
Latest Text of EU Copyright Directive Shows It's Even Worse Than Expected - sqdbps
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180703/01343440162/latest-text-eu-copyright-directive-shows-even-worse-than-expected-must-be-stopped.shtml
======
stakhanov
And it's very telling, regarding the quality of journalism nowadays, that the
battlefield has moved to fighting over who gets to monetize headlines pointing
to content that's too shitty for people to click through to.

Regarding links that people actually click on, the current situation is that
it'll take users to the publishers' websites, where the publisher monetizes it
through advertising. Nothing wrong with that.

But, apparently, that's not enough. Because the state of journalism has been
reduced to providing headlines that make people go "...naaaah. not worth it."

At the same time, the way they lobbied for this law was based on the notion
that media companies don't get adequately rewarded for the bang-up job that
they're doing, creating all this high-quality and highly original content.

~~~
hrktb
Totaly agree. Also sometimes headlines used to link to articles are way better
than the whole article itself.

It’s a noble art on 2ch and japanese groups to sum up articles in the most
insane way possible. I understand bean counters wanting money on where the
action is happening, irrelevant to their deserving of any.

------
incompatible
What we see is the logical extension of what's required for continuation of
the copyright system: a highly regulated Internet where nothing can be
published unless its copyright status has been accurately identified. Only
authorized people can be relied on to produce new content, otherwise there's
no way to tell if they just copied it from someone else.

The next step would be to shut down proxies, systems such as Tor, and
connections to sites in rogue states that don't sufficiently enforce
copyright.

~~~
ekianjo
and the shutdown of basically any kind of public forum on a small site since
it is going to be nearly impossible for small entities to comply with
regulations.

~~~
olliej
But they say that you don’t need to filter all content! Like if you know no
one will ever upload copyrighted content there’s nothing to worry about.

And that not all content will be covered (although they appear to have
accidentally forgotten to include that bit in what they published).

~~~
swsieber
"if you know no one will ever upload copyrighted content"

How in the world could I know that as a website master? How am I supposed to
know the range of actions for any future users.

~~~
olliej
I was being sarcastic (I thought the tone and content made that obvious :) )

~~~
krotton
You're joking here, but a politician in Poland, when asked about how shall a
popular link sharing platform (wykop.pl) deal with submissions, of which there
are 100k / hour in peak times, actually suggested that "users should know not
to upload illegal materials".

------
rbehrends
The analysis of Article 11 is misleading. The actually relevant part is in
Article 11 (3), which incorporates (by reference) the usual limitations and
exceptions to copyright [1], including the right to quote. This is necessary,
anyway, because the Berne convention mandates that right [2].

Article 11 targets news aggregators and search engines. Unlike blog posts or
newspaper articles, they generally cannot benefit from the right to quote [3].
Article 11 has two goals. One, it aims at protecting pieces of a work that are
generally too short to enjoy regular copyright protection; second, unlike the
usual practice in continental European copyright law, it grants ancillary
copyright to publishers, not authors, for easier enforcement of these rights.

Note that this does not mean that I endorse Article 11 (I do not and actually
consider it harmful and the result of misguided lobbying), but we should be
clear what we are actually talking about.

[1] Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote)

[3] As the Wikipedia article above summarizes it, "the resulting new work is
not just a collection of quotations, but constitutes a fully original work in
itself".

~~~
stakhanov
...what Article 11 is really about is that the European contentmafia wants to
collect taxes from Google. We've already seen how that played out when Spain
introduced something like this on the level of national law. IIRC, Google
retaliated by taking Spanish media companies' content out of the index which
is something that advertising clients of those media companies were less than
pleased about, and a deal was quickly reached between Google and them, saying
that Google didn't have to pay.

So, what it will really do will be to create a monopoly enshrined in law, that
news aggregation and search is a business you can only be in, if you already
wield Google-esque influence over the world of media.

Which is wrong. It's just wrong, on so many levels.

~~~
Angostura
To raise a counterpoint, the point where I though Google as a Search engine
started being "a bit evil" was the point where it stopped redirecting users to
search result websites, and instead started displaying content on its own
pages, in the form of snippets, thus reducing traffic to those cites.

I don't deny the util of being able to see movie times without having to click
through, or a businesses contact details, but the effective redirection of
traffic with reduction in site's ad revenue of whatever feels 'wrong'.

~~~
greggman
from a user perspective that seems like a complete win. I'm not quite
convinced the marginal value of offering that data is worth any kind of
compensation. Movie times seems like something movie theaters would want to
give out for free and that ideally there would be a standard feed format for
that data.

News blurb also seems rational to me. If I only need the headline I shouldn't
have a go to the site. The headlines will be all over twitter and Facebook as
people share with their friends so it's hard to see how Google is doing any
harm here. If I want to read the details then I'd click through to the site.

Heck i come to HN and scan the headlines and only occasionally click through
to the actual article. This topic for example I have not clicked through. Does
that make HN evil?

~~~
Angostura
Don't get me wrong, from a user point of view it is. Nonetheless, it impacts
the business, no-doubt. A movie theatre may want to embed adverts for other
films down the side of its listings, it may have other reasons for wanting
people to actually visit its site.

Google isn't doing harm from a user perspective, but it palpably _is_ doing
harm from a content provider's point of view by screen-scraping the content
and repackaging it as its own.

~~~
gumby
Yes, but at the end of the day it should be all about the user, right?

For example when considering the cost of water pollution we don't try to
balance the interests of the owners of paint factories with the interests of
people who drink water. Instead we consider if the cost of compliance with new
antipollution laws will be worse for people who use paint then the cost to
them of drinking polluted water.

~~~
mijamo
It is all about the user in the long term. Google dominating and closing the
internet is very problematic. In the long term, we could have users that do
not go out of Google and just accept whatever Google give them as THE answer.

Maintaining a healthy ecosystem and competition is good in the long term.

There are many things that are forbidden even though the consumer might like
them in the short term (ex: selling lower than the cost for retailers to kill
all attempt of competition).

~~~
throwaway37585
> selling lower than the cost for retailers to kill all attempt of competition

Which specific law are you referring to?

~~~
18pfsmt
Anti-dumping laws vary by country:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

------
b11484
The report released is here: [1] And a pdf of it is here:[2]

[1][http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fTEXT%2bREPORT%2bA8-2018-0245%2b0%2bDOC%2bXML%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN#title1)
[2][http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A8-2018-0245+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN)

------
larkeith
Query: if this directive passes and the outcomes are in line with the negative
predictions, what happens?

If it becomes standard practice for all except certain large corporations to
ban all EU addresses, how will this impact the web and the EU?

~~~
dingaling
> what happens?

Ideally, people would submit their own creative content. Personal blogging and
vlogging would flourish. Gallery sites would expand exponentially with floods
of new, self-made art. The Internet would shift back from primarily
consumption to creation.

Ideally...

~~~
mercer
I can't help but feel that any 'radical' positive perspective I hold depends
on whether google/facebook/etc. can find a way to not be subjected to these
laws.

------
harel
I'm a pro EU remain voter who respects the results of the referendum in the
UK. If this law passes, I will be a former pro EU remain voter, and will flip
to the leave camp (should my vote ever be required for a second referendum).
This will be going too far.

~~~
dpwm
I feel similarly, but history suggests that if it's a terrible idea then the
UK government will be very keen on passing domestic legislation that is
similar but more extreme.

~~~
harel
I'm hopeful common sense will prevail here. I just wish the EU would have had
the sense to see the growing sentiment around their lack of transparency and
where it leads (i.e., Brexit and that is probably just the beginning).

------
drtillberg
I think the better point about hyperlinking is that you shouldn't have
something so ambiguous at the center of the law concerning the use of the
Internet.

~~~
shiado
Indeed. Is it just the anchor tag or are other methods cool? If the site lets
me embed their content in an iframe is that cool? What about bookmarks, all I
am really doing is saving a link. What about link shorteners? Do they become
illegal? What about instead of a link somebody programs an extension that
intercepts links and manually types the link url into the address bar and
programmatically presses return? If I drop the referer header are they even
going to know it is a link? Is a bot that indexes their page into a search
engine saving an illegal link? The answer to all of the above is probably
whatever the IP holder deems the most profitable in each circumstance.

~~~
DanBC
Why do you think hyperlinks are illegal? What possible interpretation of the
law are you using?

> What about bookmarks, all I am really doing is saving a link

Perfect example of the confusion caused by these fucking stupid articles.

i) The law doesn't apply in any way to your book marks.

ii) The only way the law could apply to your book marks is if you're a
commercial organisation, and you publish them as part of a commercial venture,
and if they are also more than hypertext links but include non-fair use
portions of a copyright work.

~~~
growt
The problem is, there is no "fair use" in europe. At least theoretically you
can be sued for any use of copyrighted material.

~~~
DanBC
It's called different things in different countries. In the UK it's called
"Fair dealing". It is a lot more restricted than the US version of fair use.
Isn't fair use, even in the US, a defence to a claim of copyright
infringement, rather than a right?

------
fauigerzigerk
The proposal is bad enough, but I don't believe the part about URLs being
considered snippets. URLs are technically necessary for linking and any
publisher can decide what goes into their URLs.

Rather than lawyers not understanding technology I think this interpretation
is just the reverse.

------
marcus_holmes
Do you want darknets? Because this is how you get darknets...

~~~
mirimir
If this applied to the entire world, sure. But this just adds the EU to China,
Russia, Iran, etc. That is getting to be a huge chunk, I admit. But EU users
will just need VPNs and/or Tor to escape.

~~~
marcus_holmes
I think it works the other way around.

If one of Facebook's users (anywhere in the world) posts a piece of
copyrighted material, and that material is served to a European user, then the
copyright owner can take Facebook to court for copyright infringement under
this legislation. I'm not even sure the owner has to be a European entity.

European law considers the offence to occur in the browser's country, not the
server's country (hence Yahoo having to block all references to Nazi
memorabilia as a result of a French court case held in France under French law
despite Yahoo not being a French company).

Mind you, the US takes the same viewpoint, hence them suing to extradite Mr
Dotcom from New Zealand for trial in the US for transgressing US law. The fact
that he wasn't a US citizen, MegaUpload wasn't a US company, and he had
committed no crime according to New Zealand law didn't matter. The US still
considered his breach of copyright to have occurred on US soil, so he had
committed a crime on US soil.

At least that's how I read it... I am not a lawyer.

~~~
strictnein
> European law considers

Thankfully foreign laws don't magically propagate over the internet, even if a
citizen of a country happens to point their web browser at your server.

~~~
infimum
GP explicitly stated a case where the US did the same. So for all intents and
purposes the law does propagate 'magically' over the internet. Well, at least
US law does.

~~~
specializeded
The EU isn’t the US, and the US isn’t New Zealand.

~~~
marcus_holmes
The EU does include France, though, and the example of French law constraining
Yahoo's behaviour is relevant.

------
banku_brougham
This discussion is informative but narrowly focused on the latest draft.

Can anyone post some links to a long form article that can explain how we got
here and what is the logical fulfillment of these forces?

To me it looks like the destruction of the internet and transformation to a
new version of televison.

------
gnode
While I fundamentally oppose this proposed legislation, I wonder whether the
law becoming inhospitable to centralized services like Google, Twitter, and so
on, could have the positive effect of pushing users towards a more free
decentralised and less commercial Internet.

~~~
stakhanov
The need to implement upload filters is probably a greater burden on smaller
players than it is on large players, so it could have the opposite effect.

Facebook can afford to just implement the damned upload filter.

But if you're an operator of a small blog, you'll likely just turn off
commenting functionality and stuff like that.

If you're even smaller, and relying on other people to provide infrastructure
for you to be able to comment on stuff, where does that push you? You guessed
it. Back to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

~~~
gnode
I'm not talking about smaller centralised services, but rather distributed
peer-to-peer systems, using IPFS for instance. Use of such systems has fallen
out of fashion largely because of the rise of centralised alternatives (e.g.
you can listen to music for free on Youtube nowadays). I think the tide could
reverse if the law harms the centralised services.

------
walterbell
If this law passes and the EU loses access to the current functionality of
Google, HN, Github, Facebook and Twitter, can EU companies build local
versions of those services, like China did?

~~~
contravariant
If that happens I'd seriously consider pulling the plug on the whole EU. I can
only hope enough people share this sentiment.

~~~
rorykoehler
I'm very pro-EU in general but this path they are on now is a step too far for
me. Way overstepping their mandate.

~~~
walterbell
Is it possible that a small number of strategic EU legislative roles have been
newly influenced/captured by special interests?

E.g. the Axel Springers of the world have long held certain positions. Why are
they getting their way now, in 2018? Did legislation in EU or elsewhere set a
recent precedent to lay the ground for this proposal?

~~~
Kliment
This is just how long it took to get it through the pipeline. It was
implemented first on a national level in Germany and Spain (with disastrous
results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to
try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them
instead and in the end the German constitutional court ruled the law
unconstitutional) so now they're attempting to get it in on a level where it's
harder to remove because it needs international collaboration to do so. The
downside for them is that it also needs international collaboration to enact,
and thus we have more chances to prevent it at the european parliament level.

So do the right thing, call every MEP from your country that isn't an EPP
member and ask them to a) be there at the vote (this is CRITICAL attendance
really matters) and b) vote to allow changes to the law (tomorrow's vote is
about whether the law continues to the next stage unchanged or whether changes
are allowed - it's not about accepting or rejecting the law in general, just
in its current form)

~~~
llukas
> with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't
> worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines
> started blocking them instead

You mean Google used their 90%+ market share to extort rights from publishers.

~~~
Kliment
Look I'm not much of a google fan either but if you are a news aggregator or
search engine and you have to figure out who owns each text snippet and what
it costs and have an accounting and billing infrastructure to go with it,
would you rather do that or simply not show the snippets? Google is one of the
few entities who could afford to implement this, but as you say the giants
with massive market share will just make a deal with the publishers to not pay
the fees in exchange for exposure, and everyone else will be stuck with having
to police their users in case they quote some news article. The main victims
of this will be small forums and entities like wikinews. Google and Facebook
will, as always, get away with it because the publishers depend on them. This
law is disastrous for everyone else.

~~~
llukas
Nobody promised for news sources that their business model would be free of
risk of changes. Same for news aggregator business model.

If it kills news aggregation and strengthens newspapers - I all in.
Investigative journalism is needed for democracy and currently going extinct
due to power shift from news sources to news aggregation - producing a news is
way more costly then distributing it.

~~~
Kliment
I don't think this will kill news aggregation, and I don't see how it will
strengthen newspapers - the biggest aggregators will just strike a deal with
publishers to not pay them anything in exchange for not delisting them. The
smaller aggregators cannot afford to license snippets and aren't big enough to
matter to the publishers so they will just stop publishing snippets. There is
no case where publishers (and even less so investigative journalists) win from
this. We've seen this in Germany and Spain where this was implemented in
national law.

However, the actual victims of this are another group. The law specifies
"commercial users" as ones that have to comply with this but does not define
what "commercial use" is. In Germany, courts have ruled "commercial use" to be
very broadly interpreted, and it would cover things like forums that collect
user donations to cover server costs, or have advertising for the same reason.
They are clearly not making money from news aggregation, but the way the law
is written any kind of commercial use is the same and has to comply. So now
they have to police all their users just to make sure they don't post a news
snippet, and there is no minimal size for news snippets. So in the worst case
you can no longer discuss news on a forum without making the forum operator
liable for license fees to whoever published the news. As a forum operator,
how am I supposed to know whether something is news or not? Do I have to
screen every post and compare against a list? The law doesn't say. The
committee proposed an exemption for user-submitted content but the proposer of
the law shot it down. So now here we are. Forum operators have to police their
users against unclear criteria or face legal liability. I think that's a
chilling effect, and it has no upside.

If you want to strengthen investigative journalism, do exactly that - put more
money into EU-wide funds to fund investigations, for example, or make it safer
for them to report by implementing EU-wide protections for journalists (to
prevent what happened in Poland from happening elsewhere for example). Or
regulate ownership of mass media to prevent concentration of power. There's
lots of things you can do on an European level to strengthen journalism and
democracy. This is definitely not it.

------
DanBC
> Because it still creates a license requirement on a snippet of any length,

No it doesn't.

For fucks sake, the law is lousy, but we don't need shit articles from
techdirt who are completely unable to read and understand law.

