The EU has a history of experimenting with directives that later become core EU regulations. E.g. the GDPR existed in one form or another for the last 20 years as privacy and data processing rules the EU directed EU/EEA members to implement.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_(European_Union)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union)
I do think it is worse because rather than 27 laws (one for each jurisdiction), you have 1 law with 27 interpretations, and unclear jurisdiction.
For instance, What might be treated as fair use in one jurisdiction could be treated as criminal in another.
In the US, while we may have different state laws, copyright and speech are managed at the Federal level, so there is only one hierarchy to navigate. This resolves the jurisdiction issue. I'm not sure the EU has that same capability in this situation. If so, then wouldn't the fair use situation quickly become harmonized?
The EU isn't making serious crimes like murder, arson etc. illegal, that's left to member states. It regulates market policy. Think something closer to NAFTA than the Federal government.
But if you squint hard you can think of EU directives as some sort of equivalent of the Federal government obligating individual states to regulate a certain topic within a given framework, without spelling out exactly how that must be accomplished.
That allows for local experimentation and flexibility. Whether you think that's a good or a bad thing I guess comes down to the philosophical argument of how close rule making should be to the governed.
I hope they win and that Article 11 and 13 will be removed.
I think this is an important moment in the birth of EU democracy, because it feels to me that one of the first times, there is a big public discussion about an issue and the people at the center aren't national politicians like Merkel or Macron but EU MEPs, namely Voss vs Reda. The EU has rightfully been criticized of not being democratic enough, and this discussion feels like it's very much democratic.
The funny/sad thing is that my people had more say over our country during the communist regime than we have today. The Soviets at least accepted bribes.
BTW yes, most people here would rather be poor and sovereign than the EU alternative. And we had no idea this is what we're joining back in 2004, and no one asked us when it changed - in fact, significant pressure that I deem absolutely unethical was made on our politicians to not let our people decide in a referendum.
You didn't actually have that up until now either.
> now the Germans and the French rule our country
Citation very much needed, unless you mean nominally German and French companies delegating factories and subsidiaries to your country, in which case, that's the point.
> and you people praise the EU for that while my grandfathers died for us to be sovereign
I think if you'd ask them, they died for their children to have a better life, and not having to fight any more wars. Also, a lot of (great)-grandfathers died in countries that are pretty happy to be in the EU; your appeal to nationalism is pretty offensive here.
> BTW yes, most people here would rather be poor and sovereign than the EU alternative.
Your country can just decide to leave. If the burden of delegating some super-national matters to a larger voluntary body becomes too much, you can just opt-out.
Yes, and we liked it.
> Citation very much needed, unless you mean nominally German and French companies delegating factories and subsidiaries to your country, in which case, that's the point.
See how countries are represented in the EP.
> I think if you'd ask them, they died for their children to have a better life, and not having to fight any more wars. Also, a lot of (great)-grandfathers died in countries that are pretty happy to be in the EU; your appeal to nationalism is pretty offensive here.
You know what, I actually asked them. Our nation maintains a project called "memory of the nation" that collects inputs like this from as many important and ordinary people of past times as possible, from various sources such as chronicles, personal diaries, letters, books, court hearings etc as well as actual conversations with them.
It is exactly what I said it is, please don't try to school me on my own nation. Our grandfathers died because they wanted us to be sovereign. Please don't try to change their (well documented) message. The whole thing by itself has nothing to do with nationalism! It is the fact that the western nations have been the oppressors of our people and the (provably) 300+-year old understanding of the whole nation (and its literature, songs, art...) that in order to be free at our homes, the country has to be sovereign - because our ideas about politics and what freedom is are different than yours.
> Your country can just decide to leave. If the burden of delegating some super-national matters to a larger voluntary body becomes too much, you can just opt-out.
It can not. The EU has just shown everyone that it will absolutely and purposefully destroy anyone that tries and severe all their international ties to a state roughly equivalent to the Cold War. On top of that, our country is economically tightly tied to Germany and France and their investors - whatever our citizens want, these foreign investors will work against it, and now their governments (that will naturally protect and help their citizens as much as possible) have the power to override our laws directly, the last thing they lacked.
The Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, or, in short the "Copyright directive" was from 2001. You adhered to that on joining in 2004.
The current proposal build on and extends that, so, in conclusion, you didn't actually have that up until now.
> See how countries are represented in the EP.
Fortunately another poster did your homework for you: "In the countries with 10 million population, you have roughly 500k people per MEP. In Germany & France, it's 850k."
But regardless, MEPs are part of European parties, which, to exist, need to represent a cross section of EU countries. EU matters are sometimes instigated by countries, but signed off on by international political blocks. There are anti-EU parties for you to vote on.
> On top of that, our country is economically tightly tied to Germany and France and their investors
A terrible thing that, employment and economic stability. Fortunately, you can elect a government that throws them out, together with the EU, and nationalise all their property and do it your way. Venezuela did exactly that, and you could join them in their glorious ascent to complete sovereignity.
> The EU has just shown everyone that it will absolutely and purposefully destroy anyone
Citation needed, and I sure hope you're not thinking of "Brexit" as some sort of example here.
> The whole thing by itself has nothing to do with nationalism!
Except for the "our people" and the "noble blood of our forebears" and the "insidious foreign influences" bits.
But we don't want to be a country that nationalises stuff. The point is on the exact opposite of the political scale. We (the citizens) didn't want to sell it away dirt cheap in the first place.
> Fortunately another poster did your homework for you: "In the countries with 10 million population, you have roughly 500k people per MEP. In Germany & France, it's 850k."
How are German and French citizens relevant to the laws of my country, why do they have a say about it in a vote? I don't want to vote about Germany either.
> Except for the "our people" and the "noble blood of our forebears" and the "insidious foreign influences" bits.
Nothing noble about it. There is nothing wrong with cherishing your heritage, especially in case of people just a generation or two away. ;-)
Are you denying history? Our national history has undeniably significantly shaped our whole culture - movies, theatre, language, literature, music, art, ways of parenting and education and so on... Basically the whole Czech culture is build on top of the fight against foreign oppression and the will to gain sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Revival
Our people == citizens, nothing else. When I say nation, I mean people with common cultural background and in most cases citizenship. I don't care about immigrants, economical migrants and even refugees and I support helping them in any way possible, BTW - they're free to live with us, by our rules (or their, if they're citizens already).
It sounds like you want to have the cake and eat it too. Get the benefits of the union but be able to refuse the laws it imposes. If the EU decides on a law, that the majority of the union agrees on but your country doesn't, then your country has the option to leave the union.
Your country might not agree with these laws, other countries might not agree with laws regarding the environment, or human rights, etc. But the union as a whole agrees on them and if you want to benefit from the union then you have to follow.
Whatever the EU is, it's not an "economic union" for at least a decade. We don't want any of that cake, as you say - you forced that upon us, I was talking about that in my previous comment.
And no, our country doesn't have an option to leave. Germans bought key state corporations from the corrupt post-revolution government and they won't let us (the people) do it, on top of that it has been proved that the EU will try to take revenge by all means and not wanting to be in the EU means they will destroy you. So much for the "friendship among nations" goal - paid friendship is not friendship.
why not leave some space for local regulation and souvereignity?
Your real enemy is globalization and modern conveniences of globally cheap goods, and globally high quality goods being available for you to purchase and manufacture and export. The alternatives are somewhere on a sliding scale between Norway / Switzerland to North Korea. The closer you are geographically to Europe, the more you'd need to be like North Korea to maintain the kind of independence you think you want, because the game theoretics of inter-nation competition demand that competitors follow international rules.
For that we need our citizens to be as free in doing business as possible, and for the whole thing to be as easy as possible. The EU is directly influencing our economical growth and technological and societal progression in this way.
What sovereignty are you talking about? The one we had before WW2, right before we were occupied by Germans? Or after WW2, that brief moment before we were controlled and later even occupied by Russians? That sovereignty is an illusion, especially in today's interconnected world. We can either be small and be controlled by the big ones or be a small part of a big one. Is EU perfect? Certainly not. We can talk about reforms. But despite all shortcomings, I would still say that being part of the EU is the best era of our history.
And saying that people had more say over our country during the communist regime than we have today... that contradicts my experience and this is the sentiment I would like to express in the strongest possible terms.
And I would not be so sure about what "most people here would rather..." - if I might share my position on this: I voted yes to join the EU in order to get roughly what I got and I would not change my vote.
Just my $0.02 - article 13 is not about what Germans and French want, it is about what powerful lobbies want - being outside of EU would not save us from something like that despite what majority of the country wants - the fact is that we were not overruled; check the stances of our representatives (https://saveyourinternet.eu/cz) - unless there is some other mountains-surrounded country I do not know about, most of our MEPs voted for the article 13.
In the countries with 10 million population, you have roughly 500k people per MEP. In Germany & France, it's 850k.
If you add up the seats of the 6 countries with roughly 10 million people, you get 126. If you add up the seats of Germany and France, you get 175. So the small countries are definitely not irrelevant. Can a single country decide on a matter on their own? No. But with 28 (soon 27) states, requiring consent of every single country would render the EU unable to take actions on issues.
The countries of the EU, including Germany, can't survive on their own in a world where there's the USA, China and India. We need a strong entity that protects european values world-wide.
Also, this isn't a new thing either. Think of Charles IV. a czech ruler of the HRE which included both today's Germany and today's Czech republic.
Then the Habsburgs gradually took that away from us and that made us angry in a poetic way in the 1770's, which has caused the Czech National Revival and has formed all of contemporary Czech culture.
I mean, GDPR is bad enough for start ups, but Article 13?
I’m pretty close to the rough-end of GDPR in my current job, but it represents real benefits for millions of people. If you asked them what’s a reasonable way to treat their data, I believe the GDPR is close-ish to what a lot of Europeans would want. Or, at least a shift in the right direction.
Article 13 on the other hand is what you get if you ask rights-holders groups what they want, and poses a direct threat to freedom of expression for millions of Europeans.
I'm pretty sure that if you asked people whether they would prefer to pay for Facebook and Google with cash or by sharing data for ad targeting, most would choose the latter. The GDPR specifically forbids that option.
Article 13 on the other hand is what you get if you ask rights-holders groups what they want, and poses a direct threat to freedom of expression for millions of Europeans.
And it demonstrates the impossibility of having a powerful bureaucracy that does only the things that you want.
They were rather happy to do so since one of its selling points is that they do not track users for advertising. Do not underestimate the general publics tracking/advertising fatigue.
You won't get the majority of people on Facebook to pay for the service after you've been giving it to them for "free" for 10 years, you'd maybe convert 10% if that, at which point what use is facebook with most of the users gone?
But a competitor can emerge by providing an alternative service, for a fee, marketing it as "the service that doesn't spy on you".
Now, sure, that will be a niche service, and social networks can't be niche services. The protonmail of facebook or twitter will probably never emerge.
I couldn't care less about anyone outside my family, if they want to contact me they can email or call me by phone.
But I agree with you on the principle that bureaucracy very seldom does only the things I want.
Do you have a source for that?
Permission must be freely given in order to be valid. It is not freely given, if access to a service requires the permission and that permission is not strictly necessary for the service.
However I believe it is good that such option is forbidden, after all the years of abuse of user data at the hands of Google, Facebook and other advertisement companies. Note that ads can still be shown without all the creepy targeting, and ads could still be used to pay for the service, without stealing user data (yes, I call it stealing, because these companies go to great lengths to trick the user into giving the permission). It remains to be shown if ads without tracking could be sustainable to keep services free.
First, it's important to distinguish between the types of lawful bases with which you are processing data. For example, if you were to provide a service of targeting ads to people, you do not need consent to collect the data you need to target your ads: because you are simply fulfilling the contract. One of the problems with the current Facebooks and Googles of the world is that they assume you don't want targeted ads. I think this is an enormous mistake. Sign me up for targeted ads! I want them! I will freely give you information so that I can get targeted ads! In reality, the Faebooks of and Googles of the world are not offering targeted ads. They are offering indiscriminate ads and also selling your data. This is incredibly important to understand.
Next, even if we decide to offer a service and ask for consent for collection of non-related information, there is nothing stopping us from paying for that collection (as far as I can tell). The law states that consent must be "freely given", however this "freely given" means that you can't threaten consequences for non-consent. There is no provision for thanking your customers.
In other words, I'm pretty sure you can charge $5 a month for a service and then give $5 a month worth of credit as a thank you for being able to use your data. (Note: I tried to find some kind of verification of this, but was unable to find a discussion of it either way. I would be grateful for some evidence even if it contradicts my thesis ;-) )
However, there are massive caveats. First you must inform the customers what you are doing with their data and who your are sending it to. Second you must allow them to withdraw their consent. If they withdraw their consent then you must also do everything in your power to notify the downstream data processors to also stop using that data.
And I think that's the real reason you don't see the Facebooks and Googles of the world trying this. They don't want to work with the data in a trackable way. They want to do whatever the heck they want with your data forever. They don't want to inform you that they've sent your data to an organisation that you might disapprove of. They don't want to allow you to cancel your consent without cancelling your service and also do whatever is necessary to stop the downstream processor from using your data if you object.
There is usually a lot of vitriol here when we discuss GDPR however usually this is a result of distilling the argument down to an either/or situation. Either the company is an abusive monster or the law is trying to remove a legitimate business model. It overlooks the idea that there are serious problems with the way this business model works right now and the law attempts to improve that situation in ways that are both useful and frustrating.
Edit: At the risk of bringing the wrath of the EU down upon my employer, I just realised that we offer a 25 GBP voucher for agreeing to sign up to our newsletter. So, there is at least 1 company who does this and I really don't think there is anything wrong with it.
The same I was getting at here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805856
in fact I think I used to get more relevant ads some years ago.
Well, it's never gone to court yet, so I guess you can't say for sure. But that's how it's widely interpreted.
"To access this website you agree to all our privacy invasion and to sell us your soul. We are not asking you, just informing you."
What is now forbidden is to gather identifiable data about people without consent and ability to remove it.
Yes, in the same way (as an exaggerated example) it forbids people selling their organs for profit or jobs with no salary etc
But the parent is right, this is not only about companies, this has a direct impact on users and freedom of expression
They would chose not to have Google and Facebook. The basic principals of capitalism that products are something people want or need. Surveillance capitalism gets around this by exploiting the fact that an average citizen does know nothing about data collection and its scale and the implications for their privacy. GDPR is trying to fix this and also the fuck all attitude to security that most companies have.
All I can say is that this is not my lived experience of Google and Facebook in the EU. This is also not those companies’ interpretation of that law (nor a common one).
There are real arguments against the burden the GDPR puts on companies who hold/process significant PII (which I am sympathetic to), but this is not one of them.
> ... powerful bureaucracy that does only the things that you want.
The same could be said of any democracy. My point is that there is no democratic basis for Article 13. It’s only getting support because IP law is too boring and abstract for most people to get worked up about.
the two aren't mutually exclusive and Europe is right now in a deep growth slump also caused by middle class not moving into entrepreneurship due all the red tape and inefficiencies around having to deal with the particularities of every European state, with the EU aggregating without unifying a mess of regional particularities (i.e. vatmoss)
we desperately need the EU to cater both to the individual and the small business interests working out the kinks of the common market.
Another instance in most EU countries tips (in restaurants/bars) should be subject of VAT, not in the UK for instance.
Different exceptions for deductibles like water for employees (but not coffee and so on)
Add to that mistranslated directives (!), misinformed and uncooperative tax officials and you quickly realize that both "ease of doing business" and the single market are all a bunch of baloney. If I ever launch a B2C service, you can bet your ass I won't be aiming it at the EU market. I'll leave that for when I can afford an expert to handle all the bureaucratic nonsense that doing business in the EU involves.
GDPR was intended to be good for peoples privacy. Pro-climate policies are meant to be good for the climate.
Somethings gotta give. People are generally more important than startups. Climate is generally more important than economy. Because without people, there are no startups. And without climate, there is no economy, people, or startups.
Not the people, not the startups, not the EU companies.
There are things to be said about GDPR and climate, but not so much about article 13. It's just retarded and insane. These people have totally no clue.
"Artificial intelligence can recognize faces today, filter out preferences and even park independently. It should be easy to distinguish between original and parody." - Says the Germany's equivalent to the RIAA
https://twitter.com/gema_news/status/1098263167636041729
Idiots like this fool are also running the EU, my god was the internet a great place before his ilk got here.
> pro-climate policies are never intended to be good for the economy
> without climate, there is no economy, people, or startups
I happen to be a small business owner in the EU and I have many customers who are the same. We all have registered with the ICO (UK) for something like £60 pa and filled in a short questionnaire. We have read the clear guidance on what records to keep and what to not keep - it's not rocket science. That is GDPR for most small businesses. Now, if your business is predicated on building profiles on people or pestering them on the phone or flogging ads etc then I can't help you there - it may be a pain.
Now Article 13: It is designed to try and make the likes of YouTube responsible for not carrying copyrighted works by putting the onus back on them. I believe they hide behind carrier status. I understand that A13 looks a bit like an anti-meme effort but it isn't because that is generally covered by parody or reasonable use regulations.
In the end, are you really sure you want the world to block us?
Yes. Let's end the cycle of pretending that we can prevent information from being free.
Copyright is a dinosaur of an idea that belongs in the annals of history and out of the present.
I know of numerous photographers who find their work ripped-off; without copyright protection they would have no comeback on that.
Copyright is a power grab around that fact. It wouldn't matter as much if they didn't extend it to a duration of two lifetimes.
Then don't copyright the content you make, just release it out into the public domain. Be the change you want to see.
But let's be honest, the people most vocal against Article 13 are those who want to leech other people's creations for free. Not those people actually creating the content.
Why would such people be at all concerned about Article 13? Torrent sites and swarms have been in flagrant disregard of the law since forever, one more law isn't going to change much. Likewise the other popular pirate mechanism, the old "upload an archive with the content to Mega or similar" technique, already frequently uses encrypted archives to make sure only people coming through the right channel (often an ad laden website + several even more ad laden URL shorteners) get access to the content, making a filter requirement ineffectual there as well.
News agencies know they are using dark patterns to skirt by GDPR while still using targeted advertising but since they know the fines will eventually start hitting, they want to move to paywalls. However, A paywall for a news company is practically useless as any major story one makes gets linked to and paraphrased by dozens of other news agencies within minutes. Users won't pay for a news website when they can get practically the same stories only slightly delayed at a free one that just paraphrases and links back to the original. Article 11 solves that problem and article 13 is to prevent 1 user who does pay for a website from copying the entire article and pasting it in a comment (I see that and archive/outline links all the time here and on reddit).
If we're going to be completely honest here, this is constructed as a personal attack and therefore doesn't merit the storage it takes up.
When someone plays music at an event, the collecting society will try to collect royalties from them, even if it's just CC or public-domain music, and the organiser is guilty until proven innocent.
That's exactly the problem. Stuff of that is protected, and with good reason. But upload filter that would be mandated by article 13 can't detect that fair use. By enforcing them for all platforms like Youtube all of this will vanish from the european internet.
Do you think I will stay in Europe with my company if this bill passes? You must be crazy.
Yes, you just need to find a way of convincing filters your parody is a parody (or other types of fair use) and not C.I. Oh wait there's no way
Well this is a double edge sword. EU still produces something like 20% of the global GDP and if a company can ignore such a market than let it be. There will be many alternative projects spawn to fill the market need (if there is a real one, not talking about surveillance capitalism products here). Is this that bad for the EU? I don't think so.
Article 13 is straight up impossible to implement.
most startups can and will. but it basically adds up the requirement of lawyering up to every startup that wants to operate here de facto annihilating the possibility for single man operations to bootstrap an idea cashless.
and someone has to write that policy and someone has to be your dpo. and that's operating costs that a garage level startup will not be able to sustain.
If you are of the position that the popular extremely invasive form of "marketing" is something that absolutely has to happen, then what I say will never apply to you. Especially as it pertains to it being self-evident that you're not violating anyone's rights.
It's like Brexit that way.
Also: as said elsewhere, article 13 is probably all good news for YouTube, so I doubt that they do anything deeply confrontational. Plus, even if they did, they would just be portrayed as evil lobbying/scheming bastards arm twisting the EU into giving them what they want.
This part is not clear to me. On one hand they are big enough to prevent copyrighted material being published. They could also offer filtering services to smaller parties.
But on the other hand, YouTube is still full of copyrighted material. You can find basically any videoclip, cd-rip, or anything else on there. There are even entire movie rips on there, that regularly get deleted. Do they currently pay some big license owner a fee for this? I don't think so (but I'm not sure).
So if this article 13 passes, YouTube will have to remove all of this material. Not only that, but they have to prevent such material being published in the first place. Or somehow make sure that a certain videoclip/cd-rip is payed off to the proper license owner.
I'm not sure if it's even possible for YouTube to make such a filter, without having either a lot of false negatives or positives.
Yep, it's going to be just another "oh lol there's a protest" and a week later nobody remembers it.
I'd be happy if wikimedia just completely blocked all of Europe for a 2-3 weeks.
The constant conflating of the two by private data protection oponents is really wearing thin.
The copyright directive is a whole different beast. Those two don't belong together.
I am saying that after implementing GDPR for a large organization with millions of customers and multiple departments.
Honestly, if your business can't survive without adhering to basic data protection principles then the world is better of without your company.
As a user, article 13 is bad for me.
Why?
The last thing I want is to give even more power to these obsolete middlemen to act as gatekeepers of information and culture.
I'm not totally against copyright as an idea, but I'm certainly against the form of it we have now.
What?? I have maned to full GDPR compliant product in several startups. What am I doing wrong?
Why is it that other EU Wikipedia language editions like French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish not joining in the protests? Did they come up with a different conclusion on the potential impact of the new copyright directive? Can people who know about the politics of other EU language Wikipedia comment whether they had discussed of joining this black out?
I think I would prefer a banner or a landing page more as it doesn't introduce any barrier to the information they provide.
When that debate is about access to that information, definitely, yes.
> “Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, [but] its existence is not.”
You might disagree with that position, but if you expect Wikipedia as a platform to be neutral, you have not been paying attention.
But I would not have supported this, I just don't believe these kind of a stunts are effective, just annoying to users. Everybody already has copyright-directive-warning-fatigue. If you must you can put up a banner.
If that is you experience, I think you might be living in a bit of a bubble (as we all do, arguably). Anecdotally, I know quite a few people who seem to be pretty unaware of the whole discussion.
Besides the site being super slow right now, I couldn't even figure out how to actually find _my_ representative. Is my representative the one of the city where I live? How can I search by city? Is this even by city? Doesn't seem so. So now I have a list of 96 random people. Which ones can actually influence this? Or which one actually need their opinion changed?
I also wouldn't really know how to contact them - just send an email and write that I hate that the make so bad politics that Wikipedia had to shut down their site in protest?
Politics is hard :/
1. In the style sheet, remove:
2. In the HTML, remove: That's all I could find on a few page visits.(I'm somewhat conflicted on using and/or helping circumventing wikipedias efforts)
They could have done better.
If I anonymously upload copyrighted material to YouTube, I can sue YouTube. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Pinterest, Imgur, Instagram, ... .
I'm building a platform where anyone can make a game and share it. If someone names his game "Zelda" or "Tetris", I can get sued. If my competitor uploads his own material to my site, they can sue me.
Theses platforms should have "automated filters that detect copyrighted material, and make a distinction between original and parody". If you know of such system, please tell me.
Staying in Europe with a user content platform makes no sense.
That's the whole point in this useless proposed jurisdiction. Such automated filters cannot exist and will never exist. We don't have strong AI which is trained to detect copyright violations, and there never will be one. Such a system would first to know what a protectable work is (in all possible formats). Then it would have to detect violations (in all possible formats). And then it needs to be available to all internet platforms which allows user content, such as e. g. Wikipedia, hackernews or reddit. This is even impossible to implement for Facebook or Google. So why changing a perfectly fine copyright law to something not implementable?
Everybody needs to geoblock EU clients, even every little block with a comments section.
You originally had no idea the images were not the property of the creator of the poster (how could you?), but as soon as you are made aware of the problem you remove the poster in a timely manner.
Does it make perfect sense to you that I (owner of the images) can now successfully sue you (the owner of the store and provider of the bulletin board service) for copyright infringement, and have you pay damages to me as compensation for the time the poster was visible at the bulletin board?
More importantly, do you think making the store owner vulnerable to litigation is 1. in line with how similar laws usually work? 2. a fair administration of justice? 3. a net benefit to the town and society at large?
Previously it was enough that they removed the content when they were notified about it; this didn't create such huge chilling effect for most content.
As no public platform will take this risk and users don't want to pay the extra money the platform needs to build or buy the impossible content filters it would need.
Making money by breaking the law should not be allowed I agree. But currently these laws (copyright) are more due for a refactoring than the medium (internet) itself. As these laws are not well balanced between all parties involved, especially with all the possibilities in the current age.
Re Article 13 and placing increased pressure against the DCMA, you'll probably stop seeing so many 1080p movies on YouTube (hence NewPipe) when you search for "x264 YIFY". That sucks.
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- Christel Schaldemose - +4540768626 - christel.schaldemose@ep.europa.eu - https://twitter.com/schaldemosemep
- Anders Primdahl Vistisen - +4553860080 - anders.vistisen@europarl.europa.eu - https://twitter.com/AndersVistisen
This site explains it well i think: https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/eu-copyright-final-text/
If you want to raise awareness, why do a half-assed job?
No so interesting. I was hoping to get a deeper dive into why they disagree with the upcoming law.
Exit light Enter night Take my hand We're off to Never—, Neverland Now I lay me down to sleep Pray the Lord my soul to keep If I die before I wake Pray the Lord my soul to take
These are the lyrics of Metallica "Enter Sandman".
YCombinator can now get sued because they didn't filter out my post. They unlawfully published copyrighted material.
Without this law, I would be liable. With this law, YCombinator is liable too.
The cooperation between online content service providers and rightholders shall not result in the prevention of the availability of works or other subject matter uploaded by users which do not infringe copyright and related rights, including where such works or subject matter are covered by an exception or limitation.
Member States shall ensure that users in all Member States are able to rely on the following existing exceptions and limitations when uploading and making available content generated by users on online content sharing services: a) quotation, criticism, review, b) use for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche.
It would however forbid you to post that lyrics without any commentary or some sort of relection.
[1]: https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Art_13_unoff...
Say your prayers, little one Don't forget, my son To include everyone I tuck you in, warm within Keep you free from sin Until the sandman he comes
[Pre-Chorus] Sleep with one eye open Gripping your pillow tight
[Chorus] Exit light Enter night Take my hand We're off to never never-land
[Verse 2] Something's wrong, shut the light Heavy thoughts tonight And they aren't of Snow White Dreams of war Dreams of liars Dreams of dragons fire And of things that will bite, yeah
[Pre-Chorus] Sleep with one eye open Gripping your pillow tight
[Chorus] Exit light Enter night Take my hand We're off to Never Never-land
[Guitar Solo]
[Interlude] Now I lay me down to sleep (Now I lay me down to sleep) Pray the lord my soul to keep (Pray the lord my soul to keep) And If I die before I wake (If I die before I wake) Pray the lord my soul to take (Pray the lord my soul to take)
[Bridge] Hush, little baby, don't say a word And never mind that noise you heard It's just the beast under your bed In your closet, in your head
[Chorus] Exit light Enter night Grain of sand Exit light Enter night Take my hand We're off to Never Never-land
[Interlude] Come on people Hey yeah, oh oh yeah
[Outro] We're off to never never-land Take my hand We're off to never never-land Take my hand We're off to never never-land
Article 13 includes those exemptions.
Publishers like YouTube can't cope with those exemptions and have implemented a baffling system where copyright material is either:
- freely available and monetised to the uploader not the rights holder
- freely available and monetised to the person claiming to be the rights holder (they may not be the rights holder)
-available with restrictions ("not available in this country")
- blocked completely, with copyright strikes against the uploader, even if the upload carefully obeys copyright laws.
This is mostly a problem with lazy publishers, but complex and inconsistent international laws don't make it easy.
We're already at a point where copyright severely restricts our ability to share our own culture. A couple of years ago we lost what was, by far, the greatest music collection ever put together. Meticulously maintained by people who love music, but destroyed by people who love money. It pains me that people can't even put up YouTube videos with certain music in the background. People can't record their actual lives because parts of their life are owned by other people.
Copyright belongs in the day of the printing press. It has long out stayed its welcome.
Explain why the EU is an "oversized bureaucracy".
Article 13 is 100% an EU law.
Pointing to the fact that maybe it's really just in the interest of specific French and German entities really only serves to highlight possible existential issues of legitimacy of that body politic.
Also, the fact that Wikipedia and other entities have to take such drastic action, never before seen, leaves no doubt as to how out of touch and unrealistic this legislation is.
Together with the $1.5B in fines today, and of course recent special French taxation legislation intended to get around the fact they view Ireland/Ducth systems as 'havens' ... well it would seem there are indeed some existential problems.
A 'winning' position would be to have something like Google based and operated on the Continent somewhere, generating real returns and exports as well.
All of this is good for discussion, but ultimately they're moves of players with a weak hand.
If long term conditions were set appropriately, the tables would be turned and the problem would be Trump threats on imports (as he does with Volkswagen). Those are 'good problems' to have.
A pretty unfair characterization. I found value in of itself, even if that value was merely "this opinion exists"
> Explain why the EU is an "oversized bureaucracy".
In order to explain why you must define how big a bureaucracy must be in order to be considered oversized. Unless two parties can agree on some ground level items, you can't hope to have a productive conversation in good faith.
I am assuming you are at least starting from the position that the EU is indeed a bureaucracy? If not, then allow me to at least explain why I believe it to be so: the EU is very formal and rigid in it's mode of action. It loves process, and it loves sticking to it. It's full of, ironically, idealistic technocrats.
It is, in theory, "oversized" because of the mere principle that bureaucratic processes can have sweeping changes that affect every member. (as an aside: often times without those members having been able to sufficiently voice their opinion, concerns, or have proper representation, thus also making it undemocratic in my opinion. Representation is democratically elected, but it is unbalanced, and all votes don't have equal influence)
Many political thinkers believe the EU should have never expanded beyond Western and Northern Europe, because, among numerous other reasons, the economies and cultures were too different. Indeed, the members that typically have the most grievances with the EU body are those neglected eastern European states, or those of the Mediterranean, namely Greece. In fact one could argue the Euro in of itself brought many of Greece's financial problems onto itself, much less the unfair-to-Greece trade mandates of the EU, but that's a story for another day.
All of this to say, there is plenty of reasoning to argue either way that the EU is "too big" or "just right", but ultimately you have to define what "too big" is, and agree on what you believe the function of governments should be.
I used to believe that, but the problem is, there's a lot of evidence that the EU is a more classic style of bureaucracy - it sticks to rules when they work in the favour of what the bureaucracy wants, and tears them up the moment the rules would work against them.
There are lots of examples of this in action. The eurozone bailouts. The reclassification of low Irish taxes as a "state subsidy". The ECJ ruling that Article 50 can be unilaterally revoked, even though it says clearly in the treaty that revoking it requires unanimity amongst members. The way Selmayr was elevated to GS of the Commission. The way the Commission changes its mind about whether countries have "equivalent" financial regulations even when no regulations have changed, because they want to impose trade sanctions on those countries as part of unrelated negotiations. There are many more like this.
What's amazing is how flagrant and open it is. The people who ultimately wield the power in the EU simply void the rules publicly and noisily, because they know nothing will happen to them at all. It's very much not a technocratic body, it's entirely and completely political in nature.
Well if it wasn't then it would be a collection of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels
But that's not what the EU Parliament is, as much as there are issues with it, both people pushing for Art 13 and people against it there were elected.
But indeed, parent's comment was codified in the "four freedoms" explicitly laid out in the early 90s: movement of goods, services, people and money. But even as early as the 1960s, most union members stopped strictly enforcing custom laws with respect to trade, and it was well known border enforcement was extremely relaxed, especially when it came to labor movement. Only the '73 Oil crisis forced some members to crack down on migrant workers, but again, by the time that was resolved, the EU was back to the status quo.
I do not think calling his comment factually incorrect is warranted, but more fair to say it is a more modern take.
A modern take on the EU now or in the 90's doesn't change anything about how and why it was started.
He said something that was simply untrue.
And in the 60s, and 70s...re-read my comment. It is clear you are being intellectually dishonest, and no point in continuing this discussion with you.
Okay, firstly, calm down.
Secondly, I missed that part of your post the first time I read it.
Either I didn't read it thoroughly because I'm at work and my attention is divided (for which I apologise); or you edited your own comment before you replied to me, in an attempt to discredit what I'm saying.
As I'm not as uncharitable as your are in interpreting the intent of other people's posts, I'll assume the mistake was on my part and you are not just a troll.
I'd appreciate it if you extended the same courtesy.
I thought the EU started as a means to regulate industrial production, then later evolved into what you describe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
Guess the Dutch Socialist Party and hard Green Party (PvdD) are right-wing now
[0]https://www.vansterpartiet.se/politik/eu/
My main issue is that the offenders are basically no longer really in trouble, but the networks (google, FB, reddit, et al) now are. (yes, that's a simplification, but bear with me).
This is akin to punishing the telephone company whenever someone makes a call on their network as part of a crime.
So, at first glance, everything is normal, until it isn't. Hence my comment about replacing the text on a page with Klingon instead - it looks fine, right up until it doesn't. This mirrors the effect of the law - something looks fine, right up until it's determined to be illegal, and then you are f'ed.
So if you disagree with me, then fine, but at least understand why my comment is there - it is supposed to be insidious, because the law is insidious.
[0] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/final-version-eus-copy...