End of the Internet as we know it, at least in Europe?

Grey Havoc

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"STRASBOURG (Reuters) - The European Union’s chief executive on Wednesday proposed hefty fines on Google, Facebook, Twitter and other online platforms if they fail to remove extremist content within one hour. "

So who gets to decide what is "extremist"? I'll bet we can guess how that will play out.
 
Currently laughing my a$$ off.
I've been dowloading music on the Internet since 2009, and I can tell you, I've seen a load of downloading systems rise and fall. E-mule, ournia, dilandau, the *original free* Deezer, and a bunch of others. Every time one died, a bunch of others apeared soon thereafter. Last trick: put some "magic word" into the youtube adress and tadaaam, access to all uploaders. Of course, they die one after another, but then, another apears.
So I'm not worried so far.
The bottom line: the power to download, and not only listen, Youtube, is too strong to be killed. It just like war on drugs. The fight will never end. Just like human ingenuity (for good or worse, unfortunately) - look at the Prohibition, palestinian vs Israel, war on drugs, or the Vietnam war.
 
Archibald said:
Currently laughing my a$$ off.
I've been dowloading music on the Internet since 2009, and I can tell you, I've seen a load of downloading systems rise and fall. E-mule, ournia, dilandau, the *original free* Deezer, and a bunch of others. Every time one died, a bunch of others apeared soon thereafter. Last trick: put some "magic word" into the youtube adress and tadaaam, access to all uploaders. Of course, they die one after another, but then, another apears.
So I'm not worried so far.
The bottom line: the power to download, and not only listen, Youtube, is too strong to be killed. It just like war on drugs. The fight will never end. Just like human ingenuity (for good or worse, unfortunately) - look at the Prohibition, palestinian vs Israel, war on drugs, or the Vietnam war.

I don't think they're talking about pirated content, but more mainstream use.
 
Its not about the pirates. Its about people who operate under fair use and fair dealing or the grey areas of the law.


Its a diabolically poor law, ripe for misuse, near impossible to implement technically. Just what you expect from a bunch of clueless politicians.

Content sharing sites such as this forum will be directly liable en masse for any errors in rights management committed by their users. It also makes linking to content something you have to pay the site you are linking to for.

Link to a news story? Violation! Copy the first sentence from the article? Double Violation!

The only defence allowed is the implementation of an automated content take down service to allow rights holders to register, submit their content claims and remove any work they deem infringes their copyright. If the system takes longer than 1 hour from notice to removal, you are operating illegally. There is no right of dispute, no claim of fair use, satire, parody, no burden of proof.

Nobody running a small website like this can even attempt to build such a system - Youtube's ContentID system cost them $60 millon to set up.

To remain compliant, you'd have to shift to Reddit or another big platform. No choice to stay legal.

Then sit back and watch as, say, Boeing assert copyright on all images of Boeing aircraft, and you find the photo you took of a Boeing plane at the airport gets removed. That photo of a model you took and uploaded to Wikimedia as public domain is taken by one of the big picture libraries, then asserted as theirs, and now you can't post it anywhere because the automated content systems remove it.

This already happens to artists of all kinds in small numbers.
 
I hope we're not so stupid as to implement something like this here in the US but I don't have high hopes. Just look at all the stupidity / hysteria around "net neutrality". Too many people in positions of power eager to abuse the potential of the internet.
 
Note that all the music I downloaded is for my own little private use (it goes on a USB for my car). I've done a small amount of space-themed videos using that music as background (using MKVT) but never uploaded any on Youtube. I keep them for myself.
If I uploaded some of these videos, would that cause any trouble ?
 
So the guy managed to win against Universal, Prince and Youtube, and re-uipload his song. He managed to prove that the three had abused of their power. Interesting.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Archibald said:
If I uploaded some of these videos, would that cause any trouble ?

I have seen *many* YouTube videos that had been yanked and stretches of them made silent and then re-uploaded because the copyright owners of such-and-such a song issued a copyright strike.

Gentlemen, behold:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.

On the other hand I got two strikes in the space of 24 hours for downloading a guys shaky-cam F-35 video, putting it through image stabilization, uploading it to my channel, and linking back to his original for credit. I was trying to help him out and that was the thanks I got. :p
 
Grey Havoc said:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/09/14/1937247/the-man-behind-the-eus-copyright-law-is-surprised-by-whats-in-the-proposal

[Raises eyebrow]

Just unscrupulous politicians manipulating other dumbass politicians. AKA "business as usual".
 
Germany tried something similar to this on their own several years ago. The idea was if a news story popped up in a google search, with a couple lines from the intro to the story present in those search results, then google would have to give the news site a bit of money. So what did google do? The told German news sites that they could either enter into an agreement where google wouldn't have to pay them or their site simply wouldn't appear in search results at all. As you can probably guess all these German sites took the agreement and things continued pretty much as before. Now for some reason the EU thinks things will play out differently....
 

 
When big business discovered how useful the Internet could be to their business, it was always on the cards that the old, wild, chaotic days were on the wane. They are now going further and further away as we type about it.
 
I'm not sure "big business" is still buying and the deploying the bulk of the deep packet/content inspection hardware.
 
Apparently Google has happily signed up with all the relevant Australian news organisations, meanwhile Facebook is playing silly buggers / playground bully and this week blocked access to Australian 'news' pages, by which it included not just news organisations, but the Australian government, including health pages in the week Australia launched its vaccination programme, charities, local community groups, its own advertising customers, and itself.
Making it worse, it's admitted it knew it was going to block most of these, and meanwhile far right and anti-vaxxer pages have been left untouched.
 
Google did the same thing in France, reaching a secretly negociated deal with 300 arbitrary selected news publishers. Those not on the deal are angry obviously and question further the reality of Macron's gov commitment to democracy and freedom for failing to represent the interests of all.

To say the least, only a couple of years ago, Monsieur Dupond from suburban France could still directly connect with the life of Mr Doe from Atlanta with a simple click on his local newspaper website.
Today this is subject to IP screening and investments made by the local US News outlet to comply with stringent ever changing European regulation.

If you needed to rebuild the Iron wall in the Matrix, that's how you'd proceed.
 
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It will be worse than not moving on the subject. With money selectively going to actors that had their way in the negociations, it's the fair market practice that was tipped over.
The small media won't get the same revenues as the ones lucky enough to be granted a Google payment.

IMOHO the Australian Gov failed here in its democratic obligations: it was its core responsibility to collect Google fees and subvention equally the media where and how it was deemed to be.
 
 
Hmmmm, I know the playbook, sadly. If the PRC alters the internet in such a fundamental way we can all look forward to pen and pencil. I wonder if they seriously believe their real intent is invisible, if so their delusion is palpable and worrying. A truly independent wild web should be able to block partisan interests in the interests of the whole. I know but I still believe that is what should be.
 
 
 
So the cloud isn't the end all solution. No surprise there. The chinese want to
control the internet in their country. Control the internet control the people.
They would like destroy our ability to operate things on our part of the internet
and force everyone else to see things their way. Also no surprise. We need to be
able to protect ourselves from cyber attacks and not be so dependent on the cloud
or other storage options that we have little control of.
 
I hope we're not so stupid as to implement something like this here in the US but I don't have high hopes. Just look at all the stupidity / hysteria around "net neutrality". Too many people in positions of power eager to abuse the potential of the internet.
US copyright law is already terrible. Software patents can be even worse. Have ever heard of patent trolls?

True story: a number of years ago (iirc, it was in the go-go 90's), somebody copied several hundred lines of copyleft (see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html) code, filed for a patent, on code he stole, which was granted, and proceeded to sue the author of the code for patent violations.

And won.

Charlie Stross has predicted the government will soon outsource copyright enforcement to corporate entities like the RIAA which will sub it out to organized crime. Seems likely to me.
 
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