This is a seriously stupid law. However, it has only passed the first stage. There's still time to prevent it coming into effect, and this first approval was a very narrow win for article 11. This needs a John Oliver style (or literally) call to arms to get people to tell them en masse that this is ridiculous.
The European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11. It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.
Article 13 puts more onus on websites to enforce copyright and could mean that every online platform that allows users to post text, sounds, code or images will need some form of content-recognition system to review all material that users upload. Activist Cory Doctorow has called it a "foolish, terrible idea". Writing on online news website BoingBoing, he said: "No filter exists that can even approximate this. And the closest equivalents are mostly run by American companies, meaning that US big tech is going to get to spy on everything Europeans post and decide what gets censored and what doesn't."
Article 11 has been called the "link tax" by opponents. Designed to limit the power over news publishers that tech giants such as Facebook and Google have, it requires online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content. The theory is that this would help support smaller news publishers and drive users to their homepages rather than directly to their news stories. But critics say it fails to clearly define what constitutes a link and could be manipulated by governments to curb freedom of speech.
But publishers, including the Independent Music Companies Association (Impala) welcomed the vote. "This is a strong and unambiguous message sent by the European Parliament," said executive chair Helen Smith. "It clarifies what the music sector has been saying for years: if you are in the business of distributing music or other creative works, you need a licence, clear and simple. It's time for the digital market to catch up with progress."
But linking to content isn't a form of distribution. Now, linking directly to copyrighted, commercial material is one thing. Linking to a publisher's website where users can make legal purchases is completely different.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44546620
Intellectual property, as a viable mechanism for the protection of content creators, has become a vile parody of itself. People steal my pictures all the time with no attribution. I find them with tineye.com - TinEye Reverse Image Search . Charging for content? Let's get serious here, nobody wants to pay for an image of some godforsaken Wisconsin farmland.
ReplyDeleteI suppose I should be proud that it's my content they've stolen and not someone else's.
Article 13 is a mess, a solution composed by people who don't understand the problem because they don't have the problem. Yet there's a part of me which watches the shrieking about Article 13 with grim satisfaction: the magazines which rip me off - the streaming services which ripped off King Crimson's music, to the point where Robert Fripp simply quit the business rather than generate stomach acid - watching once-proud magazines, newspapers of record, going a-begging...
... wonder not why the Internet has become such a degraded and insipid thing. I religiously credit photographers and artists. I don't steal because I don't like the sensation of being stolen from.
I recently added a short section on terms of use to my website : http://www.rhysy.net/contact-1.html
ReplyDeleteReally I think this is very simple. Sharing is generally something to be encouraged, not restricted. But if you don't want people using your stuff - for which there are plenty of legitimate and excellent reasons - don't bloody transmit it via a medium where it can be instantaneously and freely downloaded and reshared by anone. Share only screen-resolution previews, with watermarks if necessary. Use zoom.it or some such if you want to make it harder to download. Trying to put the genie back in the bottle on already widely disseminated information is folly.
Rhys Taylor I am not beholden to deface my own content with watermark graffiti so as to discourage image thieves. Should anyone ask, and some people have, I'll let them use the content for free and send them the original; thank goodness I have other sources of income. I had thought a lightweight Google Photos image wouldn't be of much use to a magazine editor but apparently it is.
ReplyDeleteBut for musicians and artists, who depend upon that sort of income, or open source projects, I always kick in some money. The Eclipse Project has provided me with the tool with which I have bought two houses and three college educations.
The point, if there must be a point here, is this: I have come to terms with the denizens of the Internet as I have come to terms with the thieves who made off with my bicycles and cars, over time. I like sharing, too. I also like attribution. That might be vanity or hubris, but stealing my content without attribution only confirms my already-low opinion of the human race.
Dan Weese The way I see it, the internet is a fantastic sharing tool. That's what it's good at, that's its fundamental nature. Placing stuff on the internet and not expecting it to be shared is less like having a bike stolen and more like putting a sign saying, "free bike" and being surprised when it's gone five minutes later.
ReplyDeleteThe way to avoid this is for those who don't want to share content to take responsibility for it. I agree, people who share without attribution are arseholes of one degree or another. One particularly dick move I saw was when someone copied one of my videos to their YouTube channel without the end credits. It takes some degree of willful effort to do that. Doesn't mean I want to make all forms of sharing harder though.
As a consumer of content, I don't want this law because it will make it harder for me to access content.
As a resharer of content, I don't want this law because it will make it harder to user other people's material for commenting or dissemination.
As a producer of content, I don't want this law because it will make it more difficult for people to share my stuff. I want my content shared, that's why I put it online ! Where I have financial interests, I can easily protect them by not sharing what I don't want shared. Easy peasy. I'd rather accept a few arseholes not giving me attribution than make it harder for everyone else to access.
I doubt very much this legislation will actually pass though. It's totally unworkable.
Rhys Taylor I have this theory, having watched the failure of communism and the various iterations of the hippies and the communards of various descriptions. Friedrich Engels says idealism never makes it off the page intact. Every scheme which supposes Man is Good is doomed to failure.
ReplyDeleteWhen my children were teenies and the Internet was a new thing in the world, my kids loved to write little books and print off images from the Internet to illustrate them. There's an artist named Nenslo my son particularly liked. So he had me write an email to him, asking for permission to use his images.
Delighted, Nenslo wrote him back and asked to see the book he was writing.
The Internet is great, if you're a good person. My continuing problem is - it's not just a few bad apples who provoke the cretinous politicians to write up such legislation as Article 13. It's the Internet itself which was premised upon the sweet and completely idiotic notion that seven year old boys would be taught to ask permission to copy images from artists.
subgenius.com - ACT NORMAL
DeeAnn Little
ReplyDelete