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Illegal Memes? Weak Safe Harbor? Unpacking the Proposed EU Copyright Overhaul
- dixie_land 8y agoif you wanna know how freedom of speech in EU is gonna like in 2 years, just look at China. 5 years? Kim is nodding at you
- frockington 8y ago2 years? Look at the current state of the UK, at least Kim is giving the appearance of desiring transperncy
- ben_w 8y agoUK doesn’t count, won’t be in the EU in two years and the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act were both given as reasons to leave by those who campaigned to do so.
- DanBC 8y ago> Look at the current state of the UK Which case are you thinking about in particular?
- pitaj 8y agoCount Dankula I assume, among others.
- lumberjack 8y agoEach European country has its own laws, but most countries never had anything resembling "freedom of speech" as an American would understand it. Every country has a list of "limitations" on free speech. It is also not something people care about.
- fipar 8y agoEvery country has "limitations", including the US. See, for example, the obscenity trials in the US.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 8y agoThe number of people in this thread pretending that ECHR article 10 doesn't exist is far too high.
- throwawayjava 8y agolumberjack did not say that the EU does not have a freedom of expression. lumberjack did say that the EU doesn't have freedom of speech "as an American would understand it". Article 10 of the ECHR as interpreted by the ECtHR is very different from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as presently interpreted by SCOTUS. It's also worth noting that the First Amendment as presently interpreted by SCOTUS protects some speech that was not always unambiguously protected; see e.g., a good fraction of humans pre-1970-or-so, the evolution of the court's treatment of obscenity, speech in the schoolhouse, and so on. In some sense, even previous Americans didn't have freedom of speech as a modern American would understand it.
- maxk42 8y agoAnd you're pretending ECHR Article 10 § 2 doesn't exist. Freedom of speech isn't freedom of speech if there's a giant asterisk next to it.
- antientropic 8y agoFreedom of speech is not a binary thing. No country in the world has absolute freedom of speech. However most EU member states are among the most free in the world (see e.g. https://rsf.org/en/ranking https://rsf.org/en/ranking).
- creaghpatr 8y agoI thought EU countries don't have a legal right to free speech?
- joejerryronnie 8y agoWell, you can pass laws blatantly targeting a major world religion, you just can't talk about it out loud.
- petepete 8y ago> Well, you can pass laws blatantly targeting a major world religion Which one would that be?
- toolslive 8y agoIt's more dangerous to target a certain minor religion ( ~14.5e+6 followers )
- ben_w 8y agoPeople targeting that religion are what ended up causing the human rights laws that say we shouldn’t target religions. I think also the right to join a trade union, though that might have something to do with who was on the winning side in the war that made all of this an issue anyone really cared about.
- mschuster91 8y ago> Which one would that be? Anti-burqa laws, e.g. in Austria.
- pjc50 8y agoECHR article 10: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Convention_on_Human_Rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_C...
- ben_w 8y ago
- zerostar07 8y agoEuropeans at large dont seem to care for freedoms like that. I mean we have blasphemy laws in many countries and not really free speech. We seem to love the american internet though, perhaps because we can have some actual freedom of speech there.
- gowld 8y agoYour national/EU laws apply to your activity on the American Internet.
- zerostar07 8y agoNot if you re not using your real identity, and even then its more complicated than if the companies were local. They would simply be shut down.
- gowld 8y agoWhich Kim?
- protomyth 8y agoKim Jong-un of North Korea
- yasp 8y agoWith this and GDPR the EU is seemingly begging to be cordoned off from the broader internet.
- dzek69 8y agoGdpr is actually a good thing. It's at least weird that USA-based companies must follow it, but the law itself is very good thing for a customer and not that bad for companies until they like collecting data and doing dirty stuff with it.
- closeparen 8y agoA fundamental right to remuneration for your creative work that can’t be signed away is in exactly the same spirit as a fundamental right to privacy that can’t be signed away. In both cases you start with a legal protection that’s good and necessary in some cases, declare it a travesty that people are signing away that right en masse against the EU’s opinion of their best interests, and close the door to that sort of contract. In both cases this flies in the face of established internet customs, so you shrug and say “in a society there must be rules, you can’t escape the law just because you’re on the internet and have gotten used to doing it.”
- joejerryronnie 8y agoAnd this is how power hungry people/organizations throughout history have implemented disastrous policies in the interest of the "greater good".
- ben_w 8y agoIt’s also how and why pretty much every law in the history of humanity gets written, so singling out only the worst examples doesn’t really say if it is our worst tendency or our best.
- cesarb 8y ago> fundamental right to privacy that can’t be signed away If you're talking about the GDPR, from what I understand you can sign your privacy away. What can't be done, is to require you to sign your privacy away as a condition to use some service, unless there's no way to provide that service without using your personal data.
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoAnybody building a colo facility in Antigua? old: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/antigua-legitimate-piracy https://www.wired.co.uk/article/antigua-legitimate-piracy
- tannhaeuser 8y agoI have yet to see an informed discussion about this law anywhere. The "copyright" (if there were such a thing) reform is about regulating two things - display of StackOverflow, Wikipedia, news, and other (commercial) info content full-text in link previews of search machines and news aggregators and discussion boards - requirement for file sharing platforms to make an effort to check user uploads for "copyright" infringements. I understand the latter is to fill a gap where file sharing platforms just shrug-away accusations of large scale copyright infringement by their users, yet receive all the economic benefit. Obviously, scanning upload content for infringement isn't technically feasible without also requiring publishers to somehow register content/hashes to claim commercial rights, and mechanisms in place for resolving disputes, etc. The law text as it is written seems also too broadly applicable. Because of these flaws, the content filtering part should maybe be unbundled into a separate law after further discussion. I also believe the Web can come up with technical superior, more practical solutions. For example, using HTML metadata to tag content, embedding and linking content from an origin site, and/or exposing snippets as public syndication feeds. In fact, these mechanisms have been in place for such a long time that they might've been forgotten already. I don't have a definite opinion yet. I guess if one accepts the EU is mainly an institution concerned with common economic market conditions, it should strive to make the Web work better for content creators than it is now with very few ad networks raking in cash. OTOH, link preview and content scanning laws are obviously lobbied for by big media (the former by German newspapers as it seems, the latter supposedly by Hollywood and music publishers).
- pjc50 8y ago- requirement for file sharing platforms to make an effort to check user uploads for "copyright" infringements. This is a lot bigger than it sounds, though; it turns upload from something that can be implemented in a weekend to something that requires reimplementing content-id. It also seems to mandate cloud storage systems to go rummaging through your files for infringement. If it applies to images and copyright is effectively restored to photographers, that's also the end of tumblr and imgur. Or just banning Europe, again :(
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago> Obviously, scanning upload content for infringement isn't technically feasible without also requiring publishers to somehow register content/hashes to claim commercial rights, and mechanisms in place for resolving disputes, etc. It isn't feasible at all. It's already common to upload encrypted zip files and distribute the passphrase with the link, as a method of privacy protection against the hosting provider. But that obviously also defeats any kind of hashing or fingerprinting system and would be employed universally by pirates as soon as any such thing was mandated. It's just a garbage law that imposes costs and yields no benefits.
- EdSharkey 8y agoAnybody else catch this delicious tidbit? > Unpublished research carried out on behalf of the European Commission at a cost of $400,000 suggests that unauthorized uploads are not a pressing problem: "In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements." Unpublished, eh? Sounds like a whistleblower in the bureaucracy is trying to torpedo this turd. Pretty weak attempt though. Next, leak some memos or emails showing government apparatchiks plotting against citizen dissenters who've used clever memes against them and then we've got a bombshell story! ;)
- captnWillard 8y agoThe bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it.
- c3o 8y agoNot a whistleblower, a member of the European Parliament with FOIA requests: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/ https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...
- EdSharkey 8y agoLaudable citizen action!
- tracker1 8y ago"By using this site, you agree to hold it's owners, management and developers harmless for any materials which users uploaded and did not have appropriate license to upload." Along with the Cookie, and GDPR notices. In order to "scan" and report, you have to agree to said TOS.