
Draft of German copyright reform proposes memes should only be up to 128 pixels - zoobab
https://imgur.com/gallery/EOWUgv0
======
dang
Proposed 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.

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kamakazizuru
there'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.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Compared to the US, Germany is more regulation heavy in general. Many of those
regulations seem fine or even great, there are definitely ones that weird me
out a bit as an American living here though, like legally enforced quiet hours
on Sunday, days where it's illegal to dance, and really just the large amount
of government-religion interaction.

~~~
ginko
I don't know. The US does seem to also have its fair share of strange,
overbearing laws to the point where you can easily find "weirdest us laws"
lists online:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/weird-us-
laws?r=US&IR=T](https://www.businessinsider.com/weird-us-laws?r=US&IR=T)

~~~
jerf
Those are generally on the books because they are unenforced, so nobody even
thinks to remove them. Were they enforced, they'd be struck quickly. Sometimes
that even happens.

Are the ones in Germany enforced? Honest question, I don't know, and I'm
interested in the answer.

~~~
zaarn
Quiet Hours on Sundays? Definitely enforced.

Dancing Ban? Usually not unless you're either A) a very big venue or B) a
public place like a school. But for either cases it wouldn't matter much since
most of them are closed on those days since they are usually national holidays
anyway.

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diamondo25
What 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
How do countries like Germany handle it when someone meets the letter of the
law but not the spirit of it?

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paulhilbert
Not at all. In fact I would call doing that the most German thing you can do.

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tyingq
I'm imagining sites returning a quantized blocky 128x128 image if you have a
German IP.

~~~
bhaak
FWIW, 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.

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dahart
I 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?

~~~
dredmorbius
Memes would almost always seem to fall well into Fair Use protections, under
both US and wider Berne law.

~~~
Mindwipe
I would say that's highly questionnable under Berne, and are fairly untested
under US Fair Use protections.

As most of them are stills, and use the entire still, there's no defence of a
partial use of the work. Under Berne the key test would be if it was
prejudicial to the copyright owner's economic rights, and it would be hard to
argue the image had no economic value if it was being used in a popular meme.

I do think the parent's comment that memes could be actionable in a great many
situations in most jurisdictions but rarely get such in practice has merit.

~~~
Mirioron
> _Under Berne the key test would be if it was prejudicial to the copyright
> owner 's economic rights, and it would be hard to argue the image had no
> economic value if it was being used in a popular meme._

Isn't that backwards though? Doesn't the Berne Convention say that exemptions
to reproduction of copyrighted works can't be prejudiced against the economic
interests of the original author?

Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter
Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie,
does it?

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dahart
> Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter
> Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie,
> does it?

That is faulty, incorrect logic, and the law (both US copyright and the Berne
convention) does not agree with you. _You_ don't have the right to decide what
is in the interests of the Marvel franchise, Marvel does.

Images of Peter Parker are being actively used for ancillary marketing
purposes, and they can easily show that infringing use of their copyrighted
image is diluting their brand and/or causing some financial harm.

BTW I'm not worried about Marvel, I'm more worried about the many smaller
independent businesses, and individual creators, that lose control of their
work and have no practical legal recourse.

~~~
Mirioron
> _You don 't have the right to decide what is in the interests of the Marvel
> franchise, Marvel does._

That doesn't sound right though. Wouldn't this mean that any time a large
corporation used somebody's copyrighted works that they're stepping on a huge
minefield, because it's now up to the individual to decide what is in their
interests?

I'm pretty sure that even US copyright law weights whether the potential
copyright infringement creates an alternative product for the market.

> _and they can easily show that infringing use of their copyrighted image is
> diluting their brand and /or causing some financial harm._

That's trademark law not copyright. It's a different matter, because
trademarks have to be actively defended.

> _I 'm more worried about the many smaller independent businesses, and
> individual creators, that lose control of their work and have no practical
> legal recourse._

Then you're worried about the wrong thing. They will never have practical
legal recourse as long as the legal system is based on spending a lot of
money. We can't even get criminal law to work with this. What's the chance
that we would get civil law to work with it?

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gumby
German copyright law is already overly draconian and holds the country back.

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dredmorbius
Which 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-...](https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-
law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html)

~~~
gumby
As was true for the USA, China, Japan....

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netsharc
If 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
> 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?

~~~
TulliusCicero
Probably, but did you miss that this post is about German law?

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chadlavi
Some great memes are going to come out of this

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yummybear
A shame we can't read what they say...

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bhaak
I guess bitmap fonts will make a comeback.

128x128 is about 1/4 of a 320x200 screen. That's a lot of space, actually.

Also imagine how much faster webpages would become.

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deltron3030
Device 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
I'm guessing they are only thinking of raster images, like excerpts of photos
or videos.

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cr0sh
> 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.

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icebraining
There are easier ways to get sued.

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phit_
actual article (in german) [https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-
memes-sollen-...](https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-memes-sollen-
nur-noch-128-mal-128-pixel-gross-sein-2001-146101.html)

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raverbashing
Leistungsshultzrecht 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)

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rkachowski
This is only for commercial usage, private and non commercial is explicitly
exempted.

~~~
chadlavi
Commercial... memes?

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cyxxon
Well, 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).

~~~
icebraining
Maybe this will help Mastodon and other FOSS social networks to become popular
in Germany.

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AndrewThrowaway
What about SVG?

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other_herbert
Maybe this was the goal... Higher quality vector memes!

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jaimex2
Who'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.

~~~
avian
> 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
> 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?

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classified
Just like nobody needs more than 640 kB RAM.

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macinjosh
The 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.

~~~
qubex
I 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.

~~~
franga2000
The EU has a huge problem of people who have absolutely no idea what they're
voting for. The cookie law was a very obvious example of that. The EU
parliament is a mix of politicians who vote for what they want and ones who
very obviously vote for whatever their party's or their corporate connections
want. The moment any kind of technology is involved, the first group doesn't
know what they want and so the second group can out-vote the crap out of them.

So yes, they have done a lot of good, but only in fields they understand. In
fields they don't, however, they are a much too powerful weapon in the hands
of (effectively) the highest bidder.

~~~
icebraining
In what way is the "cookie law" a result of voting for whatever their party's
or their corporate connections want? Which corporations benefit from that?

~~~
franga2000
The cookie law is so incredibly stupid and ineffective, my best explanation
for it is that it was made by people who didn't actually want more privacy for
users, and the ones who did, voted for it because they didn't understand how
useless it was.

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_-___________-_
Link is a 404 (and the imgur 404 page breaks the back button!)

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11235813213455
makes sense in terms of storage space, when you know the energy and
environment costs for this

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anon463637
There should be a recycle redemption tax on memes so there's an economy to
pickup outdated, displaced and discarded memes for their return value.

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netsharc
I 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..

~~~
TheDong
It 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)

