16 ms·

The European Union versus the Internet

194 points by juokaz 8y ago

arxpoetica 8y ago
It seems there's a common warfront in general around what can or can't be said, and it has coalesced in the every-one tool, the Internet. Greater ease to publish, greater impulse to control one another. The test of our day seems to be around the right to speak freely, online.
- netsec_burn 8y ago
  I'm surprised Tor usage hasn't skyrocketed.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    I'd say the lack of Tor-exclusive easy-to-use applications. That Tor underpins an application should be transparent. If the Tor browser is the same on the outside as a web browser but slower, the anonymity alone isn't a good enough reason for many to use it. Rather, a (non-browser?) communication platform needs to compete on features and just happen to use Tor.
  - octosphere 8y ago
    Well we do know that Tor usage shot up after Snowden's revelations https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186025-privacy-behaviors-after-snowden/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186025-privacy-behavio... https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/tor-usage-doubles-snowden-nsa-prism/ https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/tor-usage-doubles-snowden-ns...
    - chris_mc 8y ago
      Darknet markets had a huge boom around that time, too, which could also correlate. I think it's more likely the cause than Snowden, as I think more people care about drugs than privacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_market#Silk_Road_and_early_markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_market#Silk_Road_and_e... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-01-01%202013-12-31&geo=US&q=%2Fg%2F11b6hxvzw9 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-01-01%202...
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Many sites (including this one) shadowban accounts created via Tor. So basically, you can't use Tor for social media.
    - ommunist 8y ago
      you can’t use Tor for the Internet banking either
kodablah 8y ago
> This brings me to a piece of legislation I have been very critical of for quite some time: GDPR. The intent of the legislation is certainly admirable — protect consumer privacy —although (and this may be the American in me speaking) I am perhaps a bit skeptical about just how much most consumers care relative to elites in the media. Amen. The way Google and FB are using data just doesn't bother the masses the way it bothers the media and the narrative they've built (or the way it bothers us). There are many steps that can be taken, some incremental, towards the curbing of these practices. But we, as technologists, should always decry heavy-handed government regulation of the internet, especially as an early step. The intent does not matter. If legislation doesn't work, don't make more or make it larger assuming it was the scope that was the problem. Take a step back and recognize alternatives including enforcing existing statues, promoting alternatives, educating citizenry, more targeted and narrowly scoped legislation, etc.
- josteink 8y ago
  > But we, as technologists, should always decry heavy-handed government regulation of the internet, especially as an early step. This is not an early step. The trend has been clear for the past decade, and it has been going in the wrong direction, at increasing speeds. This is pretty much something the tech industry brought upon itself by trying to always trying to outdo itself in terms of how much tracking and privacy violations it could get away with. IOW, from a techie to another: cry me a river.
  - pathseeker 8y ago
    >The trend has been clear for the past decade, and it has been going in the wrong direction, at increasing speeds. Tools to block tracking have gotten better. Spyware is more difficult to spread, etc. I'm not convinced it's going the wrong direction "at increasing speeds". Do you have any empirical evidence of this or is it just based on perception? >IOW, from a techie to another: cry me a river. Don't do this. " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
no1youknowz 8y ago
It's not just the EU that the Internet is in danger of. A Labour MP in the UK announced a bill that wants to curtail "closed" forums on social media [0]. Analysis on the topic [1]. [0]: https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3062557/mp-plans-laws-to-open-up-closed-internet-groups-claiming-they-fuel-extremism-and-hate https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3062557/mp-plans-laws-to-ope... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eobVBf5S8uM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eobVBf5S8uM
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  That's absolutely ridiculous. Is she going to let us listen in on all her private phone calls? Read all her emails? Please tell me this has no hope of passing...
  - mjw1007 8y ago
    It's a Ten-minute rule bill. Ten-minute rule bills have no hope of passing. You're welcome.
    - chris_mc 8y ago
      For the lazy folks who (initially) thought this was a 120x extension to the 5 second rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Minute_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Minute_Rule
  - davemp 8y ago
    Whoever purposes such an irresponsible and evil law should also have no hope of a future in politics.
    - Matticus_Rex 8y ago
      That's a really nice thought.
walterstucco 8y ago
The Web is not the Internet EU is targeting US WEB tech giants, but can't directly name them
reacweb 8y ago
The usage of natural language to write legislations about internet will always create ambiguities and loopholes. I think regulations should be writen in a mathematical language with proof of consistency and unambigous reference implementation of algorithms that are imposed to FAI.
- furgooswft13 8y ago
  Lets pass a law that states all laws must be written in Haskell! Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    But the laws that were written would apply to all, even those who don't know Haskell. That's probably not a desirable outcome.
  - mdpopescu 8y ago
    > Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language. Legalese didn't seem to have that effect.
    - furgooswft13 8y ago
      Yea but you can throw legalese madlibs into a document and get it passed as law as long as you provide the legislators enough kickbacks. Haskell has to compile at least, and be pure and stuff. Who's up for a Pure Functional Programming government.
      - makapuf 8y ago
        Sometimes I get the impression we get pure fictional programs before the elections ...
- yifanl 8y ago
  I thought the whole point of legislation is that it should be left to reasonable interpretation. Trying to be exacting just leads to a race to how many loopholes we can find (and we will find them), and now you get a scenario where the law only applies to you if you cannot afford a sufficiently good lawyer.
tw1010 8y ago
It's super interesting to watch the reaction of the US blogosphere to EU laws. I feel like I'm learning a lot about US culture just by observing the general attitude that seems to be coalescing against things like GDPR. I used to think that I'd been pretty well indoctrinated into the US value system, despite being born in the EU, just by virtue of having most of my influences (movies, the internet) having come from there. But seeing how much different my attitude is towards all these laws, compared to articles like this one, totally gives me a whole new source of specific little value updates I aught to make if I want to escape from a mindset I suspect isn't optimal in the current economic climate (an EU-based one), to one that is (i.e. an american attitude to things).
- kodablah 8y ago
  I also find it interesting from the inverse perspective. I am of course naive, but I think most of the viewpoint differences boil down to how one views business owners and government. Not necessarily one versus the other, though that does come in to play, but more about whether the former deserves rights/consideration and whether the latter is equipped to reasonably restrict them. This is especially true for big business and big laws.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  I also found the reaction interesting because even techies here were overwhelmingly in favour of GDPR. Mainly because it is so similar to data protection that's been in place for 20 years and they have been used to implementing without problem. That included founders and executives within companies. Thanks to the profile of people I know that's been mainly in smaller companies. Most of the negative opinion I heard was that the regulations wouldn't be enforced strongly enough to achieve enough change. Yet a common US reaction was to view GDPR as something draconian and anti small business, and to deliberately misunderstand that a maximum penalty wasn't going to be the always penalty. Much like this blog post does. On the copyright proposals those same people here in the EU are unanimously against.
  - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    >and to deliberately misunderstand that a maximum penalty wasn't going to be the always penalty. This is the only way to view penalties like this that don't have clearly defined criteria. It's all up to a judge, and when so much is at risk, a company will assume the worse.
mrmekon 8y ago
In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law. Everybody is completely and 100% against the copyright law. There is a huge difference between the two from my point of view: GDPR is not a law about "The Internet", it is a law about company records. It applies to Google, but it also applies to the Pakistani food stand on the corner. It affects Google a lot more, sure. I support the concept that a company does not have some inherent right to be a steward of my personal data without my explicit consent. GDPR is also easy enough for even tiny startups to comply with, and is significantly easier for small companies than large ones. It does not create a large barrier to entry for new startups or a rift between the existing small and large companies. The copyright law, however, is a law about The Internet. It controls how businesses interact with the internet. It sets _technical_ restrictions on how they can do so. It sets technical restrictions that are probably not even feasible, at that. It absolutely does create a huge barrier to entry for small companies, and could possibly enshrine the existing tech giants into de-facto monopolies (I mean, if they aren't already...) The copyright directive is horrible enough on its own. I don't see why everyone is in a rush to pull in mentions of GDPR to make it seem "worse". For a lot of us, it weakens the argument instead of strengthening it. Not everyone likes GDPR, obviously, but we can _all_ agree that the copyright law is garbage.
- throwaway122378 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on the specifics of the copyright law?
  - mrmekon 8y ago
    It's all still up in the air, and the wording is vague. GDPR's wording is also vague, as EU laws are. When we read between the lines, GDPR's vagueness sounds promising (hard to over-reach, easy to understand intentions), and the Copyright Directive's vagueness sounds terrifying (easy to over-reach, hard to understand intentions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_... A big difference is in the boundaries. GDPR is bounded by your customer records. One customer, one collection of personal data. There's a hard upper limit: about 7 billion. Companies tend to scale with customers, so generally bigger companies will have bigger customer bases and bigger employee bases to handle protecting the records. The Copyright Directive's bounds is user content. One customer, any number of potential infringements. A single person can run a company with 100 customers who upload 10,000 images each per year. Managing the customer base is pretty easy, managing the data storage is pretty easy, GDPR-protecting 100 people's data is pretty easy. But 1 million potential copyright infringements per year, each one of which could even be claimed by multiple rights holders. Your risk exposure grows with data, not with people. That one-man show probably can't handle tens of thousands of take-down requests, nor build an AI Machine Learning Cloud Native Copyright ID Blockchain System to automate it.
FactolSarin 8y ago
I disagree with the EU about their copyright legislation, but applaud their attempts at increasing privacy. What I find odd about the conversation around EU internet legislation is the idea that "The Internet" is a single entity that has some kind of natural state, and further that natural state is for all information to be free and to be a place where anyone can say anything (or should be able to). I think this grows out of the American origins of the Internet, and the American concept of free speech. But other countries have different views of how free speech should be. Should you be able to deny the holocaust? Should you be able to purchase unlimited political ads? Should you be able to spread misinformation? Americans tend to say yes, because the truth will sort itself out. I'm not going to make a judgement on whether that's true, but it is true that other societies make different judgements on where to draw the line on freedom of expression, and those countries have a right to implement those decisions for their people on the Internet just as much as Americans have a right to have wild-west style freedom of expression. Oh, also, before someone straw-mans me, I'm not talking about repressive regimes. I'm talking about societies where the populace is making informed decisions about their leaders, and have collectively decided they draw the line on expression in a different place than Americans do.
- nybble41 8y ago
  > ... and those countries have a right to implement those decisions for their people on the Internet ... No, they do not. One's natural rights do not disappear just because one happens to be living under a regime which fails to acknowledge them. When an American talks about the freedom of speech, they're talking about a right shared by every human being on this planet, not just the ones who happen to live in the USA. It is a matter of objective fact, not opinion or local preference, that the use of force, including fines, imprisonment, etc., is not a proportional response to mere speech, regardless of the content.
  - FactolSarin 8y ago
    It's a matter of objective fact? Show me the experimental data that shows the American interpretation of freedom of speech is correct. Even Americans draw the line somewhere. For instance, the old "shouting fire in a theater." bit. Or, say, planning a murder. Other people decide to draw the line different places. Sorry, but claiming the American legal interpretation is "objective fact" and, say, the German one is wrong is just crazy.
digikata 8y ago
So there's a lot of coverage about the EU parliament process, but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? There seems to very little coverage on how this directive came about. Whose interests are being represented by these changes?
- LeoNatan25 8y ago
  Corruption: lobbying and corporate money.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  My understanding is the copyright proposals were at least partially thanks to incumbent big media in Germany, and their link tax reaction to Google news.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? A similar yet more apt question might be, where did the idea that parliament can get away with such large internet regulations come from?
  - hyperman1 8y ago
    The fiction of every law making organisation is that they can get away with creating every law they want. If they did not believe this fiction, the whole idea of law as something that applies to everyone becomes meaningless. In practice, the power of a lawmaker is limited by if he can get the law applied. For example, multiple muslim countries have laws banning women walking around without head scarf. Not only in their country, but everywhere in the universe. In practice, you see many women walking around without one, and the relevant lawmakers dont know or care. But suppose one of these women is in such a country, gets summoned in court for this, and proof is given she violated the law, even outside the country, then the judge has only one option: Guilty. Society runs on hoping this does not happen, i.e. selective enforcement. For Europe, the situation is clear: They can get away with any law in Europe, as long as it doesnt cause them to be voted out. And it seems the general public is not going to vote them out, so they can easily get away with this.
a_imho 8y ago
tldr; the author uses the copyright directive to go off tangent and cry about GDPR a bit more
supermatt 8y ago
IMHO, It should be up to the respective authorities to decide if things are covered by copyright or not. Following this ridiculous proposal, THEY should be the ones to provide the relevant tools and services to service providers to enforce this ludicrous position.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I will come out and say I don't agree with this portrayal of EU legislation being absurd. Time and again we're discussing what's wrong with the current web landscape: commoditization of content, leading into an attention economy with tracking and surveillance, and concentration of ad spend and most money to be made in the hands of very few players. If creators don't get their share of profits made using their works, this won't sustain further content creation. YouTube and file sharing sites can not shrug and say "we're just running the platform" when they disproportionally benefit and leave content creators with a pittance if anything. Now that the EU actually wants to do something about it, the law is being denounced as lobbied by big media, but, to the contrary, the current status quo only serves Google et al. I have my reservations about the feasibility of content filtering, but "EU vs the Internet" is coming from an internet "mob" mindset having come to expect everything to be free (as in FREE of direct cost) immediately and without friction. "The Internet" is not consumers, but made by creators. In fact, I'm cautiously optimistic this (and the GDPR) legislation will benefit smaller publishers and diversity and bring back unproblematic syndication and end-user content aggregation via RSS or similar. The EU is first and foremost a common market and concerned with creating fair economical conditions. Obviously, the web is stuck (economically) in a quasi-monopolistic situation. The EU Commission/Parliament is attempting to do exactly what is necessary to re-establish desirable market conditions. If they'd do nothing, this would question their very reason for existence; they're not in for establishing state- or other monopolies. Along these lines, what the EU should consider next is to establish workable e-payment standards and legislation.
- minitel 8y ago
  > Now that the EU actually wants to do something about it, the law is being denounced as lobbied by big media, but, to the contrary, the current status quo only serves Google et al. Do you think these regulations will make it more difficult for smaller companies to arise in any space where they are relevant? If so, this legislation favors incumbents. It provides them with a nice little moat in the form of higher start-up costs. The EU does not pass legislation out of the kindness of their hearts. There are lots of people in Brussels bargaining on behalf of clients who are first and foremost interested in the health of their businesses. Granted, there is a lot of feel good propaganda about "protecting the people." As this site is a community centered on the creation of new companies it is normal that this legislation would be looked at negatively here. Since it will stifle small companies.
3pt14159 8y ago
The only part about these EU types of laws that kinda rubs me the wrong way is how they infect across business dealings. But overall I support their objectives, even if I think the true solution to some of the problems they're trying to solve is a technical change to how the web and internet work.
zer0faith 8y ago
Let's say I live in the EU but use a VPN in another country can I circumvent this copyright law?
phobosdeimos 8y ago
To be hypocritical is to be human: if the EU can make life miserable for some American based businesses Trump style I won't lose sleep over it.
ttepasse 8y ago
The author's strange interpretation of the motivations behind the GDPR makes me ask if he never spend any thought on the preceding data privacy directives and national privacy laws of EU members. It's a rather small update, not big paradigm change and the GDPR is rather in the same spirit like the privacy laws of the 90s and 80s.
AdamM12 8y ago
"Internet tech giants including Google and Facebook could be made to monitor, filter and block internet uploads under amendments..." Should read. "Countless companies that do not have the resources of Google and Facebook could be made to monitor..."
joejerryronnie 8y ago
I think it boils down to the following question: "Do you trust the government to make decisions that will benefit and protect you?" In the EU, it appears the answer is Yes. In the US, the answer is unequivocally No.
angrymonk 8y ago
I take it that every one is pro intellectual property when it comes YOUR data being handled by services through their support of GDPR. But also anti intellectual property when it comes to copyright data being handled by services through their opposition to copyright laws, because that would be overreach. Just take your punishment.

194 points by juokaz 8y ago

It seems there's a common warfront in general around what can or can't be said, and it has coalesced in the every-one tool, the Internet. Greater ease to publish, greater impulse to control one another. The test of our day seems to be around the right to speak freely, online.

netsec_burn 8y ago
I'm surprised Tor usage hasn't skyrocketed.
- kodablah 8y ago
  I'd say the lack of Tor-exclusive easy-to-use applications. That Tor underpins an application should be transparent. If the Tor browser is the same on the outside as a web browser but slower, the anonymity alone isn't a good enough reason for many to use it. Rather, a (non-browser?) communication platform needs to compete on features and just happen to use Tor.
- octosphere 8y ago
  Well we do know that Tor usage shot up after Snowden's revelations https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186025-privacy-behaviors-after-snowden/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186025-privacy-behavio... https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/tor-usage-doubles-snowden-nsa-prism/ https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/tor-usage-doubles-snowden-ns...
  - chris_mc 8y ago
    Darknet markets had a huge boom around that time, too, which could also correlate. I think it's more likely the cause than Snowden, as I think more people care about drugs than privacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_market#Silk_Road_and_early_markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_market#Silk_Road_and_e... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-01-01%202013-12-31&geo=US&q=%2Fg%2F11b6hxvzw9 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2013-01-01%202...
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Many sites (including this one) shadowban accounts created via Tor. So basically, you can't use Tor for social media.
  - ommunist 8y ago
    you can’t use Tor for the Internet banking either

kodablah 8y ago

> This brings me to a piece of legislation I have been very critical of for quite some time: GDPR. The intent of the legislation is certainly admirable — protect consumer privacy —although (and this may be the American in me speaking) I am perhaps a bit skeptical about just how much most consumers care relative to elites in the media. Amen. The way Google and FB are using data just doesn't bother the masses the way it bothers the media and the narrative they've built (or the way it bothers us). There are many steps that can be taken, some incremental, towards the curbing of these practices. But we, as technologists, should always decry heavy-handed government regulation of the internet, especially as an early step. The intent does not matter. If legislation doesn't work, don't make more or make it larger assuming it was the scope that was the problem. Take a step back and recognize alternatives including enforcing existing statues, promoting alternatives, educating citizenry, more targeted and narrowly scoped legislation, etc.

josteink 8y ago
> But we, as technologists, should always decry heavy-handed government regulation of the internet, especially as an early step. This is not an early step. The trend has been clear for the past decade, and it has been going in the wrong direction, at increasing speeds. This is pretty much something the tech industry brought upon itself by trying to always trying to outdo itself in terms of how much tracking and privacy violations it could get away with. IOW, from a techie to another: cry me a river.
- pathseeker 8y ago
  >The trend has been clear for the past decade, and it has been going in the wrong direction, at increasing speeds. Tools to block tracking have gotten better. Spyware is more difficult to spread, etc. I'm not convinced it's going the wrong direction "at increasing speeds". Do you have any empirical evidence of this or is it just based on perception? >IOW, from a techie to another: cry me a river. Don't do this. " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

no1youknowz 8y ago

It's not just the EU that the Internet is in danger of. A Labour MP in the UK announced a bill that wants to curtail "closed" forums on social media [0]. Analysis on the topic [1]. [0]: https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3062557/mp-plans-laws-to-open-up-closed-internet-groups-claiming-they-fuel-extremism-and-hate https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3062557/mp-plans-laws-to-ope... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eobVBf5S8uM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eobVBf5S8uM

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
That's absolutely ridiculous. Is she going to let us listen in on all her private phone calls? Read all her emails? Please tell me this has no hope of passing...
- mjw1007 8y ago
  It's a Ten-minute rule bill. Ten-minute rule bills have no hope of passing. You're welcome.
  - chris_mc 8y ago
    For the lazy folks who (initially) thought this was a 120x extension to the 5 second rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Minute_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Minute_Rule
- davemp 8y ago
  Whoever purposes such an irresponsible and evil law should also have no hope of a future in politics.
  - Matticus_Rex 8y ago
    That's a really nice thought.

walterstucco 8y ago

The Web is not the Internet EU is targeting US WEB tech giants, but can't directly name them

reacweb 8y ago

The usage of natural language to write legislations about internet will always create ambiguities and loopholes. I think regulations should be writen in a mathematical language with proof of consistency and unambigous reference implementation of algorithms that are imposed to FAI.

furgooswft13 8y ago
Lets pass a law that states all laws must be written in Haskell! Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  But the laws that were written would apply to all, even those who don't know Haskell. That's probably not a desirable outcome.
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  > Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language. Legalese didn't seem to have that effect.
  - furgooswft13 8y ago
    Yea but you can throw legalese madlibs into a document and get it passed as law as long as you provide the legislators enough kickbacks. Haskell has to compile at least, and be pure and stuff. Who's up for a Pure Functional Programming government.
    - makapuf 8y ago
      Sometimes I get the impression we get pure fictional programs before the elections ...
yifanl 8y ago
I thought the whole point of legislation is that it should be left to reasonable interpretation. Trying to be exacting just leads to a race to how many loopholes we can find (and we will find them), and now you get a scenario where the law only applies to you if you cannot afford a sufficiently good lawyer.

tw1010 8y ago

It's super interesting to watch the reaction of the US blogosphere to EU laws. I feel like I'm learning a lot about US culture just by observing the general attitude that seems to be coalescing against things like GDPR. I used to think that I'd been pretty well indoctrinated into the US value system, despite being born in the EU, just by virtue of having most of my influences (movies, the internet) having come from there. But seeing how much different my attitude is towards all these laws, compared to articles like this one, totally gives me a whole new source of specific little value updates I aught to make if I want to escape from a mindset I suspect isn't optimal in the current economic climate (an EU-based one), to one that is (i.e. an american attitude to things).

kodablah 8y ago
I also find it interesting from the inverse perspective. I am of course naive, but I think most of the viewpoint differences boil down to how one views business owners and government. Not necessarily one versus the other, though that does come in to play, but more about whether the former deserves rights/consideration and whether the latter is equipped to reasonably restrict them. This is especially true for big business and big laws.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
I also found the reaction interesting because even techies here were overwhelmingly in favour of GDPR. Mainly because it is so similar to data protection that's been in place for 20 years and they have been used to implementing without problem. That included founders and executives within companies. Thanks to the profile of people I know that's been mainly in smaller companies. Most of the negative opinion I heard was that the regulations wouldn't be enforced strongly enough to achieve enough change. Yet a common US reaction was to view GDPR as something draconian and anti small business, and to deliberately misunderstand that a maximum penalty wasn't going to be the always penalty. Much like this blog post does. On the copyright proposals those same people here in the EU are unanimously against.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
  >and to deliberately misunderstand that a maximum penalty wasn't going to be the always penalty. This is the only way to view penalties like this that don't have clearly defined criteria. It's all up to a judge, and when so much is at risk, a company will assume the worse.

mrmekon 8y ago

In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law. Everybody is completely and 100% against the copyright law. There is a huge difference between the two from my point of view: GDPR is not a law about "The Internet", it is a law about company records. It applies to Google, but it also applies to the Pakistani food stand on the corner. It affects Google a lot more, sure. I support the concept that a company does not have some inherent right to be a steward of my personal data without my explicit consent. GDPR is also easy enough for even tiny startups to comply with, and is significantly easier for small companies than large ones. It does not create a large barrier to entry for new startups or a rift between the existing small and large companies. The copyright law, however, is a law about The Internet. It controls how businesses interact with the internet. It sets _technical_ restrictions on how they can do so. It sets technical restrictions that are probably not even feasible, at that. It absolutely does create a huge barrier to entry for small companies, and could possibly enshrine the existing tech giants into de-facto monopolies (I mean, if they aren't already...) The copyright directive is horrible enough on its own. I don't see why everyone is in a rush to pull in mentions of GDPR to make it seem "worse". For a lot of us, it weakens the argument instead of strengthening it. Not everyone likes GDPR, obviously, but we can _all_ agree that the copyright law is garbage.

throwaway122378 8y ago
Can you elaborate on the specifics of the copyright law?
- mrmekon 8y ago
  It's all still up in the air, and the wording is vague. GDPR's wording is also vague, as EU laws are. When we read between the lines, GDPR's vagueness sounds promising (hard to over-reach, easy to understand intentions), and the Copyright Directive's vagueness sounds terrifying (easy to over-reach, hard to understand intentions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_... A big difference is in the boundaries. GDPR is bounded by your customer records. One customer, one collection of personal data. There's a hard upper limit: about 7 billion. Companies tend to scale with customers, so generally bigger companies will have bigger customer bases and bigger employee bases to handle protecting the records. The Copyright Directive's bounds is user content. One customer, any number of potential infringements. A single person can run a company with 100 customers who upload 10,000 images each per year. Managing the customer base is pretty easy, managing the data storage is pretty easy, GDPR-protecting 100 people's data is pretty easy. But 1 million potential copyright infringements per year, each one of which could even be claimed by multiple rights holders. Your risk exposure grows with data, not with people. That one-man show probably can't handle tens of thousands of take-down requests, nor build an AI Machine Learning Cloud Native Copyright ID Blockchain System to automate it.

FactolSarin 8y ago

I disagree with the EU about their copyright legislation, but applaud their attempts at increasing privacy. What I find odd about the conversation around EU internet legislation is the idea that "The Internet" is a single entity that has some kind of natural state, and further that natural state is for all information to be free and to be a place where anyone can say anything (or should be able to). I think this grows out of the American origins of the Internet, and the American concept of free speech. But other countries have different views of how free speech should be. Should you be able to deny the holocaust? Should you be able to purchase unlimited political ads? Should you be able to spread misinformation? Americans tend to say yes, because the truth will sort itself out. I'm not going to make a judgement on whether that's true, but it is true that other societies make different judgements on where to draw the line on freedom of expression, and those countries have a right to implement those decisions for their people on the Internet just as much as Americans have a right to have wild-west style freedom of expression. Oh, also, before someone straw-mans me, I'm not talking about repressive regimes. I'm talking about societies where the populace is making informed decisions about their leaders, and have collectively decided they draw the line on expression in a different place than Americans do.

nybble41 8y ago
> ... and those countries have a right to implement those decisions for their people on the Internet ... No, they do not. One's natural rights do not disappear just because one happens to be living under a regime which fails to acknowledge them. When an American talks about the freedom of speech, they're talking about a right shared by every human being on this planet, not just the ones who happen to live in the USA. It is a matter of objective fact, not opinion or local preference, that the use of force, including fines, imprisonment, etc., is not a proportional response to mere speech, regardless of the content.
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  It's a matter of objective fact? Show me the experimental data that shows the American interpretation of freedom of speech is correct. Even Americans draw the line somewhere. For instance, the old "shouting fire in a theater." bit. Or, say, planning a murder. Other people decide to draw the line different places. Sorry, but claiming the American legal interpretation is "objective fact" and, say, the German one is wrong is just crazy.

digikata 8y ago

So there's a lot of coverage about the EU parliament process, but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? There seems to very little coverage on how this directive came about. Whose interests are being represented by these changes?

LeoNatan25 8y ago
Corruption: lobbying and corporate money.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
My understanding is the copyright proposals were at least partially thanks to incumbent big media in Germany, and their link tax reaction to Google news.
kodablah 8y ago
> but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? A similar yet more apt question might be, where did the idea that parliament can get away with such large internet regulations come from?
- hyperman1 8y ago
  The fiction of every law making organisation is that they can get away with creating every law they want. If they did not believe this fiction, the whole idea of law as something that applies to everyone becomes meaningless. In practice, the power of a lawmaker is limited by if he can get the law applied. For example, multiple muslim countries have laws banning women walking around without head scarf. Not only in their country, but everywhere in the universe. In practice, you see many women walking around without one, and the relevant lawmakers dont know or care. But suppose one of these women is in such a country, gets summoned in court for this, and proof is given she violated the law, even outside the country, then the judge has only one option: Guilty. Society runs on hoping this does not happen, i.e. selective enforcement. For Europe, the situation is clear: They can get away with any law in Europe, as long as it doesnt cause them to be voted out. And it seems the general public is not going to vote them out, so they can easily get away with this.

a_imho 8y ago

tldr; the author uses the copyright directive to go off tangent and cry about GDPR a bit more

supermatt 8y ago

IMHO, It should be up to the respective authorities to decide if things are covered by copyright or not. Following this ridiculous proposal, THEY should be the ones to provide the relevant tools and services to service providers to enforce this ludicrous position.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I will come out and say I don't agree with this portrayal of EU legislation being absurd. Time and again we're discussing what's wrong with the current web landscape: commoditization of content, leading into an attention economy with tracking and surveillance, and concentration of ad spend and most money to be made in the hands of very few players. If creators don't get their share of profits made using their works, this won't sustain further content creation. YouTube and file sharing sites can not shrug and say "we're just running the platform" when they disproportionally benefit and leave content creators with a pittance if anything. Now that the EU actually wants to do something about it, the law is being denounced as lobbied by big media, but, to the contrary, the current status quo only serves Google et al. I have my reservations about the feasibility of content filtering, but "EU vs the Internet" is coming from an internet "mob" mindset having come to expect everything to be free (as in FREE of direct cost) immediately and without friction. "The Internet" is not consumers, but made by creators. In fact, I'm cautiously optimistic this (and the GDPR) legislation will benefit smaller publishers and diversity and bring back unproblematic syndication and end-user content aggregation via RSS or similar. The EU is first and foremost a common market and concerned with creating fair economical conditions. Obviously, the web is stuck (economically) in a quasi-monopolistic situation. The EU Commission/Parliament is attempting to do exactly what is necessary to re-establish desirable market conditions. If they'd do nothing, this would question their very reason for existence; they're not in for establishing state- or other monopolies. Along these lines, what the EU should consider next is to establish workable e-payment standards and legislation.

minitel 8y ago
> Now that the EU actually wants to do something about it, the law is being denounced as lobbied by big media, but, to the contrary, the current status quo only serves Google et al. Do you think these regulations will make it more difficult for smaller companies to arise in any space where they are relevant? If so, this legislation favors incumbents. It provides them with a nice little moat in the form of higher start-up costs. The EU does not pass legislation out of the kindness of their hearts. There are lots of people in Brussels bargaining on behalf of clients who are first and foremost interested in the health of their businesses. Granted, there is a lot of feel good propaganda about "protecting the people." As this site is a community centered on the creation of new companies it is normal that this legislation would be looked at negatively here. Since it will stifle small companies.

3pt14159 8y ago

The only part about these EU types of laws that kinda rubs me the wrong way is how they infect across business dealings. But overall I support their objectives, even if I think the true solution to some of the problems they're trying to solve is a technical change to how the web and internet work.

zer0faith 8y ago

Let's say I live in the EU but use a VPN in another country can I circumvent this copyright law?

phobosdeimos 8y ago

To be hypocritical is to be human: if the EU can make life miserable for some American based businesses Trump style I won't lose sleep over it.

ttepasse 8y ago

The author's strange interpretation of the motivations behind the GDPR makes me ask if he never spend any thought on the preceding data privacy directives and national privacy laws of EU members. It's a rather small update, not big paradigm change and the GDPR is rather in the same spirit like the privacy laws of the 90s and 80s.

AdamM12 8y ago

"Internet tech giants including Google and Facebook could be made to monitor, filter and block internet uploads under amendments..." Should read. "Countless companies that do not have the resources of Google and Facebook could be made to monitor..."

joejerryronnie 8y ago

I think it boils down to the following question: "Do you trust the government to make decisions that will benefit and protect you?" In the EU, it appears the answer is Yes. In the US, the answer is unequivocally No.

angrymonk 8y ago

I take it that every one is pro intellectual property when it comes YOUR data being handled by services through their support of GDPR. But also anti intellectual property when it comes to copyright data being handled by services through their opposition to copyright laws, because that would be overreach. Just take your punishment.