What's the chance of this actually passing? Aren't there are a lot of stupid proposals in most legislative institutions that never make it out of committee?
The article is light (read: empty) on details regarding its chance of passing. Even details like which committee are we talking about are missing. Which MEPs sits on it?
But was that with the amendment introduced on 25 May? The original article says the proposal was introduced on GDPR Day, I assume that means 25 May. That blog post was last updated on 25 May. Was that before or after they had taken the temperature for MEPs' stance on this new proposal?
Is it possible this is a negotiation ploy? Introduce something outrageous, so people will focus on that, then 'give in' on that proposal just before the vote, it will be seen as a victory when the main bill - without the proposal - is passed, despite the bill itself being heavily flawed in its own right.
Seems like this is even less thought out than SOPA and ACTA.
It's only a pity there is not a comparable banner and outage campaign for this as there was for those. Made them impossible to miss and just about everyone knew of them. Ensured all the politicians were getting dozens of calls. Above all it worked. Dozens of non-US sites joined in.
This time around? A few news pieces on tech sites have cropped up otherwise a lot of silence. That's surprising as it seems like this will affect everyone too. Yet it's barely rated a mention in the mainstream media, here in the UK at least. Admittedly most of our EU news has been the idiocy of Brexit for the last year.
Would probably be helpful not to lose the topic in yet another discussion of GDPR too.
SOPA and Net Neutrality got the benefit of US-based partisan PACs funding PR staff (which translates into blog/news article volume) and social media posting/resharing/upvote bots. If it's policy made by the EU those organizations do not activate.
This will create a super-DMCA where there are zero penalties for false claims, no counterclaim, and no recourse for false claims. All content sharing is DEAD in Europe.
It is not only that - basically even a message you post on a forum could contain copyrighted text so that would have to be filtered too. It is a dead of internet as we know it.
How is this even compatible with GDPR? Is this not sharing protected data with a third party data processor? Would the legal basis for regulatory compliance or something else?
The GDPR does not prohibit sharing data with third parties. It prohibits sharing data without informed consent or any other legal basis. Compliance with laws and regulations is explicitly listed as valid basis for data sharing. You can’t deny your employer to share your income information with the tax authorities either.
Why wouldn't it be compatible with GDPR? It's a content copyright checking requirement, mandated by law (that part by itself likely makes it compliant with GDPR).
If I submit a blog post, that content gets run through a mandated copyright check, nothing about me or the actual content is permanently stored by the checking software. The content of the blog post is flagged or not for violating a copyright, the flag determines whether it's allow to be published.
Someone correct me if I'm misunderstanding how this law would work.
Would this speed up movement towards decentralised, p2p services? If you can't point to the entity that is hosting the content because it's decentralised (think dat, ipfs, your favourite blockchain technology or p2p network), can it even be enforced?
> If you can't point to the entity that is hosting the content because it's decentralised (think dat, ipfs, your favourite blockchain technology or p2p network), can it even be enforced?
Yes. This "if a law becomes difficult to enforce, law enforcement will just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" meme is fiction. History suggests the law will become stricter towards end users and mercurial in its enforcement.
On a decentralized, p2p service, the entity that's hosting the content is "everyone". That is, everyone who is a part of the network could be held responsible, either directly (for distributing the content) or indirectly (for being part of a service which does not have a mechanism to follow the law forbidding distribution of the content).
We have to get the governments part of this service (say, if there'll be a service that replaces http, and the governments want to provide digital services to their citizens then they'll have no way around it), so they host the content themselves, then they sue themselves and shut down and we'll be a free society once again.
I don't see this as a realistic threat, because it seems like it'd be so easy to abuse that merely swamping the detection system with everything we can find will be so disruptive to politicians themselves that if they're stupid enough to pass it, they'll reverse it just as quickly. E.g a suitable attack would be to claim every tweet, press release and speech from every politician and watch them deal with being censored.
It will be another useless law - once user clicks through accepting cookies, then accepting gdpr stuff, then will have to log in and the page will be acting as a partner in conversation end to end encrypted. What you upload will be then distributed by that virtual person to other users in form of messages. That way unless they also want to filter private messages it will be unenforcable.
It links to a page to call "my MEP" by Mozilla that will call me and have me say some dull words to them. Has anyone done that? I'd rather know who my MEP is, call them, and personally explain them the issue. Any idea how to figure out who "my MEP" is and call them?
