Article 13 Is Back On: Worse, Not Better

https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/

by walterbell • 7 years ago

490 223 7 years ago

Kenji• 7 years ago

One day nobody will care about this back and forth between EU politicians and they will finally pass a law that will destroy the internet as we know it. It's inevitable because we have to win every single time, they only have to win once. My point being: Harbours for creative and intellectual people will always be under fierce attack by the common fool, and they will always have to occupy a niche, hidden from the intolerant eye.

LoSboccacc3• 7 years ago

exactly. we already did try to push back these and other directives, didn't work, stuff gets added to random articles or just passed verbatim some time later because people cannot rile up activism every single time without generating increasing apathy from the sense of helplessness.

lol this is exactly what's happening but no, -1 hive mind tries to disagree facts.

jplayer013• 7 years ago

You're entirely right. Defending against the encroaching of our rights and the freedoms afforded by the internet (or freedoms in general) requires constant vigilance. A one-time win doesn't matter - big interest groups continue to exist and continue to pour money intro ensuring their interests are disproportionately represented.

This is a losing battle for us. It's a gradual chipping away at our rights that will continue because it simply requires too much effort on the part of citizens.

Digit-Al• 7 years ago

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few."

c3o8• 7 years ago

On the face of it, the fix is rather simple: Vote for politicians who listen at least as much to civil society as they do to corporate lobbyists.

Unfortunately, the political system currently structurally incentivizes the opposite, especially at the EU level, about which there is little reporting because that is all organized at the national level. If Julia Reda weren't an MEP and hadn't been sounding the alarm for years now, the first you heard about Article 13 may have been after the final vote in which an even worse version of it was enacted.

At this point, the Greens/EFA group in the EP is the only one which has even taken the time to build infrastructure to voluntarily track (necessary to even hope to achieve any kind of balance!) and transparently publish their lobby meetings online. (Here's an ugly backend view, the pretty one is on individual MEPs' websites: https://lobbycal.greens-efa-service.eu/all/)

simias• 7 years ago

Surely there's a less inflammatory article out there discussing this?

mcv14• 7 years ago

Is there a less inflammatory way to discuss this?

Ygg2• 7 years ago

Sure. We can pretend it doesn't exist. Or we can shout loudly LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU...

sputr• 7 years ago

Sometimes truth is inflammatory. Art 13. is a natural disaster in the making. I've publicly debated many proponents, even had the plesure of debating mr. Voss and ... they have no clue what they are doing. Remember the US congress deposition of Google and Faceboko CEOs and how utterly uninformed they were? Well the elected representatives in Europe are no better.

Their response to most arguments on how this will hurt creators is "we're just trying to protect creators". No counter arguments, just "our intentions are good". Yeah, I've almost given up at this point. Most legislators just don't understand how modern economy and society works ... and the political groups (like the Pirates) who do, are having a very hard time growing due to overall apathy.

ddebernardy2• 7 years ago

Julia Reda usually is on top of this topic:

https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/

mcv14• 7 years ago

You'd think those law makers would learn. Or maybe we're the ones who should learn.

When the original proposal was shot down, we were happy because we thought/hoped it was shot down for our reasons, but even then there were signs that some parties in the EU opposed it because it wasn't quite terrible enough. So now they made it worse.

I hope we can keep getting this shot down, but it seems to be important enough for the copyright monopolists to keep pushing this, and public opinion may eventually tire of this.

The good thing is that EU elections are coming in May. We need to know which parties support this so we can campaign against them. Let them bleed in the elections if they won't listen.

yeahitslikethat11• 7 years ago

They have learned. 2 decades worth of learning from the failed dmca, which basically granted Google immunity from copyright violation.

Why should companies like Google be allowed to profit off content creators' work without complying with those content creators' licenses?

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

Why should companies like Google be allowed to profit off content creators' work without complying with those content creators' licenses?

If only it were the actual content creators and not corporations that publish the content for the content creators.

rhn_mk1• 7 years ago

They shouldn't. No one should also be forced to comply with law that requires the impossible to comply.

Abuse by Google is bad, but this is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Asooka• 7 years ago

Copyright is theft. It is theft of people's natural right to expression and sharing. We've seen that if you give publishers an inch, they'll take the whole 9 yards and sue you for there not being 20 yards, because their accountants predicted a 30 yard profit. At this point I don't think I can honestly support any kind of copyright law. Some limited author's right law, one that cannot be reassigned, sublicensed, etc. might work, but I have my reservations for that as well.

baxtr2• 7 years ago

The problem with this thinking is that google et al will profit! They have the resources to deal with this. Smaller companies will not be able to deal with this so easily.

Thus, we are subsidizing people with the help of google at the expense of smaller competitors (incl those in Europe). That’s a though trade-off

mcv14• 7 years ago

  > Why should companies like Google be allowed to profit off content creators' work
  > without complying with those content creators' licenses?

If it's about profit, simply having YouTube pay all revenue from infringing videos to the real owner, might be a much better idea than to block all content.

The process might work like this: A publishes something, gets revenue from it. B claims copyright. YT suspends payment to A until the issue is settled. When B turns out to be right, B gets all the withheld revenue plus however much YT already paid to A, either to be paid by A, or to be withheld by YT from other payments to A.

skh• 7 years ago

Once an unpopular proposal is shot down backers of said proposal back off for a bit. They bring up the idea repackaged some months/years later. They fight the battle again. Eventually, after enough votes the measure will pass. People can only remain vigilant for so long.

StavrosK5• 7 years ago

Since this is driven by the entertainment industry, a solution would be to just stop consuming entertainment. They've been fucking with copyright long enough trying to get their old business models to stop failing, why are we still giving them money?

tzs• 7 years ago

In most of these kinds of situations, the unpopular proposal is actually addressing some real problem that probably should be addressed.

Those who find the proposal terrible rally against it, but usually don't offer alternatives to address the problem. They may win, but then since the underlying problem was not addressed another proposal will arise. And since the opposition to the last one didn't contribute any new ideas to solving the problem this new proposal is usually similar to the old one.

And where is the general public in all this? The first time when they are told the proposed solution is terrible they can get behind that and call and write and sign petitions at the opposition's urging. The proposal is shelved and the public is told they won.

But they know that there still is an underlying problem to be solved, and signed on to oppose the bad proposal with the expectation that a better proposal would be offered, because the general public does actually want the underlying problem solved.

By the second or third time the now modified in small ways original proposal comes around, each time with the same "no to this, but we aren't going to offer an alternative solution" opposition, people are starting to think that maybe the proposal is the only way to solve the underlying problems because that's the only way that ever gets proposed.

This sort of thing happens with laws in a variety of fields, at all levels of government. National security, housing, transportation, crime, healthcare, education...in all of them you can find bad things eventually passed because the people vigilantly fighting those things didn't offer any answers themselves, just reasons not to accept other's proposed answers.

AsyncAwait2• 7 years ago

The reason I'm surprised is because the EU must know it is becoming less and less popular by the day, so why would you insist on pushing this? I get the corporate interests, but is it worth slowly disintegrating the EU over?

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

Historically people either don't vote or vote blindly for a national party that is part of some block in the EU parliament without any regard for the issues. Turn out rates are usually low in any case. So as a consequence, most of the EU parliament is made up of second rate politicians who spend most of their career not interacting with or being scrutinized by voters, press, media, etc. The EU parliament is not where most countries send their best politicians currently (to put it mildly).

Last time the populists barely managed to scrape together enough votes to even form a block (there are some esoteric rules for this). For the past few decades, the christian democrat block and socialist block have dominated decision making. Those two are of course dominated by the leading parties in France and Germany, supported by their smaller sisters in other EU countries. However, both SPD and CDU/CSU in Germany are a lot smaller in the last few years an barely managed a majority nationally. In France, the socialists were completely wiped out and the current president bootstrapped a new party. Across Europe, the parties that make up these two blocks have been in decline.

So, this time, things may end up a bit more chaotic. While I don't necessarily see the rise of populism as progress, I do think shaking up the powers that be a bit may end up being a good thing in the EU.

The key lies in actually campaigning on issues and putting the pressure a bit on EU parliament members that are likely to lose their seat. As far as I understand there are a lot of currently very comfy christian democrats and socialists that are possibly not going to keep their seats due to their national parties doing less well across Europe lately. As soon as they are forced to debate and campaign on these issues, they'll be a lot less likely to commit to voting for something that is fundamentally a hard sell.

So, just start calling out EU parliament members on their voting past and put them on the spot to defend their points of view. Name names. Get them nervous. Remove their ability to hide behind the blocks + national parties they represent and whose party line they blindly toe. Make them work for a living.

Mirioron8• 7 years ago

The problem with this is that it only applies to people in some EU countries. The rest of us have to just hope that Germans see the light, because we're completely irrelevant to any German politician.

And in other news, the EU wants to do away with unanimous voting on tax issues.

tomatocracy• 7 years ago

The problem is, as important as issues like this are, whichever party you vote for you are likely to disagree with 20+% of their platform, so its just a game of 'best fit'. Minority interests like this lose out in that process because many more people are happy for it to be part of their own personal '20% I disagree with' (or more likely '50% I don't understand') than other big picture issues.

What's worse, theres no guarantee that theres sufficient overlap in everyone's 'parts of the platform I agree with' that ANY of their policies actually have the support of even 50% of the party's own voters. (This is the public choice theory of politics).

Party list systems then make this a bit worse because they make it easier for parties to discourage independent voices since few politicians will have sufficient personal following to be able to buck the machine over the long term.

The only realistic way in my view to get things like this changed is to buy into the system therefore - engage in lobbying of the existing parties, and have sufficient people join those parties, become involved in the party policy development mechanisms and stand for office for those parties to change them from within.

I think that's sadly something that activists for digital rights (for want of a better term) have not fully bought in to, and its why we keep seeing this pattern play out as a 'best case'.

ddebernardy2• 7 years ago

Better source:

https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/

dang2• 7 years ago

OK, we changed to that from https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190204/09090341521/artic.... Thanks!

piokoch• 7 years ago

EU slowly starts to resemble old monarchies, detached from reality, "solving" problems that does not exists and totally missing important issues like Euro currency zone crisis, immigration crisis, lack of common and cohesive policy towards Russia and US, economic inequalities between old and new EU members, southern and northern EU countries.

After Lisbon treaty EU became some kind of mixture of the union of independent countries and a single organism. "The force" that is supposed to bind all countries into a single organism are EU council, EU commission and EU parliament. The real power is in the hands of the first two institutions - that's the EU bureaucracy which became a modern days "monarchy" - people does not have any power to decide who is nominated to those bodies and those bodies can do whatever they want. EU parliament is pretending to be some kind of "democratic" control, but, at the end of the day, everyone votes "properly", if not, voting is repeated again and again, MPs are disciplined, some words are replaced with their smoother version and we get what we were supposed to get.

ginko2• 7 years ago

Why are these articles always used for anti-EU tirades? Did people also call into question the democratic legitimacy of the United States while SOPA was on the table?

dingaling• 7 years ago

Perhaps because the European common market seemed to operate successfully for 40 years without such legislation?

If the EU was purely about trade, like the EC&SC and EEC were, then we wouldn't be having this conversation or even Brexit. But such opportunities are useful to remind EU citizens that they are part of something much more daunting and profound.

timrichard4• 7 years ago

The United States is pretty settled as a sovereign nation.

The EU is on a roadmap for complete integration along the model of the USA.

It's not unreasonable for people to stop and question whether this is what they want when they see that they have no power to oppose disagreeable, draconian laws like this one.

LoSboccacc3• 7 years ago

"why people getting punched write anti-bullying tirades?"

because EU is overstepping a lot recently. that's why. the EU could be made to work, but the decision making actors need to be brought far far closer to the constituent than they are now. they basically rule with the detached impunity of who doesn't need consensus to rule, and that's not going to work nor in the short term with these kind of powerplay nor in the long term with the stability of they whole eurozone.

kodablah2• 7 years ago

Did people also call into question the democratic legitimacy of the United States while SOPA was on the table?

When they overstep, absolutely. All the time, constantly referencing a much more ingrained charter too. For the US the march to federalism was slower than for the EU, but the centralized large government's legitimacy of handling several matters is often called into question.

What I see more often is a deflection of real political concerns about a growing centralized government. (well, that while often the cheering on of increasing its size/reach)

AnaniasAnanas• 7 years ago

monarchy

I think you mean oligarchy.

parliament is pretending to be some kind of "democratic" control, but, at the end of the day, everyone votes "properly", if not, voting is repeated again and again

Isn't this true for most countries anyway? The gov ministers are the ones who tend to create articles to be voted, while the MPs only vote on them.

mcv14• 7 years ago

I'd like to see that reversed: let parliament make the laws (that's what it's supposed to do, isn't it?) while government merely executes it. Power has become too centralised in the hands of the executive branches.

makomk4• 7 years ago

Most democratic countries allow ordinary elected representatives to propose laws, I think. It's mostly a question of whether they can get enough votes, which is easier if the current government supports them. The fact that the EU-level elected representatives have no power to make new laws whatsoever is quite unusual.

watwut• 7 years ago

Which non-existent problems monarchies were trying to solve?

dang2• 7 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological or political or national tangents. They're off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Shivetya• 7 years ago

to be honest, after reading this post and the julia link I understand why the law is bad but the idea it is worse simply because it applies to more groups is wrong. a bad law is always a bad law.

the small business exception merely turns a bad law into a bad law as a money grab because penalties will be assessed on a company with deeper pockets and likely increased just because of that.

the whole idea of exceptions to internet related laws recently based on size of the organization or just as worse, its "for profit" or "not for profit" method of business is just politicians moving their weaponization of laws into a new forum

kmlx• 7 years ago

we're getting the the Great Firewall of Europe in small but important steps.

expect to see more "Banned because you're from Europe" messages plastered all over the Internet.

except for VPN and moving to another country, is there any other way for a European to avoiding EU regulation?

mcv14• 7 years ago

Vote. Write and talk about this. Create awareness.

We need to shoot this down again and again until they learn. We need to vote them out of office and fix this corporate corruption in our government.

Most importantly, we need to get non-geeks to care about internet freedom, because as long as they believe the talk about how this is necessary, or simply don't care, the copyright monopolists will be able to get away with pressuring governments to undermine our freedom.

makomk4• 7 years ago

I don't think we even can vote them out of office. All proposed EU laws are created by the European Commission, which is made up of unelected political appointees that aren't even meant to represent the views of ordinary citizens. We really have little say. The European Council is a little better in that it represents member governments which could be voted out of power, but unless there's a huge number of single-issue voters in multiple states who care only about this I can't see this having much effect.

Democratic accountability in the EU is incredibly weak, and the member governments seem to love it because it's great for creating laws they couldn't get away with at the national level.

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

I think another measure that could help would be to make the lobbying interests hurt. Old media companies are infamous sponsors of it. Boycott them and call for them to be split up as abusive monopolies and they might keep their heads down or die faster.

onlydeadheroes• 7 years ago

Sadly, it is time we join the pedos and traffickers in Tor sites. Our discussion sites, our culture creation sites, all of those should be divorced from law enforcement's reach and be moved to safety. It might seem ridiculous to move a site like HN to tor, but it is ridiculous right up to the day it isn't, and then it is too late. We would also free ourselves of copyright, which in the current state only restricts creativity (the things you would put effort in, risky) and in practice fully allows duplicating complete works (effortless, no risk).

The time of running the web on the simplest paradigms (direct connection) that facilitate meddling has come to an end as any bovine lawmaker can give us impossible instructions that they do not understand themselves. It is time to assert the power of mathematics, let them stew in it a little while, let them realize they can't just shut the whole thing down anymore, and maybe in a couple generations they will have cleaned up their lawmaking act and we can try to join lawful society again. Maybe. But I expect that in time a fully torified core of sites will be considered a foundation of freedom, and not something to give up in any circumstance.

mcv14• 7 years ago

Sometimes I wish we could go back to the early 1990s, when governments didn't care about the internet, and it wasn't controlled by corporations yet. Some way to cut out the corporations and governments and run a network directly between people would be nice.

Preferably without pedos and traffickers, of course, but it's probably unavoidable that if we'd be able to do our own thing without corporate/government interference, then so would any other group. That makes this a tough problem.

konschubert• 7 years ago

Governments are constructs created by people. You can’t circumvent them.

kodablah2• 7 years ago

Sadly, it is time we join the pedos and traffickers in Tor sites.

It's not that sad. There is safety in even more numbers, especially legitimate users. It's now easier than ever to spin up a Tor onion service on you own computer. While I have one I'm tinkering with on the side, surely sooner or later a service that makes easy Tor homepage (remember that word?) creation+self-hosting+sharing/linking will emerge.

It might seem ridiculous to move a site like HN to tor, but it is ridiculous right up to the day it isn't, and then it is too late.

Also, it's the perfect model of lightweight html/css that thrives under Tor. I would ask those building Tor HTTP onion services to keep their content lightweight.

jackjeff• 7 years ago

EU laws do not apply to the rest of the world. No need to spin up TOR. Put your site in California that should be enough. I don't see HN caring a rat ass about EU law, in the same way that HN did not ask for a publishing license from the Chinese department of communication.

The irony is that the French are the first ones to complain about the hegemony of sites like Google (burning tons of tax payers' money on useless projects like the Quaero search engine), but when they're given an opportunity to shoot themselves up in the foot repeatably, and to kill ANY hope of having ANY European site that EVER competes with the US then they seize on it. It's the apex of stupidity.

I'm going to write an angry mail to my French representative tonight.

deadbunny• 7 years ago

Put your site in California that should be enough

What if you want the strong(er) privacy protections of the EU?

growt• 7 years ago

I completely agree with your second paragraph. It's the same in germany.

wslh• 7 years ago

Liberte fraternite egalite

emersion• 7 years ago

(It's the other way around -- "liberté égalité fraternité")

titanix2• 7 years ago

Bravo la startup nation !

TomMarius• 7 years ago

The top-rated comment when they cancelled it last time was "seems like the system is working". So is it?

ailideex2• 7 years ago

Depends on who you are and your perspective - it definitely is working for someone - just that someone is not representative of EU population.

bsaul• 7 years ago

As a french i beg other european nations : please, don't let french law makers decide the future of european internet. They don't understand a thing about technology (or science in general) and have a passion for ideology and state regulation.

One of the reason we have had riots every single week for the last 3 months is because of their inability to make smart and pragmatic regulations. Don't listen to them.

entity3454• 7 years ago

French lawmakers do not decide.

EU legislation passes through majority support.

This is not a national issue so let's not try to make it one.

One of the reason we have had riots every single week for the last 3 months is because of their inability to make smart and pragmatic regulations

Except that many rioters want a rollback on pragmatic measures for purely ideological reasons, of course.

StavrosK5• 7 years ago

French lawmakers do not decide.

No, but they influence enough that they highly correlate with the outcome.

ailideex2• 7 years ago

This is not a national issue so let's not try to make it one.

Why not?

coldtea• 7 years ago

EU legislation passes through majority support.

Which is hugely influenced by top dog states and their behind the scenes talks.

Mirioron8• 7 years ago

EU legislation passes through majority support.

Due to the way the EU is set up and the "EU parties" are set up, this basically means that France and Germany have a ridiculous amount of sway on the issue.

gdfasfklshg42• 7 years ago

The EU parliament is not the main legislative body in the EU. That would be the Commission. Furthermore the Council has roughly equal power to the Parliament.

Both the Commission and the Council are nationally controlled by the individual member states rather than directly elected.

Juliate• 7 years ago

because of their inability to make smart and pragmatic regulations.

It didn't start 3 months ago... :D

umichguy• 7 years ago

Unfortunately with the chaos with the UK and it likely crashing out, there will be a less of vocal opposition. Though, ironically, the UK itself right now can't seem to make up its own mind up about anything.

fermigier• 7 years ago

It's not French lawmakers (in this precise occurrence), it's the French Government.

Note that the French MEPs voted quasi-unanimously in favour of the directive, so yes that's a French issue.

The main issue IMHO is the proximity (some would way "collusion") between the French ministry of Culture and the companies (such as SACD[1]) undertaking collective rights management for authors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_des_Auteurs_...

close04• 7 years ago

Did anyone ever doubt that political decisions are (also) driven by (personal) economic gain? It even has a name that puts a "legal" shine on the act of corruption: lobbying.

Aeolun• 7 years ago

I find it hard to understand how anyone can think this law is a good idea.

Who exactly are they claiming to protect?

marcus_holmes2• 7 years ago

Because of the structure of the EU, the process of creating new laws is extremely vulnerable to lobbying. Parliament can only vote down laws, which can only be proposed by unelected officials.

So the leverage that the average EU voter has is only applicable at one very narrow point in the process (the vote to approve), while lobbyists can always buy influence with the lawmakers all they way through the process.

And this is the result. Though it does have to be said that the same process came up with the GDPR and that was a decent (and necessary) piece of legislation.

I do wonder why FAANG aren't more active lobbying the EU, though

detaro• 7 years ago

I do wonder why FAANG aren't more active lobbying the EU, though

They are quite active. I.e. Google is said to have spent 30+ millions on lobbying about the copyright reform. Facebook is lobbying too: https://www.politico.eu/article/inside-story-facebook-fight-... (although not necessarily as one would think from their public statements, it seems like they're quite happy to tout how effective upload filters are when it seems like they can use that as an argument to avoid other rules)

YetAnotherNick• 7 years ago

I do wonder why FAANG aren't more active lobbying the EU, though

I think they know that article 13 is going to be beneficial for them. If law requires costly content ID, it will make half of companies go out of business or non profitable in Europe. I really think many companies are going to ignore Europe as a whole.

vsl• 7 years ago

came up with the GDPR and that was a decent (and necessary) piece of legislation.

Funny you say that. I'd say it's just the same kind of shitshow - badly written, vague (case in point: if Google's layers can't safely parse GDPR, nobody stands a chance to have certainty: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191591/google-gdpr-fine...), entirely unnecessary, isolating EU from the rest of the world behind the new Great European Firewall. Not a day passes that I wouldn't encounter a site that geoblocks EU visitors because they don't want to deal with the uncertainty of GDPR. Expect much more of that if Article 13 passes.

Great for VPN services, though.

vfclists3• 7 years ago

They are not interested in protecting anybody and they don't claim to.

You have no idea of the communist and fascist tendencies the EU is riddled it. They just use the enhancements of living standards that the high productivity afforded by modern technology to cover their real goals.

British people have a very good nose for this bullshit that is why they voted for Brexit.

Leopards never change their spots. The human leopards only paint them over.

SanderSantema• 7 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but from my limited viewpoint it seemed like the British mostly voted from an ideological standpoint and now they seem to regret their decision.

dsabanin• 7 years ago

Article 13 looks like a really nice foundation for censorship.

It’s interesting for me to see how EU socialistic tendencies correlate with things like “right to be forgotten”, “article 13” and other initiatives. It’s as if party nomenclature is worried about their self preservation already.

It’s also telling to see how little effect citizens of EU have over these decisions.

bubblethink2• 7 years ago

What constitutes a European website ? As long as you are not accepting local currency and don't have a registered company in Europe, are you still affected by this ?

volkl48• 7 years ago

Well, from a practical perspective, if you have no operations in or other ties to a country, you are not subject to their laws.

US-centric sites ignoring GDPR compliance would be one such example.

sametmax2• 7 years ago

By operation, do you mean a legal one, a financial one or a technical one ?

sametmax2• 7 years ago

Good question.

I host http://0bin.net/.

I comply to the regular take down notices, but by its very nature, I cannot filter the service since I cannot see what's been pasted.

Would it mean I'll have to move the server outside europe ? Would it mean I'll have to block european IP ?

bubblethink2• 7 years ago

Would it mean I'll have to move the server outside europe ?

Perhaps ?

Would it mean I'll have to block european IP ?

Not really ? They can block you if they want (similar to how DMCA works). That gets into general censorship territory though, for which people are looking into other solutions for far more oppressive regimes than the EU. See signal in Iran, domain fronting etc.

As for currency exchange, this may be the killer app for cryptos ?

c3o8• 7 years ago

This doesn't seem to be a for-profit service, so it's outside of the scope of the latest drafts of Article 13 thankfully. As long as you never put ads on it, you're good.

gnode• 7 years ago

I'm not sure this service qualifies. It's not browsable, so it's arguably more like a cloud storage service, which are explicitly exempt.

c3o8• 7 years ago

The law's not limited to "European websites": If you're making your service available to Europeans, you fall under it.

Of course, the EU can't enforce its laws on you in practice unless you have a local subsidiary (or datacenter, bank accounts, etc)... but it's possible that rightholders may get European ISPs to block offending and non-repentant sites at that level – like ThePirateBay is blocked in countries like Austria and Belgium.

jswizzy• 7 years ago

Theses are the same law makers who passed Net Neutrality too and laughed at Brexit.

crb002• 7 years ago

And they wonder why the Brits want out of this.

lbj2• 7 years ago

This has happened countless times: A very ill received proposal meets sufficient public resistance to be publicly labeled as "defeated", only to resurface in an almost identical version months/years later. It seems obvious that strong powers playing the long game are lobbying to see this passed.

afpx• 7 years ago

This seems to have become standard operating procedure in the US, and it really kills peoples' trust of our legislative system. It's saddening to hear that the EU is not immune to it either.

lbj2• 7 years ago

I would say it's standard in most western countries.

Mirioron8• 7 years ago

The EU has been pulling this stuff for a while. Back when Ireland had a referendum whether they should ratify the Lisbon treaty the Irish voted against it. A year later they were asked to have another referendum with some concessions given by the EU.

Referendums don't really work if one side can just ask to have another one.

porpoisely2• 7 years ago

Just a legal version of "keep voting until we get the vote we want".

But it shouldn't be shocking that the elites get what they want. The EU was created by the elites for the benefit of the elites, not ordinary europeans.

The elites of every major region seem intent on controlling and censoring the internet ( EU, China, Russia, US, etc ). The question is towards what end? It certainly isn't for the benefit of their own people.

simonebrunozzi• 7 years ago

The EU was created by the elites for the benefit of the elites, not ordinary europeans.

Citation needed.

kevin_b_er2• 7 years ago

This will kill any form of free expression on the Internet in Europe. Join me in considering France, and soon the EU, as an enemy of human rights. The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 10, is dead.

Mirioron8• 7 years ago

I used to be in favor of the EU, but over the last decade the more I learned about how it operated and what kind of regulations they passed, the more opposed I became to it. Just the fact that they're bringing this proposal back again means that the "lawmakers" have zero respect for the general public.

ajmurmann• 7 years ago

Sounds like the reason it went away in the first place wasn't because of concerns of the public, but because Germany and France couldn't agree on the details about who is affected. Given the new proposal, it seems like booth parties might have thought the other's proposal wasn't wide enough.

jplayer013• 7 years ago

I agree to an extent. If France decided to implement these laws in their own country, 30 something other countries could shrug and do their own thing, while the French could attempt to fight it on a local or regional level. While the EU has enabled plenty of good, it's also the perfect platform to implement less good policies such as this in the interest of corporations or rightsholders on an intranational level in a way that wasn't possible before. It's also much harder to be heard as a citizen on the EU-level. I'm not sure what the solution should be, since overall I support the EU.

matt40772• 7 years ago

It’s this sort of frothing hyperbole that gets the tech community laughed out of the room in the places where decisions are made. It’s not helpful.

kevin_b_er2• 7 years ago

I care not. The copyright cartel consistently views profit over human freedom of expression. They, and their bought out politicians, must be called out for their avarice.

jelly2• 7 years ago

It's almost unbelievable that they want to remove the single piece of protection that makes Article 13 remotely acceptable to me: exemption for SMEs. If many small European internet platforms were allowed to grow in place of the existing American megaplatforms we could have a more competitive ecosystem (i.e. platforms couldn't suddenly change their policies or UIs without risk of significant user losses) and upload filters wouldn't be a legal requirement.

azinman2• 7 years ago

But that’s been the case as we haven’t had article 13 yet, meanwhile where are all these competitive ecosystems?

jelly2• 7 years ago

Failing to overcome the network effect unfortunately. My (perhaps naive) hope for this copyright directive was that it would add a cost or limiting factor to the network effect, i.e. after your platform grows past a certain size you are accountable for every user and have to filter uploads at great cost.

amyjess• 7 years ago

Stuff like this is why I've gone from being horrified by Brexit to hoping for a hard Brexit. The UK can do better than being stuck with Article 13.

pygy_• 7 years ago

The same lobbies exist in the UK, I'd expect a copycat law to land as well.

thecleaner• 7 years ago

I think that all data scientists can pick up the baton here. Maybe we could have a nice analysis about the evolution of Article 13 and who supported what clause. Given that elections are in May this would be valuable information. For the DS people it could be a great example of how to communicate complex ideas in a simple manner. Just a project suggestion for ones portfolio.

moby_click• 7 years ago

At least they added an explanation with regard to "best efforts":

When assessing whether an online content sharing service provider has made its best efforts according to high industry standards of professional diligence, account shall be taken of whether the service provider has taken all the steps that would be taken by a diligent operator [...] taking into account best industry practices [...]

Further, they added "future developments" to the state of the art of existing means.

Page 7, https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Mandate-R...

crsmithdev2• 7 years ago

I wonder if at some point it will just make good business sense not to offer your service / product in the EU? I imagine the cost of developing and running software to comply (plus the fines for anything but perfect compliance) would exceed potential revenue from EU customers in many cases.

Cynddl• 7 years ago

Do you mean as someone not living in the EU? More than 500M people live there and their primary market, when offering a service or a product, is indeed the European market.

crsmithdev2• 7 years ago

Yes. Of course, if you are living in the EU, you are stuck with that market :)

jandrese4• 7 years ago

Depends on your service. Something like Wechat could pretty easily decide to just not service the EU. It would be a much tougher choice for someone like Google or Amazon.

ohthehugemanate• 7 years ago

Personally I'm rooting for the worst possible version of Article 13.

Feed the lawyers, starve the businesses. Make the starkest possible contrast between countries where the lobbyists win, and everyone else. Sometimes you need to get bitten to learn to avoid the snake.

The EU can be to copyright law what Brexit is to internationalism and free trade. A brutal, public, and visible example that completely fucks a major economic player, to the obvious benefit of its neighbors.

The Internet is global. It is much easier to move a digital company than a bricks-and-mortar one, and this would give ample incentive. We will continue connecting the world, continue progressing, and continue making great money doing it. And all the EU citizens will be shut out of that for as long as our government can keep its eyes shut.

Their eyes will open a lot faster under visible economic pain and international embarrassment than they would on the present course.

koonsolo• 7 years ago

Yeah, in a way, I hope after this Article 13, we (Europe) get blocked from all major "user generated content" sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc.

Try to explain it then to the general public.

DigitalWheelie2• 7 years ago

This is a depressing thread. :(

kragen• 7 years ago

The admin of my Mastodon instance tells me he'll have to shut it down if this passes: https://nerdculture.de/@ij/101541005474837977

rmbeard• 7 years ago

Perhaps the internet is only temporary and will soon be gone, at least in some parts of the world. Perhaps it will be confined to only a few countries. Perhaps something will be developed to replace it.

anticensor3• 7 years ago

HackerNews with Turnitin/Copyscape would be far worse than what it is now like. Really, there are just a few companies which can implement a "copyright" filter.

For text:

  *Copyscape
  *Turnitin

For the rest:

  *Google+Amazon+Apple (ContentID)
  *Microsoft+Facebook+Netflix ("Microsoft Rights", anyone?)

Article 13 Is Back On: Worse, Not Better

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