
The EU's Copyright Proposal Is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even Wikipedia - Mononokay
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal-extremely-bad-news-everyone-even-especially-wikipedia
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tehabe
For all EU citizens please write, call, speak to your MEP! The vote is on June
20. This cannot wait until the law is done.
[https://saveyourinternet.eu/](https://saveyourinternet.eu/)

~~~
runj__
I wrote my MEP a while ago and he responded and made a youtube clip talking
about this issue, one of the few times I really felt like I was part of the
EU.

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tofof
On this side of the Atlantic, we successfully blocked SOPA from becoming
reality (so far).

Looks like it's your turn, EU techies.

~~~
lossolo
We blocked ACTA and SOPA in EU couple of years ago.

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dingo_bat
Government mandated, privately paid censorship. That's what it has come to.
Again, just like GDPR, this won't hurt any big sites at all (Youtube already
does this). But smaller players will struggle, and users will get
inconvenienced and censored.

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tannhaeuser
IMHO it isn't helpful that anti-"copyright"-reform initiatives such as
[https://saveyourinternet.eu/](https://saveyourinternet.eu/),
[https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-
fi...](https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-finish-line/)
and now EFF use clickbaity, juvenile, and outright incorrect arguments, foul
language, and lacking nuance. Am I an outlier in thinking that YouTube/Google
and others should be held liable for willfully profitting from "copyright"
infringement at a massive scale, yet simply find the proposed law very badly
done and in obvious need of consideration? The elephant in the room being that
there is no "media database" that could be used for content scanning; the
entire concept is technically infeasible. The whole idea of scanning "uploads"
stinks; why not requiring that works are linked to rather uploaded, or use
HTML metadata to represent an asserted license/"copyright" weaver. Moreover,
the law isn't aligned with press laws: it's completely unclear who is subject
to this law in the first place eg. if you're hosting sites on your domain, or
at your IP, yet others take responsibility and are mentioned by name for the
site's content (under VisdP in German press law, for example).

~~~
pimmen
I sent an email to my MEPs saying exactly this; it's not technically feasible
to implement this without having the media in question, so you are shifting
this very steep requirement of proof from the accuser to the accused. The
media companies are the accusers, they should build this database to make it
easier for them to prove their case.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Interesting. How did you formulate your concerns? IANAL (well, took four
semesters) and it's difficult even for most lawyers to recap the entire legal
theory behind commercial and moral rights of works. Do you know a better
template text than
[https://saveyourinternet.eu/](https://saveyourinternet.eu/) and in German?

I agree the law should be reconsidered, or at least, as you say, should
address publishers's part in eg. maintaining and distributing SHA keys for
works they claim, though we all know this can trivially be defeated by just
recoding content. I also don't understand why concepts of other parts of the
law (link previews of snippets from news, Wikipedia and StackOverflow being
shown on SERP pages so users don't go to the original source) aren't
integrated, when there are obvious, widely used, and readily available
techniques for linking, annotations and HTML metadata, or why these two issues
should belong in the same law. I guess it's just a profoundly incompetent law.

I'm still confused who is behind the push for this part of "copyright" reform.
German party CDU they say (eg. the party of Ms Merkel) with their
buddy/sponsor Axel Springer Verlag, but OTOH last year's equally flawed law
for online platforms self-censoring was initiated by Heiko Maas, SPD, so the
lack of public or parliamentary discussion smells like a hidden quid-pro-quo
deal here to me. I'd really appreciate links to more balanced and
comprehensive coverage; even netzpolitik.org coverage is too one-sided IMHO.

------
politician
Copyright.

These media companies would be all over a technology that injected content via
direct neural stimulation at an authorized retail outlet.

Or a technology that was a permanently sealed container containing the content
that must never ever ever be shared. After all, if you can prevent sharing it
1 million times, that translates into pretty low false negative rate on
preventing acceptable sharing.

Or a tax collected that covered 100% of estimated revenues "just in case".

Ads, however, are vitally important to our global economy and must be shared
widely, as wide as possible.

------
skrebbel
I still don't understand how roughly the same people can do so well at the
GDPR and at the same time screw up so badly on this copyright stuff.

I mean, sure, GDPR isn't perfect but at its core it's a pro-citizen thing that
has some decent vision behind it and had to resist a _lot_ of corporate
lobbying to make it through. This copyright bill seems to be the opposite in
every respect.

If anyone can explain to me how the same organizations can do both these
things at about the same time then I'd love to learn :-)

~~~
throwaway13337
Both GDPR and this new proposal are pro big internet businesses, and anti
small businesses & community run organizations. Both increase consumer
annoyance. And both will likely in the end not help consumers with privacy or
otherwise.

It seems like the same group could definitely be responsible. I see no
contradiction.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
GDPR is strictly pro-consumer. Data hoarders like Google or Facebook are the
ones that were hurt the most.

~~~
ghein
Very stringent regulation is in the interests of large businesses. They have
the resources while smaller businesses do not.

We've seen this in reports after GDPR go live where Google's advertising
market share went up: they had the resources to demonstrate compliance as well
as a better ability to get consent (google vs random ad exchange asking for
your consent.. google vs a restaurant you go to a few times a year..).

People announce good intentions and create laws and regulations embodying
these intentions. They don't look at what the second and third order responses
are likely to be, just at what they consider bad behavior and what looks to be
a first order response to that. It is very, very hard to create laws and
regulations that will have the actual effect that you intend but it is very
easy to write laws that have good names and have superficial appeal.

Whether the subject is market structure, privacy, or taxation, far too many
supposedly intelligent people adopt or accept the superficial response rather
than the well thought through one. You wouldn't accept that approach in your
code but you're happy to accept it in national and international governance.

People are then shocked that they don't obtain their desired results and argue
for new, improved, superficial laws and regulations.

~~~
nerdponx
This is true about a lot of regulations, e.g. slaughterhouse regulations in
the USA. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have those regulations, or at least
some version of those regulations.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _This is true about a lot of regulations_

Managing how the regulatory burden falls is a core part of lawmaking. GDPR
fails in this respect.

Complain-investigate regimes (where complaints frequently trigger a regulatory
interaction) are effective. They're also among the most-onerous forms of
oversight. (Second to mandatory licensing and auditing.)

Add to that the power of each of the EU's twenty-eight national data
regulators to interpret the rules. Result? A law that's great for Facebook and
Google and terrible for almost anyone else. To wit, Facebook and Google's
shares of EU advertising has risen since GDPR went into effect.

~~~
pnutjam
Cry me a river. I don't want every little startup compiling my information,
and selling it once they fail.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
My complaint isn’t with the objective of the rules. It’s with its
implementation. One can be totally privacy-first, retaining zero customer
data, and still incur costs and risks because of GDPR.

~~~
jakelazaroff
What risks are incurred by storing zero customer data?

~~~
throwaway37585
Read again. That’s not the risk they’re referring to.

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soufron
Come on... this is not "Eu's copyright Proposal"... it's one proposal, from
one MEP, for one commission of the Parliament...

~~~
dannyobrien
No: it’s worse than that. This is the last committee vote before a plenary,
and the main parties and the member states have decided to support it.

The only way this is stopped from becoming law is if you contact your MEP now.

[https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-
fi...](https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-finish-line/)

------
IanCal
> Under Article 13 of the proposal, sites that allow users to post text,
> sounds, code, still or moving images, or other copyrighted works for public
> consumption will have to filter all their users' submissions against a
> database of copyrighted works. Sites will have to pay to license the
> technology to match submissions to the database, and to identify near
> matches as well as exact ones. Sites will be required to have a process to
> allow rightsholders to update this list with more copyrighted works.

I don't understand where this level of detail has come from. Can someone
explain?

Here's article 13 as far as I can tell

> Information society service providers that store and provide to the public
> access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their
> users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the
> functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their
> works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their
> services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through
> the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use
> of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and
> proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with
> adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures,
> as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of
> the works and other subject-matter.

> 2.Member States shall ensure that the service providers referred to in
> paragraph 1 put in place complaints and redress mechanisms that are
> available to users in case of disputes over the application of the measures
> referred to in paragraph 1.

> 3.Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate, the cooperation between
> the information society service providers and rightholders through
> stakeholder dialogues to define best practices, such as appropriate and
> proportionate content recognition technologies, taking into account, among
> others, the nature of the services, the availability of the technologies and
> their effectiveness in light of technological developments.

Edit -

> after Article 13 becomes law, any information hosted in the EU might
> disappear—and links to US mirrors might become infringing

How would links be infringing? Also where in A13 are they talked about at all?

Edit 2 -

I need to dig out a source but I'm near certain that there is an allowance for
review, critique and satirisation of the news in the EU docs they're talking
about.

> news sites may seek to withhold linking licenses from critics who want to
> quote from them in order to analyze, correct and critique their articles

~~~
rbehrends
The current proposal is here: [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CONS...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CONSIL:ST_9134_2018_INIT&from=EN) [1]; the text you
have seems to be an older version.

I'll add that there is indeed a lot of wrong stuff in the EFF article. Don't
get me wrong, articles 11 & 13 are indeed bad law (IMO), but promoting
inaccurate information does not help.

For example, there is no mention of "noncommercial activity" in the entire
text of Article 13 (non-commercial activity is only mentioned in one of the
recitals for a different purpose). Article 13 applies to "online content
sharing service providers". These are defined in Article 2:

"‘online content sharing service provider’ means a provider of an information
society service whose main or one of the main purposes is to store and give
the public access to a large amount of works or other subject-matter uploaded
by its users which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes.

"Providers of services such as non-for-profit online encyclopaedias, non-for-
profit educational and scientific repositories, non-for-profit open source
software developing platforms, as well as internet access service providers,
online marketplaces and providers of cloud services which allow users,
including businesses for their internal purposes, to upload content for their
own use shall not be considered online content sharing service providers
within the meaning of this Directive;"

Likewise, the following claim is misleading:

"Speaking of references: the problems with the new copyright proposal don't
stop there. Under Article 11, each member state will get to create a new
copyright in news. If it passes, in order to link to a news website, you will
either have to do so in a way that satisfies the limitations and exceptions of
all 28 laws, or you will have to get a license. This is fundamentally
incompatible with any sort of wiki (obviously), much less Wikipedia."

Article 11 is about ancillary copyright; now, ancillary copyright is a bad
idea, but the above is a misrepresentation. For starters, Article 11 (3)
subjects ancillary copyright to the same limitations as regular copyright, in
particular Articles 5 to 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC, including the right to
quote such content (which in turn requires attribution).

What Article 11 does is (potentially) creating a copyright for small excerpts
that might normally not be copyrightable and granting that right to press
publishers in addition to the authors. This is a problem for news aggregators
and search engines (which rely on producing content that's an aggregation of
normally not copyrightable material) but not per se for Wikipedia (where pages
consist of original material littered with references and quotes).

The biggest problem for news aggregators is that Article 11 (1) leaves the
definition of "insubstantial" up to member states, which will probably lead to
a "lowest common denominator" result, where the most restrictive
interpretation by a member state effectively determines copyrightability for
the purposes of ancillary copyright.

[1] And earlier revisions can be found here: [https://eur-
lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280](https://eur-
lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280)

~~~
IanCal
Thanks, that has a lot more detail and seems more familiar, I was just using
the link in the article (on mobile so hard to dig into things much).
Interesting overview too, that was my general impression.

~~~
rbehrends
Ugh, I hadn't even realized that EFF was linking to a two year old version.
Little wonder that they got so many things wrong.

For a better overview on upcoming EU legislation, I recommend the legislative
train schedule [1]. While the current page on the Directive on Copyright in
the Digital Single Market [2] only has the penultimate version, it's still
more up to date.

[1] [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-
train/](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/)

[2] [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-
connec...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-connected-
digital-single-market/file-directive-on-copyright-in-the-digital-single-
market)

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merinowool
All content will have to go through "filters" \- that means it is the end of
end to end encrypted services.

~~~
notahacker
The proposed law applies only to commercial sites which publish user-submitted
content which can be accessed by the general public.

~~~
merinowool
I can't see how a messenger type of software to which general public has
access wouldn't fall into that.

~~~
notahacker
If something is end to end encrypted, then by definition it is not made
available (in unencrypted form) to the general public (as opposed to a select
group of individuals with the relevant keys/logins)

The fact the software itself may be available to the wider public to set up
other private communications channels to exchange other messages with other
parties is irrelevant

~~~
merinowool
In that case it will be very simple to circumvent. As webpage could be
delivered once you log in, in form of an encrypted message.

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sbhn
It’s only bad for Californian copyright lawyers

~~~
k_sh
Why?

