It's still an idiotic law.
The legislation avoids mentioning any specific technological approach to policing online infringement, allowing supporters to plausibly claim that this is not a filtering mandate. Yet it seems pretty clear what this will mean in practice. Big content producers want to see YouTube beef up its Content ID filtering technology—and for other online platforms to adopt similar strategies. Shifting liability for infringement from users to the platforms themselves will give content companies a lot of leverage to get what they want here.
The legislation requires a new copyright for news publishers to restrict how people summarize and link to their articles. The goal is to get Google, Facebook, and other technology giants to pay news publishers licensing fees for permission to link to their articles. Critics have derided this as a "link tax," and they've pointed out that similar efforts were not very successful in Germany and Spain. Google responded by simply de-listing German and Spanish news sites from the Google index, an action that hurt the publishers a lot more than it hurt Google.
But the legislation approved on Wednesday remains vague about how this will work in practice. It doesn't make clear what kinds of links or summaries will be allowed and which will require a license. It says that publishers' rights "shall not extend to mere hyperlinks, which are accompanied by individual words." But does that mean Google will need a license to link to an article using more than one "individual word" from the article? It's not clear. Once again, these details may ultimately be hashed out through 27 different bills passed by 27 different national governments.
In addition to approving new rights for news publishers, the legislation also narrowly approved a new copyright for the organizers of sports teams. Copyright law already gives teams the ability to sell television rights for their games, but fans have traditionally been free to take pictures or personal videos and share them online. The new legislation could give sports teams ownership of all images and video from their games, regardless of who took them and how they are shared.
Under the European Union's convoluted process for approving legislation, the proposal will now become the subject of a three-way negotiation involving the European Parliament, the Council of the Europe Union (representing national governments), and the European Commission (the EU's executive branch). If those three bodies agree to a final directive, then it will be sent to each of the 28 EU member countries (or more likely 27 thanks to Brexit) for implementation in national laws.
Time for a round of signing petitions, methinks...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/european-parliament-approves-copyright-bill-slammed-by-digital-rights-groups/
Franz Kafka once said If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
ReplyDeleteThat's the problem with these goddamned do-gooders: they build these legislative Towers of Babel, little realising the fate of every such tower is to collapse under the weight of its builders. Doesn't stop them from trying, though, the swine. Never was such a pile of evil done as from good intentions.
If it served any useful purpose, or protected one author or photographer or filmmaker, I'd be for such legislation. It doesn't, though. Hell is run by French bureaucrats.