Just in: Articles 11 and 13

colak · 2019-03-26 12:58:04

Net censorship is now eu law. Articles 11 and 13 have been ratified.

Bloke · 2019-03-26 13:20:10

Someone ought to tell Whatsapp to remove their animated GIF meme tool.

Destry · 2019-03-26 13:38:21

colak wrote #317310:

Net censorship is now eu law. Articles 11 and 13 have been ratified.

Maybe not quite yet. Unlike GDPR, this has some extra steps that could take at least to 2021.

And by then the internet could blow up, so don’t sweat it. ;)

michaelkpate · 2019-03-26 17:02:15

It was nice knowing all of you back when you were still allowed to be on the Internet.

bici · 2019-03-26 19:43:39

maybe we will all head over to the deep dark web… wherever that might be.

michaelkpate · 2019-03-26 23:52:29

A breakdown of the vote by Member Nation

via this tweet

Destry · 2019-03-27 07:17:22

It’s useful to compare that chart with the one breaking it down by political party. Julia Reda has one, but I can’t find it except here

All Greens and Pirate parties voted it down, for the most part, regardless of country. They would be in that orange part of the bar, I guess.

So, you know, vote sunflowers and Jolly Rogers. ?

michaelkpate · 2019-03-27 20:17:02

The Plot thickens.

A few hours later, the EU put out the official voting record which includes an astounding 13 MEPs who said they voted incorrectly. Ten of them said they meant to vote for amendments. Two of them said they wanted to vote against it. And one did not want to vote. As you can see in the screenshot below, everyone next to the “+” would have voted for the amendments if they had actually realized what they were voting on. All told, that would have shifted the vote and allowed for a vote on amendments. By a slim majority, the law would have been opened up to deleting Articles 11 and 13. In other words, whoever changed the order of the vote pulled a fast one and got the EU Copyright Directive approved… despite the EU Parliament not clearly agreeing on that. – Enough MEPs Say They Mistakenly Voted For Articles 11 & 13 That The Vote Should Have Flipped; EU Parliament Says Too Bad

jakob · 2019-03-27 22:13:00

which includes an astounding 13 MEPs who said they voted incorrectly

If that’s true, that’s amazing. Whether or not someone’s pulled a fast one with rephrasing or reordering items, it’s still their job to actually look at what they’re voting for!

phiw13 · 2019-03-27 23:33:46

jakob wrote #317352:

If that’s true, that’s amazing. Whether or not someone’s pulled a fast one with rephrasing or reordering items, it’s still their job to actually look at what they’re voting for!

Colour me extremely sceptical about that one. In a high stakes game like this, most MEP would pay attention to what they do. Unless they are stoned or drunken or something. (and all sources for that claim of mistaken vote are tainted, imho)

PS – I for one am fairly happy that this legislation finally passed. There, I said it.

Destry · 2019-03-28 07:14:28

michaelkpate wrote #317330:

A breakdown of the vote by Member Nation

There must be more to the weightings of a given country, and France has way too much weight, evidently, because when I look at that chart, the ‘yes’ only has it down to Hungary, and you can remove Czech Republic and Slovenia before that, which makes it noticeably fewer countries than what voted ‘no’. Presumably the blue abstainers mean zilch.

phiw13 wrote #317354:

I for one am fairly happy that this legislation finally passed. There, I said it.

I have to admit, I’ve always wondered what the big deal is, too, for anyone outside of mainstream media. I have no love for them, or search engines, or socmed memes for that matter. I can function just fine with linked titles; I don’t need all the extra metadata.

I figured I just didn’t understand the bills, or what it could lead to in the future, and that’s probably still true. (Please, no links, I’ve read enough.)

It doesn’t look like it matters anyway. With all the marshaling that has been going on to petition against it, etc, having no influence… The popular wigs don’t give a shiza. And the rebels will just come up with something in spite of it all.

colak · 2019-04-09 10:52:49

this new copyright law is making every online platform older that three years, directly liable for every copyright infringement that their users commit.

youtu.be/u2yu_yLHWVg

Destry · 2019-04-09 12:07:02

It’s my understanding, Colak, that only platforms that have a commercial objective are subject to the filtering requirements, or at least have anything to worry about penalty-wise. So Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest (it will be interesting to see what happens to that one), etc. are definitely subject (and the main targets of the law), but this forum, for example, is not. That is, nobody is going to suddenly take Team Textpattern to court, for example, because you posted that YouTube video.

Also, it’s not that content is being shared, but that to much of the content is being made part of the links. So in Google+, for example and all of those social platforms, in fact… Someone shares a link and it’s designed to show title, description, hero image, author… whatever they pull. That is what the laws are not happy about. If those platforms only shared the URL, there would be no problem. (Come to think of it, the timing of Google Plus’s demise is rather curious.)

So it seems to me that any platform concerned about being in violation of this law only needs to downgrade their link tech so it shows a text URL only, not all the meta-gloss too. I see Facebook, for example, already back-pedaling and looking about nervously from the long and unrelenting trail of bad press it’s getting. If this copyright law is a further kick to FBs ribs, dropping the beast, I’m not complaining.

Where I see people unhappy, and maybe this is where you sit too, is fearing they can’t share pictures of something they found online, or whatever. Something that is not their own creation. Well, again, if you just point a link to the source instead of re-posting the artwork on your platform, there is no problem. Or, if you get a license from the source, as copyright laws generally require, there is no problem. Everyone keeps saying, like in this video, the ‘danger’ of this. We’re all going to be living under totalitarian rule…

Well, I don’t know. I think the world is already somewhat totalitarian, some places worse than others, and we face much bigger and far more critical problems in the near future than worrying about infringements. That much I would agree to here. And that speaks to proponents of either side on these laws, not just one or other. Such energy should be focused on other, more-critical problems in society, like oil dependency and species loss, in my opinion.

In any case, I’m happy to be shown wrong, but that’s my understanding of the policy. So let’s dive into the actual policies, if necessary, to find out what it really says there, like we did with the GDPR, rather than listen to the opinions from people who just want free access and use of the creativity of others.

Here are some questions I would have:

If you’re a creator and freely share your work with a public license, can others then freely use/share it as allowed?
If you get permission (rights of use license) from the creator of copyrighted work, can you then use it as requested?
If copyrighted work exits the 70-year protection period, becoming public-domain, can we then use it in our work?

I would think the answer to all these questions is ‘yes’, same as it’s always been. So where is the problem for the little guy, exactly? Nothing changes as far as I can see. Those big tech social platforms that so clearly trample our rights, on the other hand, are going to feel the heat. I’m not bothered by that.

That’s my jaded position. Show me where I’m blind.

colak · 2019-04-09 17:42:11

Hi Destry
You phrase the situation in a way that it is hard to argue against but I think that the net is a much more complex place, behaviourally-wise.
For example there are the memes which are so important in today’s net culture and activism. There are large curated sites or accounts residing in platforms which can only pass their message through serial copyright infringement. Check out this one for example.

The problem with the law (as with all such commercially orientated laws) is that it does not consider context.

michaelkpate · 2019-04-09 22:54:14

Destry wrote #317571:

Also, it’s not that content is being shared, but that to much of the content is being made part of the links. So in Google+, for example and all of those social platforms, in fact… Someone shares a link and it’s designed to show title, description, hero image, author… whatever they pull. That is what the laws are not happy about. If those platforms only shared the URL, there would be no problem. (Come to think of it, the timing of Google Plus’s demise is rather curious.)

If you don’t want people to share your content on a social network, don’t include the markup tags.

With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experiences to Tweets, helping to drive traffic to your website. Simply add a few lines of markup to your webpage, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to their followers. – Optimize Tweets with Cards

Facebook is trickier because it will guess.

Most content is shared to Facebook as a URL, so it’s important that you mark up your website with Open Graph tags to take control over how your content appears on Facebook. Without these tags, the Facebook Crawler uses internal heuristics to make a best guess about the title, description, and preview image for your content. Designate this info explicitly with Open Graph tags to ensure the highest quality posts on Facebook. – A Guide to Sharing for Webmasters

You can also disallow their crawler bots specifically in your robots.txt.

The issue in Germany and Spain was not that the content was being shared. It was after the mandatory licensing laws were put in place Google specifically stopped sharing their content.

Rather than risk paying licensing fees for using snippets of Axel Springer’s stories, Google removed everything except the headlines from their results. After that, Axel Springer’s web traffic fell off a cliff: visitors from web search fell 40 percent; from Google News, they fell 80 percent. The company’s chief executive said they would have “shot ourselves out of the market” if they’d continued with the policy, according to Reuters. This isn’t a tiny company fighting a monolithic corporation, either: Axel Springer publishes Europe’s top-selling daily paper, Bild. – German publisher caves to Google News after massive traffic drop

The publishers wanted their content shared so that they could get paid for it. In Germany, publishers could opt out and they all did after Google stopped sharing their content. In Spain, the law was specifically written so that publishers could not opt out and Google shut down Google News in Spain.

I presume something similar will happen in 2021.

Here are some questions I would have:

I am going to use YouTube specifically for this one although there are other applications.

1. If you’re a creator and freely share your work with a public license, can others then freely use/share it as allowed?

In theory, yes. The problem is that it is very difficult for YouTube’s Content ID system to determine the license for something.

While Youtube requires that people who want to make ContentID claims go through a vetting process, the process is very lightweight and allows all kinds of bad actors in, who can then steal creators’ revenues by falsely claiming copyright over their videos. No one expects Youtube to be perfect, but it also fails with a remarkable lack of grace. The small number of humans available to review contested claims means that people who fall afoul of machine error, sloppiness and criminal mischief are often unable to get a fair hearing or justice. – Blackmailers use false copyright claims to shut down victims’ Youtube accounts, offer to lift them in exchange for Bitcoin

With YouTube now liable for every false negative, I doubt the system is going to get much better.

2. If you get permission (rights of use license) from the creator of copyrighted work, can you then use it as requested?

In theory, yes. Here’s a case I ran across the other day: A YouTuber recorded an original background track and put it up years ago. Recently, the video was claimed to be infringing on another work. It turns out the claimant bought the track from a third party who claimed it was their own original work, added vocals, and released it on her own channel. So neither the original creator nor the new one did anything wrong. But it will be difficult to sort out under existing law let alone Article 19.

3. If copyrighted work exits the 70-year protection period, becoming public-domain, can we then use it in our work?

In theory, yes. Although I don’t know where you are getting the 70 years from.

Currently in the US, Copyright for something created by a person is 70 years from the death of the author, not the publication of the work. Copyright for work-for-hire is 120 years from creation or 95 years from publication, whichever is shorter. It actually used to be worse because there used to be a renewal provision. That was one of the reasons Google has pretty much dropped their Book Scanning Project, even after winning the suit with the Author’s Guild.

At this point, the safest thing for major companies to do is just keep all EUCD content off their sites. Which again is not actually what the rights holders want.

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#1 2019-03-26 12:58:04