
Will the European Union ruin the internet? - poster123
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/will-european-union-ruin-internet.html
======
merricksb
Discussed previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17354442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17354442)

------
baxtr
I think this proposed law is completely absurd. People who obviously don’t
understand how the internet works have created it.

For those not familiar. There are two main points that are quite harmful:

#1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible
copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large
companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so
they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload
functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies

#2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content.
This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content
without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will
happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how
google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links
online publically will become an outlaw.

The whole thing is nuts. Please, if you live in the EU, call your MEP about
this. @senficon is leading the fight on this.

~~~
teamhappy
> Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for
> killing innovation and supporting large monopolies

The law explicitly states that the size of the company, the amount of data
that is uploaded and the availability, cost and effectiveness of the measures
should be taken into account.

I don't understand how you call call this completely absurd considering that
sites like Twitch and YouTube are already doing it.

> Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content.

The "link tax" has nothing whatsoever to do with linking. If you run a
commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to
obtain a license to do so. That's all there is to it.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications
> you now have to obtain a license to do so_

Suppose someone posts a _Der Spiegel_ article. I read it and quote a sentence
in a comment. Y Combinator must now (a) reach out to _Der Spiegel_ , (b)
negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of _Der Spiegel_
content, (d) remit international payments to _Der Spiegel_ and still (e)
subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU
compliance costs entail? (I'm ignoring questions around whether including the
article's title itself requires fee remittance.)

That's what is being proposed and that is dumb.

~~~
phicoh
If I got it correct, that is not what is proposed. What is proposed is that
you pay an amount of money to a collection agency and then get the right to
publish those snippets.

I think it is a bad proposal that will do more harm than good. But it is
something that can be made to work.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _What is proposed is that you pay an amount of money to a collection agency
> and then get the right to publish those snippets_

Pardon me, so I post a comment on Hacker News and now Y Combinator has to (a)
identify _Der Spiegel_ 's collection agency, (b) reach out to said agency, (b)
negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of _Der Spiegel_
content, (d) remit international payments to _Der Spiegel_ 's collection
agency and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee
agreement and EU compliance costs entail.

This system having the benefit that when I quote _Le Temps_ , presuming they
work with the same collection agency, we cut out step (b). Otherwise all of
that again.

~~~
phicoh
That's not how it works for existing cases. There is in each country a single
agency per section of the law.

For example, if you want play music in a restaurant, you know who to contact.
In return you get the right to use all music ever created. No need to figure
out who owns what.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Do you think it's reasonable for Y Combinator to be assessed, by twenty-eight
national agencies, fees and fines if I--a non-revenue generating user--quote a
European publication in a comment?

------
vfc1
What is happening here to the internet is what as happened to any other sector
that was innovative at the time.

Bureaucrats who have a complete disconnect with what they are legislating but
that somehow need to keep justifying their own job existence, will go ahead
and vote regulations one after another even if they are unnecessary or
harmful.

Bureaucracies will keep themselves alive by inventing new rules constantly and
the EU is no different.

GDPR was not that bad though, it was about making sure that our personal
information is not being sold to third parties like HR companies that provide
services like telling companies your sexual orientation and other things of
that nature.

GDPR was about telling the consumer what is being done with their data and
about transparency, so at least it was for the people.

But this link tax is beyond absurd, and the content upload copyright
infringement is only enforceable by the biggest companies.

In practice, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud will implement this on their cloud
services and probably charge for it directly or indirectly to SaaS companies,
and there will be a couple of years of a grey zone period where the law will
not be actively enforced.

~~~
pif
> ...is what as happened to any other sector that was innovative at the time.

s/innovative/"innovative and illegal"

While everybody has got used to "freely" enjoy copyrighted content on
internet, IP protection is still a pillar for the low of most (if not all)
countries in the world. Let's stop being hypocrite: either we push IP into
oblivion or we enforce it consistently. Pretending that IP laws matter only
when it concerns our own content doesn't help innovation.

~~~
Silhouette
The problem isn't enforcing legitimate IP rights. Effective and consistent
enforcement would cause a wrench for a lot of people, and that in turn would
surely cause laws to be changed to give a more proportionate and realistic
situation, but we'd adapt.

The problem is that no mechanism can exist to reliably enforce genuine IP
rights as provided by law today without also causing collateral damage and
excessive costs.

~~~
pif
Well, you agree with me that current IP laws are obsolete and should be
ameliorated, I suppose!

~~~
Silhouette
I don't think copyright as a principle is obsolete. It generates useful
economic incentives to create and distribute works, which I consider to be
good things, and I have yet to encounter any alternative economic model that
looks anything like as successful at achieving those things.

I do think the current implementation of copyright in law is flawed in a lot
of places. This is bad because it potentially imposes excessive restrictions
on ordinary people and sometimes limits how much we can take advantage of the
benefits of new technologies. It is also bad because it brings the law into
disrepute, and combined with the practical difficulty of enforcement
particularly against small-scale infringement that is only a civil matter, it
results in a general sense among much of the public that infringing copyright
is a victimless crime and socially acceptable.

------
JumpCrisscross
It's somewhat amazing how, between GDPR and this, I've gone from hardcore pro-
EU to moderate Euroscepticism. Curious to see if this is personal or part of
something broader.

~~~
pjc50
The thing that the present crisis has crystallised for me, as part time
Euroskeptic, is that _leaving the EU does not make the EU go away_. Even
dismantling it entirely leaves you with 30ish different countries.

Would you rather have one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with,
or thirty different potentially incompatible ones, not all of which are
translated into English?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _dismantling it entirely leaves you with 30ish different countries_

A study of American history reveals the wisdom of governments defaulting to
inaction. If the country is split 50/50 on an issue, the proper thing to do is
debate. Not wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population
hates. We love to complain about gridlock in Congress but, most of the time,
that is the system working as designed.

Twenty-eight countries would be harder to do business with. But as it is, GDPR
will be interpreted by each of the the EU's twenty-eight national regulators.
A single market the EU is not.

Co-ordinating twenty-eight nations to enact a treaty is a huge friction. But
perhaps that is needed to counterbalance the continent's instinct for useless,
often protectionist bureaucracy.

~~~
pjc50
You do realise that actually passing EU law requires ... co-ordination from
all the countries via the Council of Ministers, through double-majority
voting, _and_ the approval of directly elected representatives in the EU?

This is far more democratic than the _secret_ processes of other international
trade treaties like TTIP.

> wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population hates

.. which is what's happening with Brexit? I mean, the British system where a
party is elected with ~40% of the votes and legislation is run through an
entirely unelected upper house isn't an improvement. And don't get me started
on the non-constitutional approach to devolution.

~~~
repolfx
EU Parliament, Commission and Council meet in secret when these decisions are
made. No minutes are taken and these meetings often don't even appear on any
agenda: they are literally the definition of secret law making.

Here's an article about it:

[https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630](https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630)

------
tehabe
The problem is that industry has been involved in EU politics for decades,
they have their people and lobbyists well in place and they are able to make
the politicians believe that they not only represent the industry but also the
consumers/users and the creators. Of course this is not true.

For example Netopia which is sponsored by the film and music industry and the
Premier League says consumers are diverse and that is why EU wide licensing is
a bad idea.

An organisation of the picture industry claims directly to speak for
photographers, even though they are their suppliers

But it works, politicians of all parties argue that those copyright
regulations will help creatives and creators, that those people need platforms
to present their art is not important, they are supposed to go to the old
players (gatekeepers).

P.S. Platform company are also not speaking for creators and creatives. I
think HN is full of links to articles about how YouTube isn't listening to the
creatives who use their site. And how YouTube is changing the site to make is
worse.

~~~
DanBC
This law, especially article 11 which people are talking about in this thrread
provide protection to the creators.

Here they're talking about letting the content creators retain their rights,
and that copyright protections cannot be used to prevent publication in other
places.

> 2\. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall leave intact and shall in no
> way affect any rights provided for in Union law to authors and other
> rightholders, in respect of the works and other subject -matter incorporated
> in a press publication. Th e rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be
> invoked against those authors and other rightholders and, in particular, may
> not deprive them of their right to exploit their works and other subject
> -matter independently from the press publication in which they are
> incorporated. When a work or other subject -matter is incorporated in a
> press publication on the basis of a non- exclusive licence, the rights
> referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use by other
> authorised users. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked
> to prohibit the use of works or other subject -matter whose protection has
> expired.

~~~
tehabe
Article 11 is about a new right for publishers. It could potentially make an
infringement to post a link to a news article on Twitter, the paragraph you
posted is a limitation to that right, because it says that authors can do that
what everybody always could have done.

This new right was "tested" in Spain and Germany. In Spain news sites lost 15%
of their traffic. Bigger site were hit less hard because people knew them and
got to them directly. In Germany they gave Google essentially a license for
free because Google didn't want to pay and because the publishers couldn't
lose the traffic from Google. But smaller companies than Google and start-ups
had to pay, putting them at clear disadvantage. Also the scheme costed around
10 million euros in legal fees had almost no income for the publishers. A
Massive failure.

But they passed it anyway yesterday.

------
Yetanfou
I'd say it should be possible to circumvent the 'snippet tax' (which is what
the 'link tax' really seems to come down to) by using a generated summary of
the linked article instead of a snippet. It would be a good project for some
student looking for a real-world application of natural language processing. A
quick-and-dirty solution is already at hand: feed the snippet to a translation
engine, translate it through a chain of one or two well-supported languages to
end up with the original language again. Here's how it would look, using the
first sentence of this text on Google Translate:

English -> German: "Ich würde sagen, dass es möglich sein sollte, die
"Snippet-Steuer" (auf die die "Link-Steuer" tatsächlich zu kommen scheint) zu
umgehen, indem Sie eine generierte Zusammenfassung des verknüpften Artikels
anstelle eines Snippets verwenden."

German -> French: "Je dirais qu'il devrait être possible de contourner la
"taxe de snippet" (que la "taxe sur les liens" semble en fait arriver) en
utilisant un résumé généré de l'article lié au lieu d'un extrait."

French -> English: "I would say that it should be possible to bypass the
"snippet tax" (which the "tax on links" actually seems to arrive at) by using
a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt."

Close, but not identical. Using different translation engines gives results
which differ more from the original text at the cost of accuracy, e.g. feeding
the French text to Bing Translate renders the following in 'English':

(Bing) French -> English: "I would say that it should be possible to bypass
the "snippet Fee " (which the "tax on the links" actually seems to happen)
using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt."

Not perfect but certainly usable.

------
integricho
Not before the USA, that's for sure.

------
mjburgess
NB.

This is just a committee vote. It's not law yet. The overall vote is in July.

~~~
yason
It particularly doesn't matter which nominal steps are still remaining, it's
the general attitude. If the EU are blind to technology regardless of whether
their intentions are good or bad, any such changes that might end up in the
legislation are still very damaging to the internet.

------
blorenz
Maybe instead of altering the Internet globally, the EU should be regulated to
modified browser clients that expose hooks into EU mandated policies like
GDPR, link tax and elimination of memes? Address the problem where it is being
consumed in the EU instead of pushing the solution upstream where it would
feed many different branches.

------
anoncoward111
So this is how the internet dies. Repeatedly stabbed by the ignorant minions
of the old elite corporations.

------
amarant
as a european: where is a comprehensive list of our representatives? Given
that I live in european country X, who do I contact about this? such a list
would be immensely useful for spreading around to friends and acquaintances!
(and for personal usage too, ofc)

~~~
pieter_mj
Please note that this was voted at the committee-stage, it will be voted upon
in plenary (the full parliament) in july.

Not every country is represented in these committees and as such you might not
have a representative and you'll have to look for the parties to find an
equivalent from another country.

IMO, this is also glaring hole in the design of EU's democratic structures,
because the chance of other-countries representatives answering to your
questions is practically zero, while at the same time them being subject to
corporate lobbying from whatever country.

the legal affairs committee :
[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/juri/home.html](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/juri/home.html)

the votes on "copyright in the digital single market" (pdf) :
[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/149721/juri-
committee-...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/149721/juri-committee-
result-roll-call-votes-20062018.pdf)

~~~
amarant
which is why it's so important to act now, make sure that your
representative(s) cast the right vote come july!

------
miguelrochefort
I thought the USA would, but Net Neutrality was fortunately repealed.

------
DanBC
Seeing the number of people using the phrase "link tax" in here is fucking
baffling. This is a propaganda phrase that doesn't reflect what the law
actually says.

If you think the law establishes a link tax you should be able to link to the
article that does so.

