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Will that wonderful EU copyright movement kill our beloved memes?
EU is yet on a another sh*** without - it seems - really grasping how much websites, communities (forums) and social networks they will affect with this. What is your take on this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8slzjs/on_the_eu_copyright_reform_ii/
Comments
While i don't think this is needed you've probably seen the effects in germany (ie. not a whole lot beyond news aggregators). From skimming over this it doesn't touch stuff like parody, criticism, citation so whoever brought memes into this seems to value drama over facts. As for automatic filtering isn't this already in place at sites like youtube anyways? If so what's the big outcry all about anyways? Besides i really don't see any loss in all the social garbage that might be affected by this. Just host your stuff elsewhere? If this is to much effort chances are your shit was all that important in the first place.
Tbh I saw this issue popping up in various online blogs and communities lately fearing to be reduced to text-only communities if whatever pics/memes are being used are interpreted to be used without consent or if e.g. a movie is being recommend, somebody wants to post a funny scene in form of a screenshot and the upload filter says know. Apparently there are already YouTubers trying to sorta got rid of their copyrights on their videos because only through sharing these, only through the community making monatages/fun clips or screenshots of their work they acctually spread their name. Same for movies/series. Id find it rather boring if you can't post screenshots from some cool moments in series anymore etc :P
Maybe that's just me though^^
Well, that might be covered by your right to cite sources but beyond that i have no idea what could cover that currently. I'd maybe check to what extend you had a legal right to do so before getting all scared about those changes. Remember your local copyright laws don't necessarily have anything equivalent to the often referred to fair use. They also likely don't care about you educating people.
Memes on the other hand usually add something sarcastic/funny (or are at least used in such a context) which gives them a high chance of not being affected as your local copyright law likely has satire exemptions.
As for the youtubers (a highly intelligent, not slightest bit overly dramatic bunch usually...) they should learn a bit about copyright before trying to disclaim it since depending on their country of residence that might not work at all (and even if it does it'll give everyone in a country where this doesn't work a huge headache). Proper licensing is the way to go.
The reason behind this is mostly the different ideas behind european and US copyright laws. Where the US is historically mostly concerned with the right to copy (which makes sense to be passed on or even disclaimed) european countries looked to safeguard the right of the author (which makes little sense to pass on as you can't make someone else the author or stop being it). This often even shows in the names of the respective laws.
The whole problem is that that isn't possible anymore. As I understand it, this legislation makes automatic filtering effectively mandatory for any party that ever 'curates' content in any way, including spam removal, automated classification, and possibly even following up on abuse reports.
This is considerably stricter than the current benchmark on whether a party is a 'safe harbour' currently, you only lose that status if you do some sort of curation on a regular and proactive basis.
This, combined with the impossibility of good 'upload filters' (because they are just fundamentally impossible to implement correctly), leads to the following:
That's a problem.
Thing is, there is effectively no 'right to cite sources' anymore, or 'parody', or 'fair use', or basically whatever else when an upload filter is added. Because upload filters cannot understand context, they can only determine whether a known-copyrighted work was used or not.
It doesn't matter what 'rights' you have on paper if the laws are such that no practical implementation is capable of respecting them.
The EU Committee and its representatives argue these new laws make it more explicit than before how one can enforce citizens' rights in case of abusive blocking (which will very likely happen, as it already happens thousands of times a day).
Basically: oh you think your content being blocked is wrong, unfair, a mistake? Just go on trial, invest some thousands bucks in legal expenses, wait months or years, and at the end if you were right, everything will be ok, you'll be able to upload stuff to exert your right to criticize a long-demoted prime minister, to express your feelings after a terror attack, whatever (those "I am Charlie" images were all using copyrighted material illegally, btw)
This will not affect non EU countries and their servers.
Its same as GDPR, nobody will follow it anyway.
That is pretty much the main point. I've only skimmed over it yet but my understanding was that filtering would be mandatory only to the extend of being a justifiable burden. Which would basically exclude ordinary forums and leave the filtering to the big guys that more or less do it already anyways.
Other sources say that the only thing that's really mandatory is to implement technical measures to cooperate with right holders. Which if true makes the whole thing rather laughable as that could be anything down to a simply contact form.
Imo the only interesting part is how it affects the little independent guys.
As if this isn't the case already when you post stuff on sites like youtube.
Let's say they really have to implement filters and this isn't just some kind of overreaction i am quite sure someone will come up with something that fits the criteria. So you need a filter? OK. Noone says the filter has to be any good (it's pretty much impossible anyways). Given i (who does?) don't have access to any kind of global recognition database the best i could do would be saving a list of hashes that have been reported as bad before and i won't allow to be uploaded again. Is it a filter? I certainly think so. Does it suck? Yes. Is it easily circumventable? Yes. Do i give a shit? No.
I'd argue implementing any serious recognition system is downright impossible for pretty much anyone but the big players and even their systems are quite crappy. My "filter" above is literally a couple cents though.
That's true but then it's already there. Afaik youtubes filter is widely known to be shit. Besides which european country has anything comparable to fair use anyways?
Is there really a definition of what satisfies the filter criteria?
Edit: I realize this might come off a bit dismissive and maybe it is. I have to admit i am somewhat triggered by the overly polemic "oh noez they be takin mah memes" narrative.
Go back to your warez forum and post mindless shit there.
For a start that whole thing is still in the making and not yet a law.
Well noted this post is largely not about MY position but an attempt to understand what it's about and what the politsters have in mind, what drives them.
Regarding the upload filtering that seems to be off the table. Some argue though that the replacement “ensure the non-availability” comes down to the same.
I disagree. To understand it we must try to see THEIR prespective which seems to be "We don't want (seen by us as) illegal content available via backdoors". Plus, I guess, they don't want to get lost in technology discussions about e.g. filtering so they just spell out what they are after.
From what I see that whole thing is the ugly miscreation with one parent being an often ignorant "it can be done so we do it" (plus profit greed) attitude in the tech world and the other parent being utterly clueless and ignorant politsters trying to somehow regulate things they do not even remotely understand. Plus I assume there is an ugly uncle too: EU vs. USA.
I personally don't take it too serious (as in "all memes and the internet will die!!!") mainly for three practical reasons.
laws are all good and nice but they must be enforced. Unless they hire hords of new judges for new courts to be built most cases will take years and hence not even be brought forward. What we will actually see is lots of demands and letters from lawyers and quite little in actually hurting outcome. Or in other words: It will mostly be applied only in (relatively few) significant cases but not for every Johns or Harrys blog with the occasional meme.
adaptation on the legal side. I expect for example many authors to put new style licences on their work. I myself (unknowingly) provided an example with the license for my vpsbench which comes down to "MPL with the exception that if my work is a profit generating part of your operations you can't use it (unless you pay me)". Something like that is what I expect to see much more often because the problem isn't the Johns and Harrys and their blogs; the problem is commercial operations making money from some elses work/rights.
adaptation on the technical side. Keep in mind that this part of the world (internet, computers) is OURS not theirs. We know the ins and outs, the rules, the shortcuts, the possibilites, the dos and donts, etc. while they are largely just farting in their chairs. They will NOT take over our part of the world; they don't have the relevant wiring in their heads and we will (once we stop being shocked or worried and think CONSTRUCTIVELY again) come up with new ways, detours, tunnels beneath their feet, etc.
Keep in mind that exactly that IS the current situation in the first place and it came only to this point because they are way, way behind us and know next to nothing about our part of the world. Finally the driving force behind the politsters is of course business interests. They however don't care a lot about either law or technology but mainly about profit.
No reason to be afraid. Angry, yes because them politsters are everything but the representatives of the people and because they don't give a damn about OUR rights and wishes. But afraid, no. They have but first generation starships while we have a Borg armada.
Microsoft buys open-source Github for 7.5 billion. Now EU wishes to block memes. This month is getting more and more interesting. I am starting to wonder when LET will be banned for linking the following gif:
The Internet really was better before we let the rest of the world join.
Yes and no. It's still pretty great if you avoid the drama/the big sites and just do your own thing. Almost everything I do online is encrypted, anonymous, and self-hosted, so I couldn't care less what new shit the government or a company come up with.
This applies to every other aspect in life, too. Always have a backup plan, always be independent.
What is ridiculous too is that memes could be so many things. Like an image macros, a stock photo, even one that a photographer puts online to view that has some copyright would be "unshareable" - how is that good for the photographer exactly? What would the repercussions be like - am I gonna get banned off my social media I worked hard for?
Kinda. I rather see it as a the time before every idiot and his dog got online. That's what ruined things. The mass appeal brought in commercialization and regulation. I can pretty vividly remember the lawless (as in if laws even existed they ment nothing) place the internet once was and even if that sounds like it was horrible dangerous back then it was actually quite tame and peaceful compared to today.
Not to mention the amount of thoughtful (sometimes brilliant) content put up by random people. Most of it either moved underground and/or disappeared long ago. Now we have facebook and youtube and even if (at least for youtube) not everything on there is complete garbage it's still really really shallow. I mean over the last 10-20 years tons of one of it's kind information has been pretty much erased from the internet globally yet hardly anyone cared. Now endanger a bunch of funny pictures - huge outcry.
I know it's harsh but when i look at all this i can't help but feel apathetic. Do these people even realize that them feeding all those corporate agendas and turning the internet into a money printing machine is not a small part of what brought on the increasingly restrictive policing? Do people really think that their hard work on some social media profile (which seems to rely on being able to post funny pictures...) has any objective value?
It's really really hard to find solidarity for all this shit and sometimes i am tempted to say: Let them just regulate it to death. What's the loss? I've made peace with this experiment being a failure long ago and it might be better for everyone in the end.
This kind of thing has to be read in the context of existing precedent. The local equivalent of the MAFIAA has been lobbying and running lawsuits for a decade now, trying to establish the precedent that upload filtering is a 1) necessary and 2) effective measure. They've been reasonably effective at that.
What that means in practice is that while we might think that an upload filter isn't reasonable for 'the small guys', a court is very likely to decide otherwise. And that is, in the end, what matters.
YouTube? Yes. But a crucial part of my point was "wherever they post stuff" - right now, only a small amount of sites have such filters, so it's relatively easy to find a place to host stuff if it gets thrown out by YouTube. This would no longer be the case with this proposal.
This is not likely to pass as sufficient, given the context I described above. Video/audio fingerprinting might, but then you have the overblocking problem.
You know that, I know that, we probably all know that here. Most judges don't, and the various MAFIAA are very careful not to mention this fact to them.
YouTube isn't the whole internet.
All of them. It's just not called that.
You have a point there and you can rest assured i dislike those kind of organizations as much as the next guy.
Well, it's not like i have 100% trust in courts being reasonable and educated on such subjects but i'd say calling such a decision highly likely is a bit pessimistic. Not to mention that leaving the ultimate outcome to some judges interpretation is very risky. Still having having followed copyright related court cases results differ a lot. While there were courts that were known to be quite biased towards right holders others have literally awarded mere peanuts in damages for infringement.
Also this isn't a binary yes/no decision so while courts may find filters to be mandatory they might still be OK with a simple hashing concept since everything else would basically bankrupt the defendant. Anyways, whatever the interpretation might be this is going to be defined in court and we can only play a guessing game right now. Again this isn't something i like all that much but painting a worst case scenario is imo hurts the credibility of the (valid!) criticism.
It's not like you can't bring your own expert witness to court (yeah, it'll cost you...) who will have a quite easy time explaining that such a requirement is unrealistic (where is that global fingerprint database?) and proof that even if possible implementing it would be an overly harsh burden on the defendant.
I surely don't know the legal systems of all european countries (and i'll be the last person to say that they aren't corruptable) but for the ones i know laws aren't made to be followed by the letter but rather to the intend. Just as fines aren't just set to some arbitrary sum but rather in relation to the persons income/wealth (yeah, i know not always working all that great...). Anyways, we are guessing again so if you prefer the worst case so be it.
See above. Also while i share your dislike for those lobby groups i am not sure if calling them MAFIAA all the time is helping the cause or if it just makes the person doing so seem overly biased to the undecided bystander.
Yeah, i guess i am guilty of pointing to them as an easy example of filters already being in place. On the other hand Youtube makes a good example as i think their success is likely tightly coupled to the copyright infringement done by their users (wasn't there even some leaked internal communication from the early years showing them knowing this quite well and not exactly opposing it?) which is kinda what those new regulations (as horribly misguided the execution might be) aim at. I think Youtube can pretty much be seen as the poster child of success stories based on user generated unlicensed content.
I guess if one was to simplify the various copyright exceptions being in place in europe that makes some sense. Still afaik fair use refers to the non commercial use of copyrighted content without explicitly defining the actual circumstances. The european exceptions i know are all coupled to certain circumstances and usually (the german Privatkopie for example obviously doesn't allow commercial use) don't bother with commercial or non commercial use (you can sell your satirical works all you want). Also i simply dislike the term in this context since it originally referrs to a concept used within US copyright and is often the result of or by itself creates confusion.
Edit: Just to get this straight. I am in no way some kind of copyright fanboy. The terms these days are excessive. Just look at US pre Berne copyright. 10 years from creation with an optional 15 years extension? Not that i like the technicalities of it all that much but still that seems way more reasonable than what are we at now? Death of author + 50-90 years (depending on country of creation)? Also stuff like the GEMA assumption (which basically reverses the burden of proof to the defendant - GEMA doesn't have to proof you have used their content, you have to proof you didn't) is something that needs to go and astronomical fines shouldn't happen for anything but maybe commercial exploitation of content (that's a larger topic though as some countries have no concept of fines being propotional to actual damage let alone to a persons ability to pay them).
@joepie91
Yes. But upload filters have always been needed at least for certain kinds of sites.
I think that for the normal site which is not mega.., etc it will mostly be more like an email or a mail from some lawyer along the lines of "You have content on your site for which you have no authorization. We ask you to take it down or to contact the copyright holder xyz to purchase a license".
One very major factor is the question of cost. The european authorities are bound to holding it reasonably low due to high ranking legal norms like adequacy and the likes and businesses are bound to keep costs low because they are all about cost vs. result/profit ratio.
And then there is of course the 800 pound gorilla in the room, the question whether unauthorized copying will finally be stopped. Some thousand years of history say "No". Humans are pretty good in finding detours. Maybe for example they'll slightly change meme images ...
Plus I think that it's a lot to do with EU vs. USA. Those new rules just happen to come in handy as ammunition in a looming political and trade war. I'm just not sure against whom those bullets will fly in the end.
I don't think these rules will be actually enforced. Pirates party in my country promise they will urge our government to stop it. I think it will end up like immigration quotas years ago. Big drama about it, however countries didn't care about quotas and nothing happened.
Nobody?
So in the month of May nobody received any privacy related emails?
Jailed over memes.
This just gets better and better.