23 ms·

I'm very pro-EU in general but this path they are on now is a step too far for me. Way overstepping their mandate.

walterbell 8y ago
Is it possible that a small number of strategic EU legislative roles have been newly influenced/captured by special interests? E.g. the Axel Springers of the world have long held certain positions. Why are they getting their way now, in 2018? Did legislation in EU or elsewhere set a recent precedent to lay the ground for this proposal?
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  It's possible but I think it has more to do with constantly chipping away. The more initiatives they push through the more brazen they get. GDPR was widely supported so now they go in for the kill.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I don't think that you should compare GDPR with this copyright stuff. GDPR is fundamentally about protecting normal people. This here is about propping up obsolete business models.
    - rorykoehler 8y ago
      They are definitely comparable. First I don't buy that GDPR was about protecting normal people. It was a shot across the bows of Facebook and Google (but will actually end up working in their favour). The word for this is protectionism. Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world. The data itself enables this too. The algorithms and learnings that come out of this can be applied in many spheres of interest and now all that is lost. It is a massive loss for innovation and humanity just as articles 11 & 13 will be. People like GDPR because they have a kneejerk emotional reaction to it and they never consider the second and third+ order effects which are disastrous at best.
      - dmitriid 8y ago
        What's disastrous about removing this crap from the web? https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1012592046102720512?s=21 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1012592046102720512?s=21 Note: there are over a hundred advertisers and trackers in advertising cookies on top of "performance" cookies. On a website about a tech stack. It's considerably worse on other sites.
      - lagadu 8y ago
        > Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world. So what? What if instead of ad revenue it was financial fraud supporting some field of innovation, should we suddenly start being OK with it?
        rorykoehler 8y ago
        Ridiculous argument
        lagadu 8y ago
        Your argument is that criminal activity (which is what this now is) is justified in the name of innovation. I agree with you that it's a ridiculous argument, because it's the same exact argument you made.
      - bloak 8y ago
        As I see it, GDPR is mostly just a harmonisation of privacy rights that already existed in several EU countries and in some cases (Germany?) have a long history. I find it implausible that it was intended as an attack against Facebook and Google, but I'll look into it if I get a chance. I also find it implausible that online advertising is a major contributor to machine learning (ML). In the literature I've read, online advertising doesn't usually appear near the top of the list of ML applications. I can see that authors might want to avoid mentioning something that everyone hates, but most of the articles do mention the military applications, which aren't likely to make most people feel enthusiastic about ML either.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Why are they getting their way now, in 2018? Naive guess: the loss of London as a balancer.
- Kliment 8y ago
  This is just how long it took to get it through the pipeline. It was implemented first on a national level in Germany and Spain (with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them instead and in the end the German constitutional court ruled the law unconstitutional) so now they're attempting to get it in on a level where it's harder to remove because it needs international collaboration to do so. The downside for them is that it also needs international collaboration to enact, and thus we have more chances to prevent it at the european parliament level. So do the right thing, call every MEP from your country that isn't an EPP member and ask them to a) be there at the vote (this is CRITICAL attendance really matters) and b) vote to allow changes to the law (tomorrow's vote is about whether the law continues to the next stage unchanged or whether changes are allowed - it's not about accepting or rejecting the law in general, just in its current form)
  - llukas 8y ago
    > with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them instead You mean Google used their 90%+ market share to extort rights from publishers.
    - Kliment 8y ago
      Look I'm not much of a google fan either but if you are a news aggregator or search engine and you have to figure out who owns each text snippet and what it costs and have an accounting and billing infrastructure to go with it, would you rather do that or simply not show the snippets? Google is one of the few entities who could afford to implement this, but as you say the giants with massive market share will just make a deal with the publishers to not pay the fees in exchange for exposure, and everyone else will be stuck with having to police their users in case they quote some news article. The main victims of this will be small forums and entities like wikinews. Google and Facebook will, as always, get away with it because the publishers depend on them. This law is disastrous for everyone else.

Is it possible that a small number of strategic EU legislative roles have been newly influenced/captured by special interests? E.g. the Axel Springers of the world have long held certain positions. Why are they getting their way now, in 2018? Did legislation in EU or elsewhere set a recent precedent to lay the ground for this proposal?

rorykoehler 8y ago
It's possible but I think it has more to do with constantly chipping away. The more initiatives they push through the more brazen they get. GDPR was widely supported so now they go in for the kill.
- adrianN 8y ago
  I don't think that you should compare GDPR with this copyright stuff. GDPR is fundamentally about protecting normal people. This here is about propping up obsolete business models.
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    They are definitely comparable. First I don't buy that GDPR was about protecting normal people. It was a shot across the bows of Facebook and Google (but will actually end up working in their favour). The word for this is protectionism. Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world. The data itself enables this too. The algorithms and learnings that come out of this can be applied in many spheres of interest and now all that is lost. It is a massive loss for innovation and humanity just as articles 11 & 13 will be. People like GDPR because they have a kneejerk emotional reaction to it and they never consider the second and third+ order effects which are disastrous at best.
    - dmitriid 8y ago
      What's disastrous about removing this crap from the web? https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1012592046102720512?s=21 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1012592046102720512?s=21 Note: there are over a hundred advertisers and trackers in advertising cookies on top of "performance" cookies. On a website about a tech stack. It's considerably worse on other sites.
    - lagadu 8y ago
      > Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world. So what? What if instead of ad revenue it was financial fraud supporting some field of innovation, should we suddenly start being OK with it?
      - rorykoehler 8y ago
        Ridiculous argument
        lagadu 8y ago
        Your argument is that criminal activity (which is what this now is) is justified in the name of innovation. I agree with you that it's a ridiculous argument, because it's the same exact argument you made.
    - bloak 8y ago
      As I see it, GDPR is mostly just a harmonisation of privacy rights that already existed in several EU countries and in some cases (Germany?) have a long history. I find it implausible that it was intended as an attack against Facebook and Google, but I'll look into it if I get a chance. I also find it implausible that online advertising is a major contributor to machine learning (ML). In the literature I've read, online advertising doesn't usually appear near the top of the list of ML applications. I can see that authors might want to avoid mentioning something that everyone hates, but most of the articles do mention the military applications, which aren't likely to make most people feel enthusiastic about ML either.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Why are they getting their way now, in 2018? Naive guess: the loss of London as a balancer.
Kliment 8y ago
This is just how long it took to get it through the pipeline. It was implemented first on a national level in Germany and Spain (with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them instead and in the end the German constitutional court ruled the law unconstitutional) so now they're attempting to get it in on a level where it's harder to remove because it needs international collaboration to do so. The downside for them is that it also needs international collaboration to enact, and thus we have more chances to prevent it at the european parliament level. So do the right thing, call every MEP from your country that isn't an EPP member and ask them to a) be there at the vote (this is CRITICAL attendance really matters) and b) vote to allow changes to the law (tomorrow's vote is about whether the law continues to the next stage unchanged or whether changes are allowed - it's not about accepting or rejecting the law in general, just in its current form)
- llukas 8y ago
  > with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them instead You mean Google used their 90%+ market share to extort rights from publishers.
  - Kliment 8y ago
    Look I'm not much of a google fan either but if you are a news aggregator or search engine and you have to figure out who owns each text snippet and what it costs and have an accounting and billing infrastructure to go with it, would you rather do that or simply not show the snippets? Google is one of the few entities who could afford to implement this, but as you say the giants with massive market share will just make a deal with the publishers to not pay the fees in exchange for exposure, and everyone else will be stuck with having to police their users in case they quote some news article. The main victims of this will be small forums and entities like wikinews. Google and Facebook will, as always, get away with it because the publishers depend on them. This law is disastrous for everyone else.