Monday, June 25, 2018

EU + Copyright Reform = Making Sausages

The quote is attributed to Otto von Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

And in some cases, this with the EU, these sausages internet regulations should simply be abandoned.

From The Journal.ie:
The EU [Legal Affairs Committee] narrowly passed the reform, with 13 votes in favour and 11 against in a ballot that was kept secret given the bitter divisions on the issue. This means the Copyright Directive is now in its final form.
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* Article 11 would force online platforms like Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content they use. Major publishers have pushed for the reform, seeing it as an urgently needed solution against a backdrop of free online news that has decimated earnings for traditional media companies.

* Article 13 would require websites to monitor copyrighted material and would make them legally liable for any copyrighted material shared by users.
From Futurism:
Article 11 would create a new “link tax” that would force news aggregators, search engines, blogs, social networks, and publishers to get a license before linking to any other news source.
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Article 13 would institute “censorship machines” that would scan every piece of user-uploaded content for any copyright infringement, no matter whether it’s a meme, a parody, or some other totally innocuous piece of content.
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We already know this kind of link tax doesn’t work to bring more income to publications. As Julia Reda, German Member of the European Parliament, points out, the result of similar “link taxes” in Germany and Spain was disappointing. “Journalists certainly never saw additional remuneration,” she writes[.]
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“Algorithms that do content-matching are frankly terrible at it,” writes Cory Doctorow, journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing, in a blog post for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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