EU threatening to destroy the internet as we know it.

[Yatogami]

I found a video about a recent push by the EU to force everything uploaded to the internet to be checked by machines to see if it violates any copyrights. (Disregarding fair use all together). This will eliminate some forms of social media, memes, content creation, and even journalism. As well as preventing the use of links, via taxes. Which only tech giants like Google can even pay for. 

 

Source (plus link to Article 13)

 

http://www.alphr.com/politics/1009470/article-13-EU-what-is-it-copyright
 

If you live in the EU, you have to stop this. This is straight out of Sci-fi distopian nightmares. Even if you do not live in the EU, this will impact you. 

[Telecaster68]

Article 13 as it's proposed does look like it could restrict companies making money out of use generated content unduly. But it's nothing to do with forcing content to be vetted 'by a machine' (that'll be the machines that make the internet work, I guess) and definitely not to 'destroy the internet as we know it'. That sounds rather proleptic to me. Or maybe just straight hysterical. 

[Yatogami]

27 minutes ago, Telecaster68 said:

Article 13 as it's proposed does look like it could restrict companies making money out of use generated content unduly. But it's nothing to do with forcing content to be vetted 'by a machine' (that'll be the machines that make the internet work, I guess) and definitely not to 'destroy the internet as we know it'. That sounds rather proleptic to me. Or maybe just straight hysterical. 

It is impossible to enforce without the use of an automated system, that is why. So yes, a "machine" will determine if what you upload is copyrighted.

 

Did you also overlook the part about complete disregard to Fair use? It isn't even mentioned in the Article. It will be impossible to control everything. But this article holds ISP and platforms resposible. So to survive, they will impliment strict upload policies or face incredible fines or destruction.

 

Destruction as we know it means the internet will slow down, and become more like corperate bureaucratic hell. You know, the reason no one watches TV anymore.

[Epitaph]

Just like the whole net nuetrality shebang in the states earlier this year right? Smells more like sensationalism to me honestly. They ain't gonna pull the rug out from under one's feet one day just because a bill passed. If anything, they'll do it slowly over the course of a long time span. It's an inevitability anyway. 

[Telecaster68]

3 hours ago, Malum said:

It is impossible to enforce without the use of an automated system, that is why. So yes, a "machine" will determine if what you upload is copyrighted.

 

Did you also overlook the part about complete disregard to Fair use? It isn't even mentioned in the Article. It will be impossible to control everything. But this article holds ISP and platforms resposible. So to survive, they will impliment strict upload policies or face incredible fines or destruction.

 

Destruction as we know it means the internet will slow down, and become more like corperate bureaucratic hell. You know, the reason no one watches TV anymore.

The proposed directive isn't about stopping anything being published, it's about making sure rights holders get paid, but the wording is clumsy, potentially contradicts three parts of the European human rights law, and could, if the directive passes in this form, and if national governments turn the directive into national law, and if they enforce it, and if their national courts uphold it (none of which are givens) cost businesses more than they make from publishing things like mashups.

 

That's what the issue is - I've read the piece you linked to, the legal academic argument against it, and a piece by a legal thinktank about it. I also lecture in, amongst things, copyright law and European media law.

 

It is not threatening the end times. Calm down. 

[Telecaster68]

1 minute ago, Telecaster68 said:

no one watches TV anymore.

I just noticed this. I assume it's sarcastic.

[Skycaptain]

Alarmist clickbait tripe from the same mindset as flatearthers 

 

What they want to stop is copyright infringement and quite rightly. It's exactly the same as existing publishing laws. If, when producing an article you quote, cite, collate data from, etc other sources, and credit them it is acceptable. If you link a song from a reputable source (or any other copyrighted media) people clicking on the link pay the appropriate royalties to the correct person. Even if you post a linked meme from a reputable resource payment will be made. 

It's if you download without posting a link that you will be possibly breaking the law. 

[timewarp]

 

[Yatogami]

15 hours ago, Skycaptain said:

Alarmist clickbait tripe from the same mindset as flatearthers 

 

What they want to stop is copyright infringement and quite rightly. It's exactly the same as existing publishing laws. If, when producing an article you quote, cite, collate data from, etc other sources, and credit them it is acceptable. If you link a song from a reputable source (or any other copyrighted media) people clicking on the link pay the appropriate royalties to the correct person. Even if you post a linked meme from a reputable resource payment will be made. 

It's if you download without posting a link that you will be possibly breaking the law. 

Do you not realize how much of what you just said exists on the internet illegally, as of right now? Just for fun, would cease to exist. Because posting fair use music, gifs, etc would now be considered illegal. 

[Skycaptain]

@Malum, gifs I understand. Posting a link to a song on YouTube or similar is no problem, as anyone viewing will be incorporated into their royalty payment system.

 

[Telecaster68]

7 hours ago, Malum said:

Do you not realize how much of what you just said exists on the internet illegally, as of right now? Just for fun, would cease to exist. Because posting fair use music, gifs, etc would now be considered illegal. 

Tough. Artists deserve to be paid. 

[iff]

21 minutes ago, Skycaptain said:

@Malum, gifs I understand. Posting a link to a song on YouTube or similar is no problem, as anyone viewing will be incorporated into their royalty payment system.

 

Indeed the copyright holder has considerable power. They can block their videos being embedded but also can place regional restrictions on who can view them. A video could be watchable in newry but blacked out in dundalk because of the copyright holder deciding that it can viewable in UK but not in ireland

 

I'd like to see the EU directive as it stands before making up my mind on the subject.

 

Is there anything about 'fair use' or such in the directive?

I'd rather read the source material on this.

[Telecaster68]

Iff

 

The link Malum posted has some links to actual non hysterical information. 

 

It does seem to be rather simplistic and absolute, with the potential for small sites to get into disproportionate trouble, from what I can see. But it's only a draft, and the general thrust, that creators deserve to be paid and the internet shouldn't be an IP free for all, is fair enough. 

 

 

[Yatogami]

On 6/2/2018 at 4:16 PM, Telecaster68 said:

Tough. Artists deserve to be paid. 

I agree. Except fair use in not violating copyright. 

 

Copyright protects an original creator from others making money on duplicating and reprinting something they created. This doesn't protect people from sharing it for free (live streaming games, movies etc.)

 

If Fair use didn't exist, everytime you invite someone to your house to watch a film you bought. They would be violating a copyright, because they didn't purchase the movie. This is why Fair use exists. 

 

Also many things online are not copyrighted. Including many artists who post things, without copyrighting them. (It requires registration).

[Telecaster68]

And those things won't be affected by this directive. 

[Yatogami]

40 minutes ago, Telecaster68 said:

And those things won't be affected by this directive. 

Hopefully. I don't trust the government to do its job right.

[Larkaloke]

The wording may be clumsy (and will hopefully be refined), but I actually think this is a step in the right direction. It's also completely different than the whole Net Neutrality thing; that is over ISPs being required -- or not -- to treat all users fairly and equally, whereas this is basically about enforcing copyright on the internet. Currently, it's incredibly easy to violate copyright on the internet, and that's a bad thing. I'd much rather see memes, remixes, and so forth go if it's a choice between that and it being as easy to steal stuff as it currently is.

 

2 hours ago, Malum said:

I agree. Except fair use in not violating copyright. 

 

Copyright protects an original creator from others making money on duplicating and reprinting something they created. This doesn't protect people from sharing it for free (live streaming games, movies etc.)

 

If Fair use didn't exist, everytime you invite someone to your house to watch a film you bought. They would be violatimg a copyright, because they didn't purchase the movie. This is why Fair use exists. 

 

Also many things online are not copyrighted. Including many artists who post things, without copyrighting them. (It requires registration).

There are a lot of problems with this, which only goes to show why new laws need to be introduced to deal with copyright on the internet, since people clearly either don't know or don't care enough to just stick to legal usage on their own.

 

Fair use is indeed not violating copyright, but quite often people claim fair use when it really isn't (I'm guessing a lot of those live streams of games/films/etc. are on the border of it or indeed actually technically illegal, as they're using the whole of the work and often profiting from it via ads or subscriptions). Copyright isn't just about reprinting, and the fact that there are some loopholes with regards to sharing things for free (yet while profiting from it) on the internet means that there definitely do need to be new laws passed to deal with that.

 

The last line there is dead wrong in most countries. You make something, it's copyrighted, no registration required. Registration makes it easier to enforce the copyright, especially with regards to monetary compensation if the copyright is violated, but stealing something that has not been registered is still just as illegal. 

[Sally]

6 hours ago, Malum said:

Hopefully. I don't trust the government to do its job right.

Are you going to band together with other people and make certain government does its job right?  If not, you're just uselessly complaining.  

[Yatogami]

.

[StupidDream]

Wouldn't worry about it, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google pretty much own the entire Internet now anyway and Youtube & Facebook have had artificial intelligence for years vetting and removing content, not all of which is "hate speech".

 

Until the Internet is run as a "utliity for the public good" (like the water supply or power grid) it will be open to censorship and controls, after all its basically a 100% private enterprise still (your ISP is a company, all the servers are run by companies, the infrastructure is owned by companies, etc).

[StupidDream]

21 hours ago, Malum said:

Hopefully. I don't trust the government to do its job right.

I don't trust the government to do ANY job right 😂

[Telecaster68]

So no using hospitals, schools, roads, courts, social services, claiming benefits etc for you then. 

 

You know what a country without government looks like? Yemen. 

[paperbackreader]

2 hours ago, StupidDream said:

Until the Internet is run as a "utliity for the public good" (like the water supply or power grid) it will be open to censorship and controls, after all its basically a 100% private enterprise still (your ISP is a company, all the servers are run by companies, the infrastructure is owned by companies, etc).

I'm all for arrangements that advocate 'the public good' but what you seem to be advocating for is a nationalised internet - which sounds slightly more 1984 to me than our current arrangement  I guess my view is that there is always gonna be a pull / push between decentralized autonomy and centralized authorities - it's not gonna be perfect, and there will be miscarriages of justice either way - but checks and balances between 2 powers with competing interests / safeguards is still the way I'd advocate for. 

 

Ref laws: I think I'd also advocate for more controls against copyright infringement that are outright illegal and respect for intellectual property, but definitely legislators should give due respect to fair use considerations. I can understand why people are worried about implementation - it's practically impossible to be dogmatically black and white about fair use terms...

 

I know pennies add up, but jeez... the computing power that it will call for to itemise and payout for every minute piece of multimedia that gets shared - maybe they're developing some advanced computing technology that tokenizes every single damn file in existence  - but from a technological perspective I don't see how that would ever be achievable without consuming huge amounts of (what seems to me anyway) unnecessary computing power. What will probably happen is that the royalties to the copyright creators will get higher and higher because of the costs of calculating it, most of the costs will be incurred go back to the power companies, we will run out of oil faster, people from lower GDP countries will get priced out huge swathes of the internet, and the people that benefit overall are people with shares in power generation companies  

 

(Someone should write a dystopian novel about it. If I had the time, I would, but I don't. If anyone here is reading this and then goes on to write a novel about it and make millions, I would be grateful if you could honour the sentiment of the legislation and pay me 0.01% of your income. )

[Telecaster68]

Someone should write a dystopian novel about it. If I had the time, I would, but I don't. If anyone here is reading this yyand then goes on to write a novel about it and make millions, I would be grateful if you could honour the sentiment of the legislation and pay me 0.01% of your income. )

 

No copyright on ideas....  😉

 

The one good thing about having private companies and individuals running media companies is that it makes it harder for government to control. Better regulation is the answer (via the process of debate and negotiation we're seeing here), not handing the whole lot over to the state and trusting them not to abuse it. 

[Tarfeather]

On 6/3/2018 at 1:47 AM, Remmirath said:

Currently, it's incredibly easy to violate copyright on the internet, and that's a bad thing.

And it will remain easy. We have peer to peer networks, encryption, proxies. Sharing copyrighted data on the internet will always be incredibly easy. Publicly sharing it, not so much.

 

As for the concerns.. Yup, completely founded. Look. They've already cracked down on platforms like youtube and file upload services, and implemented completely unfair systems that make it easy for copyright holders to file claims without any risks to themselves if the claims are false. Online content sharing platforms are already bending over backwards to appease copyright holders. Anyone who claims they're not doing enough has no clue of what's going on.

 

 

On 6/2/2018 at 10:16 PM, Telecaster68 said:

Tough. Artists deserve to be paid. 

That's literally a propaganda talking point, coming ironically not from artists, but from the very people who exploit and rip off artists to increase their bottom lines (record labels and the like). And since you always demand studies: https://gizmodo.com/spotify-to-taylor-swift-were-not-fucking-you-over-rec-1657397605/1683998289

 

Quote

Within the study there's an analysis of where the money from a €9.99 music subscription goes. (In Europe the main streaming players are are Spotify and Deezer.) The study notes that €4.56 of it goes to record labels, €2.08 goes to the platform, €1.67 goes to tax, €1 goes to publishers and songwriters, and €.68 goes to artists.

No doubt you will find a way to discredit that, too, though. If you had any sense of honesty, you wouldn't need studies to understand that this is what's going on.

 

Talk to any self-published artists, and most of them will tell you that they *want* (some of) their work to be freely available and shared as much as possible, because this is free advertisement for them, which actually boosts their bottom line! No sane indie game dev has a problem with Let's Plays of their games on youtube. Most self-published music artists make a few of the songs in their albums available for free, because they know this is the best way to get people to buy the album.  Authors of all kinds have absolutely no problem with parts of their work being quoted or played back in a review or analysis.

 

It's greedy corporations who want to get rid of fair use and make money off any and all usages of their licensed content who are the problem, and there isn't really any doubt that legislation like this one is directly being pushed and bankrolled by these corporations. Your "artists deserve to be paid" point has about as much merit as Trump's "climate change is a Chinese hoax".

[Tarfeather]

On 6/3/2018 at 11:30 PM, paperbackreader said:

I'm all for arrangements that advocate 'the public good' but what you seem to be advocating for is a nationalised internet - which sounds slightly more 1984 to me than our current arrangement 

Actually, the internet *is* treated as a public utility. That's what net neutrality is all about. Meanwhile, google, facebook, youtube, etc. are not treated as public utility, but rather as private entities who can make up their own rules and discriminate as they see fit. That's a real issue. For instance, Google can and does de-rank sites with radical left views. Youtube has an official ToS that basically forbids news coverage of any controversial events. Facebook meanwhile makes it possible for propaganda organizations to get access to everyone's data. It's pretty clear that it'd be in the interest of everyone to also treat these sites as public utilities, which mostly means having net-neutrality style regulations in place.

[paperbackreader]

4 hours ago, Tarfeather said:

Actually, the internet *is* treated as a public utility. That's what net neutrality is all about. 

Err, I was responding specifically to @StupidDream's post there... You argue about treating sites and organisation that run sites as public utilities - how would you distinguish between Facebook / Google vs say, AVEN or your local store website? How is that different from a 'centralised command and control' for the internet..?

 

7 hours ago, Telecaster68 said:

No copyright on ideas....  😉

Too true, but I thought I'd give people a chance to be grateful millionaires and lovely people if they so wish . 

Agree completely about your quip to totalitarian power. Checks and balances and transparency is the way to go even if it takes a bit more time and occasionally descends in to bureaucratic madness...

[Telecaster68]

4 hours ago, Tarfeather said:

That's literally a propaganda talking point, 

It might be, but it's coming from someone (me) who produces content for a living, and wants to be paid for it. This isn't an abstract principle to me. 

[Yatogami]

On 6/3/2018 at 2:36 PM, StupidDream said:

Wouldn't worry about it, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google pretty much own the entire Internet now anyway and Youtube & Facebook have had artificial intelligence for years vetting and removing content, not all of which is "hate speech".

 

Until the Internet is run as a "utliity for the public good" (like the water supply or power grid) it will be open to censorship and controls, after all its basically a 100% private enterprise still (your ISP is a company, all the servers are run by companies, the infrastructure is owned by companies, etc).

These companies have all proven they have extreme biases against anything that isn't far left. I say is a powergrab to silence dissent from Euro-skeptics and people not happy with their terrible governing systems.

[StupidDream]

Just now, Malum said:

These companies have all proven they have extreme biases against anything that isn't far left. I say is a powergrab to silence dissent from Euro-skeptics and dissent.

I agree but the far left is the only strong voice in politics now.  We seem to have forgotten "the middle ground" which is a shame.