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It's perfectly fine to share links, the EU directive specifically states so. What you can't do, is take content, and host it as your own without getting authori

It's perfectly fine to share links, the EU directive specifically states so. What you can't do, is take content, and host it as your own without getting authorization to do so by the content creator. You can probably imagine why that would be a problem from Reddit. I don't personally care if companies like reddit get to face the harshest possible fines from the EU, they are morally bankrupt after all. I mean, almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy, and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit, and that's not even touching their shady political and commercial manipulation. On the other hand, I really doubt that EU legislation will ever be successful in stopping people from sharing dank memes. Also, I'm guessing this only applies to the desktop version of reddit, because would be impossible to see anything on the mobile version anyway since everything is blocked by all those "USE OUR APP" banners.

nerdponx 8y ago
So linking to an image in-place is fine, but reuploading to Imgur is not?
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Image hosters, before comments and likes, were useful mirror too
- eksemplar 8y ago
  If I'm a photographer and you see my images and like them, then you can't download them and then upload them as your own on reddit, and reddit certainly can't make money from the clicks generated by my photos that you uploaded to their site. Unless you have my permission. Thats the clear case, it gets difficult with stuff like Star Wars memes. Disney probably doesn't mind someone using Darth Vader to tell a joke, they probably don't care if you stole the image and uploaded it as your own either, and they probably don't care if your joke is distributed on reddit either or whether they make money from it. Because at the end of the day, thet's sort of a free commercial. Under the law though, you have to ask permission. It's annoying to be honest. I give a lot of presentations, and not having every image on the internet available to me, is just annoying. But I work for a municipality, and it can potentially be held accountable if I use proprietary images without having permission to do so. It's been like that for a long while by the way, but internet companies like Reddit have somehow gotten away with doing what the rest of us cannot. In fact they've build a big part of their business model around it, and now the EU is telling them they aren't above the law, so of course they're unhappy.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > somehow gotten away with doing what the rest of us cannot [...] the EU is telling them they aren't above the law, so of course they're unhappy It is so unfortunate to see a lack of enforcement of existing statutes justify increasing the number of statutes. "Somehow" your company/municipality is subject to a law Reddit is not? And you wonder why that subjectivity exists? And instead of questioning the efficacy of the law or its enforcement you defend doubling down with the same approach? And surely you recognize that an employee violating an existing law is different than a user of that company's materials doing so? Shall we go after copy machine companies next for not checking whether something can be copied before transferring it to paper?
  - randallsquared 8y ago
    > If I'm a photographer and you see my images and like them, then you can't download them and then upload them as your own on reddit, It would strengthen your point to remove “download them and then”. When reading through this, I stopped to mentally argue with this at that point (since having viewed the image implies downloading already), but that part is incidental to your argument.
betterunix2 8y ago
Morally bankrupt? Copyright is not a moral issue, it is just a several centuries old regulation created by people who could never have envisioned something like the Internet. The effort to turn copyright into a moral issue is nothing more than a tactic employed by copyright-based industries in their desperate bid to stay relevant without changing their business models.
- snazz 8y ago
  The potential moral issue is that the creator of the work (author, photographer, artist, musician) receives no compensation for widespread use of their work. On the other hand, the publishing company or record label or other middleman almost always makes most of the money anyway. An illegal but morally somewhat right thing I’ve seen people do is to pirate the work and pay the artist directly, cutting out most of the expense while still benefiting the creator.
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    There is no moral obligation for people to be paid for their work, even if other people enjoy that work, even if it is widespread. Are you going to track down every person who told you a funny joke at a bar that you go around repeating to your friends, or perhaps feel guilty about repeating that joke? The idea that there is moral obligation to pay authors for their writing was itself a tactic used by the publishing industry to establish copyright law when it was first being debated. As you point out, publishers almost always receive the bulk of the money while creators receive little if any compensation. Copyright has always been about business interests and not about morality.
    - Angostura 8y ago
      > There is no moral obligation for people to be paid for their work Make sure to tell your boss.
      - randallsquared 8y ago
mistercow 8y ago
> and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit Very often, when a gif taken from a video is shared, for example, the top comment will be a link to the source video. In even more cases, such a comment is near the top of the thread. That absolutely benefits the content creator.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  It would be much better if the post was linked to the creators actual page so they can get ad views.
Zak 8y ago
The sort of images most commonly posted to reddit are screengrabs from movies or games with text added for humorous effect. This sort of use has traditionally been classed as fair use under copyright law. Penalizing reddit for doing so would not result in more revenue for the creators of the source material.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  If anything it results in less. Memetic sharing of snippets of content leads lots of people to get interested in the source material, seek it out and pay for it.
  - Zak 8y ago
    Indeed. I recently binge-watched four seasons of a series on Netflix after seeing a Youtube montage of the lead character murdering people.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      What series?
      - Zak 8y ago
        The Blacklist.
- pergadad 8y ago
  That's not illegal under the EU directive though...
AsyncAwait 8y ago
I believe the way copyright is structured and enforced today is the moral issue here. Let's not forget why Hollywood is in Hollywood after all.
HissingMachine 8y ago
I really can't be bothered to defend platforms like Reddit or Facebook from directives or laws, but what I do care and hold dear is the user experience that will suffer greatly if the directives pass as proposed. In the end, it's the users who will bear the brunt of legislation like this by losing access and tools to communicate, and that is the crux of this issue, legislation rarely does what it's primary intention is and ends up harming the public the most. After all, laws are very blunt objects to deal with soft matters because they are enforced by fines and penalties and weakest members, usually individuals, are least prepared to defend their rights, companies can hire lawyers or even shift focus to something else. Users will lose everything.
ekianjo 8y ago
> almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy You mean copyright infringement? You know there's an infinite amount of debate as to how much copyright protection costs society vs its actual benefits (most of the said benefits go to big cartels rather than individual creators anyway). > almost every image Really? You have any source to prove your extraordinary claim? > very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit, Erm... ever heard of publicity?
- hk__2 8y ago
  >> very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit, > > Erm... ever heard of publicity? Publicity doesn’t pay the bills, and it only works if the original author is mentioned.
buboard 8y ago
I totally agree with the sentiment. You can't take content from the world and host it without giving something back. A newspaper reporting on a funeral? pay the descendants a fee. Reporting on celebs? pay another fee. Reporting on science? pay the scientists a fee. We forget though that the media is also another form of aggregator. They write about the news, but don't create them. Whether one sort of aggregator is more profitable than the other depends on the cost of the writing and the breadth of the audience.
geggam 8y ago
Explain the difference in hosting content on a server vs downloading and hosting it local to be rendered by a browser ? The number of people in the audience its being shared with ? If I show someone what I have locally I have doubled that audience. Remember the double a penny math ? If everyone shared a photo with 1 person effectively doubling the sharing, in 40 days you are going to have the entire world covered. The entire premise of IP and copyright is broken when it is so cheap the common method of presenting material is to copy it and render it locally.
LMYahooTFY 8y ago
This is awfully dogmatic, and I'm sad to see it on HN. Your arguments would effectively turn the internet into nothing more than a text messaging service seeing as Google indexing and mirroring images is also "piracy". P.S. - Maybe we should ditch the old MPAA/RIAA propaganda lingo? No one is talking about robbing a sea faring vessel.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  > MPAA/RIAA propaganda lingo? yes, sad to see people on here using that bollocks speech still. This is far more complex and subtle than stealing doubloons on all sides of the argument.
liftbigweights 8y ago
> I mean, almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy No it's not. It's called fair use. As long as it is changed or altered in some way as a means of commentary/criticism/etc. Using your logic, everything is piracy, even "original" content.
Findeton 8y ago
That's not the problem. The problem is that the law wants the webpage owners to be liable for copyright infringements from whatever content users generate.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Most threads on reddit are either links to an original source or text threads where users are providing the content. How is this theft?
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Only for news articles. Almost all images and videos are rehosted
sometime 8y ago
> almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy This statement seems questionable and needs to be backed up by statistics. Looking at the front-page, the most entertaining items are original content contributed by the users. Clearly, piracy is happening too, perhaps in the total uploads more so than what reaches the front-page, but I distrust the notion that this is associated with substantial economic loss. And in the utilitarian analysis of the problem it matters whether it is substantial because of the implications on freedom of speech that may come from an automated filter.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy, and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit Almost every time I stumble upon a picture I really like I tineye it to find more works of the same author and a hi-res version perhaps. Some times this leads to discovering amazing artists on resources like DeviantArt and popularizing them everywhere continuously and even considering buying a print. I can see no reason how sharing a low to medium resolution version of a picture even without mentioning the author means any harm to the author but in cases when they prefer to keep their work secret. In fact I believe forcing everybody to contact the author to request a formal approval is much more harm to them and their profits.
scarejunba 8y ago
By this standard, HN users constantly indulge in blatant piracy, through encouragement and use of outline.com to bypass paywalls.

nerdponx 8y ago

So linking to an image in-place is fine, but reuploading to Imgur is not?

agumonkey 8y ago
Image hosters, before comments and likes, were useful mirror too
eksemplar 8y ago
If I'm a photographer and you see my images and like them, then you can't download them and then upload them as your own on reddit, and reddit certainly can't make money from the clicks generated by my photos that you uploaded to their site. Unless you have my permission. Thats the clear case, it gets difficult with stuff like Star Wars memes. Disney probably doesn't mind someone using Darth Vader to tell a joke, they probably don't care if you stole the image and uploaded it as your own either, and they probably don't care if your joke is distributed on reddit either or whether they make money from it. Because at the end of the day, thet's sort of a free commercial. Under the law though, you have to ask permission. It's annoying to be honest. I give a lot of presentations, and not having every image on the internet available to me, is just annoying. But I work for a municipality, and it can potentially be held accountable if I use proprietary images without having permission to do so. It's been like that for a long while by the way, but internet companies like Reddit have somehow gotten away with doing what the rest of us cannot. In fact they've build a big part of their business model around it, and now the EU is telling them they aren't above the law, so of course they're unhappy.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > somehow gotten away with doing what the rest of us cannot [...] the EU is telling them they aren't above the law, so of course they're unhappy It is so unfortunate to see a lack of enforcement of existing statutes justify increasing the number of statutes. "Somehow" your company/municipality is subject to a law Reddit is not? And you wonder why that subjectivity exists? And instead of questioning the efficacy of the law or its enforcement you defend doubling down with the same approach? And surely you recognize that an employee violating an existing law is different than a user of that company's materials doing so? Shall we go after copy machine companies next for not checking whether something can be copied before transferring it to paper?
- randallsquared 8y ago
  > If I'm a photographer and you see my images and like them, then you can't download them and then upload them as your own on reddit, It would strengthen your point to remove “download them and then”. When reading through this, I stopped to mentally argue with this at that point (since having viewed the image implies downloading already), but that part is incidental to your argument.

betterunix2 8y ago

Morally bankrupt? Copyright is not a moral issue, it is just a several centuries old regulation created by people who could never have envisioned something like the Internet. The effort to turn copyright into a moral issue is nothing more than a tactic employed by copyright-based industries in their desperate bid to stay relevant without changing their business models.

snazz 8y ago
The potential moral issue is that the creator of the work (author, photographer, artist, musician) receives no compensation for widespread use of their work. On the other hand, the publishing company or record label or other middleman almost always makes most of the money anyway. An illegal but morally somewhat right thing I’ve seen people do is to pirate the work and pay the artist directly, cutting out most of the expense while still benefiting the creator.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  There is no moral obligation for people to be paid for their work, even if other people enjoy that work, even if it is widespread. Are you going to track down every person who told you a funny joke at a bar that you go around repeating to your friends, or perhaps feel guilty about repeating that joke? The idea that there is moral obligation to pay authors for their writing was itself a tactic used by the publishing industry to establish copyright law when it was first being debated. As you point out, publishers almost always receive the bulk of the money while creators receive little if any compensation. Copyright has always been about business interests and not about morality.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    > There is no moral obligation for people to be paid for their work Make sure to tell your boss.
    - randallsquared 8y ago

mistercow 8y ago

> and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit Very often, when a gif taken from a video is shared, for example, the top comment will be a link to the source video. In even more cases, such a comment is near the top of the thread. That absolutely benefits the content creator.

ndnxhs 8y ago
It would be much better if the post was linked to the creators actual page so they can get ad views.

Zak 8y ago

The sort of images most commonly posted to reddit are screengrabs from movies or games with text added for humorous effect. This sort of use has traditionally been classed as fair use under copyright law. Penalizing reddit for doing so would not result in more revenue for the creators of the source material.

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
If anything it results in less. Memetic sharing of snippets of content leads lots of people to get interested in the source material, seek it out and pay for it.
- Zak 8y ago
  Indeed. I recently binge-watched four seasons of a series on Netflix after seeing a Youtube montage of the lead character murdering people.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    What series?
    - Zak 8y ago
      The Blacklist.
pergadad 8y ago
That's not illegal under the EU directive though...

AsyncAwait 8y ago

I believe the way copyright is structured and enforced today is the moral issue here. Let's not forget why Hollywood is in Hollywood after all.

HissingMachine 8y ago

I really can't be bothered to defend platforms like Reddit or Facebook from directives or laws, but what I do care and hold dear is the user experience that will suffer greatly if the directives pass as proposed. In the end, it's the users who will bear the brunt of legislation like this by losing access and tools to communicate, and that is the crux of this issue, legislation rarely does what it's primary intention is and ends up harming the public the most. After all, laws are very blunt objects to deal with soft matters because they are enforced by fines and penalties and weakest members, usually individuals, are least prepared to defend their rights, companies can hire lawyers or even shift focus to something else. Users will lose everything.

ekianjo 8y ago

> almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy You mean copyright infringement? You know there's an infinite amount of debate as to how much copyright protection costs society vs its actual benefits (most of the said benefits go to big cartels rather than individual creators anyway). > almost every image Really? You have any source to prove your extraordinary claim? > very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit, Erm... ever heard of publicity?

hk__2 8y ago
>> very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit, > > Erm... ever heard of publicity? Publicity doesn’t pay the bills, and it only works if the original author is mentioned.

buboard 8y ago

I totally agree with the sentiment. You can't take content from the world and host it without giving something back. A newspaper reporting on a funeral? pay the descendants a fee. Reporting on celebs? pay another fee. Reporting on science? pay the scientists a fee. We forget though that the media is also another form of aggregator. They write about the news, but don't create them. Whether one sort of aggregator is more profitable than the other depends on the cost of the writing and the breadth of the audience.

geggam 8y ago

Explain the difference in hosting content on a server vs downloading and hosting it local to be rendered by a browser ? The number of people in the audience its being shared with ? If I show someone what I have locally I have doubled that audience. Remember the double a penny math ? If everyone shared a photo with 1 person effectively doubling the sharing, in 40 days you are going to have the entire world covered. The entire premise of IP and copyright is broken when it is so cheap the common method of presenting material is to copy it and render it locally.

LMYahooTFY 8y ago

This is awfully dogmatic, and I'm sad to see it on HN. Your arguments would effectively turn the internet into nothing more than a text messaging service seeing as Google indexing and mirroring images is also "piracy". P.S. - Maybe we should ditch the old MPAA/RIAA propaganda lingo? No one is talking about robbing a sea faring vessel.

tluyben2 8y ago
> MPAA/RIAA propaganda lingo? yes, sad to see people on here using that bollocks speech still. This is far more complex and subtle than stealing doubloons on all sides of the argument.

liftbigweights 8y ago

> I mean, almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy No it's not. It's called fair use. As long as it is changed or altered in some way as a means of commentary/criticism/etc. Using your logic, everything is piracy, even "original" content.

Findeton 8y ago

That's not the problem. The problem is that the law wants the webpage owners to be liable for copyright infringements from whatever content users generate.

michaelmrose 8y ago

Most threads on reddit are either links to an original source or text threads where users are providing the content. How is this theft?

ndnxhs 8y ago
Only for news articles. Almost all images and videos are rehosted

sometime 8y ago

> almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy This statement seems questionable and needs to be backed up by statistics. Looking at the front-page, the most entertaining items are original content contributed by the users. Clearly, piracy is happening too, perhaps in the total uploads more so than what reaches the front-page, but I distrust the notion that this is associated with substantial economic loss. And in the utilitarian analysis of the problem it matters whether it is substantial because of the implications on freedom of speech that may come from an automated filter.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy, and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit Almost every time I stumble upon a picture I really like I tineye it to find more works of the same author and a hi-res version perhaps. Some times this leads to discovering amazing artists on resources like DeviantArt and popularizing them everywhere continuously and even considering buying a print. I can see no reason how sharing a low to medium resolution version of a picture even without mentioning the author means any harm to the author but in cases when they prefer to keep their work secret. In fact I believe forcing everybody to contact the author to request a formal approval is much more harm to them and their profits.

scarejunba 8y ago

By this standard, HN users constantly indulge in blatant piracy, through encouragement and use of outline.com to bypass paywalls.