EU law: Brussels burps up aspirational copyright tweaks

Audiovisual sector whinging

Can I, as a person living in Europe, buy a British TV licence and get access to the various online content?

No? Then maybe YOU ought to think harder about who is failing who.

price banding

Why not just price band by time if territoriality becomes unavailable. License your content for much $$ so rich western europeans can buy it and then price drop later so that poorer europeans can get on board when their means allow

news

"news publishers get a right to ask for money from snippets scraped by aggregators and search engines like Google"

Solution for problem that does not exist

If a news company does not want a snippet of their story indexing - robots.txt can stop search engines. And if robots.txt is ignored then legal avenues to take.

Don't expect a search engine to pay to index your content they do not want to give away profits needlessly

.. and then the fine line between news company & citizen journalist - your average (wo)man on the street might fond a juicy news exclusvbe and publish it online. There's plenty of newsworthy dirt dished up on dodgy council behaviour by disgruntled council tax payers (as an example of stuff the big news companies do not bother with as regional journalism cut to the bone but happy to print later)

Given that plenty of reports saying many people are incraesingly getting their new from social media, will "News companies" start getting cash from people posting on Twitter, Facebvook, whatever?

Maybe I'm odd, but hardly ever use search engine to find news, get news from visits to a few sites I regulaly visit, some news co specific apps and news email / RSS subscriptions..

Only time I do use search engine is to discover the news that someone is trying to hide in the UK via a super injunction

Unusual support for Google

Its unusual to see El Reg (particularly Andrew) giving such strong support for Google!

The requirement for platforms to "prevent the availability on their services of content identified by rightholders" immediately kills off any startup trying to compete with YouTube, as they are not going to be able to implement a feature like ContentID. Personally I would much prefer Google to be open to competition, particularly from European alternatives that take into account European cultural priorities, like data protection.

In addition, it also kills off any use of internet platforms for legitimate non-infringing uses of content, such as the new exceptions they are so keen to talk about!

Note to editors: copyright is not, and never has been, an absolute right. Whether use of a particular piece of content requires a licence depends on the type and purpose of use, and other aspects of the context. And the decision on whether new content infringes rights in an earlier content is up to a jury to decide (there are many cases where this decision has been extremely difficult to predict).

"Reduce the differences" in copyright regimes

Code for "strengthen copyright protection". They never reduce copyright terms or weaken anything, they always take the strongest bits and apply them everywhere. Then wait for whoever is able to further lengthen or strengthen, and repeat.

That's how Mickey Mouse will still be under copyright long after everyone reading this is dead.

Massive u-turn

About 6 months ago he was talking about removing geo-blocks but that appears to have been shelved, no doubt with pressure from the US government and revolving doors media companies and organisations.

The constant lobbying and increasing copyright terms and laws is half the reason no one feels bad when they stream or copy the media of MPAA or RIAA affiliated companies. Biggest lawyer team syndrome.