I wonder how Bert will blame this on Chairman Pai.
https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-finish-line/
Update from May 25th 2018, 13:37: Member State governments have today
adopted their position on the copyright reform, with no significant changes
to the upload filters and link tax provisions. It is now up to Parliament to
stop them.
This week, people across the world are learning what they need to do to
comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which will become
applicable on Friday - and many are finding themselves wishing they had
involved themselves in the debate when the law was decided more than two
years ago. A wide public debate about its finer points is happening when it's
too late to make changes or ask for clarifications - a lost opportunity even
for a law that I support.
On the topic of copyright, you NOW have the chance to have an influence - a
chance that will be long lost in two years, when we'll all be "suddenly"
faced with the challenge of having to implement upload filters and the "link
tax" - or running into new limits on what we can do using the web services
we rely on.
In stark contrast to the GDPR, experts near-unanimously agree that the
copyright reform law, as it stands now, is really bad. Where in the case of
the GDPR the EU institutions pushed through many changes against the
concerted lobbying efforts of big business interests, in the copyright
reform they are about to give them exactly what they want.
Parliament and Council have had over a year and a half to fix the glaring
flaws of the Commission proposal - but despite their growing complexity, the
latest drafts of both institutions fail to meet basic standards of
workability and proportionality. Here's the state of play in both bodies:
I. Council: The member state governments
This Friday, the Bulgarian EU Council Presidency is (again) seeking to
finalise the Council's position.
Their latest proposal would still force internet platforms to implement
censorship machines - and makes a total mess out of the planned extra
copyright for news sites by allowing each member state to implement it
differently.
28 different link taxes
The German government is standing in the way of an agreement over which
kinds of snippets of news content should fall under the "link tax" and thus
become subject to a fee when shared: They insist that whether a snippet
constitutes an original intellectual creation by its author or not should
not be a criteria.
To appease them, the Presidency is proposing that every country should just
decide for themselves. Sharing "insubstantial" parts of an article should
remain free, but member states get to choose whether that means snippets
that lack creativity, or snippets that have "no independent economic
significance", whatever length that may be - or both (Recital 34a).
Of course, this fundamentally contradicts the aim to create a Digital Single
Market with common rules, which is right there in the title of the planned
law. Instead of one Europe-wide law, we'd have 28, with the most extreme
becoming the de-facto standard: To avoid being sued, international internet
platforms would be motivated to comply with the strictest version
implemented by any member state.
It also remains open whether simple links will be affected, because they
almost always contain the title of the linked-to page, and it's not obvious
that an article's title counts as "insubstantial". Get ready for drawn-out
court cases and years of legal uncertainty around hyperlinks if this version
of the text becomes the law.
You don't need to filter, but we'll sue you if you don't
The Bulgarian Presidency agrees with the Commission's goal to force internet
platforms to monitor all user uploads to try and detect copyright
infringement, even though that will necessarily lead to takedowns of totally
legal acts of expression. But they realise that putting that in plain
writing violates existing EU law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Their "solution": Make platforms directly liable for all copyright
infringements by their users, and then offer that they can avoid that
unreasonable liability if they can show they've done everything in their
power to prevent copyrighted content from appearing online - namely, by
deploying upload filters (Article 13, paragraph 4). Which remain totally
optional, of course! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Tragically, the only remaining point of disagreement in Council is whether
this proposal is bad enough, or should be made worse.
Where the member states stand
Here's what we know about each member state government's position on the
latest proposals:
****Excerpt. More at link above****
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