14 ms·

For your info: Hacker news is: - an Internet platform - that organizes and promotes large amounts of posts - which are copyright-protected works uploade

• claudius 8y ago
  For your info: Hacker News being responsible for the data its users provide is not a problem for the users, it is a problem for Hacker News and similar platforms who leech off content from the general public for their own profit. Further for your info: Hacker News does not "need a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie", it only needs to take responsibility of you commit copyright infringement by doing so. I’d happily let Hacker News go if it means other such platforms go with it.
  • yostrovs 8y ago
    Are you sarcastic? It's often difficult to differentiate a Nazi from a nanny.
    • dang 8y ago
      Please don't break the site guidelines regardless of how wrong another comment might be. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • Y_Y 8y ago
    PILATE: Hoo hoo hoo ho. The little wascal has spiwit. CENTURION: Has what, sir? PILATE: Spiwit. CENTURION: Yes. He did, sir. PILATE: No, no. Spiwit, siw. Um, bwavado. A touch of dewwing-do. CENTURION: Oh. Ahh, about eleven, sir. PILATE: So, you dare to waid us. BRIAN: To what, sir? PILATE: Stwike him, Centuwion, vewy woughly! slap
    • c3o 8y ago
      This would indeed seem to be a copyright infringement in many EU member states. For example, in Germany it wouldn't fall under the quotation exception (no such thing as vague "fair use" here), since you aren't critically engaging with or commenting on the quote, which would be allowed – you just reproduced it. The movie studio could now hold HN liable. Well, except that HN is not under EU jurisdiction, so it could probably choose to ignore EU court decisions against it. Bigger platforms of course won't have that luxury, so they'd need to come up with some way of limiting or avoiding that liability... or maybe just blocking EU users.
      • toyg 8y ago
        > you aren't critically engaging with or commenting on the quote He's using the quote to make an unrelated point. This wouldn't be considered copyright infringement anywhere you have an impartial judiciary.
      • phissk 8y ago
        Your post, right here, discussing quote, makes this fair use.
        • c3o 8y ago
          True, I guess you could see "the comment thread" as the larger (collaborative) intellectual work within which the movie was quoted for illustrative purposes.
    • meh2frdf 8y ago
      This is a very poor argument even under basic scrutiny.
  • Zak 8y ago
    > I’d happily let Hacker News go if it means other such platforms go with it. Why? I'll take as a given that many platforms are profiting from copyrighted content uploaded by users, but I very much doubt that the copyright owners would secure any of those profits for themselves if the platforms in question were driven out of existence. Do you believe otherwise? If so, why?
• drewbuschhorn 8y ago
  I feel like we had this exact same argument over GDPR, but no horror stories have descended about Mom and Pop operations run out of business but the evil Brusselcrats.
  • KevanM 8y ago
    These are enforced on a national level though aren't they, in the UK ICO doesn't have the resources to hunt people down and are probably only going to enforce action against major players in the market as they are under the most scrutiny. The problem comes when a nation decides to use those rules in a way that is detrimental to the populace or a service they see as troublesome.
  • yostrovs 8y ago
    It's not clear what's going on with GDPR, good test cases are only now starting to be tested. But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
    • r3bl 8y ago
      > But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about. There's just one large company that decided to block EU visitors: Tribune Publishing[0]. Yes, them blocking Europe is bad. Them owning so many local newspapers that this decision even makes an impact is a bigger problem. I'm not saying that they're the only ones blocking Europe, but I am saying that we wouldn't think of it to be as wide spread if it weren't for Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and LA Times (among others). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Publishing
      • gregknicholson 8y ago
        tronc [vt] To make content unavailable in certain jurisdictions due to unwillingness to comply with their laws. Examples: * Tribune have troncked Europe because their data control is jazzy. * Google should really tronc China - fight the Firewall!
• cribbles 8y ago
  I get the larger point you’re making, but I’d guess that copyright-protected works make up less than 0.05% of all content posted to this site and that includes repo links. /new is mostly just TechCrunch articles and things like that. I’m aware that bad faith interpretation of imprecise wording can be used to weaponize laws, and that laws are sometimes passed for this very reason, but it would be an incredible stretch (both legally and colloquially) to claim that phrasing applies here.
  • sesutton 8y ago
    >/new is mostly just TechCrunch articles and things like that Those are all copyright-protected works. Literally everything of any substance is automatically copyrighted.
    • atq2119 8y ago
      Those articles also aren't uploaded but merely linked, so the rule doesn't apply.
      • Junk_Collector 8y ago
        Sort of, there is a big push in that direction mostly from the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlinking_and_framing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...
      • c3o 8y ago
        Another article of the same law (Article 11) would apply copyright also to shortest excerpts of news articles, anything longer than "individual words". (Colloquially known as the "link tax" provision.) So even reproducing the full title of a news article would likely be an infringement, and then that becomes another thing platforms take liability for/need to filter under Article 13. Whether there's a link or not would be irrelevant. (It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.)
• presscast 8y ago
  >What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law. Hold on, that's not true. The intent of law matters and is codified in various ways, including stating the intent of the law directly in its text. This in turn informs judges (including appellate judges!) of how to evaluate a specific case. In jurisprudential systems, this in turn becomes case-law which further cements the intent of the law as a binding legal construct. I agree the letter of the law is more strongly binding, but to dismiss intent as irrelevant suggests you don't understand the difference between law and computer code.
  • Nasrudith 8y ago
    Or they are exceedingly cynical about the arbiters and paranoid about abuses - not a bad tradition when defending rights. Intents may be pretenses which are cheap and mean nothing. The USSR was "for the people" and killed record ammounts of them. Even if ungrounded in displayed maliciousness a "how will this be abused" mindset is its own tradition and I argue a good thing when considering and writing laws. Since writing a law meant to allow self defense that has text which allows shooting jaywalkers from your backyard is a bad law "to stop offenses in progress" is a bad law. Even if "reasonableness" is applied that leads to more judiciary work, uncertainty and the possibility of injust absurdities holding. Like bashing the head man who is stabbing you right now into the tile wasn't self defense because wood could have stopped him with less force. Explicit text definitions could have stopped the absurdity with say "threat of lethal force by an invading interloper may be met with lethal force" or "proportionate force" even. I recognize EU law holds different principles but it isn't treating law as computer code. The opposite in my opinion - you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor. You are accurate when describing people and the law.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • nokcha 8y ago
      >you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor C compilers have been known to "optimize" code with undefined behavior in such a way as to introduce a security vulnerability that would not exist in the most direct translation of the C code to machine code.
• GuB-42 8y ago
  Yep, it is. The directive applies to Hacker News. And it will certainly be in trouble people decided to use it to post an entire Harry Potter novel and it becomes the go-to place to read it. But Hacker News has moderators, and in practice, these posts are aren't likely to stay long, therefore fulfilling Article 13 obligations. I'm pretty sure that movie quotes are not copyright-protected. And the last point in the article seems to be there to protects such uses explicitly. As for the potential for abuse, I don't know, I am not a lawyer. But as I said before, it is just a directive, not a law, and it is incomplete. The spirit is all we have now, there is still a lot of work to be done on the letter.
  • sokoloff 8y ago
    Why would movie quotes not be copyright-protected? They are almost certainly copyright protected, with copyright law provisions granted for certain fair use purposes.
    • pavpanchekha 8y ago
      Keep in mind that "fair use" is an American doctrine, not built into international copyright treaties and often defined administratively (not legislatively) in other countries. And we are discussing copyright law in Europe. Europe uses several itemized exceptions to copyright; a movie quote could fall under 5.3i "incidental inclusion" or 5.3k "pastiche", or in some contexts 5.3d "criticism and review", but there's no overall doctrine that "reasonable uses" are allowed.
      • sokoloff 8y ago
        That outcome sounds a lot like the outcome of US system.
        • wahern 8y ago
          Except in the U.S. judges can organically evolve the system as new questions arise and better resolutions are found. The continental legal system is much more bureaucratic. This matters because it's easier to push boundaries when the rules aren't written in stone, permitting more rapid and responsive evolution of the law. Interestingly, the U.S. is slowly moving toward a more continental-style legal system while the E.U. is actually moving toward a more judge-made law system. That's because fragmented jurisdictional power in the E.U. has forced European judges (at both the national and EU level) to embrace de facto law making powers, and increasingly embracing doctrines that look exactly like stare decisis. (French-style civil law is a relatively recent development, anyhow; Europe isn't adopting the English system so much as reaching back into their own legal traditions to find a similar model of jurisprudence.) By contrast, the bitterly partisan, winner take all politics in the U.S. has seen both the Democrats and Republicans attempt to centralize more power, both at the state and federal level. And judges, especially at the Federal level, increasingly eschew their law making role (albeit inconsistently). This is, arguably, why many common law copyright doctrines long relied upon by the open source community have begun falling to the wayside; judges increasingly prefer sticking to the strict letter of the statutes, effectively discarding the old doctrines that channeled and constrained their application.
• m-i-l 8y ago
  Most film quotes on HN would be covered by "fair use"[0]. If someone pasted an entire script in a comment that would be something different entirely, and likely to be picked up by the existing flagging or moderation system. Also, I'm not entirely sure how HN itself can be said to be profit-making, e.g. there are no subscription fees to use it and it doesn't appear to have any advertisements from any advertising platforms. [0] e.g. https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/fair-use-copyright-explained https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/fair-use-c... for UK and https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html for US
  • banku_brougham 8y ago
    Fair Use is cold comfort, if we’ve learned anything from the abuse of DMCA.
    • jandrese 8y ago
      Fair use is annoying vaguely defined in the law. This means media companies will tell you that's it is so limited as to be almost useless, while the EFF and the courts may disagree. You may hear stuff about "10 second clips are the max allowed by law", but the law doesn't draw any clear likes like that and in fact is usually much more generous. Typically quotes like that come from a single precedent where someone was acting outrageously in many other ways and not relevant precedent for what you're doing.
      • c3o 8y ago
        That's true in the US. EU law actually knows no such thing as vague, court-interpreted fair use. The EU instead has a list of very specific exceptions and limitations to copyright – which member states don't even have to implement, so what you can do varies widely.
  • jtbayly 8y ago
    Companies pay to get their job listings in front of the HN eyeballs. This is advertising.
• ABCLAW 8y ago
  >"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit" HN does not organize large amounts of copyright-protected works, nor are the links to articles an 'upload'. If HN organized PDFs of the linked articles so you could just skip heading to a third party site then we'd be talking. 'meant' is not a dangerous word. All laws require interpretation, which is why most countries have specific interpretation guidelines for legislation and even then sometimes it takes a few cracks at the can to get it right. That's not something 'dangerous', although it can and does go wrong from time to time. But it's a standard risk of rulemaking as it's the standard process for courts interfacing with legislation or other rule-making texts.
  • kd5bjo 8y ago
    Many of the comments on HN are substantive enough to be covered by copyright, and modern copyright law protects everything protectable whether there’s a copyright notice or not.
    • ABCLAW 8y ago
      ...So what? Comment content is governable in the site ToS, where copyright assignment or other methods of defining the respective user/site rights can be dealt with. Even if it wasn't, your performance in posting implies consent to provide at the very least a limited license to publish content you posted. So where's the beef here?
      • kd5bjo 8y ago
        Only that, the comments section alone on HN is pretty straightforwardly “organis(ing) and promot(ing) [...] copyright-protected works uploaded by (its) users”, and so whether or not it falls under the scope of this section(1) hinges only on the regulators’ and courts’ opinions of what a “large amount” is. (1) In a hypothetical world where this law has unbounded jurisdiction
        • ABCLAW 8y ago
• sunir 8y ago
  In the US the letter of the law matters because of how jurisprudence evolved there. EU has a different jurisprudence system based on guidelines and interpretation. There is a wide range of options philosophically. Confucian courts are even farther from what you might recognize.
  • theonemind 8y ago
    I have a pretty limited understanding, but at first, I would think you would have this the other way around? The US uses a case law system where precedential judicial proceedings modify how the law works in practice relative to how they got written. Besides the UK, most of the EU has a statutory law system, where the law gets applied as written with less regard for previous judicial decisions. So, the short version of the question, in regard to your original comment, how so..?
• hpcjoe 8y ago
  One way to "fix" this, unfortunately, is the same way some firms "fixed" their non-GDPR compliance. Block European users. More specifically, block users coming from IPs known to be located in Europe. Fundamentally, laws have jurisdictions that they are valid in. Imposition of a law outside of a jurisdiction is problematic at best, as it enables some bad actor countries (pick and choose who you want to consider to be in this group) to export their internal battles globally. A great example of this is the US's FATCA rules, which have resulted (at least initially) in many non-US banks denying banking options to US citizens. Due to the threat built into the law, of being unable to leverage US banking system, if they fail to comply. As someone else commented, the road to hell is paved with "good intentions". Solutions will emerge to route around the liabilities and costs this creates, but probably not initially.
• alacombe 8y ago
  > So hacker news needs a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie. "Yipee-yi-yea...mother-fucker." ! -- Die Hard Done :-)