Draft of German copyright reform proposes memes should only be up to 128 pixels

by zoobab • 7 years ago

137 115 7 years ago

netsharc2• 7 years ago

If it's not clear (the article does say "if not[,] you will need to get a license from the creator"), it's because most memes and GIFs take a copyrighted image/clip before adding a caption to it.

E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek".

bhickey• 7 years ago

E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek".

The image doesn't supersede Dawson's Creek. My understanding is that this template is lampooning overwrought acting on the show. Isn't this covered under transformational fair use in the United States?

TulliusCicero2• 7 years ago

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

rkachowski• 7 years ago

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

Reventlov• 7 years ago

So, for example, reddit or imgur would be affected by this as they're for profit, right?

eschulz• 7 years ago

They are probably considered neutral public forums even though they may operate a for profit business. I believe laws such as this will generally apply to the content creators, although public forums will usually have to cooperate with authorities who request assistance in enforcing the law.

ben_w2• 7 years ago

This is good, of course. I am curious: while a typical user of imgur would clearly be non-commercial, would imgur itself be at risk for hosting the material? Or does Germany have a “safe harbour”-like concept for platforms that host user content?

rvnx• 7 years ago

imgur is clearly a commercial image hosting platform. There wouldn't be any ads nor payment systems if it would be non-commercial

chadlavi2• 7 years ago

Commercial... memes?

dx87• 7 years ago

I've started to see a lot of ads that are based on memes, mainly on reddit.

laszlokorte• 7 years ago

In Hamburg for example public transit busses are covered in memes [0]

[0] https://i.redd.it/ygj1fa5130f11.jpg

afandian• 7 years ago

Yes. I've seen the Harold meme used in commercial advertising. The original was an unlicensed (I think) ShutterStock image.

(Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21481351)

Why should commercial companies be able to make money off copyrighted material? Or if you think they can, why not expliclty abolish image copyright?

cyxxon• 7 years ago

Well, commercial use of memes, like, say a company liek Reddit or Imgur that profites from the use of memes (let's not go into their revenue or business model in detail now). So in reality ALL memes are commercial (unless you host yourself, I would guess).

blkhawk• 7 years ago

Even an ad-banner put on your page by a free hosing service makes it technically commercial in Germany.

swiley• 7 years ago

IMO: this is a good thing, memes are addictive and worse still they’re often themselves advertising on commercial sites. I’m glad something is being done.

phit_• 7 years ago

actual article (in german) https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-memes-sollen-...

raverbashing3• 7 years ago

Leistungsshultzrecht is the "Link tax" so this shouldn't apply to "memes" but to snippets of news

(Of course, the link tax is BS, but it's not exactly related to memes)

tyingq3• 7 years ago

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

bhaak2• 7 years ago

FWIW, that would be great.

If the link tax ("Leistungsschutzrecht") gets implemented on a European level, I also hope that Google (and all other search engine provider) then just return search results with the maximal allowed word count.

chadlavi2• 7 years ago

Some great memes are going to come out of this

yummybear• 7 years ago

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

bhaak2• 7 years ago

I guess bitmap fonts will make a comeback.

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

Also imagine how much faster webpages would become.

diamondo25• 7 years ago

What a meme. Maybe they can just cut up the meme in chunks of 128x128 and display that instead. Its not a full image but a lot of tiny ones

Klathmon• 7 years ago

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

paulhilbert• 7 years ago

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

Kaiyou• 7 years ago

Why should they if it meets the letter of the law? Letter of the law is all that counts.

gmueckl2• 7 years ago

Well, the gap between the letter of the law and the spirit of it is quite narrow in most cases because of how the law is written in an abstract form and applied to a real case. Intent matters, not just the execution. If you know that something is unlawful, but you take deliberate steps to (seemingly) circumvent a rule while effectively breaking it with the result of your action, you're still on the hook. I find that people generally underestimate this aspect of how law is applied to the real world.

zaarn3• 7 years ago

There is a certain extend where the judge can easily see that you're just trying to bullshit around the law itself.

In this case, the most likely outcome is that the judge will rule that breaking the image into 128 pixel squares and then reassembling them is simply the same as displaying the full image by intent. The result is the same so you broke the law.

no_identd• 7 years ago

i.e. JPEG macroblocks? Sounds like a challenge for a metamemetic image meme-image–macro meme image codec(MIM-I–MIMIC) format to lampshade the absurdity of all of this.

(No, I ain't gonna write it. But I did just give all y'all an acronym for it, and I ain't gonna ask any of you to write it, either. However, I do dare challenge you to come up with some recursive derivation of the acronym, tho!)

JadeNB• 7 years ago

some recursive derivation of the acronym

MIMIC: MIMIC Is Memes In Chunks.

gmueckl2• 7 years ago

The small chunks won't matter to a judge because the intended result is to have the resulting ensemble displayed as a single, larger image again. The intermediate steps of breaking it up and reassembling it are irrelevant technical details that will be abstracted away.

CyanBird• 7 years ago

Ah, so then you would need to make every little 128^2 square be a meme of its own, which could then be part of a broader picture at the same time

netsharc2• 7 years ago

I wonder if this stupid compliance trick works: encode the image in base64 (or whatever, maybe something more dense), output that as plain text in the page, tell users they need to install a browser extension that recognizes these parts, decodes them and puts the image in place of the text.

Just for kicks the browser extension is open source and is maintained by anonymous..

regularfry• 7 years ago

I mean, if you're up for working around the law rather than obeying it, assembling 128x128 tiles into a bigger image by tacking them together in HTML is far easier.

anoncake• 7 years ago

I wonder if this stupid compliance trick works:

It would be correct, tautological even, to say in German "Deutsche Richter haben die Intelligenz einer Kartoffel". But that doesn't translate to "German judges have the intelligence of a potato" but to "German judges have the intelligence of a kraut".

In other words, no, that is not how the law works.

TheDong• 7 years ago

It sounds like you're falling into a common pitfall of interpreting laws in terms of purely technical details rather than their intent.

I recommend reading What Colour are your bits [0].

The major point that it tries to get across is that as software devs, we think in terms of data and computers. The law doesn't. The law says "you can't have an image like X", and you immediately think "hah, well, arbitrary base64 encoded data isn't an image." The law doesn't care about that though. If the law says you can't display an image like X to users, then it doesn't matter what weird layers you go through. It doesn't matter if you stitch together 1 million 1-pixel images, or if you have them install a browser extension, it just matters if you intended for them to be able to see that image, and then they could see that image.

The blog-post I linked does a much better job of explaining this, and I recommend reading it.

[0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

anon463637• 7 years ago

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

AndrewThrowaway• 7 years ago

What about SVG?

other_herbert• 7 years ago

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

jacamera• 7 years ago

Verboten. One year in prison per element.

jaimex2• 7 years ago

Who's pushing for this? Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.

It's like media industries love to hurt themselves. They've already brought back mass piracy by fragmenting streaming services, next they want to kill any chance of their content going viral I guess.

tom_mellior• 7 years ago

Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.

Most of the time I don't know where the meme's graphical content is from so it's not really advertising the source. But by the same token of course the meme is not harmful to the the content owner's economic interests.

avian• 7 years ago

Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.

Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising.

Anyway, the "Germany to ban memes" is just a spin on the story to generate clicks and outrage (similar to the EU copyright directive some time before). This legislation is about commercial use of images. The 128x128 pixels is what the law would consider a "thumbnail" image that can be used without explicit license from the copyright holder.

Perhaps a more correct headline would be "Germany to unban memes smaller than 128x128 pixels".

mfcl• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising.

They also don't make money when the meme is 128x128 pixels or not used at all. What is your point?

Mirioron7• 7 years ago

This is just a consequence of the copyright reform by the EU that passed. Remember article 11 and 13? (15 and 17 when passed.) This is it. The EU can't make laws themselves: it gets the national governments to make the laws and this is the one for Germany.

11235813213455• 7 years ago

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

macinjosh• 7 years ago

The EU is a nightmare of over regulation. No wonder the U.K. is leaving. They can’t just leave people well enough alone.

Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal over the entire page on their image only URLs. I feel like I can’t escape the EU’s ruination of the Internet and I have never stepped foot in the bloc.

the_other• 7 years ago

The hope behind GDPR, as with the earlier "cookie law" was that businesses would respond by improving their revenue models and data practices. Instead businesses have responded by making the UX shit for their users whilst claiming they had to do it to follow the law.

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

While the UX is definitely shit, GDPR has definitely improved privacy practices within the EU.

raverbashing3• 7 years ago

Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal

I find it hilarious how companies allegedly afraid of the big bad fines by the EU continue to use a non-compliant solution for a problem they created themselves.

It's cargo-culting of the stupidest way of (barely) solving the problem. American lawyers trying to interpret EU regulations never worked well it seems.

I have never stepped foot in the bloc

It's not like the rest of the world doesn't have to obey several American laws as well.

tyingq3• 7 years ago

Don't some countries treat the US DMCA similarly?

qubex2• 7 years ago

I strongly disagree. There might be a tendency to over-legislate in some areas (after all, there is now an exposed central authority that can be lobbied by special interest groups) but on the whole, the EU has been a strong positive influence on the continent of Europe and Britain is facing a serious self-inflicted wound as a result of Brexit. I say this as somebody who has dual citizenship in both a EU country (Italy) and the UK.

franga20002• 7 years ago

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

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

jpz• 7 years ago

The EU has important geopolitical reasons for existing on the continent of Europe.

However, the UK does not share the history of the continental countries of being occupied by their neighbours.

The compact "I surrender much of my sovereignty for security from being periodically exterminated by my neighbours" - has a very different balance on the scales for the country of the UK than it does for countries with a recent memory of occupation, that have seen large percentages of their populations dying from violence in continental wars going back centuries.

kamakazizuru• 7 years ago

there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things. This is a great example.

Additionally today they announced that while profits on stock trading (specifically derivatives) can be taxed fully, losses can only be accounted for upto 10.000€

Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013.

This kids, is what it looks like when a government is too scared to solve bigger structural challenges (digitization of the beauraucracy, switch to electromobility, better competitive environment for startups, questionable pension system, unneccesarily high taxes that keep leading to surpluses, I could go on) - and instead keep themselves occupied with non-issues that are PR heavy. Schade.

Mirioron7• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure this is just a consequence of that EU copyright reform that passed some months ago (article 11&13/15&17). At least the linked article talks about it (in German).

The EU can't make laws themselves. The way they work is by requiring member states to make laws and this is Germany's.

raverbashing3• 7 years ago

You are correct

But the implementation details are left to the member states and of course Germany came up with this in their interpretation of the link tax

johannes12343212• 7 years ago

Correct, it is the national implementation implementation of an EU directive.

And to the other point: There are two kinds of EU law. Regulationsa and directives. Regulations are direct law in all member states, directives need national implementation.

krona• 7 years ago

The EU can't make laws themselves.

They can. It's called a regulation. Directives are what you're referring to.

A regulation is a legal act of the European Union that becomes immediately enforceable as law in all member states simultaneously.

dgellow• 7 years ago

Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013.

Just a note, because that can be misinterpreted very easily: that's something from the local Berlin government (Bundesland), not at the federal level.

TulliusCicero2• 7 years ago

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

ginko2• 7 years ago

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

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

svth• 7 years ago

The US has lots of overbearing regulations and laws relating to "moral" stuff such as drinking and nudity. In many places in the US, it's illegal to drink alcohol in public [!!!]. That's pretty fucked up, not being allowed to drink a beer on a park bench. And don't get me started on the puritan anti-nudity laws...

sneak2• 7 years ago

In the US, the government dictates what hours you're allowed to drink, and in buildings that serve alcohol, you frequently need a license to be able to dance in those same places - even when there is no alcohol being served at that time.

karmakaze• 7 years ago

I don't necessarily think there's an agenda to most of these laws. It's Germans doing what they do best, overengineer in this case, laws.

45ure• 7 years ago

there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things.

As unnecessary as it might seem, however, it is not bizarre. This piece of legislation was not cooked up overnight, as you suggest. Basically, this is how the start of enacting Article 13 aka 'meme ban' looks like.

Article 13 aka "the meme ban" explained.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-article-13-article-1...

deltron3030• 7 years ago

Device pixels (resolution) or viewport pixels (like in CSS)?

I mean OS manufacturers could just change the way viewport pixels are calculated in their viewport rendering, which makes the law redundant. And relying on device resolution doesn't make any sense for modern devices with hidpi displays.

icebraining5• 7 years ago

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

tyingq3• 7 years ago

What if I have the browser scale it up via css width and height? Is it still compliant since there's only 128x128 unique squares?

If it's a rectangle, can one side exceed 128 pixels if the product of width and height is less than 128x128?

cr0sh• 7 years ago

I'm guessing they are only thinking of raster images

Someone somewhere will come up with a JPG to SVG or CSS converter for images, if it doesn't already exist.

gumby2• 7 years ago

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

dredmorbius4• 7 years ago

Which is of course ironic given the history:

No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...

gumby2• 7 years ago

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

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

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

dahart6• 7 years ago

I don’t understand all the mock outrage; memes are already illegal in most cases at any size and copyrights are currently being enforced with takedowns in some cases. It seem like the title & text is trying to be intentionally inflammatory. It’s already illegal to use someone else’s image without permission, unless you’re covered by fair use (which memes are not automatically). Memes just happen to not be very enforceable by anyone who’s not a large corporation. The text seems to suggest that Germany is proposing an exemption to copyright infringement when the images are small enough. Isn’t that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now?

t0astbread• 7 years ago

The recent tonal shift regarding online expression and copyright in the EU certainly doesn't suggest that the intention here was to increase internet users' rights.

falcolas• 7 years ago

Isn’t that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now?

Maybe? 128 pixels is a vanishingly small amount as display pixel density continues to rise. That's under an inch on many displays.

Not to mention, while no fair use defense is automatic (fair use is a defense against copyright lawsuits in court), memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories.

dahart6• 7 years ago

I'd guess that small (or just large & blurry) is the idea -- to make the criteria for the exception depend on having the quality be less than the original. Still, small and legal is better than illegal?

memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories.

I feel like the problem with that claim is the parody and/or critique is very commonly not related to the subject of the image in any way. It seems strange to claim I should be able to fairly use a copyrighted picture of a famous person in order to comment on memes, or vegetables, or (super commonly) as a completely random funny backdrop to a saying.

The ideas behind the parody and critique exceptions in fair use is that you can use a picture of Patrick Stewart to make comments about Patrick Stewart's acting or something he said in an interview, not that you can use a copyrighted picture of Patrick Stewart to comment on use of fonts on the internet, just because he happens to have a pose that makes the saying seem funny.

When I Google "memes" right now and look at images, I see an entire page of copyrighted images, and only one of them (out of 26 images on the first page) has text relevant to the image. The other 25 are not making a parody of the person(s) in the image, or critique something even remotely relevant to the image.

dredmorbius4• 7 years ago

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

Mindwipe2• 7 years ago

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

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

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

dahart6• 7 years ago

I googled it before I commented, and I can't find any lawyers who agree with that. They all say it might be possible, but that fair use is definitely not automatic, and that the best course of action is always to either acquire rights explicitly, or only post images that you have explicit rights for.

Mirioron7• 7 years ago

The reason people are outraged is because in practice memes were permitted. These new rules create more enforcement, which means that in practice people will likely have less freedom.

dahart6• 7 years ago

No, memes have not been “permitted”. Something is not legal just because you don’t get caught or sued. Memes that try to use frames from movies have been handed takedown notices. Other memes just haven’t been handed takedowns because the owner isn’t making enough money to make a legal defense worthwhile. It’s not ethical to claim it’s permitted just because someone can’t defend it.

classified• 7 years ago

Just like nobody needs more than 640 kB RAM.

dang• 7 years ago

Proposed bills rarely go anywhere, and so do not count as on-topic for HN unless there is something intellectually interesting about them—which there rarely is, since the reason they get picked up and broadcast is always sensational. This one is described as a "discussion draft", so it isn't even a bill.

Draft of German copyright reform proposes memes should only be up to 128 pixels

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