So we now got our own SOPA to deal with. Important note: the bill now goes to trilogue before it&#x27;s ready to face a plenary vote. Though I&#x27;m not holding my breath.

&gt; Any amendments approved on Wednesday will be subject to further negotiations between politicians and member states in a closed-door process known as “trilogues.” Whatever emerges from those debates will be subject to a final vote by the EU Parliament in January. After that, it will still be up to individual member states to interpret the directive and turn it into law.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;9&#x2F;11&#x2F;17845394&#x2F;eu-copyright-directive-reform-date-vote-article-11-13" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;9&#x2F;11&#x2F;17845394&#x2F;eu-copyright-dir...</a>

The youtuber who&#x27;s claim to fame is making a video where he shouts &#x27;Gas the Jews&#x27; repeatedly? I wonder why he wasn&#x27;t listened to.

A couple of YouTubers from the UK went to EU Parliament to make the case against Article 13. Unfortunately, their pleas mostly fell on deaf ears. They discuss the (undemocratic) process here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UHwaA3fMPgc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UHwaA3fMPgc</a>

One could say the same thing about americans and it would probably just as true&#x2F;false.Me personally I&#x27;m not into that kind of generalisation.

Yes, that is unfortunately the case. Exactly this is creating a feeling amongst many of us that something is fundamentally wrong with the EU as governing and legislative body. Of course, you could reverse that and say: People have to inform themselves properly. But that&#x27;s just the situation were in right now.

I believe most Europeans don&#x27;t know much or anything about the EU, because our states retain a lot of power, so we already have enough to deal with.

It is taught in schools all over the EU, but the EU is a &quot;new&quot; thing.

I&#x27;m getting the impression that many Europeans don&#x27;t seem to have a grasp on how their laws are passed. Is my impression correct? I&#x27;m baffled by the commission, Parliament, individual states, and how they interact to make laws. Is this topic teachable to 3rd graders in Europe?

Here are more details on the process following this vote from the EDRi: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;press-release-eu-parliament-flip-flops-backwards-on-copyright&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;press-release-eu-parliament-flip-flops-back...</a>

I&#x27;m European but as many don&#x27;t have a clear idea of how this will work.At my understanding, there will be discussions about the amendments and another vote, like the one we had two months ago. Is it right? There is still time to act, right?Also, is there a place to see who voted what? Elections are close and those choices could impact the vote of many. I knew Votewatch but I don&#x27;t know if it still doing it, saw some excel file going around last time and wondering if they are being updated, to see who changed ideas.

I think it&#x27;s going to work like jaywalking - it&#x27;s illegal, but I&#x27;ve done it, and it&#x27;s fine as long as  it doesn&#x27;t cause a bigger issue, and as long as enforcer isn&#x27;t overzealous. It&#x27;s true though, that it&#x27;s a weapon waiting to be used for political reasons, and the perspective of that happening is no good for anybody.

I think they know how the internet works, but they want to change it

Yes, the Googles and Facebooks of the future will be affected the most.This is consolidation of power, finally locking down the Free Internet just as we&#x27;ve done with every other industry. Stripping the power to change from the small.And what are we doing about it?

YouTube, the company, will be fine. They&#x27;ll just ban any content that triggers their enforcement systems. I&#x27;m worried about YouTube, the platform, and the bastion of free exchange of information and ideas that is has been until now. A response-type video or movie review will almost certainly be false-flagged by a system like this.Of course, I agree with you that independent platforms are going to have a rough time. They either have to manually review all content themselves, not allow any user-uploaded content, or pay a company to do this for them.

What about distributed systems without central control? Will the new laws force them to introduce filtering into the software (which could e.g. be open source and forkable by anyone)? Or does this only apply to systems with a centralized repository?I&#x27;m curious how this is supposed to work.

This is wrong. Small and micro platforms are excluded from directive’s scope.Source from legislation: In particular, small and micro enterprises as defined in Title I of the Annex to 
Commission Recommendation 2003&#x2F;361&#x2F;EC, should be expected to be subject to less 
burdensome obligations than larger service providers. Therefore, 
taking into account the state 
of the art and the availability of technologies and their costs, in specific cases it may not be 
proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that 
therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove 
specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders.

The likes of YouTube will be affected the least. They already have aggressive copyright enforcement measures in place, and they can afford to do that.Smaller, more independent platforms will not be able to afford to implement compliance with these new regulations, and will potentially be driven out of business.

Interestingly, Farage wasn’t actually a part of that, BoJo wouldn’t let him join the official Leave campaign. So you can blame UKIP for lots of things, but not the bus.

Yeah, it seems to me UKIP has good track record of things &quot;getting rammed through without a public discussion&quot; by now, like the 350 million for the NHS with Brexit.

That&#x27;s an interesting point. It&#x27;s true that the issue wouldn&#x27;t be quite as terrible if IP laws were more reasonable to begin with. We shouldn&#x27;t have to wait for literal centuries before a work becomes public domain for instance.

Fair use (in the US) is actually designed to provide for the ability to comment on, or criticize another work. You can’t do that effectively without showing the subject matter you are discussing.There are absolutely well defined “fair use” exceptions which a stringent filter will block.&gt; Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is &quot;I don&#x27;t know, it depends.This is the only answer a lawyer will basically ever give you.

I don&#x27;t believe this is true. Every legitimate YouTube fair use case that I&#x27;ve seen go to court has gone in favor of the fair user.The biggest name one so far is the H3H3 trial.[1] One that looks to be settled soon is Akilah Hughes suing Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), where all that Benjamin does is edit together two of Hughes videos with the only original addition being a new title. This is almost certainly going to go in favor of Sargon, yet YouTube&#x27;s algorithms turned up to the nth degree would almost certainly have blocked it.[2]If you go outside of YouTube, fair use law in the United States is very broad. Just look at what Richard Prince does with others&#x27; art. [3]edit: added links1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;newsbeat&#x2F;article&#x2F;41037631&#x2F;youtube-stars-h3h3-win-landmark-court-case-against-matt-hoss" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;newsbeat&#x2F;article&#x2F;41037631&#x2F;youtube-stars...</a>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6LMgGBDZbJY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6LMgGBDZbJY</a>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jul&#x2F;18&#x2F;instagram-artist-richard-prince-selfies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jul&#x2F;18&#x2F;instagram...</a>

Fair use has a much narrower definition in the EU, in addition to varying from country to country.

If rights-holders and&#x2F;or YouTube had to pay a monetary penalty every time they screwed up (by taking down content that was fair use), perhaps it might level the playing field?

Are you basing this on law in the EU? Because as far as I know, &quot;fair use&quot; is purely a US thing that doesn&#x27;t even exist in the EU -- although specific countries may have laws that do somewhat similar things.

Why force the platform to enforce? Shouldn’t the copyright owner be required to protect their own rights rather than having others do it for them?

&gt; The real problem lies in the laws it relies on, namely the extremely stringent copyright laws and the weird fair use.Real problem is the negative incentive to be correct.The rule penalise you harshly if you serve copyrighted content, but there is nothing if you decide to not serve non-copyrighted content and there is so much content on the internet, that &quot;market pressure&quot; simply isn&#x27;t going to work. If you are a small publisher of free content, there is a huge risk for content platform to serve your content and no reward if they do.And that&#x27;s the best case scenario, where all actors have good intentions. But in the real world we know that large copyright holder are very often bulk claiming bulk content. There is no penalty, so that would be crazy for them no to do it.The laws is also talking about terrorist content and the need to remove it within 1 hour or risk up to 4% turnover fine ! There is not going to be any manual check done within 1 hour, and anyway the risk is so great you may as well have a blanket no-question ask removal policy.I fail to see the &quot;good intentions in mind&quot; you mention. MEP are some of the most successful politicians, they would be Olympic level is it was a sport. Their field of expertise is the people and public relation. I can believe they are naive with technology (like encryption or monitoring actual capabilities) but I can&#x27;t accept they are candid about businesses or individual motivations. Any negative consequence of this law is there on purpose.

&gt;&gt; 2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.Have you read the YouTube terms for original content uploaded by individuals? I&#x27;m not so sure doing remixes isn&#x27;t allowed. If you don&#x27;t want people doing that to your stuff, keep it off YouTube. I could be wrong, it&#x27;s been many years since I read their ToS.

&quot;but I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind&quot;The road to hell is paved with good intentions...

&gt; I believe the law is made with good intentions in mindI disagree, no other utility is blamed for the actions of its users, if I use an electric drill to hurt some one I am at fault not my electricity provider, but if I do something illegal on the internet like piracy its some how my internet providers fault?I also don&#x27;t like making excuses for policy makers who &quot;don&#x27;t understand the internet&quot;, its not the 90s, ignorance is no longer an excuse, these people know what the internet is, and they know exactly what they are doing.

&gt;I may be naive in saying this, but I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind.I disagree. This law was made with the intention of being selectively enforced. This is never a good intention.

&gt; I believe the law is made with good intentions in mindthe first time around? _maybe_after the enormous backslash and numerous expert opinion pieces decrying the exact problems of the proposal? _hardly_

&gt; I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind.&quot;He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best. The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It. Eric was standing on: For the Sake of the Children. “Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “Why do it like this?” “I think they’re meant to be good intentions,” said Rincewind. This was a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists. And, while they are of course irredeemably evil, they are not always bad. And so Rincewind stepped off We Are Equal Opportunity Employers and through a wall, which healed up behind him, and into the world.&quot;

I may be naive in saying this, but I believe the law is made with good intentions in mind. The real problem lies in the laws it relies on, namely the extremely stringent copyright laws and the weird fair use.&gt; Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.As weird as it sounds, you are wrong. In a short summary:1. Fair use is a very small exception to some very broad rights.2. Fair use almost definitely does not apply to most youtube content : if you use content other people made (video games or music immediately come to mind) you are infringing copyright holder rights.3. If you rely on fair use rights, then you might find yourself in trouble.What&#x27;s even worse is that right holders can pick and choose who to bust, and they don&#x27;t need to be consistent about it. So even if they rarely go after small groups, they can still shut down bigger ones.I have a childhood friend who is now a copyright lawyer and I sometimes jokingly ask him whether something is copyright infringing. Other than yes, the most frequent answer I get is &quot;I don&#x27;t know, it depends. Both sides have arguments so ultimately it&#x27;s down to the judge.&quot; It&#x27;s just bad law. The only difference between then and now is that now we have the technology to actually enforce it.

This is just plain stupidity.Sometimes I feel like the whole world is ruined by ignorant people in power. As for the Internet, it is exclusively being ruined by ignorant actors in positions of state power. All the while, armies of good people make the Internet better every day.

&gt; Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video.That actually isn&#x27;t legal in many countries and is e.g. why regional wikipedia sites don&#x27;t show movie posters.

If those were the only interested parties against it in the UK then that doesn&#x27;t bode well for us getting rid of it in a few years, even if we don&#x27;t negotiate away our right to. Shame.

He was the first one to report the decision on Twitter, and was literally livestreaming in that link I provided before the news was reported anywhere. I&#x27;m sorry that he&#x27;s not on your approved list of people to report on this event.

Nazi Dog Guy is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the EU&#x2F;Britain. He got in trouble for offending people. That is ridiculous that there are laws against offending people.

&gt; Markus Meechum (aka Count Dankula)Do we really not have anyone better as a source than the Nazi dog guy? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scotland-judiciary.org.uk&#x2F;8&#x2F;1962&#x2F;PF-v-Mark-Meechan" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scotland-judiciary.org.uk&#x2F;8&#x2F;1962&#x2F;PF-v-Mark-Meecha...</a>(Perhaps someone from Open Rights Group or EDRI?)

You&#x27;re making the paper producer liable for what someone writes on it.

Read the next sentence. &quot;even legal uses of copyrighted content&quot;In practice, this constitutes the abolition of the &quot;fair use&quot; doctrine on the internet.

This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas. YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability. They might be able to automate, but it depends on the jurisdiction. For example, the US has fair use laws. A person may copy a segment of a copyrighted work to comment on it. There are territories in the EU where they can&#x27;t. How does YouTube filter this?If the new product was produced in the US and references material from the EU, should YouTube allow the content to go public? According this and GDPR, the EU has the ability to cross territorial boundaries. So YouTube now has to ban such a work in the US even though our legal system allows it.Essentially, YouTube will have to create a new process where by all content must go past the censors, who are probably people and not machines. Otherwise YouTube will quickly die due to death by a thousand fines. So much for a free and open exchange of ideas.

Beyond the chilling effect others have mentioned, it also adds a huge barrier to entry for any Youtube competitor

&gt;&gt; If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.What exactly is wrong with that? Seriously.

The &#x27;against&#x27; camp is badly misunderstood. We&#x27;re taken for pirates. And not the good kind! Example of a tweet chat with Howard Goodall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ariaminaei&#x2F;status&#x2F;1039856894893010945" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ariaminaei&#x2F;status&#x2F;1039856894893010945</a>

Probably nothing.This is just a guess but I don&#x27;t think ISPs are expected to do any form of DPI. The most likely question they will have to answer is &quot;who is this IP address assigned to?&quot; and possibly &quot;who communicated with that IP?&quot;. Neither require any form of packet inspection that goes beyond what is needed to perform routing.

So if ISP&#x27;s are required to install monitoring software, what does that mean for HTTPS, or other end-to-end encryption schemes, that prevent the ISP from doing packet inspection?

An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government.The vote that occurred today was by the EU parliament, which is entirely elected. The directive was prepared inside the JURI committee, which also exists entirely out of elected representatives.Also, you can&#x27;t have a single digital market without a single copyright regime. The economic union implies the single market which implies a single copyright directive. I agree that the contents of that directive is lamentable, but the need for one is clear, even for those opposing this particular directive, provided you buy into the notion that single markets should exist at all.

I agree with your sentiments, but couldn’t one argue that this is in fact an issue regarding goods&#x2F;services&#x2F;trade&#x2F;economy? It’s not clear to me what would set this apart, just looking for more clarification.

&gt; Keep giving more control to the government and they&#x27;ll keep ratcheting down the screws on you.It&#x27;s amazing that people never see this issue. Everyone needs to stop making bigger and bigger governments.

Most people seem to think we are just one more law away from creating Utopia.

&gt; This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works.Same sad song as it ever was. Keep giving more control to the government and they&#x27;ll keep ratcheting down the screws on you.An economic union should be about tariffs and the free movement of goods, not an entirely unelected bureaucratic federal government. Centralizing authority only benefits the well connected political class.

UKIP and the Green Party joined forces to prevent Article 13 from getting rammed through without a public discussion. It was a good first step, but here we are, 2 months hence, and it was passed with virtually no amendments to the original text.This is an abhorrent decision by people who have no idea how the internet works. Markus Meechum (aka Count Dankula) was at the hearings, and reported that MEPs voting on the issue could not, or refused to, explain why they supported the bill. You can see him discussing the result in the immediate aftermath here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ISyiTcA6RIw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ISyiTcA6RIw</a>If you want a quick example of why this is bad take a look at fair use and YouTube. Article 13 would make YouTube liable for copyrighted content on its service.Much of YouTube content is (perfectly legal) remixes, responses, or criticisms of other YouTube content that embeds part of the referenced video in their own video. There is more content uploaded to YouTube than can possibly all be manually reviewed. Aggressive automated content filtering to comply with Article 13 would mean that these videos would straight get filtered out.

Not true. Many of the directives differ in countries (even major ones - for example countries in EU that don&#x27;t use Euro). EU wants people to believe it is USA but it is not. The directives are not enforceable directly but if you want to be good EU country (which has its benefits) then you need to behave :)

They can interpret anything sufficiently vague as they see fit. For example Article 10 of Directive 2004&#x2F;38&#x2F;EC states that a government shall only require &quot;a document attesting to the existence of a family relationship&quot;, which most people would consider to be a marriage certificate, it also states the residence permit will be granted within 6 months of presentation of the documens. Article 25 limits the cost of the issuance of the residence permit.Unlike many EU countries, the Netherlands requires that the marriage certificate is &quot;legalised&quot; and charges for the process. They will not even accept the documentation before you go through this extra legal procedure thereby increasing the total time to over 6 months. Under some interpretation of article 10 and 25, this would be illegal, they have a different interpretation.You can find various compliance studies for directive 2004&#x2F;38&#x2F;EC and other directives as well. It is just a fact in Europe that the transposition into local law leads to inconsistent application of the law. Applying for the same visa (from the European perspective) in the Netherlands and in Germany can be two wildly different experiences.

Individual countries cannot &quot;interpret the directive as they see fit&quot;. Transposition has to match the directive, otherwise the whole excercise would be pointless.

&gt;The legislation approved today still faces a final vote in the European Parliament in January (where it’s possible, though very unlikely, it will be rejected). After that, individual EU member states will still get to choose how to put the directive in law. In other words, each country will be able to interpret the directive as they see fit.It&#x27;s not totally over yet, both the final vote and the implementation in member countries can disarm the worst parts of the directive.

How is this a local issue though? It affects 500m people directly so should be debated at that level.

You see where this at national level, I have some access and ability to plead against it. But instead we&#x27;ve three MEPs serving a constituency of near 800,000 and they&#x27;re never around.I hate the removal of substantive access to local politicians that the EU has.

Ask Brits who their MEPs are, see if they know (or have even heard of MEPs... modulo Farage for his infamy)

Two points:1) You could argue whether the EU Parliament has democracy deficits or not. I assume it has (based on the legislation process itself with involvement of the Committee, but also based upon unequally weighted votes of citizens from different countries).2) However, the most important point is that this law is considered as a &quot;techie niche&quot; by the vast majority of citizens. Also, EU topics as such suffer from a very narrow attention in the general public. Having said this, it is far easier for lobbyists to place such an initiative &quot;under the radar&quot; than it would be to lobby in 28 countries. In techie speak, a centralized entity like the EU is more or less a single point of failure for the unavoidable &quot;bugs&quot; of a democracy.

Well, first of all I have yet to hear about this vote from any of my local news sources. If I didn&#x27;t browse hackernews I likely wouldn&#x27;t know about it.Secondly I don&#x27;t recall voting for any MEPs, as far as I can tell it&#x27;s similarly not reported on. Besides given the lack of news about what any of the parties are up to it&#x27;s hard to say anything about who you should even vote for.Thirdly just because somewhere at the end a vaguely democratically elected group of people get to make a decision about it that doesn&#x27;t somehow absolve the rest of the process from being undemocratic and seemingly driven by corporate interests. The biggest problem being that the decisions on what should be voted on and how seem to be mostly taken by an unelected group of people, who will evidently (given the way Selmayr was promoted) vote for anything if it gets them better pay and pensions.

the European Parliament (here the body making a decision) is the EU institution that supposedly does not have the &quot;democratic deficit&quot;, they are elected by the citizens. So in what way is this different from what we expect in democracies?

Of course, individual countries can still pass draconian legislationBut I think this can have a significant impact on the perception of the EU on the general public

Why would Switzerland and Norway introduce this law?

&gt;After this goes through I will become a single-issue voter, to leave the EU.This law will be introduced in Switzerland, Norway and UK. Most probably UK will have to keep it after Brexit.

&gt; This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.It&#x27;s still the politicians passing the law. The fact that back-handers might be involved only makes them potentially even more corrupt.

It&#x27;s worse: this is driven by Doepfner and co. They don&#x27;t even hide.

Well, yes. Politicians created the system where it was possible for this to go through without any support from citizens, because they have simply no idea what is going on inside the EU.TL;DR, politicians created the EU, it currently sucks even if they pass some very good laws sometimes. Now it&#x27;s time for some very bad laws, the issue is that these laws is so bad the good laws seems very small in comparison.

Do you really believe this is something politicians came up with in the first place?This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.Also, if they think this will fix the revenue problems of the majority of newspaper publishers they are certainly wrong, newspaper are not dying because people read news on Google.

&gt;Rightholders are liable for unjustified takedownsThat&#x27;s potentially interesting, what does it mean in practice though? How would they be liable? If there was a monetary penalty attached, the record companies would be bankrupt in a day based on the false positives of the youtube content ID algorithm.

If you follow Julia Reda&#x27;s blog (she&#x27;s MEP), you can get tons of insight into this issue in the EU parliament:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;juliareda.eu&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;copyright-showdown&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;juliareda.eu&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;copyright-showdown&#x2F;</a>

National legislatures are better to the extent that the populace exerts direct electoral control over their representatives.If the election of Trump or Ocasio-Cortez taught us anything, it should be that appealing to voters can get you into office, even with powerful entrenched interests running against you.Elected politicians are 100% beholden to their voters, now more than ever.

This is somewhat true, but are national legislatures really any better? There&#x27;s nothing quite like Brexit to convince me that my local legislature is completely refusing to listen to me (or anyone with any sense) at all on even the most basic issues.

If you think being outside the EU will stop politicians voting for these types of laws, here&#x27;s a nice UK example for you that &quot;make administrators and moderators of certain online forums responsible for content published on those forums&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;services.parliament.uk&#x2F;bills&#x2F;2017-19&#x2F;onlineforums.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;services.parliament.uk&#x2F;bills&#x2F;2017-19&#x2F;onlineforums.ht...</a>

&gt; After this goes through I will become a single-issue voter, to leave the EU.Same. This institution has given me enough. Not only in tech.

This is so sad but kind of expected. EU is run by politicians and the public has very little to no insight.After this goes through I will become a single-issue voter, to leave the EU.

Most immediate way around this: block European traffic and&#x2F;or don&#x27;t do business in Europe.

The users certainly don&#x27;t, but I think that Hiroshimoot will be rather miffed if he starts getting shit from the EU for not complying with these insane rules.

&gt; implying chans give a damn about silly yuropoor laws either way

Just imagine how easy it&#x27;s going to be to screw over other websites, just by making an account, uploading material that could in some way be construed as violating copyright but passes the filter because it cannot be perfect, and then reporting the site to one of the bodies responsible for upholding this directive.Hell, just by doing that you could probably end any potential upholding of this system really fast.

&gt; I cannot imagine that, for example, the Chans will take this kindly.That will be funny

So how long will it take people to find a way around this? I mean, I cannot imagine that, for example, the Chans will take this kindly.

It&#x27;s already happening. chicagotribune.com leads to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tronc.com&#x2F;gdpr&#x2F;chicagotribune.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tronc.com&#x2F;gdpr&#x2F;chicagotribune.com&#x2F;</a> for example. Not sure what to think about that.

I wish the EU would, so that it stops damaging things for the rest of the planet. Eventually the costs of complying with the EU&#x27;s decrees will get high enough where it will make more sense for companies to block European traffic than comply.

There are some projects going on to do just that. Another (now dead) comment mentioned Zeronet, which is a good start. There&#x27;s also IPFS, and some other lesser known ones. I think there were some based on Ethereum and other crypto as well.The problem with all of these projects is content. Because there is low usage and a technical barrier to entry, nobody is bothering to put up interesting content that would attract users. (Except for some, ahem, &quot;fringe&quot; interests.) It&#x27;s a chicken-and-egg problem. I keep hoping that one of these regulations will rekindle interest in distributed hosting, but it hasn&#x27;t happened yet.If some advocates would be willing to convince (and possibly help) some major OSS-related resources to establish a beachhead, it might help draw in some of that crowd at least. Adoption there would probably improve the systems, gradually bringing in people from the outside like with the original Internet.

Anyone in the EU who wants to create a new Internet?

If you voted for Britain to leave the EU because of the EU&#x27;s &quot;capability to be authoritarian&quot;, then perhaps you should have already voted (with your feet) to leave Britain because of its much worse capability to be authoritarian.For example, it was Britain that introduced the Snoopers&#x27; Charter:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016</a>without any encouragement from the EU, and indeed that Act has since been found incompatible with European law.Out of interest, can you name another example where the EU was authoritarian (acting in a way that the British government wouldn&#x27;t have)?

the EU&#x27;s capability to be authoritarian (and from what I gather, propensity to use this authority) was one of the reasons I voted to leave. The central dictation of &quot;how it shall be&quot;, reality be damned, reminds me of the Soviet Union. Obviously not to the same extent and severity, but the EU is making the same mistakes in thinking that broad-brush central planning of a huge geographic region isn&#x27;t a fundamentally flawed concept.

Can&#x27;t say I didn&#x27;t expect this, or the politicians&#x27; &quot;I can&#x27;t and don&#x27;t have to tell you why I voted like that&quot; attitude. (see ericdykstra&#x27;s comment).Maybe this is the one single solitary positive to Brexit...

Does it really matter? The EU is a supra-national, oligarchic institution that merely has the appearance of democratic mechanisms.

It&#x27;s a bit ironic, since the very first thing I see when I visit the link is a giant banner to consent to being tracked, or visit each and every third-party advertiser&#x27;s opt-out site from the giant list of advertisers present on Vox&#x27;s platform. Said list carries the explicit note &quot;We provide the table below as a courtesy, but we are not obligated to maintain or update it. We are not responsible for third-party sites and their privacy practices as it relates to opt-outs from tracking activities.&quot;

Bureaucracy, compliance cost, uncertainty of enforcement... The category doesn&#x27;t need to be the same, just the pile upon pile of anti-(small)business regulation.

&gt; I have no idea how you think those two are even remotely related or in the same category.They’re both controversial EU-wide regulations, for one.

I have no idea how you think those two are even remotely related or in the same category.Oh, and by the way, as long as you show something to EU visitors (even an error page telling them to GTFO), you need a privacy policy.

For some companies, making the IT-related changes to accommodate for GDPR was simply too expensive.

maybe - but the philosophy behind it is similar. The EU lawmakers just cannot stand to the existence of unregulated area. Everything gotta be under their control. Unfortunately, once you support pro-strict regulations, then there is no going back. One day, I believe, the internet as we know today won&#x27;t exist in the EU.

GDPR is TOTALLY different. If you can&#x27;t run a business under GDPR legislation then what you&#x27;re doing is almost certainly unethical or at worst mismanaged and irresponsible with customer data.On the other hand this legislation will completely change the internet as we know it.

If GDPR didn&#x27;t make you block the EU, this will.

This already is in progress on Youtube (an Alphabet company). There is significant push to onboard the well known cable news brands on Youtube, on preferential conditions as compared to the regular, individual youtubers.

Google probably has the cash lying around to make its own news empire if needed.More likely? They drop anyone who doesn&#x27;t give them a free or very generous rate.

It is an intended block on convincing people through facts. In all reality, the EU is ruled by old bureaucrats and they see internet like a commodity that needs to be controlled and regulated. Make a joke on the internet? Think twice your IP will be your liability.

How would this work in practice? I could easily set up a news company. Would they have to link to my articles as much as other news articles?

Germany was a pioneer with its &quot;Leistungsschutzrecht&quot; and German publishers indeed wanted to force Google to show their news snippets (and therefore pay for them).
Their reasoning was that Google as a monopoly position and therefore they have to show news from all publishers equally.

Of all those items I&#x27;m happy Art 11 is the one most likely to blow up on the face of those pushing for it

&gt; The fact that they show people&#x27;s content without giving them page viewsAre you talking about AMP?

&gt; The problem is that Google is without question a monopolyThis is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....&gt; The fact that they show people&#x27;s content without giving them page views..This is just false. Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com). Unless you&#x27;re talking about AMP, but that&#x27;s a decision made by the publisher too.

the real problem is that newspapers have no idea how to monetise themselves in the age of the internet, with its near-free content duplication.

&gt; The problem is that Google is without question a monopolyIs it? I mean, sure, far more people use Google than, say, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But there&#x27;s nothing actually stopping them from using those alternatives, other than the fact that they&#x27;re not as good.

&gt;The fact that they show people&#x27;s content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenueThink about how grossly afflicted with clickbait the news ecosystem is today, and then imagine how much worse it could get if Google were legally prevented from even attaching a blurb to the links that it shows users.

&gt; I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shownI agree that regulation might be useful here, and impartial search results are a good goal. But linking fees go against that. If newspaper A wants a fee from google for showing its links but newspaper B doesn&#x27;t, it would be unfair to the entire market to force google to include both A and B equally. If A and B agree to charge google the same fee, that sounds a lot like a cartel doing price fixing, which is already illegal. The government could set a fixed price google has to pay, but at that point we have given up on finding a free market solution, so that&#x27;s a last resort that isn&#x27;t nessesary yet.It&#x27;s fine that people can demand money for links, but I don&#x27;t see any scenario where this would happen in reality.

How do you judge impartial objectively? You can&#x27;t even handle fake news without it being a cudgel for censors denying reality. Pure stats won&#x27;t work and as seen with the moderation problem with Facebook not advocating their partisan view sets off their persecution complex.Also by previewing they prevent load as well and boost relevance. That favors real data instead of SEO page caching garbage that tries to get matched to every common keyword. You do not have a right to a business model, much less it being unchanged by time.

The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly, and so I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown. The fact that they show people&#x27;s content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue. I think there is also a valid argument for this as well.But I do think that the EU copyright law is significantly flawed because it&#x27;s purpose is to further extend the already ridiculously over-extended draconian copyright laws that exist in the EU. I don&#x27;t think the issues they (ostensibly) set out to solve are something that should be ignored though -- Google acting as a biased monopoly which implements features that impact people&#x27;s ability to make money is a real problem that needs to be solved somehow.

I think the newspapers forgot that Google doesn’t need them.

I’m under the assumption you have to setup your site and apply for Google News before they start indexing your articles. Of the
Big publications opt out it just leaves space for smaller outlets to grow.

About 10 years ago, newspapers got together to try and get Google to give them some money, for the content Google was indexing to populate their news search results.Google&#x27;s response was to give them better ways of de-indexing content. IE, a way to opt out. Take it or leave it. Naturally, few newspaper took leave it, preferring to get readers &amp; no revenue than no readers and no revenue.Since then, efforts have focused on turning that around. Give Google a take it or leave it option. Either shut down Google news or pay newspapers somehow. So far, Google have walked a couple of times, when such laws were passed locally.So yes, Google could end Google news search.

Google’s end goal is that the only way to monetise content is by one of their ads. That’s not a world good for either democracy or journalism or any artistic work.

Google should resolve this by conspicuously refusing to link to newspapers. There should be a banner saying &quot;results from certain news sites are not available in your country&quot;, like the existing chillingeffects one.(This dealt with an earlier local version of this in some European countries)

Yes, Spain has been shut out of Google News since December, 2014. It&#x27;s a good example of regulation that can actually go so far that even the biggest companies will stop doing business in your country.

Google News for Spain certainly closed in response to that law. I guess that Google News for other countries then also doesn’t link to spanish newspapers, since those could still somehow sue google as a company that operates in Spain.

Didn&#x27;t Spain news media ram through some kind of link-tax laws to try and extricate money out of Google, and that&#x27;s why we don&#x27;t hear any news out of Spain any more?

I was wondering the same thing then read in the article that links with &#x27;single word&#x27; descriptions are ok.  So my guess is that it&#x27;s aimed a &quot;linkers&quot; who quote a significant fraction of an article (I.e. eliminating the reason to click on the link)

Is the license fee really for a simple link? I&#x27;d think the other publishers would love for sites like Google to be linking content and driving traffic to their platforms.If it&#x27;s about scraping content and presenting it in a separate feed or otherwise outside of the source platform, I can see why they would not want that.

&quot;Article 11 is intended to give publishers and newspapers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories…”Is there anything stopping a search engine like Google choosing not to link to a newspaper? Surely they can’t be required to link to a newspaper AND then pay that newspaper to do so?The trade-off if Google chose not to link to the newspaper would be a (slightly) less useful search engine, but the cost to the newspapers would surely be higher in the long term…or am I missing something?

This will be hilarious: Russians buying EU VPN while EU citizens buying Russian (well, not necessarily ofc). Both to bypass each states stupidity...

Yep, Google is causing harm by filtering what people see, and dammit, the EU commission wanted to do that harm themselves.Sarcastic joke perhaps, but very true.

Google being a monopoly that applies biases to the results it shows (in a way that has no public accountability) is a significant problem -- as well as the fact they implement features which effectively take away revenue from websites by showing their content without giving them page views. That is (ostensibly) the justification for these kinds of laws. I think that they are flawed because they focus on further copyright extensions that I find draconian, but the problem itself I think is pretty obviously a real problem.

I think the upload filters are meant to serve a peeking hole for EU governments to listen to what people share on the internet, as this bypasses the encryption. This will enable governments to stop content harmful to the regime from being shared and also track individuals who are working against the government. This all happened before in all socialist regimes. I remember it well, when I was phoning someone there were censors actively listening to the conversations. This is being transplanted on the internet. It is ironic how people fought this through the 80s only to have it reinstated.

Newspapers are dying and try to find a way to make money from their content. They find that the big user distributor Google doesn&#x27;t give them their fair share and therefore try to make him pay. They get supported by other content producers and now we all are facing another absurd law.I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.

The one case where I can see it being useful is when 1 news site has some exclusive content that they post, and then every other news site copies the story by linking to the original and paraphrasing the whole thing.  I see this happen a lot and I can totally see how it disincentives creating original content when every other news story just copies the story and users only read the first article they see about it.

I don&#x27;t understand why any of this was necessary in the first place, the only reason I can think of is this being on the wishlist of a powerful lobbying bloc.There is something suspect about the EU&#x27;s cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.

I overheard some discussion of the &quot;upload filter&quot; on the radio. It was very simplified, all about big rights-holders that have to ensure they get paid, and nothing about the power of consumers or even journalists or those acting like that (review&#x2F;commentary).

I could be wrong but wouldn&#x27;t the global versions still be accessible and capable of selling ads?

And drop out of the EU market? That sounds insane.

Wouldn&#x27;t they still get cash from advertisers? The sites are still accessible from the EU, it just means local businesses who want to advertise need to pay the US division?

A lot of money. More than they&#x27;d lose by complying, probably.

Google benefits from this and almost certainly secretly lobbied for it.This is great for the FAANG providers who already have automated content control tools and massive help centres to act on anything 24&#x2F;7. It is a death-knell to any upstart startup who would challenge Youtube or Facebook however.

Is there any reason now why Google shouldn&#x27;t shutdown all their EU web services and remove its divisions like it did in China?If they did so they can conveniently also ignore that $5B anti-trust fine.

Yeah it&#x27;s this.Just another in a long list of efforts by the copyright cartels to restrict access to information and culture.

No, this is just lobbying by the copyright industry playing the &quot;look how poor Bono is, he deserves more&quot; card.

Do you think that after GDPR and the fact that everyone actually took it seriously the EU is trying to see if they can keep pulling the same string and making the world dance?

I think it will change only when the world order changes, which may be soon. Many Western countries operate on untenable platforms in the long term that are designed to preserve existing order in the short term (uncontrolled creation of Fiat money, uncontrolled welfare programs). This just adds to the list and hastens the change.

If this directive is voted, it will be interesting to watch the aftermath. Copyright is a legacy concept that is incompatible with digital media. This will make the absurdity of owning an idea and profiting from it virtually forever (at least as a ratio of human life) stand out. I hope it leads to a changes in the mindset&#x2F;laws  regarding IP.

&gt; And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).Just wait until you walk around Brussels. EU politicians don&#x27;t mix with the locals. They&#x27;ve got separate everything. They have reserved parking spaces, separate taxes, separate restaurants, separate social security, separate supermarkets, schools and swimming schools that the locals are excluded from.Needless to say, all are vastly superior to what the locals get.Compared to that, I would argue you&#x27;re wrong. I don&#x27;t know how UK politicians live, but I very much doubt it is half as &quot;separate class&quot; as the EU class in Brussels. In Brussels the politicians live like the politicians in Beijing live.

I emailed my 10 UK MEP &quot;representatives&quot; about this law, explaining why it was bad news and encouraging them to vote against it.I received one &quot;pre-canned&quot; email acknowledgement from UKIP, attempting to make the bill into an &quot;EU bullying us&quot; issue, and nothing from anyone else. One politician I tried to call had a published phone number that connected to a commercial money lending service.And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).

Well, look at Voss cheering there.  
I&#x27;m sure his bank account will benefit. 
Same goes for the right owners who will sue people. I mean, they need to get along in the 21st century and if you are to lazy or old, suing people is the only way left.

I think the most &quot;noble&quot; angle you could have is that it&#x27;s supposed to protect artists and help them benefit from their work instead of having it &quot;stolen&quot; by third parties. Of course in practice it seems like it will do nothing of the sort but if you only look at it on the surface to a casuals observer it might look like it would actually do some good.On one hand I&#x27;m sad that the EU fell for that crap, on the other copyright law is so fucked up already that it kind of feels like more crap in a bucket of crap. One day this whole thing will become completely unsustainable and will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The same tired bullshit that publishers trot out every time they push copyright enforcement responsibilities onto companies, governments and the tax payer:&quot;Won&#x27;t somebody think of the creators!&quot;And they have pushed this kind of crap on us relentlessly for decades.Neglecting to mention they absolute shafting these obsolete middlemen of cultural access give to the artists and creators they sign.

Is there anything good about this law? Is there any logical, coherent argument for what benefit it might provide to anyone?

&gt; this is obviously an unavoidable &quot;bug&quot;Why unavoidable? For example, if a sufficient number of qualified people complain about any law, isn&#x27;t it possible to hold MEPs accountable by openly questioning them about their reasoning? I&#x27;m sure there are journalists who can make good use of any suspicious argumentation.

I believe the word you were looking for is: &quot;Corruption&quot;.

Unfortunately this bug, which is in my opinion most of the time caused by the people and not the system democracy itself, can be exploited by both lobbyists and populists.

Danish MEP Jens Rohde has called opponents of the law &quot;internet communists who do not want creators to be paid for their work&quot;.What&#x27;s that again you&#x27;d rather not call &quot;uninformed&quot;?

I&#x27;d rather not call it &quot;uninformed&quot;. We pay good amounts of money to parliamentarians, including their personal assistants.It&#x27;s more like a &quot;bug&quot; in democracy as such. As long as a topic doesn&#x27;t have widespread attention, it&#x27;s the lobbyists who make the laws, not the citizens. I am pretty sure there are other bad laws in other very specific areas, we as techies don&#x27;t have a clue about.As I&#x27;ve written in another comment here, this is obviously an unavoidable &quot;bug&quot;, but the more centralized a legislation process is, the more it is prone to exactly this &quot;bug&quot;.

Any thoughts on how that relates to Axel Voss and his friends? We know about Ajit Pai&#x27;s dodgy dealings, but is Voss in someone&#x27;s pocket? He seems too young to be this dumb about tech.

You aren&#x27;t? This lae was handcrafted by big publishers. And it is obvious to see. Very obvious...

I&#x27;m worried not so much about the outcome of this decision (which indeed is bad), but more about the whole decision-making process and how often we&#x27;ll see such uninformed decisionmaking in the future.

So now it&#x27;s time, if you have news agregator or img&#x2F;video upload site, to close it to Europe and if not, just ignore the new laws and see what happens next.

glances at Facebook timeline well... maybe that won&#x27;t be so bad afterall.

Wasn&#x27;t Web 1.0 only user content?

Sounds like the web without user content... Web 1.0? So much for free speech.

&gt; German courts at least agree that for such thingsThis implies that you are going to have to go to court because you got an email at 1am and didn&#x27;t reply right away...in order to fight off potentially serious fines. Whether it&#x27;s accurate or not it&#x27;s still very expensive to prove it&#x27;s inaccuracy (in time alone, not including financially and stress).This has very serious consequences for small and even medium businesses.

From what I read on this specific proposal, it&#x27;s not entirely draconian and has some benefits to the user, since the process also implements transparency requirements and complaint mechanisms.As far as the one-hour-rule goes; if I get an email about taking down content at 01:00AM, then I will naturally be unable to respond for atleast another 5 hours, German courts atleast agree that for such things, it counts when you are first aware of the illegal&#x2F;infringing content, even if it&#x27;s weeks after (though you already have an obligation to operate a contact through which you can be quickly reached when you operate in germany atleast, IIRC this proposal will introduce that EU-wide which is good IMO).

Obviously that&#x27;s impossible and it&#x27;ll be easier to just not have comments, which is exactly what websites will do, and exactly what the EU wants. The EU is sick and tired of people sharing their opinions and pointing out how stupid and draconian and bereaucratic the EU can be, so they did this to shut it all down under the guise of protecting copyright or somesuch.

Wow, this gets crazier and crazier. So either any content provider should be able to determine within one hour whether every comment is &quot;terrorist&quot; or not (with guidelines as clear as &quot;information which is used to incite and glorify the commission of terrorist offences&quot;) and remove it, or, more likely, they&#x27;d auto-remove every comment that anybody marked as &quot;terrorist&quot; and let people complain about it later. Coupled with law enforcement interface (which would probably mean notifying the law enforcement about somebody posting &quot;terrorist content&quot; - that&#x27;s only make sense?) this paints a very scary picture for the future of online free speech in EU.

They will never stop asking for more power to police the use of their imaginary property. They&#x27;d push for mandatory deletion of copies inside people&#x27;s brains if that was possible.

&gt;all non European content providers would just block the EU rather then take on a task that even giants like facebook and google can barely manage.One way to ensure your citizen don&#x27;t read them &quot;foreign propaganda websites&quot;.

As terrible as this is, I am actually even more shocked by this proposal:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;europe-to-push-for-one-hour-takedown-law-for-terrorist-content&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;europe-to-push-for-one-hou...</a>Having one hour to remove offending content, draconian fines and no, absolutely no exceptions for small content providers would, I think, end the internet as we know it in Europe. I see no way to host any kind of content under such jurisdiction and surely all non European content providers would just block the EU rather then take on a task that even giants like facebook and google can barely manage.

Example: article in arXiv gets later published in a journal. Will the arXiv article version be still available for anybody? Only for non-EU people? Will be removed from arXiv? None of these?

Two more examples examples for arXiv and one for Figshare. (1) Article in journal has a flaw. For some reason the journal is slow or unhelpful concerning a correct version, so the author posts on arXiv a revised and perhaps much bigger version. Filters (will these be on arXiv?) detect a copyright infringement. (2) I translate an Euler article and post it on arXiv (with all attributions). Or an English translation of an obscure German or Russian article by a great mathematician. (3) I post on Figshare (and GitHub?) the meat of a published article (like data, procedures, results of experiments, programs) in order to make the research Open Science. I explain the context but maybe I don&#x27;t pass the automated filter which detects a copyright infringement. For all examples, same questions as before.

What kind of effect do you think that these laws could have on your use of arXiv?

Right, will arXiv implement such filters? Same question for other green or gold OA platforms. We all know about Elsevier, but if I put my paranoid hat then for gold OA this is even more perverse, will they try to kill green OA (not that I believe in this failed classification which separates between green &quot;repositories&quot; for archiving and gold publication platforms). Anyway arXiv is a monument which has to be protected from this madness.

apparently, arxiv will have to implement a filter that stops you from posting figures or excerpts from elsevier&#x27;s journals for example ?

Thank you. Anybody who has any influence in the discussion, please help to make this clear. It is important for the researchers, I think. In this particular case arXiv is by no means &quot;small&quot; (has 1.4 million articles) but is non-commercial, What about Figshare which may classify as commercial? Other platforms?

Unfortunately, the actual text isn&#x27;t available yet, and now I can&#x27;t seem to find the list of amendments I was reading earlier, but if I recall correctly, in both the original and proposed amendments, scholarly publications were considered not to be press publications and were not covered at all by the press publication protections.The EU Parliament press release is also claiming that a number of non-commercial and &quot;small&quot; platforms will be excluded.

IANAL but the way I read it, scientific, research and teaching resources are (to a degree) exempt.

As a EU researcher, reader and author, I ask: does this reform affect my use of arXiv or say figshare? Until now I don&#x27;t have a clear answer.

&gt; Meanwhile, people who don&#x27;t understand how the internet works are deliberately breaking it to save their out-dated business models instead of embracing the new.The link tax is really absurd. Traditional news is now almost completely useless. Information distribution is near free in todays market and &quot;journalist&#x27;s&quot; opinions don&#x27;t add much value to the information either. A large amount of stories are almost pre-written and sent off to publications anyways. Quality curation is really the only aspect that I would consider valuable, but these establishments just spread click-bait and junk articles.

The whole thing really makes me furious beyond words. I shouldn&#x27;t be that aggravated, but unfortunately I am. I feel like this is really the opposite of progressive and will leave the EU even further behind the US and China. Meanwhile, people who don&#x27;t understand how the internet works are deliberately breaking it to save their out-dated business models instead of embracing the new.

&quot;If you are in the EU, you are not allowed to use this website.&quot; Pretty much the same solution for kids under 13 years of age (which is to say, they of course still do use these sites, they simply lie about it which shifts the burden...)

Status code 451. And frankly I understand the foreign start ups that end up just doing this.

Why wouldn&#x27;t Silicon Valley be affected by this? Most companies have european customers.

&gt; but it doesn&#x27;t have any social media platforms with the reach that American ones do.
A lot of people I know don&#x27;t bother having more then one social media account. I don&#x27;t know what you mean

Exactly. I thought that the EU wanted a thriving tech sector, but it doesn&#x27;t have any social media platforms with the reach that American ones do. And after this mess of legislation, the barriers to entry into the market will get far more expensive. Nothing will ever be able to clear it.Sometimes, when companies climb the ladder to the top of the market, they kick the ladder down. This time, big copyright (and their political friends) kicked it down.

I am not even sure why I would want to reach the likes of the Silicon Valley.

I honestly don&#x27;t understand why people keep comparing the culture of American cities and states to European ones. America is one giant country - the EU isn&#x27;t. The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin.Not every city in America is San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin, but neither one state nor one city is as technologically dysfunctional as their European counterparts.

&gt; This continent is a mess in terms of IT, with a few exceptions (London, Berlin, Dublin, some spots in Eastern Europe).So... pretty much like the US (with a few exceptions like Silicon Valley or Austin, Tx)?

This decision is one of the many reasons why Europe will never reach the likes of Silicon Valley, no matter how much money will they sink down the &quot;technology&quot; hole (not that the US doesn&#x27;t have its fair share of dumb legislators, because it has). This continent is a mess in terms of IT, with a few exceptions (London, Berlin, Dublin, some spots in Eastern Europe).

And also how giant fuckup will be, once every country will implement it differently. 27 different versions and levels of upload filter. How will you display content upload by someone in Italy to someone in Germany if Germany has stricter filtering policies? Will you need to recategorize it for display in different countries?

Member states can be even stupider. I get scared thinking of what a &quot;reasonable interpretation&quot; by some right-wing local government with poor understanding of digital markets would look like.

It&#x27;s worth noting that this is not a law in the commonly understood sense. It&#x27;s an EU directive, which requires member states to achieve a required outcome, but leaves the legal implementation up to the individual state. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how the member states interpret the language and what legal framework will be used to enforce it.

The European version will be the same thing when I try to go on a non-gdpr US site, a big banner that tells me to *$#^ off.

The EU was furious when the large internet firms chose to have a reduced EU version and informed their customers the EU had forced them to remove stuff.So they will do their very best to make it affect the global internet.Given that all major powers want that, it&#x27;ll happen. Maybe not right now, but it&#x27;s coming. It would have happened a long time ago if it wasn&#x27;t for the stroke of luck that these companies are in the US and the US government is protecting them (for now succesfully).

Will this affect the global internet, or will big sites simply make a reduced &quot;european version&quot; where some filtered content isn&#x27;t shown in the EU but is shown in North America?

And the publishers are in nice conflict of interest with this piece. I saw one online medium that I follow(It is relatively balanced), to publish only one article saying that we shall support this law. For 5 million country pretty sad. But not really surprising.

This shows you the power of old money vs new money ( tech companies ). I laugh when people say tech companies are powerful when you see even small newspapers bully them into submission.Of course what&#x27;s best for the people and the internet is a non-consideration for these politicians who work for the moneyed-class rather than the people.The news companies ( especially the big ones like BBC, NYTimes and CNN ) already bullied google and facebook to give them exceptional preferential treatment. Now they want a link tax? We already have news companies&#x27; social media team bombarding the internet with their spam, now they will go into overdrive mode if news links are monetized. That&#x27;s so ridiculous. What&#x27;s to stop anyone from creating a &quot;news&quot; company and them spamming their own links everywhere to profit from this tax?As for the upload filter, all that&#x27;s going to do is to impede or silence critics, artists, etc using materials protected as &quot;fair use&quot;.People talk about china or russia all the time, but the biggest enemy of a free internet so far has been the EU since their legislation can be global while china and russia are pretty much confined to their own borders. And of course with EU behaving so erratically, this will just embolden china, russia and the rest of the world to act in bad faith as well.

I don&#x27;t buy it that they understand exactly what it entail, they just think &quot;nobody will pirate my work so good, right?&quot;Until of course the filters take his legitimate content and claim it as somebody elses

Those &quot;artists&quot; believe that if their music disappears from pirate sites, they&#x27;ll start to make money. They don&#x27;t take into account the fact that likely nobody is downloading their stuff.

&gt;because a majority either doesn&#x27;t agree with you or doesn&#x27;t care enough to bother. &#x2F;&#x2F;That&#x27;s why we&#x27;ve not moved on from representative democracy. The problem is the representatives are supposed to represent the people - and the people think they do (or try) - but in practice the representatives often don&#x27;t.In the UK we very rarely get chance to influence decisions, instead we get to choose the people who will decide, and they almost? always lie about how they will make decisions and what will influence them.PR would make it better, but reduce the power of those who need to decide to give us PR.

I generally agree, living in a democracy means that sometimes you have things happen you don&#x27;t agree with because a majority either doesn&#x27;t agree with you or doesn&#x27;t care enough to bother.In a few years the EU could be on it&#x27;s way to undo the linktax again, who knows? Meanwhile there are other EU proposals on the way that are also interesting for tech people, not only the linktax and &quot;delete terror in 1 hour or else&quot;... And non-tech proposals too!I do believe that it&#x27;ll be possible to work with the filters and link tax considering some edits during the initial phases did disarm the worst of the first proposal (it&#x27;s still not a very nice one).Disclaimer: I operate a platform for user generated content in the EU as well as working for a platform for user generated content, HQ&#x27;d in the EU, my views may be biased.

So since the majority of the voices here on HN seem to be pretty negative towards this, I think it&#x27;s worth noting there are some creative voices who are in favor of some copyright law. For example, here&#x27;s one fellow on the twitter machine who&#x27;s a composer and seems pleased: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Howard_Goodall&#x2F;status&#x2F;1039833762262134784" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Howard_Goodall&#x2F;status&#x2F;103983376226213478...</a>Simultaneously, I&#x27;m not campaigning in favor of the &quot;link tax&quot; component, here. I think it&#x27;s widely agreed upon that that part of this proposal is pretty dire bunkum.But let&#x27;s not be eager to discard the baby and bathwater together. The idea of some EU copyright policy consensus is not inherently evil. If HN wants to rally about the &quot;link tax&quot; issue, do so. Don&#x27;t jump directly to &quot;boo, the EU is undemocratic because they didn&#x27;t do what I want&quot;. That&#x27;s just bizarre and we should be above that.

EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’