Posted on 06/20/2018 6:11:49 PM PDT by MarchonDC09122009
The End of All That's Good and Pure About The Internet
https://gizmodo.com/the-end-of-all-thats-good-and-pure-about-the-internet-1826963763
Rhett Jones June 20 2018
The EU has passed an Internet link tax on anyone who links to any EU published content. The tax will be levied against individuals or organizations in any country due to mutual copyright treaty conventions.
Article 11 Article 11 has been variously called the link tax or the snippet tax. Designed to mitigate the power over publishers that Google and Facebook have amassed in the last decade, it codifies a new copyright rule for linking to news organizations and quoting text from their stories. Online platforms will have to pay for a license to link out to news publishers, and this will theoretically help support organizations that are vital for public information and drive users to their homepages.
That all sounds decent in principle, but Article 11 doesn’t bother to even define what constitutes a link. Details will be left to the 28 individual countries in the EU to figure that out. That opens the door for political abuse of how news is spread in each country, and it will likely have the opposite of its intended effect.
Google can afford a license, there’s no guarantee smaller organizations can. Member of European Parliament Julia Reda is firmly opposed to Article 11 and 13. She recently wrote on her website: “Instead of one Europe-wide law, we’d have 28, with the most extreme becoming the de-facto standard: To avoid being sued, international internet platforms would be motivated to comply with the strictest version implemented by any member state.” In response to her MEP counterpart Alex Voss’s defense of Article 11, Reda gave The Next Web an illustration of how the differences between countries could play out:
The sentence ‘Angela Merkel meets Theresa May,’ which could be a headline of a news article, cannot be protected by copyright, because it is a mere statement of fact and not an original creation. Mr. Voss said repeatedly that he wants these purely factual statements to be covered by Article 11, that the protection granted to press publishers will therefore be much broader than even what the journalists themselves get.
Reda also pointed out that egregious sampling or wholesale theft of news content is already illegal under current copyright law. There’s no reason to believe that Facebook with its fancy link license will ever face penalties for users posting an entire article on their wall. But when Facebook decides it doesn’t like your particular political point of view, it’ll be a lot harder for you to start a small platform and express it.
The consequences of Article 11 and Article 13 remain a matter of speculation, but the nature of the legislation—both its design and its vagueness that makes it ripe for abuse—make it all but inevitable that they will leave the internet torn and tattered in its wake. Here are some likely victims.
Memes
Even if you think that people who pirate music should be executed and all news organizations are the devil, you probably like memes. Well, whoever took a picture of that one guy looking at that one girl instead of the other girl, will be having a field day running around filing complaints against any platform that uses it without permission. Just kidding, that guy sold the photo to iStock, a subsidiary of photo-licensing giant Getty Images. No fair use means you’ll have to go shoot your own photo to caption and make it clear that anyone is allowed to further caption it in the pursuit of creating a meme.
BINGO.
Try and enforce it Euroweenies.
Yup, this is aimed to kill off / contain EU state establishment critics.
If this stands, EU news stories about Muslim rape-ugees won’t be as readily shared outside the EU, for instance.
Article 13 has been widely touted as marking the death of memes - although this needn’t actually come to pass. Member states have the right to establish exceptions in the case of caricature, parody or pastiche; and in any case rights holders will be required to justify any decision to refuse permission to access their works.
However, it could undoubtedly make it a lot easier for copyright holders to frustrate users wishing to link to their material with the aim, perhaps, of criticizing them. And even when they don’t wish to block access to their work, it could still happen anyway. The proposed system has a lot in common with YouTube’s ContentID system - not known for its accuracy, with perfectly legitimate content frequently flagged.
It might also entrench the already monopolistic status of the large platforms such as Facebook and Google, with startups highly unlikely to be able to find the funds for a filtering system. And it could even, suggests blogger Cory Doctorow, allow trolls to use bots to file copyrights to content they don’t actually own, shutting down political discussion.
In an emailed statement following the ruling, Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, points out that there is still time to stop Article 13, which must be approved by the European Parliament in a plenary vote early next month.
“The EU Parliament’s duty is to defend citizens from unfair and unjust laws. MEPs must reject this law, which would create a Robo-copyright regime intended to zap any image, text, meme or video that appears to include copyright material, even when it is entirely legal material,” he says.
Follow me on Twitter: @EmmaWoollacott
The possible intent?
If I post a UK Dailymail article on FR, the EU will get the Fresno swat team out to take down FR? I don't think so.
Some people here don’t read or think things thru:
“allow trolls to use bots to file copyrights to content they don’t actually own, shutting down political discussion.”
So you don’t think that the DNC / SPLC wouldn’t have trolls wage copyright claims against FR and conservative sites, miring them in copyright defense legal bills?!
No, they can’t because it is EU law. Granted, they might get a Hawaiian judge to rule in their favor but it won’t stand.
Dispute the fact that EU copyright holders can seek judgement against US copyright violators:
U.S. Copyright Office - International Copyright
https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl100.htmlProxy Highlight
The United States became a member of the Berne
Convention on March 1, 1989. ... and other countries or under specific provision of a country’s national laws.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the European Union ...
https://law.duke.edu/cspd/papers/nextsteps.docProxy Highlight
I then discuss the second wave: efforts embodied in
the European Union’s Enforcement Directive and the United States’ proposed INDUCE Act to provide even ...
The EU Copyright Directive as Compared to US Copyright Law and ...
scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.c...Proxy Highlight
Jul 1, 2006 ... This Article is brought to you for free
and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted ...
Will EU copyright law ‘carpet bomb’ the digital world? | New ...
https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/201...Proxy Highlight
Jun 12, 2018 ... Article 13 of the EU’s Copyright
Directive, up for vote on 20 June, will impose ...
And I read everything, ok. So can the condescension.
They can have my hyperlinks... when they pry them from my cold dead keyboard.
I OWN UE.
The EU is now claiming world ownership of the combination letters “EU”.
You cannot think EU.
You cannot speak EU.
You can no longer say the word, Deuterium.
I hereby claim world ownership of the letters UE.
You cannot say the word UE or the word Duet. I own it!
There is not much I can do about any of this.
“It’s not that I’m lazy. I just don’t care”
It is however something Trump needs to deal with.
>> Obama let the Internet go,
Yup, an asshole to the core.
with ANY content originating from any EU country’s source
= = =
Well, that would take in everything from the Vikings up to now.
And any mooslimes coming in through Ellis Island.
And I guess that includes the KJV.
PS Where did we get our alphabet from????
I don’t care if the whole internet goes away. We can go back to doing real things.
[ US Federal Trade Commission and International Copyright laws ensure legality here in USA. ]
Buy stock in VPNs
Boycott EU-based links.
Google images changed it policy months ago. Notice how you now have to “click to open image in new tab”. It’s because of Getty & the like.
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