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TLDR: Excuse me, but MEP Julia Reda always uses strong languages and makes a civil liberties drama from everything (it's her job after all). AFAICT, the rights
by tannhaeuser 8y ago
TLDR:
Excuse me, but MEP Julia Reda always uses strong languages and makes a civil liberties drama from everything (it's her job after all). AFAICT, the rights and interest at stake are
1. the commercial and moral rights of content creators (well not the content creators themselves but their original publishers)
2. the rights of providers of search engines (Google) to scrape content from news publishers to the extent that users aren't visiting the news site, but get everything from the SERP page already; it's a similar problem with Wikipedia articles presented in full or large parts on Google's SERP
3. and, unrelated but combined into the same directive, a new law that would require platforms to make an effort to detect "copyrighted" (if there were such a thing in EU law) content
Maybe there's also a law involved that would make linking to "illegally provided", "copyrighted" content unlawful.
The major pros/cons discussed are
- search engines argueing that they are executing fair use rights, and are helping to discover content which news publishers were happy with in the past and want them to continue to do
- restricting fair use rights creating a case for restrictions of other fair use such as academic or journalistic quotation
- content scanning only feasible for large platforms, thereby only helping defacto monopolies
- the two issues not belonging into the same law.
Please downvote or criticize if you have an issue with this synopsis.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoTo be clear, I don't have an opinion on these issues yet. I respect commercial interests of content producers. For me, making everything free for all just because it's technically feasible/trivial isn't a solution and will just result in pushing more power to platforms. OTOH, I believe the material issue with news scraping could be very easily and practically solved by - using RSS or other syndication format rather than full-page scraping, or using HTML metadata to limit what search engines may display - using HTML metadata, deep linking/embedding or giving credit (like is done for photo credits) for citing larger excerpts My gut reaction to implementing user content scanning, or any other technical details is that something like that has no place in this law. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent of the law, in that it's a lesser evil compared to making platforms liable for damages by uploaded "copyrighted" user content.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoThis threat has really degraded into irrational rants against ... whatever. For a more balanced, still pro-civil rights view I'd recommend [1] (in German, with a focus on German parliamentary politics). [1]: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/eu-staaten-sprechen-sich-fuer-upload-filter-und-leistungsschutzrecht-aus/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/eu-staaten-sprechen-sich-fuer-u...