
Article 13 is almost finished and will change the internet as we know it - philipps
https://juliareda.eu/2019/01/article-13-almost-finished/
======
GuB-42
It looks surprisingly reasonable.

"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-
protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"

That's actually a lot of limitation. From my understanding: "organise and
promote" means it is not simple hosting, and "in order to make a profit"
excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons and "large amounts" most likely
excludes smaller websites like fan sites, and "uploaded by their users"
exclude search engines.

It is clearly meant to target a form of abuse that is much too common in the
"internet as we know it". It is mostly apparent in sites like PornHub. They
live by monetizing content they don't have the rights for, and they use their
status as a platform as a way to stay legal. I think YouTube admitted that in
the early days, they voluntarily turned a blind eye to copyright infringement
as a way to grow ahead of their competition.

It is unfair to legitimate companies who do their best to make sure their
content really is original or properly licensed.

And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will
push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old
internet.

As for the potential for abuse, remember that the article isn't finished, it
has yet to be completed, ratified, and tried. Public debate is important and
we shall not let everything pass, but IMHO, the spirit is good.

~~~
hyperman1
For your info: Hacker news is:

    
    
      - an Internet platform
      - that organizes and promotes large amounts of posts
      - which are copyright-protected works uploaded by their users 
      - in order to make a profit as it is an advertisement for y combinator.
    

So hacker news needs a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie.

What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law. Besides,
'meant' is a very dangerous word when used by politicians as jaded as the EU
folks. It is a way to whitewash unpopular laws, and make them look reasonable
when they are in fact the complete opposite.

~~~
drewbuschhorn
I feel like we had this exact same argument over GDPR, but no horror stories
have descended about Mom and Pop operations run out of business but the evil
Brusselcrats.

~~~
yostrovs
It's not clear what's going on with GDPR, good test cases are only now
starting to be tested. But the fact that many American newspapers, for
example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.

~~~
andrewnicolalde
> But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in
> Europe is certainly something to worry about.

They are not blocked. They have chosen to take their services offline because
they don’t think changing their business model such that it no longer depends
on aggressively tracking their users is worthwhile or cost-effective. Which is
fine by me imho.

~~~
yostrovs
You must understand the economics. Newspapers have zero cash on hand these
days, so their choice was to fire staff to allocate money for GDPR or not.
Seeing how staff is at a minimum, that was the practical option. Result is
equivalent to censorship. I'm surprised you don't find this a terrible
outcome.

~~~
gregknicholson
> Result is equivalent to censorship.

I don't agree that if a business chooses not to operate in a country, because
it's unwilling to spend the money required to comply with the country's laws,
that that is equivalent to censorship.

Another person's personal information is not protected speech.

~~~
vedantroy
I always viewed it as a transaction--go to the news site and read the news, in
exchange they will sell data on what articles you're reading, etc.

I was fine with that transaction. In fact, I would rather have them sell my
data instead of charging money.

Consumers have a choice on whether or not they want to go to these sites, it's
not like they are forced to give away their personal information to news
sites.

I would say the GDPR blocking news sites is a net negative because it denies
consumers the choice to read news stories.

~~~
rdlecler1
Agree. There are ways to protect your data if that’s important to you. If I
walk out in the middle of a freeway I should expect that I might be hit by a
car rather — the EU instead says, “let’s ban freeways”.

~~~
Fargren
No, EU says "let's put signs that point to where there are (previously
invisible) freeways".* GDPR does not ban any practices, it just says that
certain practices need to be communicated to and approved by the people
affected by them.

*metaphors can get quite silly

------
porlune
This seems like it will benefit the whales more than the fish, as they can
absorb copyright infringement costs into their already expansive legal
departments, whereas a smaller company will likely go belly up or be chummed.

~~~
ddxxdd
The same can be said for every other EU law.

Net neutrality regulations include vague language that allows "reasonable
network management", which is a multi-million dollar legal hassle that
stresses small ISP owners. And I shudder to think how Duck Duck Go's
programmers will manage to comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten [from a
search engine's results]".

I hope the politicians in Washington, D.C. recognize that America is the
world's last refuge for small business growth and economic innovation.

~~~
rapind
I would imagine you'd be able to simply submit a domain to DDG, they would ask
for a txt record or file to be present within the site, similar to a DNS
verification tool. Then it would be queued up in a crawler for removal upon
verification. Is there something I'm missing?

If it's individual pages, then probably just a meta-tag?

I think robots.txt could be leveraged for this though maybe.

~~~
Kiro
> Is there something I'm missing?

Yes, they don't have their own crawler for regular websites. They get their
organic search results from Bing and Oath.

~~~
rapind
I assume then that Bing will be responsible for this then (or if they won't
then they'll need to find a new engine)

------
danijelb
In a weird way, this might be EU's strategy to finally deal significant damage
to Google and Facebook, as this law will encourage development of alternatives
on decentralized peer-to-peer technologies. However, I'm not sure if EU
politicians are that smart...

~~~
jaabe
It’s not made by EU politicians, it’s made by a combination of lawyers,
engineers and public administration majors.

In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through
the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also
massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never
read through something that wasn’t sound.

Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a
good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural
principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.

~~~
deltron3030
>but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.

Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The
problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common
sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon
to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for
the common good.

------
losthobbies
I wrote to my MEP and this is the response I got:

Following a number of important amendments being made to the Copyright
Directive since July, the proposal was put to a plenary vote in September,
which over 60% of MEPs supported. During further negotiations between
Parliament, the Council (EU Member States) and the European Commission, any
remaining shortcomings can be addressed.

I am in favour of a balanced Copyright Directive that allows for a free and
fair internet, and also ensures the fair remuneration of creators, artists,
publishers and journalists who create important jobs, growth and innovation in
the EU.

With regard to a stronger right for press publishers, Article 11 allows for: •
Fair remuneration for journalists and press publishers for the use of their
articles. • Financially independent press (independent from platforms). •
Quality journalism. • Journalists to get a share of the press publishers'
remuneration. Private use of press articles is allowed. Hyperlinking is
allowed.

With regard to the value gap, Article 13 allows for: • Platforms to take more
responsibility for the content on their websites. • Fair remuneration for
European right holders (artists, musicians, authors etc.) from the platforms
that use their works. • Platforms to conclude licenses with the right holders.
• Right holders and platforms to find a practical solution to bring copyright
and liability in a better balance. The scope of Article 13 has been limited to
those platforms which infringe the most copyright. Platforms like Spotify,
iTunes, Netflix, eBay, Wikipedia, dating-platforms, software developing
platforms, blogs, private homepages, dropbox etc. do not fall under Article
13.

Copyright rules need to reflect the new realities and business models of the
21st century, particularly the rise of digital media. Press publishers and
other content producers should receive a fair share for the use of their
content on the internet. Currently, most generated revenue goes to the
platforms and aggregators, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube.

It is of course a priority that the Internet remains a platform where free
speech prevails. The rules will only affect platforms that explicitly make
profit from copyrighted works. Private individuals can continue to share
content on the internet for non-commercial purpose. Platforms such as
universities, scientific databases and online encyclopaedias, which are not
dealing with copyright content as their primary purpose, will all be exempt
from the new rules.

_________________

~~~
tomp
Thanks, that's actually a reasonable and balance view. Let's just hope that's
what _actually_ gets implemented in the law as well...

------
radarsat1
The GDPR has already resulted in quite a few websites simply refusing to serve
the EU. Will this clinch it? Will the EU be cut off form the internet due to
over-regulation that no one wants to put themselves at risk over?

~~~
DCKing
I think calling GDPR over-regulation is extremely suspect. The GDPR does a
good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with
personal data. Clear communication, consent, control over your own data and
data protection principles. Things that should be self-evident but we have
been failing with forever, and something that has become an extremely
widespread widespread in an online society. The only reason to call it over
regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand - but
there was a clear need for such a law and codifying reasonable privacy
principles. I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this
in their own country.

Article 13 is fundamentally different from the GDPR. The fundamental problem
is that I think (and most people hopefully do) user privacy is an ethical
good, and I don't believe (much of) copyright law is an ethical good. If you
fundamentally believe copyright must be defended vigilantly Article 13 is not
an unreasonable consequence at all - I just don't agree with that premise one
bit.

Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you
really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw
you too. But for Article 13, the laws are only in the interest of big
corporations. I don't care about those.

~~~
sambe
There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations,
regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has
been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-
regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.

Besides, there is also a cost to me: the never-ending pop-ups and acceptance
dialogues, inability to access information in a straightforward manner for
those that choose to block, etc.

What is the percentage of users who actively control their privacy as a result
of GDPR (and still happily use the website)? What is the percentage of badly
-behaving businesses who will be prosecuted?

~~~
DCKing
Every regulation is a trade-off.

> There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing
> regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad
> their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations.
> You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people
> are burdened by it.

Indeed - the lack of this cost of business was causing (1) reckless and (2)
(deeply) unethical behaviour to become rampant [0]. I think it was fair to say
it was not acceptable anymore, and I think the GDPR does a good job of
formalizing rules of _basic_ common sense about personal data protection.
There's really nothing in the GDPR that I can point to that is overbearing,
although of course many businesses do implement unnecessarily overbearing UX
on top of it.

Processing personal data _should_ be a risk to business, and I think some
basic rule of law was warranted for this risk to be clear to business.

I'm not saying there is no cost to regulation. But the cost needs to be
proportional to the good it achieves and I think the GDPR does that quite
well. Article 13 - in my opinion - clearly will not.

[0]: E.g. in unregulated countries:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684)

------
Legogris
This has the potential of being a blessing in the disguise since these
barriers will not hold for decentralized alternatives where there is no
obvious platform operator to hold responsible.

~~~
unhammer
Don't they already have that covered through existing policy, though?
bittorrent is highly policed

~~~
pas
only the centralized public trackers are "affected". and the fact that they
are still around and kicking, and distributed decentralized anonymous
reputation-market systems are pretty empty shows that that policing is rather
weak (otherwise people would move toward the "policing resistant" networks)

------
marak830
Bloody hell that's rather terrifying. After GDPR I was thinking Europe would
be the bastion of the internet, now it looks like it's time to decentralise
the internet completely. Which is going to surely have it's own issues I'm
sure.

~~~
vixen99
its own issues

~~~
marak830
Yeah phone autocorrect.

------
haywirez
I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers,
especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be
important for the EU to be able to vote for representatives regardless of your
primary jurisdiction.

Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they
will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal
forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different
universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.

Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of
how stupid the proposal is.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024](https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024)

~~~
aloisdg
This is why we need Esperanto.

~~~
azangru
Or English as the officially recognised global language

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
jaabe
With Britain leaving the EU there is sadly a lot less reason for English to be
the official language.

~~~
flexie
Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language
so no country has an advantage.

It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in
close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken
language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language.
It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture
and of international diplomacy (sorry France).

~~~
Xylakant
> Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language
> so no country has an advantage.

There’s still the Irish.

~~~
flexie
True, but Ireland is less than 5M, 13 seats in the EU parliament. They are not
seen as a competition to anyone. The UK is 66M with 73 seats in the
parliament, member of G7 and one of the most important economies in the EU.

------
belorn
> Legal content should not be blocked.

I don't think this will happen, but if this is actually made into a liability
then this would create a rather interesting situation where a platform could
be sued for blocking fair use content and miss-identified content.

~~~
philpem
I think the net result would probably be a rapid increase of the "451 Not
Available For Legal Reasons" errors which have appeared post-GDPR.

That and a load of innovative start-ups simply setting up overseas instead of
inside Europe, and perhaps major sites simply preventing any kind of
contribution from European users.

After all, there's no A13 clause which says that if your US site allows
uploads, your European one also has to?

------
josteink
OK. So I'd like to help make some noise surrounding this issue. Who should I
email for best impact?

~~~
mpartel
Your MEPs, politely and in your own words.

~~~
petre
I've already tried e-mailing the MEPs, it doesn't work. If you do get a
response it goes in the lines of _sorry mate, but you 're wrong, here's why
blah blah; our party consensus is that we're doing the right thing by voting
for this controversial measure_. Good luck with that.

~~~
corin_
That doesn't mean that contacting MEPs "doesn't work", you can't expect them
to change their opinion immediately based on receiving one email from one of
their constituents.

------
DanBC
A friendly reminder that almost no-one commenting in this thread has read the
full articles and recitals.

~~~
philpem
I'd love to see a "cliff's notes" summary of what A13 means as it is right
now. Something like the "Doorstep EU" app does for Brexit-related news -- an
actual, thought-out summary which links to authoritative reference material.

~~~
c3o
Isn't that what the linked-to article is?

------
bloak
It's unclear to me what "internet platforms that organise and promote large
amounts of ... works uploaded by their users" really means. It presumably
applies to Facebook. It presumably doesn't apply to e-mail. But if I had a
social networking service that had no advertising and was only accessible to
its paying users, would the law apply to it? What if postings were encrypted
and could only be read by users that had requested access to them? Would the
company running the service be expected to either backdoor the encryption or
create bogus accounts and request access from those bogus accounts in order to
monitor postings that might contain infringing content?

------
humanetech
> Licenses that platforms take out cover uploads by their users, as long as
> they act non-commercially or “don’t generate significant revenues”

Am I reading correctly that when you have a forum (e.g. Discourse) which is
non-commercial i.e. for an open community, that any users uploading stuff or
quoting article sections are exempt from this regulation (even though the
forum is hosted on Discourse servers on a paid plan)?

------
zimbatm
This might be a good thing actually.

If huge content distribution platforms like YouTube and Facebook are not
viable anymore, it might put a renewed wind in the sails of self-hosting
systems. Getting the Internet back to it's distributed nature would make it
more resilient.

~~~
buboard
youtube does not rely on infringing content anymore. at least, 100% of the
channels i follow are by makers who try to make fair use of copyrighted stuff
or using public domain of historic stuff .

> the sails of self-hosting systems

Self-hosted content is pointless if there are no watercoolers to chat about
it.

------
shubb
So usenet is dead, right? 90%, usenet ISPs are a download server pretenting to
be a mail server so they can claim safe harbour. If they are responsible for
auditing their content, presumably this isn't viable anymore...

~~~
yani
I am so tired of this abuse ... finally there is light

~~~
ahje
How will this help? The usenet providers will be responsible for the uploads
their own customers do -- not for the content posted elsewhere on Usenet.

~~~
shubb
If in a federated platform the ISP is not responsible for content they
agregate, that's a big loophole. It would really encourage P2P approaches.

------
philipps
I am curious about other interpretations of the impact this law will have.
Would it encourage the development of more peer-to-peer sharing networks,
which lack a central space to upload?

I wish we had the kind of concerted effort that the copyright lobby is able to
launch, but focused on issues that reduce the net benefit of these platform
more than copyright infringement: hate speech or intentional misinformation.

~~~
Arnt
It'll encourage growth of telegram/whatsapp groups where stuff is forwarded
around and reaches a large audience, but without a crawlable URL.

Social networks.

~~~
glogla
Like in the old Direct Connect days.

------
yani
I like this new law. My rights are abused every hour and corporations hide
behind the safe harbour. It is a really good thing. Keep up EU

~~~
kmonsen
Can you be more specific? Which rights?

~~~
yani
I have a software product. People resell it on marketplaces. They make
€30~50,000 per year from doing this. When I contact the marketplaces they hide
behind safe harbour - yes, they suspend the user account but the same user
will register the next day under a different name and keep the same practice.
The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the author
to the platform so abuse like this is not repeated.

~~~
ad_hominem
> _The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the
> author to the platform_

How is the platform going to know what's legally published and what isn't? In
some cases I suppose you can work with an industry, like YouTube's Content ID
for music, however even with Google's resources Content ID still has severe
glitches[1] (should they be legally responsible for false positives too?).
Otherwise what, hire an army of mechanical turks to manually review every
single thing that's uploaded?

At best I think under this kind of system you're going to get a stagnant
landscape where only corporate giants with deep pockets and/or industry
connections can create new innovative products. There's going to be no more
upstart Instagrams, Snapchats, Soundclouds, whatever if the company can get
sued into oblivion if some rando takes a pic or uploads a snippet of
copyrighted material.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/SmellyOctopus/status/1082771468377821185](https://twitter.com/SmellyOctopus/status/1082771468377821185)

------
tikumo
This wil change nothing that is not already in effect for most sites. Try to
upload a movie to Youtube, it will be removed. But only when the owner/author
complains or some automatic filter is triggered.

There is also too much content to check and enforce it all.

~~~
c3o
YouTube has stated that if this passes, "EU residents are at risk of being cut
off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn
times" – i.e. despite all the overblocking and mistakes, still too much slips
through ContentID for them to take the risk of direct liability.
[https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/11/i-support-
go...](https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/11/i-support-goals-of-
article-13-i-also.html)

~~~
consp
I hope this happens and everyone will wake up, complain and the directive will
be changed.

~~~
philpem
In all likelihood, EU users will just end up using VPN-type services to bypass
the blocks... rather than talking to their MEPs.

(I don't blame them to be fair, I've gone down the MEP route - they replied
with a form letter to the effect of "this is party policy and I'll support it
because it's for your own good, and I'm not discussing it further")

------
dotdi
I'm an EU citizen.

Honest question here: What can I do to influence this decision?

~~~
chosenbreed37
> I'm an EU citizen. Honest question here: What can I do to influence this
> decision?

Mmm...maybe you could write to your local/nearest European Parliament
Representative...I think they call them MEPs...

------
kerng
What strikes me as odd is that most of these efforts are driven by the EU. Are
other unions and nations not seeing the need for these things? It reminded me
of GDPR.

------
red75prime
What if an internet platform requires encryption of every upload? And other
internet platform stores keys for such uploads, and decryption happens on
user's computer.

------
mempko
This will either be really good by forcing people to run their own sites (the
web is a giant social network naturally) or will kill the meme culture.

------
mscasts
I hope my country leaves the European union, soon.

~~~
chosenbreed37
> I hope my country leaves the European union, soon.

LOL...why though? By the way...which country is that?

~~~
mscasts
It won't happen any time soon I'm afraid. I want to leave the eu because I
don't believe in big centralized countries making decisions for hundreds of
millions of people. I like decentralization.

Just look on all the big countries of the world, they all kind of suck. There
is simply no way for ordinary citizens to have any effect on EU because of
it's size alone. Almost all my countries MEPs voted no to Article 13 but it
still got passed.

I don't want Germany and France to control Sweden (which is the country I'm
from).

------
suomiperkels
That's why more and more people feel resentment towards their states and the
EU. This is a blatant corruption and this is only going to get worse. There
should be an investigation of all the people involved, money traced even for
distant family members and acquaintances. If any shady behaviour is discovered
then the justice should be dispensed. Any politician that abuses his position
to serve company interest in exchange for money should receive a capital
punishment as a deterrent

------
jasonjayr
Is AWS's S3 (or other object store providers) on the hook for upload
filtering? Maybe just their EU locations?

~~~
mrep
Well, you have to sign up with a credit card for AWS so I would think they
would just pass on the lawsuits straight to you as they know who you are.

------
vectorEQ
what if they post from outside of the EU, or the platform is not in the EU?
that would mean these laws don't apply? seems a bit useless law considering
what the internet is... besides that it's prone to trolls getting companies
fined. stupid idea for on the internet if you ask me.

------
gdsdfe
Hmmm This might make the dark net more mainstream

------
austincheney
How will this be different from SOPA?

~~~
raverbashing
It isn't different from SOPA (or from ACTA)

------
nercury
Small companies won't have resources to create their own content filters.

Guess who is going to sell content-filter-as-a-service?

~~~
hu3
From the article:

> Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted
> from the law.

~~~
Ravengenocide
From the article:

> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text.
> Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.

------
ouid
Ah yes, a private police force for the copyright holders. What on earth is
wrong with just letting them sue?

------
rdlecler1
The EU is going to regulate themeselves to the dark ages by simply creating an
environment that is too antagonistic and costly to capitalism compared to
other parts of the world. The regulations around capital raising for a fund in
the EU is aweful. You’re better off being based in the US and simply invest in
EU startups.

------
ptah
seems fair, if you're going to make your money from user created content

------
h0mEDw
As much as I like GDPR, I have no idea why would this law be any good. Perhaps
I'm not seeing something here - can anyone explain how this law is good for
society?

~~~
pas
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18883114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18883114)

------
tanilama
Poor Europeans. The European's Great Firewall.

------
LoSboccacc
Well there goes my startup idea I was working on and off last two years.

~~~
DanBC
Your startup idea was to host large amounts of copyrighted material for
profit, without checking who had the rights to distribute that material?

In some parts of the EU that's already illegal. Not just a civil tort for
which you can be sued, but an actual criminal offence for which you can be
prosecuted.

Which would you prefer?

~~~
LoSboccacc
> Your startup idea was to host large amounts of copyrighted material for
> profit, without checking who had the rights to distribute that material?

of course not don't be silly.

but so far liability was on the uploader, when the police comes knocking you
gave out user data and that was it. see, for example, the jsfiddle constant
issue with illegal content: [https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-
part-5](https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-part-5)

people miss here that any user generated content could be part of a copyright.
even text if they are lyrics. there's NO user platform that's safe.

~~~
DanBC
Can you post a link to the bits of article 13 (from the EU source) that you
think make your idea unworkable?

------
SidItion
Julia is running her own upload filter in advance of the legislation she is
fighting. My comment does not appear on her site.

