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Draft of German copyright reform proposes memes should only be up to 128 pixels
- netsharc 7y agoIf it's not clear (the article does say "if not[,] you will need to get a license from the creator"), it's because most memes and GIFs take a copyrighted image/clip before adding a caption to it. E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek".
- bhickey 7y ago> E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek". The image doesn't supersede Dawson's Creek. My understanding is that this template is lampooning overwrought acting on the show. Isn't this covered under transformational fair use in the United States?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TulliusCicero 7y agoProbably, but did you miss that this post is about German law?
- rkachowski 7y agoThis is only for commercial usage, private and non commercial is explicitly exempted.
- Reventlov 7y agoSo, for example, reddit or imgur would be affected by this as they're for profit, right?
- eschulz 7y agoThey are probably considered neutral public forums even though they may operate a for profit business. I believe laws such as this will generally apply to the content creators, although public forums will usually have to cooperate with authorities who request assistance in enforcing the law.
- ben_w 7y agoThis is good, of course. I am curious: while a typical user of imgur would clearly be non-commercial, would imgur itself be at risk for hosting the material? Or does Germany have a “safe harbour”-like concept for platforms that host user content?
- rvnx 7y agoimgur is clearly a commercial image hosting platform. There wouldn't be any ads nor payment systems if it would be non-commercial
- johannes1234321 7y agoYou can also be commercial without ads. Distinction is more complicated. Even a non-profit without ads can do it for business.
- ben_w 7y agoThat is why I asked about imgur in particular. Safe harbour, y/n?
- chadlavi 7y agoCommercial... memes?
- dx87 7y agoI've started to see a lot of ads that are based on memes, mainly on reddit.
- laszlokorte 7y agoIn Hamburg for example public transit busses are covered in memes [0] [0]: https://i.redd.it/ygj1fa5130f11.jpg https://i.redd.it/ygj1fa5130f11.jpg
- pmontra 7y agoIt could be that the ad agencies are using the memes not to pay for the images. Maybe the photographers that used to work for them complained and got this law.
- icebraining 7y agoI don't see why you'd need a new law to prevent the unlicensed use of a copyrighted work in an ad; I'm pretty sure that's been illegal for quite some time now, including in Germany.
- afandian 7y agoYes. I've seen the Harold meme used in commercial advertising. The original was an unlicensed (I think) ShutterStock image. (Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21481351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21481351) Why should commercial companies be able to make money off copyrighted material? Or if you think they can, why not expliclty abolish image copyright?
- cyxxon 7y agoWell, commercial use of memes, like, say a company liek Reddit or Imgur that profites from the use of memes (let's not go into their revenue or business model in detail now). So in reality ALL memes are commercial (unless you host yourself, I would guess).
- blkhawk 7y agoEven an ad-banner put on your page by a free hosing service makes it technically commercial in Germany.
- swiley 7y agoIMO: this is a good thing, memes are addictive and worse still they’re often themselves advertising on commercial sites. I’m glad something is being done.
- phit_ 7y agoactual article (in german) https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-memes-sollen-nur-noch-128-mal-128-pixel-gross-sein-2001-146101.html https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-memes-sollen-...
- raverbashing 7y agoLeistungsshultzrecht is the "Link tax" so this shouldn't apply to "memes" but to snippets of news (Of course, the link tax is BS, but it's not exactly related to memes)
- tyingq 7y agoI'm imagining sites returning a quantized blocky 128x128 image if you have a German IP.
- bhaak 7y agoFWIW, that would be great. If the link tax ("Leistungsschutzrecht") gets implemented on a European level, I also hope that Google (and all other search engine provider) then just return search results with the maximal allowed word count.
- chadlavi 7y agoSome great memes are going to come out of this
- diamondo25 7y agoWhat a meme. Maybe they can just cut up the meme in chunks of 128x128 and display that instead. Its not a full image but a lot of tiny ones
- Klathmon 7y agoHow do countries like Germany handle it when someone meets the letter of the law but not the spirit of it?
- paulhilbert 7y agoNot at all. In fact I would call doing that the most German thing you can do.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Kaiyou 7y agoWhy should they if it meets the letter of the law? Letter of the law is all that counts.
- gmueckl 7y agoWell, the gap between the letter of the law and the spirit of it is quite narrow in most cases because of how the law is written in an abstract form and applied to a real case. Intent matters, not just the execution. If you know that something is unlawful, but you take deliberate steps to (seemingly) circumvent a rule while effectively breaking it with the result of your action, you're still on the hook. I find that people generally underestimate this aspect of how law is applied to the real world.
- zaarn 7y agoThere is a certain extend where the judge can easily see that you're just trying to bullshit around the law itself. In this case, the most likely outcome is that the judge will rule that breaking the image into 128 pixel squares and then reassembling them is simply the same as displaying the full image by intent. The result is the same so you broke the law.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 7y agoI wonder if this stupid compliance trick works: encode the image in base64 (or whatever, maybe something more dense), output that as plain text in the page, tell users they need to install a browser extension that recognizes these parts, decodes them and puts the image in place of the text. Just for kicks the browser extension is open source and is maintained by anonymous..
- regularfry 7y agoI mean, if you're up for working around the law rather than obeying it, assembling 128x128 tiles into a bigger image by tacking them together in HTML is far easier.
- anoncake 7y ago> I wonder if this stupid compliance trick works: It would be correct, tautological even, to say in German "Deutsche Richter haben die Intelligenz einer Kartoffel". But that doesn't translate to "German judges have the intelligence of a potato" but to "German judges have the intelligence of a kraut". In other words, no, that is not how the law works.
- TheDong 7y agoIt sounds like you're falling into a common pitfall of interpreting laws in terms of purely technical details rather than their intent. I recommend reading What Colour are your bits [0]. The major point that it tries to get across is that as software devs, we think in terms of data and computers. The law doesn't. The law says "you can't have an image like X", and you immediately think "hah, well, arbitrary base64 encoded data isn't an image." The law doesn't care about that though. If the law says you can't display an image like X to users, then it doesn't matter what weird layers you go through. It doesn't matter if you stitch together 1 million 1-pixel images, or if you have them install a browser extension, it just matters if you intended for them to be able to see that image, and then they could see that image. The blog-post I linked does a much better job of explaining this, and I recommend reading it. [0]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- anon463637 7y agoThere should be a recycle redemption tax on memes so there's an economy to pickup outdated, displaced and discarded memes for their return value.
- AndrewThrowaway 7y agoWhat about SVG?
- jacamera 7y agoVerboten. One year in prison per element.
- other_herbert 7y agoMaybe this was the goal... Higher quality vector memes!
- jaimex2 7y agoWho's pushing for this? Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder. It's like media industries love to hurt themselves. They've already brought back mass piracy by fragmenting streaming services, next they want to kill any chance of their content going viral I guess.
- tom_mellior 7y ago> Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder. Most of the time I don't know where the meme's graphical content is from so it's not really advertising the source. But by the same token of course the meme is not harmful to the the content owner's economic interests.
- avian 7y ago> Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder. Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising. Anyway, the "Germany to ban memes" is just a spin on the story to generate clicks and outrage (similar to the EU copyright directive some time before). This legislation is about commercial use of images. The 128x128 pixels is what the law would consider a "thumbnail" image that can be used without explicit license from the copyright holder. Perhaps a more correct headline would be "Germany to unban memes smaller than 128x128 pixels".
- mfcl 7y ago> Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising. They also don't make money when the meme is 128x128 pixels or not used at all. What is your point?
- Mirioron 7y agoThis is just a consequence of the copyright reform by the EU that passed. Remember article 11 and 13? (15 and 17 when passed.) This is it. The EU can't make laws themselves: it gets the national governments to make the laws and this is the one for Germany.
- 11235813213455 7y agomakes sense in terms of storage space, when you know the energy and environment costs for this
- macinjosh 7y agoThe EU is a nightmare of over regulation. No wonder the U.K. is leaving. They can’t just leave people well enough alone. Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal over the entire page on their image only URLs. I feel like I can’t escape the EU’s ruination of the Internet and I have never stepped foot in the bloc.
- the_other 7y agoThe hope behind GDPR, as with the earlier "cookie law" was that businesses would respond by improving their revenue models and data practices. Instead businesses have responded by making the UX shit for their users whilst claiming they had to do it to follow the law.
- _-___________-_ 7y agoWhile the UX is definitely shit, GDPR has definitely improved privacy practices within the EU.
- raverbashing 7y ago> Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal I find it hilarious how companies allegedly afraid of the big bad fines by the EU continue to use a non-compliant solution for a problem they created themselves. It's cargo-culting of the stupidest way of (barely) solving the problem. American lawyers trying to interpret EU regulations never worked well it seems. > I have never stepped foot in the bloc It's not like the rest of the world doesn't have to obey several American laws as well.
- tyingq 7y agoDon't some countries treat the US DMCA similarly?
- qubex 7y agoI strongly disagree. There might be a tendency to over-legislate in some areas (after all, there is now an exposed central authority that can be lobbied by special interest groups) but on the whole, the EU has been a strong positive influence on the continent of Europe and Britain is facing a serious self-inflicted wound as a result of Brexit. I say this as somebody who has dual citizenship in both a EU country (Italy) and the UK.
- kamakazizuru 7y agothere's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things. This is a great example. Additionally today they announced that while profits on stock trading (specifically derivatives) can be taxed fully, losses can only be accounted for upto 10.000€ Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013. This kids, is what it looks like when a government is too scared to solve bigger structural challenges (digitization of the beauraucracy, switch to electromobility, better competitive environment for startups, questionable pension system, unneccesarily high taxes that keep leading to surpluses, I could go on) - and instead keep themselves occupied with non-issues that are PR heavy. Schade.
- Mirioron 7y agoI'm pretty sure this is just a consequence of that EU copyright reform that passed some months ago (article 11&13/15&17). At least the linked article talks about it (in German). The EU can't make laws themselves. The way they work is by requiring member states to make laws and this is Germany's.
- raverbashing 7y agoYou are correct But the implementation details are left to the member states and of course Germany came up with this in their interpretation of the link tax
- johannes1234321 7y agoCorrect, it is the national implementation implementation of an EU directive. And to the other point: There are two kinds of EU law. Regulationsa and directives. Regulations are direct law in all member states, directives need national implementation.
- krona 7y ago> The EU can't make laws themselves. They can. It's called a regulation. Directives are what you're referring to. A regulation is a legal act of the European Union that becomes immediately enforceable as law in all member states simultaneously.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deltron3030 7y agoDevice pixels (resolution) or viewport pixels (like in CSS)? I mean OS manufacturers could just change the way viewport pixels are calculated in their viewport rendering, which makes the law redundant. And relying on device resolution doesn't make any sense for modern devices with hidpi displays.
- icebraining 7y agoI'm guessing they are only thinking of raster images, like excerpts of photos or videos.
- tyingq 7y agoWhat if I have the browser scale it up via css width and height? Is it still compliant since there's only 128x128 unique squares? If it's a rectangle, can one side exceed 128 pixels if the product of width and height is less than 128x128?
- cr0sh 7y ago> I'm guessing they are only thinking of raster images Someone somewhere will come up with a JPG to SVG or CSS converter for images, if it doesn't already exist.
- icebraining 7y agoThere are easier ways to get sued.
- gumby 7y agoGerman copyright law is already overly draconian and holds the country back.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 7y agoWhich is of course ironic given the history: No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might. https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
- gumby 7y agoAs was true for the USA, China, Japan....
- _-___________-_ 7y agoLink is a 404 (and the imgur 404 page breaks the back button!)
- dahart 7y agoI don’t understand all the mock outrage; memes are already illegal in most cases at any size and copyrights are currently being enforced with takedowns in some cases. It seem like the title & text is trying to be intentionally inflammatory. It’s already illegal to use someone else’s image without permission, unless you’re covered by fair use (which memes are not automatically). Memes just happen to not be very enforceable by anyone who’s not a large corporation. The text seems to suggest that Germany is proposing an exemption to copyright infringement when the images are small enough. Isn’t that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now?
- t0astbread 7y agoThe recent tonal shift regarding online expression and copyright in the EU certainly doesn't suggest that the intention here was to increase internet users' rights.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 7y ago> Isn’t that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now? Maybe? 128 pixels is a vanishingly small amount as display pixel density continues to rise. That's under an inch on many displays. Not to mention, while no fair use defense is automatic (fair use is a defense against copyright lawsuits in court), memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories.
- dahart 7y agoI'd guess that small (or just large & blurry) is the idea -- to make the criteria for the exception depend on having the quality be less than the original. Still, small and legal is better than illegal? > memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories. I feel like the problem with that claim is the parody and/or critique is very commonly not related to the subject of the image in any way. It seems strange to claim I should be able to fairly use a copyrighted picture of a famous person in order to comment on memes, or vegetables, or (super commonly) as a completely random funny backdrop to a saying. The ideas behind the parody and critique exceptions in fair use is that you can use a picture of Patrick Stewart to make comments about Patrick Stewart's acting or something he said in an interview, not that you can use a copyrighted picture of Patrick Stewart to comment on use of fonts on the internet, just because he happens to have a pose that makes the saying seem funny. When I Google "memes" right now and look at images, I see an entire page of copyrighted images, and only one of them (out of 26 images on the first page) has text relevant to the image. The other 25 are not making a parody of the person(s) in the image, or critique something even remotely relevant to the image.
- classified 7y agoJust like nobody needs more than 640 kB RAM.
- greggeter 7y agoNew killer app cuts up your memes into 128x128 blocks before sending them out
- dang 7y agoProposed bills rarely go anywhere, and so do not count as on-topic for HN unless there is something intellectually interesting about them—which there rarely is, since the reason they get picked up and broadcast is always sensational. This one is described as a "discussion draft", so it isn't even a bill.