I wish that the EFF would include links to the updated directive. The latest I can find is the language as of 2018-05-25 (http://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35373/st09134-en18.pdf) which doesn't contain the terms "commercial platforms", "news site" or link. It does leave the definition of "unsubstantial parts" up to member states, which is indeed worrying from a single market perspective.
Furthermore, that wording contradicts EFF's assertion for article 13 that unlicensed content is not allowed to appear, "even for an instant." Since all that is needed to avoid liability is to perform effective and proportionate efforts to prevent availability and to react expeditiously upon notification. Proportionality and effectiveness explicitly depend on the size of the content provider: a new streaming video service would explicitly need to do less than YouTube. Has the updated documentation explicitly removed the provision about expeditious action upon notification? Because the exception proves the rule (the rule being that unlicensed content is indeed allowed to appear for more than an instant).
So... links to spam commissioners but no links to verify that EFF is presenting a fair reading of the updated documents.
Instead of requiring filtering on behalf of rightsholders that refuse to license to platforms (an asymmetric relationship that just increases costs for one party), I wish that the EU would legislate FRAND style royalties.
As in, if you want copyright protection then you have to issue Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licenses to any platform that may want to host the content. Don't want to issue such a license? Then the EU won't help you protect your work. In that way a platform could just host the content using a central database and performing deduplication instead of using the same central database to forbid viewing. Rightsholders would get royalties by virtue of the license agreement, EU would spend less money policing copyright since there would be many more legal avenues to access content.
It's alarming that there appears to be no provision for fair use of copyrighted materials. I'm not in the EU, but that would seem to be a grave oversight.
One can imagine an image or any copyrightable material which might become offensive or embarrassing might get copyrighted so as to in effect censor the material.
Hm, well, education is an exception already, but political speech and comedy are not enumerated as exceptions. (Though I guess these things will be decided by the Courts eventually, as the Directive is about proportional remuneration).
Also, the proposal leaves intact other Directives, and it'll take a bit of work to figure out if all of these are in harmony, or if there's a conflict between the rules. (And if there which one prevails.)
"Except in the cases referred to in Article 6, this Directive shall leave intact and shall in no way affect existing rules laid down in the Directives currently in force in this area, in particular Directives 96/9/EC, 2001/29/EC, 2006/115/EC, 2009/24/EC, 2012/28/EU and 2014/26/EU."
There is no direct equivalent in EU law to the general "fair use" provisions in the US. Indeed, the US provisions are somewhat controversial, because arguably they don't meet the requirements of the main umbrella international agreements for intellectual property.
The closest equivalent in Europe would be something like the fair dealing provisions here in England and their counterparts in other member states, but those tend to enumerate specific scenarios where copying may be lawful without the permission of the copyright holder, rather than the US approach of specifying a small number of general principles and leaving it to the courts to resolve any specific case.
I'd be surprised, if this whole situation didn't already happen with Youtube and DMCA (I know the real law does leave such provisions but current system of DMCA takedowns is still used in this manner).
Action was already taken when large-scale government interference of the internet was cheered on in the past. Since taking the bad with the good of a less-regulated internet wasn't acceptable, we now have to take the bad with the good of a more-regulated internet. Ideally we could have nuance where things work the way they're intended and overreach of power to add legislation wasn't continually leveraged. But reality has shown us it doesn't work that way.
To get around the linking to news sites problem, couldn't search engines just not provide ANY links to news sites? Who defines what a "news" site is? Is there a strict definition? Anybody with a website? If it's something I have not read or known before, it's "news" to me no matter how old or from where.
That's what Google did in Germany when a "have a contract with news sites" law went into effect. It didn't take long before Google got free access to all German news sites.
Spain learned from this and make a minimum compensation mandatory. Since then Google News hasn't been available in Spain.
So now they're making a third attempt to make Google pay for sending business to news site. The result will probably be the same though.
I wonder whyI always get downvoted into oblivion for stating that which to me is an obvious fact: The EU is too far removed from reality to legislate. It now has a long and sordid history of over-doing things to the extreme.
In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
We had what felt like a complete shutdown of IT departments in the months leading up to the GDPR because, again, it was overreaching and too vague. (the idea was good though)
I could write a list much longer, but in general I think the Unix approach works: Many small things that each do one thing well. The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well - If for no other reason, than the distance from the Parliament to a wooden cabin on the mountains of norway is just too great for them to regulate that cabin in great detail, but still this is what they attempt to do. And now, down to each word on each and every webpage accesible from the EU.
> In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
So your government decided to go overboard with enforcement (instead of classifying cinnamon buns as a traditional good and exempt, like the Swedish did, if those are a big issue in Denmark) and that's purely the EU's fault? (Or did they did not go overboard and regular food safety inspections with one more thing to test on the list got styled as "cinnamon patrols"?)
The EU certainly has very far reach and goes into pedantic detail, which isn't always good, but states love to redirect annoyance at their crap implementation on it. That's still partially a problem with it, but still annoys me.
> In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
Is this for real? I know it's anecdotal but I find it hilarious
> I could write a list much longer, but in general I think the Unix approach works: Many small things that each do one thing well. The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well
Well...I'm sure many could point out somethings that the EU has done well...I guess at the heart of regulating cinnamon buns is the issue of standards...that specific instance is probably an overkill but having a common standard of electrical equipment produced/imported to the EU makes sense...at the very least you could argue that some member states have benefited considerably although that may not necessarily be attributable to EU policy
But sure, example could be dug up of good things the EU have done. But even in those cases the cost is much too great.
For instance, they built a really nice hallway at the Parliament, but when it came time to name it, they assigned 76 diplomats and the president of the EU to work through the name. That alone ended up costing something like 11 million euros.
I can't think of anything they've done, which hasn't resulted in millions of taxpayers money being poured down the drain. Not surprisingly, the EU has the lowest growth rate in the world.
The EU is not the only thing keeping Europe from being deaf and blind, and Russia has much better targets than most of the EU if it was going to take expansion risks. This is needless fearmongering.
Sounds like this is more of a "Denmark problem" than an "EU problem", unless you think the EU should simply not legislate the use of products that can cause health issues when present in high quantities in food (in this case cinnamon)
You know why the EU overregulates? Because EU countries individually overregulate. And you know why that is? Because European people ask for new regulation every single time something goes wrong or might go wrong in the future or is a little bit unfair in some rare cases.
In the UK, we now have a debate about regulating portion sizes of ready meals, because some people are overweight. If you have voters and politicians who will even start to think about regulating this sort of thing, you're bound to end up with massive overregulation.
Sometimes the choice we have is between 28 different ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary laws or just one ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary law.
Your Unix metaphor is flawed. Countries are not special purpose tools. They don't do different things. They all do largely the same things in slightly different ways. So each country on its own already comes with all the issues that we criticise in monolythic software.
Don’t let the food processing companies derail that discussion. Decreasing portion size will just make people buy two. If anything should be regulated it would be the ingredients allowed in things that are called meals. Specifically sugar.
.. As a dane I completely disagree with this post.
The EU is a big machine, and yes some parts of it may seem outdated and or obsolete, and some parts of it may even be so.
That's how it is with big things, but it doesn't mean that it's bad, just that we need to keep improving it.
I have a really, really hard time understanding people that says we should leave the EU, especially when they hand out the same, or similar examples that you just did.
Beside legislating the amount of cinnamon bakeries use, the EU handles so many important things that a small country like denmark will never have the resources to handle.
This in no way means that they are perfect, but work to improve it instead.
We have this big project, it has been running in production for 15 years, it solves a lot of problems, but there are of course some technical debt that we should find the time to improve and fix.
In my head you are the new guy telling everyone that we should rewrite it.
which is doubly ridiculous: cinnamon is actually one of the few parts (probably the only) of the cinnamon bun which is good for you: it's high in fiber and has been shown to have numerous health benefits.
Right to be Forgotten, GDPR, and now this... pretty soon the barrier to entry will be so high that no new players would be able to get off the ground with an internet company in Europe.
a) Regarding the right to be forgotten and GDPR, can't you handle it manually when you're small and automate it when you're big? Complaints should be proportional to the number of users, so it hardly seems like a problem.
b) Article 13 is apparently "a proposal to end the appearance of unlicensed copyrighted works on big user-generated content platforms". I don't know what "big" means, but presumably it excludes "new players" that haven't gotten "off the ground".
I have no idea what i-shirt is but it's likely that if an user uses copyrighted material for his i-shirt, you'll have to pay because it's your platform. Bonus points for not using a censorship filter in trying to do this.
Right to be Forgotten affects search engines. GDPR is common sense, allow users to delete their data. If you make aggregate data of your users and their behavior then it's not their data anymore.
Tax law is a lot more complicated yet never stopped anyone from innovating if there was an economic niche waiting for them.
Any regulation is a barrier to entry. The more complicated the regulation is, the worse it is for competition.
Of course tax law has stopped people from innovating. It's one of the biggest drains on competition and economic growth. Taxes would be the biggest source of economic efficiency even if they weren't as complex as they are.
Readit News
Furthermore, that wording contradicts EFF's assertion for article 13 that unlicensed content is not allowed to appear, "even for an instant." Since all that is needed to avoid liability is to perform effective and proportionate efforts to prevent availability and to react expeditiously upon notification. Proportionality and effectiveness explicitly depend on the size of the content provider: a new streaming video service would explicitly need to do less than YouTube. Has the updated documentation explicitly removed the provision about expeditious action upon notification? Because the exception proves the rule (the rule being that unlicensed content is indeed allowed to appear for more than an instant).
So... links to spam commissioners but no links to verify that EFF is presenting a fair reading of the updated documents.
It describes the changes and why they will/will not work
Instead of requiring filtering on behalf of rightsholders that refuse to license to platforms (an asymmetric relationship that just increases costs for one party), I wish that the EU would legislate FRAND style royalties.
As in, if you want copyright protection then you have to issue Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licenses to any platform that may want to host the content. Don't want to issue such a license? Then the EU won't help you protect your work. In that way a platform could just host the content using a central database and performing deduplication instead of using the same central database to forbid viewing. Rightsholders would get royalties by virtue of the license agreement, EU would spend less money policing copyright since there would be many more legal avenues to access content.
One can imagine an image or any copyrightable material which might become offensive or embarrassing might get copyrighted so as to in effect censor the material.
Also, the proposal leaves intact other Directives, and it'll take a bit of work to figure out if all of these are in harmony, or if there's a conflict between the rules. (And if there which one prevails.)
"Except in the cases referred to in Article 6, this Directive shall leave intact and shall in no way affect existing rules laid down in the Directives currently in force in this area, in particular Directives 96/9/EC, 2001/29/EC, 2006/115/EC, 2009/24/EC, 2012/28/EU and 2014/26/EU."
for example 2001/29/EC is the WIPO copyright treaty [ratification] directive, which already protects political speech and parody/caricature. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive#Exceptions... )
The closest equivalent in Europe would be something like the fair dealing provisions here in England and their counterparts in other member states, but those tend to enumerate specific scenarios where copying may be lawful without the permission of the copyright holder, rather than the US approach of specifying a small number of general principles and leaving it to the courts to resolve any specific case.
Spain learned from this and make a minimum compensation mandatory. Since then Google News hasn't been available in Spain.
So now they're making a third attempt to make Google pay for sending business to news site. The result will probably be the same though.
Deleted Comment
In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
We had what felt like a complete shutdown of IT departments in the months leading up to the GDPR because, again, it was overreaching and too vague. (the idea was good though)
I could write a list much longer, but in general I think the Unix approach works: Many small things that each do one thing well. The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well - If for no other reason, than the distance from the Parliament to a wooden cabin on the mountains of norway is just too great for them to regulate that cabin in great detail, but still this is what they attempt to do. And now, down to each word on each and every webpage accesible from the EU.
Well when you write obviously non factual nonsense like
>The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well
You tend to get downvoted. When you write hilarious nonsense like this
>In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
And imply its the EU's fault, you get downvoted.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/12/25/256602581/wh...
Can you name anything the EU has done well?
So your government decided to go overboard with enforcement (instead of classifying cinnamon buns as a traditional good and exempt, like the Swedish did, if those are a big issue in Denmark) and that's purely the EU's fault? (Or did they did not go overboard and regular food safety inspections with one more thing to test on the list got styled as "cinnamon patrols"?)
The EU certainly has very far reach and goes into pedantic detail, which isn't always good, but states love to redirect annoyance at their crap implementation on it. That's still partially a problem with it, but still annoys me.
Is this for real? I know it's anecdotal but I find it hilarious
> I could write a list much longer, but in general I think the Unix approach works: Many small things that each do one thing well. The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well
Well...I'm sure many could point out somethings that the EU has done well...I guess at the heart of regulating cinnamon buns is the issue of standards...that specific instance is probably an overkill but having a common standard of electrical equipment produced/imported to the EU makes sense...at the very least you could argue that some member states have benefited considerably although that may not necessarily be attributable to EU policy
But sure, example could be dug up of good things the EU have done. But even in those cases the cost is much too great.
For instance, they built a really nice hallway at the Parliament, but when it came time to name it, they assigned 76 diplomats and the president of the EU to work through the name. That alone ended up costing something like 11 million euros.
I can't think of anything they've done, which hasn't resulted in millions of taxpayers money being poured down the drain. Not surprisingly, the EU has the lowest growth rate in the world.
Individually European countries are pretty weak. They're only strong as a common entity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/eu-worrie...
Sounds like this is more of a "Denmark problem" than an "EU problem", unless you think the EU should simply not legislate the use of products that can cause health issues when present in high quantities in food (in this case cinnamon)
The reaction to a bad regulation being passed shouldn't be "oh, well, the government can just exempt your specific product from that regulation".
In the UK, we now have a debate about regulating portion sizes of ready meals, because some people are overweight. If you have voters and politicians who will even start to think about regulating this sort of thing, you're bound to end up with massive overregulation.
Sometimes the choice we have is between 28 different ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary laws or just one ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary law.
Your Unix metaphor is flawed. Countries are not special purpose tools. They don't do different things. They all do largely the same things in slightly different ways. So each country on its own already comes with all the issues that we criticise in monolythic software.
Beside legislating the amount of cinnamon bakeries use, the EU handles so many important things that a small country like denmark will never have the resources to handle. This in no way means that they are perfect, but work to improve it instead.
We have this big project, it has been running in production for 15 years, it solves a lot of problems, but there are of course some technical debt that we should find the time to improve and fix. In my head you are the new guy telling everyone that we should rewrite it.
a) Regarding the right to be forgotten and GDPR, can't you handle it manually when you're small and automate it when you're big? Complaints should be proportional to the number of users, so it hardly seems like a problem.
b) Article 13 is apparently "a proposal to end the appearance of unlicensed copyrighted works on big user-generated content platforms". I don't know what "big" means, but presumably it excludes "new players" that haven't gotten "off the ground".
Edit: typo... t-shirt
Right to be Forgotten affects search engines. GDPR is common sense, allow users to delete their data. If you make aggregate data of your users and their behavior then it's not their data anymore.
Tax law is a lot more complicated yet never stopped anyone from innovating if there was an economic niche waiting for them.
Of course tax law has stopped people from innovating. It's one of the biggest drains on competition and economic growth. Taxes would be the biggest source of economic efficiency even if they weren't as complex as they are.