
EU Council of Ministers Approves Copyright Directive - amima
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-ministers-approve-copyright-directive-including-article-17-13-190415/
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rayiner
This is a good illustration of EU legislative structure:

> The legislation was voted through by a majority of EU ministers just a few
> minutes ago, despite opposition from Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland,
> Finland, and Sweden.

Nonetheless, those countries will have no choice but to implement national
laws to comply with the EU directive:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francovich_v_Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francovich_v_Italy)

> Francovich v Italy (1991) C-6/90 was a decision of the European Court of
> Justice which established that European Union member states could be liable
> to pay compensation to individuals who suffered a loss by reason of the
> member state's failure to transpose an EU directive into national law. This
> principle is sometimes known as the principle of state liability or "the
> rule in Francovich" in European Union law.

Indeed, EU members lack the sovereignty even of U.S. states. The US federal
government can pass laws directly binding on the citizens of every state, but
cannot compel state governments to pass and enforce particular laws. The EU
can do both (the former through regulations, the latter through directives).
In the US, the inability of the federal government to hijack state legislative
and enforcement machinery to its own ends is seen as an important measure of
accountability—you can always blame state legislators for state laws. (You see
this in the areas of drug and immigration law. Sanctuary cities can exist
because the federal government cannot force state organs to enforce federal
law. Likewise, legalized marijuana at the state level.)

~~~
Juliate
Well, it's more like an illustration of a voting/decision group where
majority, but not unanimity, is required for the decision to be taken. And
where the decision taken is binding for everyone.

The mechanism in question was and is known by all participant countries that
joined the EU.

Not perfect, but is there a better system at reach?

There's a country I heard, overseas, where it can happen that someone is
elected president although they didn't get the majority of the people's vote.

~~~
x38iq84n
> The mechanism in question was and is known by all participant countries that
> joined the EU.

That is just not true. The mechanism was changed drastically by Lisbon treaty
- no more vetos, qualified majority now overrules the rest. Needless to say,
'no' was not accepted as an answer to European Constitution/Lisbon treaty, as
reminded by referendums in France, Netherlands and Ireland. This is the true
nature of the EU.

~~~
Juliate
Not saying it is perfect, once more.

The referendums were a disgrace, true. So were they because referendums are
often organised, and seen, and used, as votes of confidence for a given
government, and not as expressions for the very question.

Find any country, political structure that is pure, of anything.

But still. Here we are. More than 70 years at peace on a continent, something
not seen for several centuries before that. The EU project, and structure, and
growth, and maturity, is central to that peace.

How factually worse, exactly, have been any EU member, since they joined the
Union? How factually better have they been as well?

Pretending that EU members would be better off without the union is a plain,
undocumented, geopolitically hostile, lie.

~~~
timrichard
That's got to be an object lesson in blinkered dogma.

> So were they because referendums are often organised, and seen, and used, as
> votes of confidence for a given government

From the grab-bag of possible explanations...

> But still. Here we are. More than 70 years at peace on a continent

Also an amazing co-incidence that NATO has been in existence for 70 years.
Containing three nuclear powers, it doesn't take a leap of imagination that it
was a greater deterrent than whatever you had in mind.

How has your version worked over 70 years? The EU has only been in existence
since 1994. Prior to that, it existed in a smaller, trade-only form as the
EEC. I thought the 'butter mountain' and 'wine lake' were figures of speech.
So were they physical defences, something like an obstacle course to deter the
Russians? /s

~~~
thefounder
Do you think the states of the United States would be better off as individual
states with a pure economic and military agreement (i.e NATO + a kind of EEC)
?

~~~
rayiner
I think most people would be at least be happier under that arrangement. We
burn enormous amounts of time in the US fighting with each other over basic
differences in culture and attitude, and the resulting compromises satisfy no
one.

~~~
thefounder
Would you agree to build walls/borders as well?

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mcv
I fear this may end up being the end of full Youtube access for Europeans.
Youtube must either have a license with all possible rights holders, which is
everybody, or content uploaded by Europeans must be checked by impossible
filters, and I suppose content uploaded from elsewhere must be checked by
those same filters before it can be shown to Europeans. So basically we're
only going to get corporate content from Youtube.

A small consolation is that it may also kill Facebook in the EU, giving more
room for smaller, open source, distributed social networks like Diaspora,
Mastodon and Friendica. If it's true that this only holds for profit-driven
sites, as someone claimed in an earlier discussion about this.

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onion2k
YouTube will be fine. It's big enough to implement enough tech that they can
say they're doing what they can. In fact, they've probably had enough there
for years.

Most content hosting startups are likely to be too small to need to implement
any tech at all, so they're fine as well for now.

The problem is that now it's practically impossible for a startup to scale up.
The route to an exit for any startup hosting content and serving the EU is
effectively closed, which is going to make raising impossible, which in turn
will make developing a solution impossible. This law cements YouTube as the
market leader in a way that no one can really challenge. They've been handed a
de facto monopoly. _That 's_ the problem.

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nkkollaw
Can Europeans avoid their content being ~~censored~~ filtered by using a VPN?

~~~
onion2k
_Can Europeans avoid their content being ~~censored~~ filtered by using a
VPN?_

I suspect content hosting companies will let anyone upload anything but only
make the content visible to people in countries that allow it. A VPN won't
help. The directive isn't saying "An American uploaded this so it's fine for
everyone to see." It's saying "The original version of this is owned by
someone else so no one in the EU can watch this derivative work." Who uploaded
it doesn't actually matter.

~~~
nkkollaw
Thank you.

How will the EU enforce that? Will they obscure any website that don't
implement filters?

~~~
rum3
The website will be liable for the copyright infringement as if they would
have uploaded the material themselves if they do not implement a good filter
whatever that is.

~~~
mises
It seems as though they would have a hard time doing this. If the website is
based in America, they can't take it down. They probably can't extradite
either; the rule is typically that it has to be illegal in both nations.

How can they enforce this?

~~~
rum3
If the website is not hosted in the EU then the law will have no effect.

I think many websites will simply move to other parts of the world. That is
what I would do anyway.

~~~
mises
That's what I figured. The worst part about it is that it won't affect shady
cyberlockers whose business models are rather suspect and often not known to
tax authorities, but legitimate sites that do business in the EU will be
impacted.

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preommr
I am 90% this means nothing and I disagree this won't affect big companies and
will only affect small startups like some of the other comments here.

The law basically says that the company has to try it's best to prevent
copyrighted material. If you're a small company, you can put together some
simple algorithm and claim that's all you can really do. Big shots like
youtube have the capital to be proactive and pay for things like real people
to monitor claims. They're at a bigger risk for not doing enough.

Either way, the bar would be high enough that I don't think anyone is really
going to be affected by this.

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yummybear
My hunch tells me this will be used as a tactical weapon by rights holders and
PR companies to bury negative publicity in lawyer fees.

You can argue that you are using some content fairly and you did your best to
prevent it in court while paying 500$/hr to your layer, or you can simply
remove it.

But yeah, that won't be a problem for 95% of companies and startups - but it
will be for some.

~~~
preommr
I wonder about that, because I don't think there are many european countries
that follow the "American rule" system where each party pays it's own fees.

In the "English rule" system the losing party pays for the legal fees so a
rich person can't just arbitrarily spam law suits.

But then again, I am making a lot of assumptions here (but then again it seems
like so is everyone else here) so I don't know about the exact legal details
that could change things.

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mrep
The interesting bits of article 17 which was 13 from the actual document [0]:

>If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers
shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public,
including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and
other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:

>(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and

>(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional
diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and
other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service
providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event

>(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice
from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites
the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent
their future uploads in accordance with point (b).

[0]:
[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2018-0245-A...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2018-0245-AM-271-271_EN.pdf)

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scoutt
>> acted expeditiously (...) to disable access to, or to remove from, their
websites the notified works

Stupid question not being native English speaker (or writer):

Shouldn't it be: _" to disable access to, or to remove from their websites,
the notified works"_ without a comma between _from_ and _their_?

Otherwise, could the sentence also mean _to disable access (...) to their
websites_? That could be a different thing than just enforcing rights to
remove some content. Or it could be at least, a sentence without much meaning.

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rasengan
My worry is that the directive will be used in unique ways to censor content.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
More than that, I fear that it will be used to justify other filters. "It
worked with copyright, so why not do the same with hate speech, terrorism, and
wrongthink?"

EDIT: "Oh, and if you don't like being censore, that means you endorse
terrorism, because politics in 2019"

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kevin_b_er
This marks the end of user generated content in Europe, as it is pretty much
impossible to comply with the demand to filter all content at the behest of
the copyright cartel.

~~~
pndy
Call me nuts, tinfoil, whatever but for last few years I'm having this hunch
that politicians along with corporations are trying to "civilize" the Internet
and ultimately turn it into cable tv-like controlled medium serving _approved_
content because at this moment it's still running wild, because in their eyes
it's too dangerous tool in hands of ordinary people who always can use it to
discredit them and their actions.

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duxup
It will be interesting to see how this plays out legally. I wonder if from
nation to nation if enforcement actually gets even more absurd than the actual
law would indicate. It seems like the member states laws could leave lots of
wiggle room / confusion.

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shapiro92
but the question is how will they enforce this? let's say there are X units of
content that based on the directive should not be available to Europeans
through platform Y.

How will they know? unless someone reports the content its impossible for any
EU system to catch that.

~~~
ccozan
the EU will not. The Directive must be implemented by member states, and they
will detail the means and the lengths of how this directive is
applied/enforced.

Since every state has it's own version of Copyright office and what powers it
has, it will not be 100% homogenous all over.

~~~
shapiro92
but then even more to the point. Will each country create its own "firewall" ?
unlikely.. maybe a new business opportunity arises :P

