A crucial vote is coming up later this month in the EU's move to change its copyright laws. The proposed plans included mandatory content filters and a so-called link tax to be paid by sites linking to other sites, articles 13 and 11 respectively. TorrentFreak writes about the current status of the legislation and of the deadline to fix or block the proposed EU copyright legislation is coming up quickly and time is running out to salvage the situation regarding rules which will drastically affect the Internet.
Earlier on SN
European Copyright Law Isn't Great. It Could Soon Get a Lot Worse
Censorship Machines Are Coming: It's Time for the Free Software Community to Use its Political Clout
Compromises on Copyright Maximalism are Clearly No Longer on the EU Agenda
Related Stories
A piece of proposed EU legislation has for many months now included drastic changes to the Union's copyright laws. Feedback from industry lobbyists looks very much like it is adopted uncritically to the exclusion of other interests. This is especially noticeable in what has been going on with Articles 11 and 13 of the Council on the European Commission's proposal for a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market [2016/0280(COD)]. CopyBuzz summarizes some of the more salient points regarding press publisher's rights (Article 11) and upload/censorship filters (Article 13) identified in the latest set of proposals.
Currently it is Bulgaria's turn to head the Council of the European Union, a position that rotates every six months among EU member states. One of the responsibilities of that position is to oversee the Council's work on EU legislation. However, with the recent rotation, the copyright situation looks grimmer rather than gaining a respite.
See CopyBuzz : Compromises on (c) are clearly no longer on the agenda.
Julia Reda (a Member of the European Parliament from Germany) writes in her bog about upcoming censorship legislation in the European Union and a call to action for those most affected, specifically the Free Software community.
The starting point for this legislation was a fight between big corporations, the music industry and YouTube, over money. The music industry complained that they receive less each time one of their music videos is played on a video platform like YouTube than they do when their tracks are listened to on subscription services like Spotify, calling the difference the "value gap". They started a successful lobbying effort: The upload filter law is primarily intended to give them a bargaining chip to demand more money from Google in negotiations. Meanwhile, all other platforms are caught in the middle of that fight, including code sharing communities.
The lobbying has engrained in many legislators' minds the false idea that platforms which host uploads for profit are necessarily exploiting creators.
The fight affects both sides of the Atlantic because once bad rules are enacted on either side, it is not uncommon for calls for "harmonization" to come from the other.
Earlier on SN:
Mulled EU Copyright Shakeup Will Turn Us Into Robo-Censors
EU Parliament's Copyright Rapporteur Has Learned Nothing from Year-long Copyright Debate
European Commission Hides Copyright Evidence Again
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a detailed explanation of the proposed changes to EU copyright law, specifically the current version of the European Digital Single Market directive, and why it is a big deal.
EFF has been writing about the upcoming European Digital Single Market directive on copyright for a long time now. But it's time to put away the keyboard, and pick up the phone, because the proposal just got worse—and it's headed for a crucial vote on June 20-21.
For those who need no further introduction to the directive, which would impose an upload filtering mandate on Internet platforms (Article 13) and a link tax in favor of news publishers (Article 11), you can skip to the bottom of this post, where we link to an action that European readers can take to make their voice heard. But if you're new to this, here's a short version of how we got here and why we're worried.
From the EFF's web site: European Copyright Law Isn't Great. It Could Soon Get a Lot Worse.
Earlier on SN:
Censorship Machines Are Coming: It's Time for the Free Software Community to Use its Political Clout
Compromises on Copyright Maximalism are Clearly No Longer on the EU Agenda
Mulled EU Copyright Shakeup Will Turn Us Into Robo-Censors
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:27PM (13 children)
And the problem will go away. There will be nobody to enforce the rules.
The ISP must go!
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:33PM (10 children)
Doh! It's all so simple!
Next you'll say that we can solve global warming by just not releasing carbon.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:41PM (1 child)
It's all about the dark mesh web net, man!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:12PM
Just do not be the poor bastard that happens to be next to a popular thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:48PM (7 children)
Bad analogy... The cause of your global warming is still debatable. The direct cause of all our internet problems can be easily traced back to the ISP. Without them the authorities are powerless.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @09:08PM
So... Everyone just becomes a Tier1 network and problem solved?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @09:52PM (5 children)
I'd say it's rather our climate change and the causes are well known and documented, at least if you trust in science.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:34PM (4 children)
Your "science" can't even figure out the right shape of Earth! lawl this ^ fool right?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:25PM (3 children)
I continue to find it strange how people who claim the Earth is shaped somehow differently than the scientific consensus, have this remarkable difficulty in describing what the actual shape of Earth is. It's got to have a shape, right? So what is that shape?
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @12:29AM (1 child)
It's shaped like a Microsoft Surface Hub 2, a powerful team collaboration device designed to advance the way people work together naturally.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:29AM
Please. Stop. Too soon.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:46PM
Roughly, spherical. There's just a lot of junk tacked on.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:04PM (1 child)
And freeways to everyone's garage!
And a full grocery warehouse in every street!
And a dam in every backyard (water AND power!)
No need for infrastructure providers! If you van pay, you can have it all!
What, you're NOT a billionaire? You want water, power, sewerage and internet, but you see them as being somehow different?
Oh well, maybe ISPs *aren't* the problem.. maybe it is the *way* you regulate certain aspects of competition.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:09PM
we should have gardens in every yard or at least in every neighborhood.
we should have solar or nano nuke power plants in every house or neighborhood.
we should have redundant, decentralized, federated, anonymous internet.
tweaking regulation is not good enough. we need to replace the whole system of serfdom. that would mean people would have to quit being ignorant moorons though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:10AM (4 children)
Hate it when the whole thread gets bushwhacked by one whack-job selling his pet theory and spewing hate off target.
ISPs are blameless here.
There's not a single reason on earth to tax links. There is no shortage of links. They require no government involvement. They serve an overwhelming social good.
Probably what should happen is the entire world should deaden all links to EU cites. Black hole them all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:42AM (3 children)
Taxing links sounds really dumb, so much so that I actually RTFA. (and followed the link to https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/extra-copyright-for-news-sites/ [juliareda.eu] )
It actually has nothing to do with taxes and isn't specifically about links. Web publishers want to charge a license fee to third parties that repost parts of their content (like what SN does when TFS is copy-pasta from TFA).
They are probably thinking that farcebook would have to make a deal with them and they'd get some free money out of it. IMO it's more likely that FB (or whoever) would work around the issue by simply describing the link with keywords or a software-generated summary.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:56AM (2 children)
Regardless of the motivation, it is pretty clearly just a money-grab. Publishers want to be in search engines, they need their articles to be widely disseminated. That said, the classic publishers are also a dying industry and they desperately want to find a way to monetize their content. The problem is: if they charge search engines and other clear fair-use instances, those services will simply stop spreading the word about the articles.
Hence the need for government involvement: "make them publicize our content, and make them pay us money, too!".
From what I've seen, the EU commission is at best totally clueless, and more likely simply corrupt. There's no reason they should be pushing this kind of rent-seeking legislation, unless they are either stupid or on the take.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:00PM
Funny then, that the campaign against the proposed EU copyright legislation is funded by the largest publishing house in Europe.
You're being taken for a ride.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:55AM
Those pushing for Article 13 are using mafia-like tactics to try to pressure legislators [juliareda.eu]. That alone should disqualify the proposal.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:42AM (8 children)
They won't "drastically affect the Internet". They'll drastically affect Europe. I'll be over here not giving a fuck what Europe passes because, and this is key, I am not European and they are not the boss of me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:21AM (7 children)
I'll be over here not giving a fuck what Europe passes because, and this is key, I am not European and they are not the boss of me.
Not giving a fuck until two minutes after Articles 11 and 13 get passed in Europe and then the politicians in the US start working overtime on "harmonization". This affects everybody. If the EU screws up on this, it'll be twice as easy for the US to follow suit by just "harmonizing" laws. It goes either direction across the Atlantic, and copyright has been one of the worst.
I expect a few of the largest US companies are already getting lobbying plans in place to jump into action on this, if they aren't already actively lobbying on the topic. Those few have a lot to gain by shutting out everyone else and turning the net into television.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:44AM (1 child)
Unlike the EU, freedom of speech kind of matters in the US.
Honestly, I want the EU to do this. Do it! Do it hard!
Occasionally the US's population needs a little reminder that free speech matters. The EU would really be taking one for the team, demonstrating the importance. Thanks, guys! We appreciate your sacrifice!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:10AM
More so than the EU, sure, but not completely. Obscenity laws, FCC censorship, free speech zones, NSLs, the war on whistleblowers, and so on are all unconstitutional, and yet they are accepted practices by our authoritarian courts. We already have countless draconian copyright laws on the books, so I'm not entirely sure that something similar couldn't happen here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:29AM (4 children)
See, there's a problem there. The US can't pass a similar law or even allow EU law to apply here via treaty without repealing the first amendment before they do. It wouldn't take twelve hours after the first case hit a court for a stay to be issued.
Major US companies that care do so because they want to be able to have a presence in the EU. They're very fond of housing shell companies and money in Ireland, for instance. Anyone who doesn't can just ignore anything the EU passes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:53AM (1 child)
Yes, there is that, but only if the US legislators and their corporate owners do not want to pass these laws. I'd argue that based on past copyright extensions and the DMCA/EUCD they are chomping at the bit to have an excuse to bring a link tax and upload filters into the US. With the latter, now that M$ owns GitHub they'd have an exception granted and thus be the only legal code repository in the region.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:53PM
As someone pointed out, I have no idea where I got it from, probably random soylent comment. GitHub is being vacated by a goodly number of people. Please see one of the recent posts on Gitlab's Twitter page. https://twitter.com/gitlab [twitter.com]
0 imports from GitHub in late May 2018. Up to 98,300 imports from GitHub to GitLab on 06/05/2018. I would call that a serious shift. It just might have something to do with who acquired GitHub recently.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:04AM (1 child)
But the US government constantly violates the Constitution, including the first amendment; obscenity laws, FCC censorship, free speech zones, etc. are examples of this, regardless of what our treacherous courts claim. The question is whether or not the government would do that here as well?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:02AM
The government isn't homogenous. It's entirely possible, even likely, that the courts would slap a big ole "eat shit and die" on any law/treaty like this.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:25AM (1 child)
Now that I have your attention, TFS is wrong. No link-tax. It's just clarification of copyright that you can't copy-paste someone else's shit and claim it's "just linking".
(Score: 3, Informative) by quietus on Wednesday June 06 2018, @12:35PM
The main source of at least one of the articles [Compromises on Copyright Maximalism [soylentnews.org]] submitted by canopic_jug on this topic was a lobbyist, working for Axel Springer SE. Axel Springer SE is Europe's largest owner of newspapers and magazines. Now why, oh why, could this company be funding a campaign to attack the very legislation which, if the sub is to believed, is designed to over-protect copyright, this publishing house's bread-and-butter?
For more details on this, here's my reply [soylentnews.org] to the quoted article; see also the reply with header Politico attached to it.