Posted on 06/01/2018 1:52:36 PM PDT by Fitzy_888
Video at link.
Holy crap is this Important!
If EU Parliament passes this in their vote 20 days from now, ALL EU based, or EU owned news sources, ie: Politico, Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, etc, will not be used in any manner, link or article snippet. Period.
News aggregators like Drudge, will be significantly limited by news content sources they can mention.
This is a political & MSM CENSORSHIP showstopper.
FR supporters must call / email EU points of contact ASAP.
And what will the EU do to us if we break their law?
Lawsuit of offending US outlet via US FTC.
Similar to the way EU GDPR violations are handled.
We have a treaty to handle GDPR.
We haven’t agreed to do anything with some maybe law of theirs in the future.
EU companies can directly sue US entities that violate copyright laws.
The US is a signatory to International copyright treaties.
https://www.rightsdirect.com/international-copyright-basics/
RE GDPR, EU Data Protection Authorities can directly investigate and fine US companies (up to 4% of their global revenue) for violation of EU citizen data subject rights.
This is one of my areas of professional expertise.
Period
You’ve been right on top of this existential threat to FR.
Jim, please consider prominent visibility - it could very adversely affect FR.
Thanks!
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3659248/posts
June 20th vote decides FR, Drudge, fair use of news article future.
EFF.org
European Copyright Law Isn’t Great. It Could Soon Get a Lot Worse.
BY JEREMY MALCOLM
APRIL 10, 2018
EU Copyright
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.
A Brief History
The European Copyright Directive was enacted in 2001 and is now woefully out of date. Thanks in large part to the work of Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda, many good ideas for updating European copyright law were put forward in a report of the European Parliament in July 2015. The European Commission threw out most of these ideas, and instead released a legislative proposal in October 2016 that focused on giving new powers to publishers. That proposal was referred to several of the committees of the European Parliament, with the Parliament’s Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee taking the lead.
As the final text must also be accepted by the Council of the European Union (which can be considered as the second part of the EU’s bicameral legislature), the Council Presidency has recently been weighing in with its own “compromise” proposals (although this is something of a misnomer, as they do little to improve the Commission’s original text, and in some respects make it worse). Not to be outdone, German MEP (Member of the European Parliament) Axel Voss last month introduced a new set of his own proposals [PDF] for “compromise,” which are somehow worse still. Since Voss leads the JURI committee, this is a big problem.
Link Tax Proposal: A Turn for the (Even) Worse
The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the “link tax” proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss’s latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to.
The practical effect of this could be to make it impossible for a news publisher to publish their stories for free use, for example by using a Creative Commons license. When a similar inalienable link tax was passed into law in Spain, the country’s biggest news aggregation website, which had been Google News, simply closed its Spanish operation. We can well imagine similar results if the link tax went Europe-wide.
That’s not all. Voss proposes that the beneficiaries of the link tax should include press agencies (who often provide the raw information based upon which other journalists write stories), and that libraries should also be responsible for paying extra fees to publishers in “compensation” for their rental and lending activities.
Although Voss hasn’t managed to make the upload filtering proposal any worse than it was before, it was plenty bad enough already. Although targeted mainly at sites that host video and music uploaded by users, it’s broad enough to extend to extend to any sort of user-uploaded content, including code contributed to platforms like Github, and even text contributed to a user-edited encyclopedia (although Voss would support an amendment excluding non-profit encyclopedias from the law, which may or may not save Wikipedia).
How You Can Take Action
These proposals benefit large publishers, but punish those who use the Internet as an open platform for sharing and innovation. Europeans are running out of time to convince their representatives to reject them. Our friends at Mozilla have developed an excellent tool that Europeans can use to directly contact their representatives to deliver a simple message—delete Article 11, delete Article 13, and instead give us copyright laws that promote competition and innovation online.
TAKE ACTION
DEMAND FAIR COPYRIGHT POLICIES
I’m sorry, but those articles are owned by companies and are not private.
Please take your privacy certification again.
Wrong. US companies have been successfully sued for misuse of EU company’s copyright content.
https://www.ftc.gov/terms/copyright
When EU votes for Article 13 publisher linkage fee / tax on June 21st USA Fair Use protections for EU publisher content end.
https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl100.html
The banning of opt-out is a far worse problem than the tightening of protection.
This is a conundrum. It would sound like not playing nice to do something strange in your copyright code that you expect people in a different country to do without even revising the covering treaty. US’s answer to this really ought to be “well that’s nice, let’s discuss putting it in the treaty, but until then go pound sand, we didn’t agree to the treaty on that basis.” The fee-charging mechanism is itself something hinky. If Donald Trump hears about this, I would expect he’d say whoa.
Reagan didn’t anticipate the “if it communicates, control & censor it” situation that we’re facing now.
This is GREAT!!!
My standard response to arguments referring to articles behind paywalls?
"It doesn't exist"
Makes their heads explode every time.
“I’m sorry, but those articles are owned by companies and are not private.”
They are posted on a medium whose expressed purpose is linking.
Thank you for weighing in - you get it.
RE:
“I’m sorry, but those articles are owned by companies and are not private.”
They are posted on a medium whose expressed purpose is linking.
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