8 ms·

I have to say (and I am not a fan of modern copyright law at all) that I'm undecided about this law. I guess the contrarian in me requires more analysis and re

by derriz 8y ago

I have to say (and I am not a fan of modern copyright law at all) that I'm undecided about this law. I guess the contrarian in me requires more analysis and reasoning than I've found in the top google search results or following some of the links posted here on Hacker News. In fact I'm aware that I often take positions based on disliking the presentation of arguments and this is a personal flaw. But I have to say most of the pieces I read rub me up the wrong way by seemingly just repeating arguments from authority or presenting interpretations without any logical reasoning built on primary sources (i.e. the text of the directive). Many of the pieces, even by respected sources, seem very click-baity where it seems there is competition to come up with the most apocalyptic claims. The directive will lead to the end of the internet itself seems to be the bar. When I finally found a piece which actually quoted text from article 13, for example, it didn't seem to explicitly support many of the claims. Is there a mandate or even reference to upload filters in the text of the article? Does it reference memes at all? I'm happy to be correct if there is. But if there isn't, I don't see an obvious path from the primary text to these sort of claims. The actual text of the article that I've seen quoted seems to simply codify the status quo that currently exists in nearly all countries. Which is that content aggregators are oblidged to cooperate with copyright holders to block copyright infringement. Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet". Don't all countries with copyright laws already provide legal mechanisms for holder to force content aggregators to remove infringing material? If that's the case, then this is simply a typical EU directive - which just represents some sort of minimum standard based on the existing laws in the 28 countries. As I said, I'm happy to be corrected if someone can provide an argument based on the text. Please reply with links or references instead of down voting :)

bad_user 8y ago
I would argue that controversial laws have to be at least delayed in order for all the points to be address. I would rather not change anything instead of risking broken legislation that does more harm than good. > Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet". Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources. This is not the same issue as with GDPR. Even if companies need to invest resources in being GDPR compliant, it can be argued that business models relying on the ignorance of users are criminal enterprises and that GDPR-style consent should have been asked for without having a law for it, being common sense in a world where people don't understand the repercussion of their actions when using technology. But copyright? That's a government granted monopoly and like all government granted monopolies it can do more harm than good. It can be argued that copyright is flawed, especially given the forever extending duration, currently being life plus 70 to 120 years, which is absolutely ridiculous. Give us 20 years, like patents and then we can discuss about extra protections otherwise fuck media companies lobbying for even more protections.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  > > Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet". > Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources. Worse, even Google sucks at it. There are so many original creators whose youtube video get slapped ads on because someone else used their music in a Youtube video before the original author did. Google wrote a fully automated, non-appealable copyright judge and jury. This is scary shit! I don't understand how anyone can look at stuff like that and think "wow, awesome, we need more of that!"
  - glogla 8y ago
    > Google wrote a fully automated, non-appealable copyright judge and jury. And executioner. Because they remove accounts over this.
    - skrebbel 8y ago
      I'm not sure the analogy extends that far. Sure, Google auto-vaporizes accounts and that's terrible, but they'd do that too if they didn't have Content ID. It's not very related to copyright anymore, just to The Google Suck.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    I am not a big fan of government meddling, but when companies are so crucial for so many people I am starting (maybe it's me getting older) to think it would be a good thing if there would be special rules made for companies like that. If 100s of millions of people use your product, it kind of be becomes a common good; I don't say it should be gov owned, but some law that they cannot, without recourse other than expensive trials which you won't win, remove something of yours and then not answer the phone. I know too many people who gambled on facebook, google, oracle(yes...) and others for their livelihood; invested their time and money into it just to get tossed out by a not very good algorithm. I am one of those, but in hindsight I am actually happy about it; it taught me never to have anything depend on any company where I cannot directly contact the CEO or CTO for business. It helps my current company a great deal to work like that; every company we work with, I can pick up the phone and call a c-level exec. Guess what; we almost never have to.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
anticensor 8y ago
Upload filter implements a proactive measure to avoid contents violating copyright.
fauigerzigerk 8y ago
Perhaps this will help you understand why the somewhat obscure and guarded legal language in the proposal is interpreted the way it is: https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ The upshot (wrt upload filters) is that the proposal makes platforms directly liable for the actions of their users. This follows from the text in the proposal where hosting user content is defined as an act of communication to the public.
Kliment 8y ago
The specific issue with Article 13 is that it requires hosting services that allow user-uploaded content to be published to ensure that copyrighted content is not made available. The specific wording in the law is "non-availability". This is different from takedown mechanisms (that already exist) in that it requires the service to screen the content before the fact, or become liable for the content. The current situation is that the service is not liable for copyright infringement as long as they implement a takedown mechanism - that is, allow rightsholders to complain and have the content taken down. The new situation would be that the service becomes liable at the time of publication. This shift in liability is what constitutes the most significant change, and because there is no punishment for false positives (failing to publish non-infringing content) but there is a punishment for false negatives (failing to stop the publication of infringing content) this will lead to a chilling effect. If you run a service that allows users to upload any kind of content, you would become liable for their copyright infringements. The talk about filters comes directly from Voss's (the law's author's) blog, where he explains the law and what is intended with it. There is a specific reference to google's content id as an example of the kind of measures services are expected to implement. In the law text these are refered to as "effective technologies". The specifics of how the filter is implemented is not exactly relevant in this case, but another aspect is - currently nobody except google has an implementation of this technology, and google's implementation has very bad recognition rates and is also easily circumvented. So if you run a service that allows user-uploaded content, you now either pre-screen each post manually, license a buggy filter from google, take the risk of being sued for something your users posted, or block user-submitted content entirely. The last one is the only option for things like small forums. Reading specifically into the law's author's blog post about this, they state that if something is wrongly filtered, the recourse is attempting to force the service to accept the upload by taking them to court. Clearly this is not something you can do on a routine basis, so if your content gets wrongly identified as infringing (and of course automated systems cannot recognize parody, or remixes, or similar but unrelated content as non-infringing) you'll end up effectively prevented from posting it. So yes, you're right that there are already mechanisms to take down infringing material. The added change in this law is that it makes publishing infringing material the point of liability, and so each service becomes responsible for all the content that its users post. This is the significant change.
stakhanov 8y ago
It requires a lot of knowledge of the context and some pretty hard work of crossreferencing several legislative texts to really get to what's going on here, although I think that the text by Julia Reda does it justice pretty well. https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ In what follows, I'll say a bit about Article 11, because it's the part of the debate that I have been following more closely, and the one that I actually care about. There is some context to this. This is a change that media corporations have been pushing for for many many years. When they did so at the level of national law in several European countries, they weren't quite as good as they are this time around at concealing their dark design. They basically came straight out and said: "We want to create an organization representing all of us in collective bargaining against the likes of Google. We want that organization to collect money from Google, compensating us for displaying headlines, webpage titles, and automatically generated summaries in search results and on Google news. And we want to change copyright so as to make it so." Some of the legislative text that was passed around on the national level in several European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Spain, actually made explicit mention of automatically generated summaries of copyrighted material, or use of copyrighted material by search engines and content aggregators etc. In Germany, such a law actually entered into effect. Here is some more reading on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_... http://www.taz.de/!5064771/ http://www.taz.de/!5064771/ (in German) Then Google set up an online platform that press publishers can use to declare that they are okay with Google continuing to use their stuff for free. Content by any press publisher that's covered by this ancillary copyright who has not entered into this agreement with Google then disappeared from the index. Guess what happened next? Everyone signed the agreement. So, it's essentially dead law now. It doesn't affect Google, as everyone signed the agreement. So far, the media aren't going after the smaller content aggregators, stepping lightly around the touchy subject, but it's certainly creating a lot of legal uncertainty for search engines and content aggregators who aren't Google. But they're still hard at work, trying to make this into a "world revolution", the hope being that, one day, enough material will be subject to this ancillary copyright that Google will no longer be willing to lose all that content and therefore the threat of just taking it out of the index will have lost its sting. Now about what's going on in Brussels: Back in September 2016, the Commission set up a draft for this new Copyright directive, which read pretty innocuously. It had an Article 11 that basically just said: "We want press publishers to be able to have some kind of a copyright in their material." From a U.S.-perspective, you probably wouldn't understand what this is even about, as, in the U.S., this has always been the way copyright worked. An employee would routinely say, in their employment contract, something along the lines of "for copyright purposes, my employer is the creator of any work I create" and that's that. In Europe, copyright is non-transferable. The only way you can be the creator of work is if you actually created it, e.g. an individual journalist or programmer, not a media or tech company. So, the way this article actually read was so as to imply that, for the special case of press publications, the Commission wants Member states to implement copyright to allow for stuff to happen that already routinely happens in the U.S. So it was fairly technical, uninteresting lawmaking. Then, between September 2016 and now, secretive, intransparent, corrupt bullshit took place behind closed doors. A committee was formed. The committee voted in changes to the proposal of a Directive to be voted on in parliament. Nobody friggin new what the changes actually were, as a text wasn't published at the time the vote was taken. Then, on June 29th, leaving only three full workdays to when the draft directive was supposed to be voted on in parliament, they published the text, and did so in a completely unreadable format. You have to read it as a meta-meta-meta-level document. The document wasn't law. It was changes to be made to a proposal about things that the Commission was going to force Memberstates to implement into law. Where it previously said: "Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the digital use of their press publications [i.e. with an ancillary copyright]."" It was now going to say: "Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC [i.e. with an ancillary copyright] so that they may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers." So, previously, you could have read it like this: Well, publishers are now going to have copyrights, but copyright is already pretty clear on hosting exceptions, quoting exception, etc., so nothing will change for search engines and content aggregators. Now that reading was definitely out! Now, the directive made it clear that this was going to be an ancillary copyright, an additional right that should have the effect that search engines, content aggregators etc should pay press publishers for something extra, something not already provided for under current copyright. And Julia Reda makes the point, which, I believe, is very valid, that, since the proposal made it clear that this was going to be a new/extra right, it was not clear at all, that certain limitations that apply to copyright also apply to this ancillary copyright. In particular, Reda notes that, to be the creator of a copyrightable work, you need to create work that crosses some threshold of originality. But in order to enjoy this ancillary right, all you need to do is to be a press publisher. So this is the way, that, this time around, they snuck back in the idea of "A headline is not too short to enjoy protection", or "If Google shows the bits about our content that have the search term in it, with dots in between, that doesn't mean the content doesn't still enjoy protection" etc. etc. Hope this was helpful in clarifying a few things.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pera 8y ago
Here is a link to the whole proposal: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... You will probably need to search for a few formal definitions, but in my opinion it's relatively easy to understand.

by derriz 8y ago

bad_user 8y ago

I would argue that controversial laws have to be at least delayed in order for all the points to be address. I would rather not change anything instead of risking broken legislation that does more harm than good. > Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet". Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources. This is not the same issue as with GDPR. Even if companies need to invest resources in being GDPR compliant, it can be argued that business models relying on the ignorance of users are criminal enterprises and that GDPR-style consent should have been asked for without having a law for it, being common sense in a world where people don't understand the repercussion of their actions when using technology. But copyright? That's a government granted monopoly and like all government granted monopolies it can do more harm than good. It can be argued that copyright is flawed, especially given the forever extending duration, currently being life plus 70 to 120 years, which is absolutely ridiculous. Give us 20 years, like patents and then we can discuss about extra protections otherwise fuck media companies lobbying for even more protections.

skrebbel 8y ago
> > Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet". > Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources. Worse, even Google sucks at it. There are so many original creators whose youtube video get slapped ads on because someone else used their music in a Youtube video before the original author did. Google wrote a fully automated, non-appealable copyright judge and jury. This is scary shit! I don't understand how anyone can look at stuff like that and think "wow, awesome, we need more of that!"
- glogla 8y ago
  > Google wrote a fully automated, non-appealable copyright judge and jury. And executioner. Because they remove accounts over this.
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    I'm not sure the analogy extends that far. Sure, Google auto-vaporizes accounts and that's terrible, but they'd do that too if they didn't have Content ID. It's not very related to copyright anymore, just to The Google Suck.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  I am not a big fan of government meddling, but when companies are so crucial for so many people I am starting (maybe it's me getting older) to think it would be a good thing if there would be special rules made for companies like that. If 100s of millions of people use your product, it kind of be becomes a common good; I don't say it should be gov owned, but some law that they cannot, without recourse other than expensive trials which you won't win, remove something of yours and then not answer the phone. I know too many people who gambled on facebook, google, oracle(yes...) and others for their livelihood; invested their time and money into it just to get tossed out by a not very good algorithm. I am one of those, but in hindsight I am actually happy about it; it taught me never to have anything depend on any company where I cannot directly contact the CEO or CTO for business. It helps my current company a great deal to work like that; every company we work with, I can pick up the phone and call a c-level exec. Guess what; we almost never have to.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

anticensor 8y ago

Upload filter implements a proactive measure to avoid contents violating copyright.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago

Perhaps this will help you understand why the somewhat obscure and guarded legal language in the proposal is interpreted the way it is: https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ The upshot (wrt upload filters) is that the proposal makes platforms directly liable for the actions of their users. This follows from the text in the proposal where hosting user content is defined as an act of communication to the public.

Kliment 8y ago

The specific issue with Article 13 is that it requires hosting services that allow user-uploaded content to be published to ensure that copyrighted content is not made available. The specific wording in the law is "non-availability". This is different from takedown mechanisms (that already exist) in that it requires the service to screen the content before the fact, or become liable for the content. The current situation is that the service is not liable for copyright infringement as long as they implement a takedown mechanism - that is, allow rightsholders to complain and have the content taken down. The new situation would be that the service becomes liable at the time of publication. This shift in liability is what constitutes the most significant change, and because there is no punishment for false positives (failing to publish non-infringing content) but there is a punishment for false negatives (failing to stop the publication of infringing content) this will lead to a chilling effect. If you run a service that allows users to upload any kind of content, you would become liable for their copyright infringements. The talk about filters comes directly from Voss's (the law's author's) blog, where he explains the law and what is intended with it. There is a specific reference to google's content id as an example of the kind of measures services are expected to implement. In the law text these are refered to as "effective technologies". The specifics of how the filter is implemented is not exactly relevant in this case, but another aspect is - currently nobody except google has an implementation of this technology, and google's implementation has very bad recognition rates and is also easily circumvented. So if you run a service that allows user-uploaded content, you now either pre-screen each post manually, license a buggy filter from google, take the risk of being sued for something your users posted, or block user-submitted content entirely. The last one is the only option for things like small forums. Reading specifically into the law's author's blog post about this, they state that if something is wrongly filtered, the recourse is attempting to force the service to accept the upload by taking them to court. Clearly this is not something you can do on a routine basis, so if your content gets wrongly identified as infringing (and of course automated systems cannot recognize parody, or remixes, or similar but unrelated content as non-infringing) you'll end up effectively prevented from posting it. So yes, you're right that there are already mechanisms to take down infringing material. The added change in this law is that it makes publishing infringing material the point of liability, and so each service becomes responsible for all the content that its users post. This is the significant change.

stakhanov 8y ago

It requires a lot of knowledge of the context and some pretty hard work of crossreferencing several legislative texts to really get to what's going on here, although I think that the text by Julia Reda does it justice pretty well. https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/ In what follows, I'll say a bit about Article 11, because it's the part of the debate that I have been following more closely, and the one that I actually care about. There is some context to this. This is a change that media corporations have been pushing for for many many years. When they did so at the level of national law in several European countries, they weren't quite as good as they are this time around at concealing their dark design. They basically came straight out and said: "We want to create an organization representing all of us in collective bargaining against the likes of Google. We want that organization to collect money from Google, compensating us for displaying headlines, webpage titles, and automatically generated summaries in search results and on Google news. And we want to change copyright so as to make it so." Some of the legislative text that was passed around on the national level in several European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Spain, actually made explicit mention of automatically generated summaries of copyrighted material, or use of copyrighted material by search engines and content aggregators etc. In Germany, such a law actually entered into effect. Here is some more reading on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_... http://www.taz.de/!5064771/ http://www.taz.de/!5064771/ (in German) Then Google set up an online platform that press publishers can use to declare that they are okay with Google continuing to use their stuff for free. Content by any press publisher that's covered by this ancillary copyright who has not entered into this agreement with Google then disappeared from the index. Guess what happened next? Everyone signed the agreement. So, it's essentially dead law now. It doesn't affect Google, as everyone signed the agreement. So far, the media aren't going after the smaller content aggregators, stepping lightly around the touchy subject, but it's certainly creating a lot of legal uncertainty for search engines and content aggregators who aren't Google. But they're still hard at work, trying to make this into a "world revolution", the hope being that, one day, enough material will be subject to this ancillary copyright that Google will no longer be willing to lose all that content and therefore the threat of just taking it out of the index will have lost its sting. Now about what's going on in Brussels: Back in September 2016, the Commission set up a draft for this new Copyright directive, which read pretty innocuously. It had an Article 11 that basically just said: "We want press publishers to be able to have some kind of a copyright in their material." From a U.S.-perspective, you probably wouldn't understand what this is even about, as, in the U.S., this has always been the way copyright worked. An employee would routinely say, in their employment contract, something along the lines of "for copyright purposes, my employer is the creator of any work I create" and that's that. In Europe, copyright is non-transferable. The only way you can be the creator of work is if you actually created it, e.g. an individual journalist or programmer, not a media or tech company. So, the way this article actually read was so as to imply that, for the special case of press publications, the Commission wants Member states to implement copyright to allow for stuff to happen that already routinely happens in the U.S. So it was fairly technical, uninteresting lawmaking. Then, between September 2016 and now, secretive, intransparent, corrupt bullshit took place behind closed doors. A committee was formed. The committee voted in changes to the proposal of a Directive to be voted on in parliament. Nobody friggin new what the changes actually were, as a text wasn't published at the time the vote was taken. Then, on June 29th, leaving only three full workdays to when the draft directive was supposed to be voted on in parliament, they published the text, and did so in a completely unreadable format. You have to read it as a meta-meta-meta-level document. The document wasn't law. It was changes to be made to a proposal about things that the Commission was going to force Memberstates to implement into law. Where it previously said: "Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the digital use of their press publications [i.e. with an ancillary copyright]."" It was now going to say: "Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC [i.e. with an ancillary copyright] so that they may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers." So, previously, you could have read it like this: Well, publishers are now going to have copyrights, but copyright is already pretty clear on hosting exceptions, quoting exception, etc., so nothing will change for search engines and content aggregators. Now that reading was definitely out! Now, the directive made it clear that this was going to be an ancillary copyright, an additional right that should have the effect that search engines, content aggregators etc should pay press publishers for something extra, something not already provided for under current copyright. And Julia Reda makes the point, which, I believe, is very valid, that, since the proposal made it clear that this was going to be a new/extra right, it was not clear at all, that certain limitations that apply to copyright also apply to this ancillary copyright. In particular, Reda notes that, to be the creator of a copyrightable work, you need to create work that crosses some threshold of originality. But in order to enjoy this ancillary right, all you need to do is to be a press publisher. So this is the way, that, this time around, they snuck back in the idea of "A headline is not too short to enjoy protection", or "If Google shows the bits about our content that have the search term in it, with dots in between, that doesn't mean the content doesn't still enjoy protection" etc. etc. Hope this was helpful in clarifying a few things.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pera 8y ago

Here is a link to the whole proposal: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... You will probably need to search for a few formal definitions, but in my opinion it's relatively easy to understand.