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I work at the European Parliament, and in 3 years of debate about the law not a single person or organisation has brought up people putting content from other platforms on FB as something that this supposedly addresses.

In fact, it's all about the music industry wanting higher licensing payments from YouTube: At least as much per play as e.g. Apple Music pays. They call the fact that they're not getting that today the "value gap" – THAT'S the undisputed reason/justification for this law (just google the term).

(Facebook, by the way, also has a content filter: https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/330407020882707)

There's another independent criterion that will cause lots of trouble/legal uncertainty:

1b. Regardless of (1), can you prove you made "best efforts" to acquire licenses for the content that was later found on your platform.

It's not specified who you should be seeking deals with, how you're supposed to know ahead of time what a user will upload, how you're supposed to identify the true rightsholders of an uploaded work, etc.

That criterion must even be fulfilled when you're less than 3 years old, by the way!

I don't think any content-sharing platform should profit from copyright infringement

That is not a requirement to fall under Article 13! Are you maybe mistaking "copyright-protected material" for "copyright-INFRINGING material"? Every creative text and photo is "copyrighted material", so this covers any for-profit UGC platform.

MEP Reda proposed making the above change in the text, that proposal was rejected. So the broad coverage is intentional.

For those who do redeem the coupon, it's often an incentive to spend money they normally wouldn't have (in high-margin stores).

The link tax was not rejected in Germany, in fact it's the law of the land there. When it failed to lead to the expected riches, the lobbyists behind it switched their attention to the EU level.

It could well be argued that all Internet regulation has to do with enabling a united market.

If you're unhappier with the national decisions (e.g. Trump) than regional ones, regionalism starts looking better and better... I'd bet that's almost all the reason behind it, not some kind of deep ideological stance on governance.

In fact, they already did: The ACTA protests.

Every EU law needs the approval of a majority of directly elected MEPs. They are up for reelection in May. Of course one can influence their behavior.

Nationalism is the problem behind that, not the solution for it:

Legislative processes in the EU are woefully under-covered by the press. That's because newspapers have offices full of reporters to work on national political stories, yet send only one person to Brussels to cover all issues there. (That in turn is one factor leading to EU political jobs being way less glamorous and desired, which in turn has an effect on who even gets sent there in the first place, etc.)

It's no wonder that when everyone's horizons end at their national borders the supra-national body will operate under too little scrutiny. We need to start thinking European – the alternative, going back to trying to regulate things like the internet in 28 different ways on a single continent, is just not a reasonable option.

Another provision of the article limits its scope to services that "organise and promote" user-posted/uploaded content "for profit-making purposes".

The 3 criteria you quoted then further narrow which of the services matching the above provision need to deploy upload filters.

Come to think of it, the pastebin-like site is actually already excluded by the "organise and promote" criterium, regardless of whether it's profit-oriented or not.

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/)

You could be taken to court and ordered to pay damages if someone reports you – but not the owner of the garden you're projecting it in. And you definitely don't have copyright cops show up at your door pre-emptively everytime you turn on your projector, without whose approval nothing will even play, do you?

The 30 million figure was a downright lie by UK music publishers – it includes the entire lobbying budget (for the year 2016, bizarrely) of any industry association Google is listed as being a member of, which for some reason even includes the political think tank of the German CDU party, whose politicians are actually BEHIND the law, not opposed to it.

Here's an in-depth factual analysis of copyright lobbying:

The limited information which is available about lobby meetings shows the intense level of lobbying taking place on the Copyright Directive, but it also interestingly exposes that the biggest lobbies were not in fact big tech companies and their associates, as many headlines claimed, but the publishers, creative industries and collecting societies.

https://corporateeurope.org/power-lobbies/2018/12/copyright-...

In one vote in the EP, something similar was proposed as an alternative:

* Make (big) platforms provide APIs with which rightholders can check new posts for their copyrighted content and request either removal or monetisation

* Give uploaders 48 hours to contest removal requests before they are honoured, during which their uploads stay online, but may be removed from search results

* Once an infringement is identified and not contested, all earned revenue goes to the rightholders

That's rather sensible. However, it was voted down in favor of just making platforms legally liable for all uploads. https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/ (The "EPP group" proposals won – that's the Parliament position, not to be confused with the Council's, which are yet to be fully reconciled).

It doesn't, though. They are obligated to immediately remove this as soon as they attain knowledge of the infringement.

You, however, are cheerleading an obligation to somehow prevent anything infringing on anyone's rights from appearing online in the first place – which is just practically impossible, and any forced attempt is bound to massively cut into free speech.

After all, there's no registry of copyrighted content. Everything creative is copyrighted automatically. If I take a photo of a tree and send it to you, according to Article 13 a service like Instagram now has to (a) make best efforts to acquire a license for that photo from me and (b) prevent you from uploading it there – how on earth should they do either?

Making platforms directly liable for all posts/uploads in practice just means they can no longer accept posts/uploads – not that artists will magically get rich.

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.

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.

That's true in the US. EU law actually knows no such thing as vague, court-interpreted fair use. The EU instead has a list of very specific exceptions and limitations to copyright – which member states don't even have to implement, so what you can do varies widely.

True, I guess you could see "the comment thread" as the larger (collaborative) intellectual work within which the movie was quoted for illustrative purposes.

You are absolutely right: The mere fact that these publishers don't block Google using robots.txt and that they in fact spend a lot of effort optimizing their metadata so that link previews show up just the way they want them to proves that it's at least mutually beneficial, and not an abuse of their intellectual property.

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

This would indeed seem to be a copyright infringement in many EU member states. For example, in Germany it wouldn't fall under the quotation exception (no such thing as vague "fair use" here), since you aren't critically engaging with or commenting on the quote, which would be allowed – you just reproduced it.

The movie studio could now hold HN liable.

Well, except that HN is not under EU jurisdiction, so it could probably choose to ignore EU court decisions against it. Bigger platforms of course won't have that luxury, so they'd need to come up with some way of limiting or avoiding that liability... or maybe just blocking EU users.

Another article of the same law (Article 11) would apply copyright also to shortest excerpts of news articles, anything longer than "individual words". (Colloquially known as the "link tax" provision.)

So even reproducing the full title of a news article would likely be an infringement, and then that becomes another thing platforms take liability for/need to filter under Article 13. Whether there's a link or not would be irrelevant.

(It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.)

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

Just to be clear, what you linked to is the European Parliament's proposal for the law. Compromise negotiations are currently ongoing with the Council (representing the member state governments), which in its own proposal does not ask for human review or an independent dispute resolution body. At this point it's unclear what the final law will say. https://juliareda.eu/2018/10/copyright-trilogue-positions/

No matter what the safeguards end up being though, Article 13 is likely to make the problem worse overall because it will force all other platforms that host a lot of user posts/uploads (all content types, including text and photos) to also implement automated copyright systems, which are likely to be even shoddier than YouTube's.

She does refer to this here:

Each individual author must actively put up a fight to restore the findability of their free speech.

That's still an unacceptable system. Apart from shifting the burden of proof, you're not even notified when your pages are de-listed, so how are you supposed to know when to send such a notice?

Also, from your link:

sending a counter-notice makes non-U.S. residents give up a powerful argument they would otherwise have -- namely, that a U.S. court does not have the authority to render a judgment against them. For these reasons, non-U.S. residents may not want to send a counter-notice

Not a whistleblower, a member of the European Parliament with FOIA requests: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...

Council (assembling the member state governments) is opaque, but the directly elected European Parliament is quite transparent – more so than most national ones. Both have to agree to any Commission proposal, so theoretically being able to follow and influence one gives us, the public, veto power no matter the failings of the other.

You're absolutely right about the media.

There is no such thing as "fair use" (or the "three-step-test" which you refer to) in EU copyright law. There is a defined list of exceptions (almost all of which are optional for member states to implement), and "link snippets" are not one of them. Every act of copying/making available not covered under those is forbidden.

Plus, as another commenter said, this is not a copyright, but a related right – certain aspects of copyright like the requirement for the work to reflect some amount of original human creativity to enjoy protection do not apply.

You claim most links do not include snippets, but given the popularity of Facebook, Twitter & Co for sharing links, I'm not sure that's still true. Even then: Even the title of a page alone is a snippet (not specifically excluded from this planned regulation), and I bet the majority of hyperlinks on the web do include the title of the linked-to page.

As for the argument that only FB or Google would argue that small publishers will be disadvantaged by this, I refer to this lobbying organisation by independent publishers: http://mediapublishers.eu

Big business massively lobbied against the GDPR. One big reason it ended up so strict is because the final negotiations happened to coincide with the Snowden revelations, giving cover for politicians to resist the lobbying.