JURI, European Parliament's legal affairs committee, voted today to approve article 11 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which allows news publishers to seek payment for reuse of snippets of articles, in a narrow 13:12 vote. It also voted to back a more controversial measure, article 13 of the same …

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  2. Wednesday 20th June 2018 22:17 GMT Mark 85
    
    Re: Hand Off My Internet
    
    People like the EFF are the classic Lenin's "useful idiots" who could only help megacorp like Google achieve their aim, blinded by their anarchism.
    
    I upvoted your post but go look again in the article and see who's funding the EFF. Hint: Google is one of the funders and appears to be in control. So EFF is the megacorp, not "useful idiots".
    
    1 4 Reply
2. Wednesday 20th June 2018 17:32 GMT Mage
  
  Re: Hand Off My Internet
  
  A totally anarchist society sounds nice, but only works for perfect people. We need to regulate companies and have laws.
  
  Internet is simply a delivery/distribution medium. The same laws as for printed material, bill board ads, TV, Radio content, and Mail Order must apply, as appropriate to content and/or service. Also similar oversight & regulation as postal services, telephone, telegraph, radio spectrum and satellite slots & frequencies.
  
  There is no sense whatsoever that the Internet should be unregulated in terms of access, infrastructure, privacy, content etc.
  
  14 3 Reply
  1. Thursday 21st June 2018 09:08 GMT technoise
    
    Re: Hand Off My Internet
    
    Internet is simply a delivery/distribution medium. The same laws as for printed material, bill board ads, TV, Radio content, and Mail Order must apply, as appropriate to content and/or service.
    
    No - it's not simply anything at all.
    
    The Internet and World Wide Web are not like the other media you are talking about, which are centralised, and rely on a lot of concentration of capital and/or power for someone to use, hence making them centralised, star networks - it's a decentralised, mesh based network, allowing many-to-many communication, and the big powers don't like that, because they have cottoned on, maybe too late, to the realisation that the very medium itself, has a natural tendency to shift the centre of gravity away from power and money, to the individual citizen, where it truly belongs, in an actual democracy.
    
    However, power and money, and the legacy media,having realised this, will naturally perceive that as an existential threat to their power and money, and influence, and so can be expected to use legislation to try to make the Internet look like any other centralised distribution system that has existed to date.
    
    3 2 Reply
    1. Thursday 21st June 2018 09:58 GMT phuzz
      
      Re: Hand Off My Internet
      
      "The Internet and World Wide Web are [...] a decentralised, mesh based network,"
      
      It might look that way from a distance, but when you look closer you'll see that generally internet connections are star shaped networks, with an ISP having all their customers connecting to them, and only a small number of routes out. Likewise, most links between cities and countries all come together in peering exchange points, and of course submarine cables tend to follow similar routes, and land at the same places.
      
      For these words of mine to reach you, most of the way they'll be travelling over corporate owned networks and systems, only the last few meters are somewhat 'free'.
      
      5 0 Reply
      1. Thursday 21st June 2018 14:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
        
        "The Internet and World Wide Web are [...] a decentralised, mesh based network,"
        
        It was, maybe, in the very beginning . Now it's an highly centralized system when most contents are stored by a few megacorps server and fashion dictates where little serfs have to go to store their little gems.
        
        Look at how much Google and Facebook control contents - email, photos, videos, blogs.... how many services run and are stored on AWS or Azure? All the code was in GitHub, and only the hatred for MS will make some migrate to other shores, until a new big centralized service becomes fashionable, and moths will fly to it and store everything there.
        
        Google is exactly scared that if the loopholes that allowed till now to become a monstrous collector of everything without any liability are closed, it cannot sustain such scale with little costs and huge profits, and then Internet yes, will break into smaller pieces, in a positive way, because it will return to be much more diverse and de-centralised one.
        
        Maybe you'll still need a search engine to find a video, but there won't be anymore a chance that 99.999999% of the times it will be hosted on YouTube...
        
        2 0 Reply
      2. Thursday 21st June 2018 14:24 GMT technoise
        
        Re: Hand Off My Internet
        
        It might look that way from a distance, but when you look closer you'll see that generally internet connections are star shaped networks, with an ISP having all their customers connecting to them, and only a small number of routes out. Likewise, most links between cities and countries all come together in peering exchange points, and of course submarine cables tend to follow similar routes, and land at the same places.
        
        For these words of mine to reach you, most of the way they'll be travelling over corporate owned networks and systems, only the last few meters are somewhat 'free'.
        
        At the hardware layer, yes, but at the interpersonal layer, which is what the legacy media and the large commercial enterprises are concerned with, we can communicate directly without having to go through their intermediation, and that is a loss of power to governments, media, corporations, and the politico-media bubble, and the corporate state.
        
        But the hardware layer, and much of the application layer, are controlled by business entities, and the corporate state can now use legislation to control those. If we let them succeed, they can get all communication back under their control. That is bad for us, and freedom and democracy, and ultimately, bad for everybody.
        
        We are not talking about some idealistic utopia, we are talking about something we already have, which, if we are complacent, we are in danger of losing.
        
        3 0 Reply
        
        Thursday 21st June 2018 18:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
        
        but at the interpersonal layer [...] we can communicate directly
        
        Yes, now using cloud services rented to you by one of the few megacorps above...
        
        Internet is becoming an highly centralized system - and the less liable those huge megacorps are about what they actually control, the higher the profits of a centralized system with little or no competition.
        
        And implementing surveillance and crushing free speech when a few large companies are in charge and are bound only to law they write themselves, is much, much easier.
        
        1 0 Reply
3. Thursday 21st June 2018 13:12 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
  
  Re: Hand Off My Internet
  
  "Get all government regulations off the Internet"
  
  Nonsense!
  
  The internet is a public area, and therefore public laws and decency should be obeyed.
  
  If the internet keeps flouting public laws, it deserves to be broken up, like any other criminal gang,
  
  3 4 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 14:54 GMT Giovani Tapini

What will happen is

Almost every fan site for anything will be taken down and stripped of its content. Blunt instrument censorship of your content stops people talking about it. Can you imagine the internet without any mentions of GOT except within the publishers sites. It would have generated far less interest and income.

I am sure that will make great business, and won't somebody think of the children!

18 3 Reply
1. Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:02 GMT Martin
  
  Re: What will happen is
  
  Can you imagine the internet without any mentions of GOT except within the publishers sites. It would have generated far less interest and income.
  
  True, that is one upside I hadn't considered....
  
  22 1 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:14 GMT IDoNotThinkSo

Ignore?

Perhaps we should just leave this EU single market thingy.

/Steps away/

12 2 Reply
1. Thursday 21st June 2018 13:39 GMT Bernard M. Orwell
  
  Re: Ignore?
  
  "Perhaps we should just leave this EU single market thingy."
  
  Last night, the Commons voted to transfer all EU law into UK law in a very short period of time. Once that exercise is complete, those laws can then be "amended" to suit the UK governments vision of Things to Come.
  
  It'd be nice to think that they'd spot this particular one and throw it out, saying "we won't stand for our nations internet users uploads being spot checked for....ahem...copyright infringement! That's against our nations strong stance on freedom of speech and expression."
  
  But, if I thought, for even one second that they are actually going to something like that, I might just find some worth in Brexit after all.
  
  I believe that this particular issue may be a real red flag for anyone who believe in the "taking back sovereignty" slogan.
  
  2 0 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:15 GMT fishman

News sites should pay the aggregators.

News sites make money off of the additional traffic driven to them by the news aggregators. The news sites should pay something to the aggregators for the additional traffic - not the other way around.

I expect that there will be fewer articles from EU news sources linked to by aggregators, replaced by news sources from other parts of the world. Look at Spain as an example of how well laws like this worked.

6 5 Reply
1. Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:20 GMT Claptrap314
  
  Re: News sites should pay the aggregators.
  
  That's only true IF they aggregators drive traffic. Drudge does. Facebook tries really, really hard not to.
  
  10 0 Reply
2. Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:38 GMT MJI
  
  Re: News sites should pay the aggregators.
  
  Years ago Google news used to link to some good news sites, so it drove my traffic to them
  
  7 0 Reply
3. Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:39 GMT The Indomitable Gall
  
  Re: News sites should pay the aggregators.
  
  " News sites make money off of the additional traffic driven to them by the news aggregators. "
  
  Which assumes that:
  
  A) aggregator sites drive traffic to content providers
  
  and
  
  B) the traffic driven is of high value.
  
  Whether A is true or not depends on whether you're interested in unique visitors or page-views. Aggregators increase the former, but decrease the latter. This is where B comes in. "Drive-by" readers are less valuable than brand-loyal "sticky" readers.
  
  Overall, aggregators appear to cost content providers significantly.
  
  6 3 Reply
  1. Wednesday 20th June 2018 18:39 GMT ratfox
    
    Re: News sites should pay the aggregators.
    
    Overall, aggregators appear to cost content providers significantly.
    
    Then make the aggregators illegal, or force them to pay like Spain did. When Google shut down their news service in Spain, I suspect it was good for the largest media, where people would naturally turn to if they have no aggregator available. On the other hand, it was probably bad for smaller sites.
    
    However, one thing I am certain is: If Google and providers would negotiate a price for showing articles in Google news, the providers would end up paying money for it.
    
    1 0 Reply
  2. Thursday 21st June 2018 15:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: News sites should pay the aggregators.
    
    "Whether A is true or not depends on whether you're interested in unique visitors or page-views. Aggregators increase the former, but decrease the latter. This is where B comes in. "Drive-by" readers are less valuable than brand-loyal "sticky" readers.
    
    Overall, aggregators appear to cost content providers significantly."
    
    your evidence for asserting this utter tosh??
    
    maybe all you regtards are much smarter than me but where on earth is the harm in this to a news provider? (see some google news headlines below)
    
    You can't increase unique visitors WITHOUT increasing page views by definition ... the users are clicking through from the aggregator link to the news provider's site - how can that not increase views as well as unique visitors.
    
    Just pasted in some headline links from google news this pm below .. i fail to see how in any way the publishers copyright is being abused or how google is "stealing" ad revenues.
    
    The reader either is interested and clicks through and the publisher gets the unique visitor and Ad revenue from page views or the user isn't intererested in either the story or the publisher in which case the publisher has neither lost a uniqure visitor or any a=Ad revenue.
    
    Only morons like Murdoch think their organs are special enough that google or any other aggregator is going to pay them for a sodding story title link... i mean really, it's totally risible propostion. I notice now that the (london) Times will in fact let you have a story or part of one for free now having shown nought but a paywall for 3 years and the Sun has basically given up on it's paywall entirely.. I mean really, how arrogant can these f***ers be? Do they seriously think people love the Sun or The Times so much they are going to pay in droves when the bbc and guardian or express etc are free. The product is just not good enough or dilneated enough for them to ever have that many brand loyal sticky readers behind the paywall.
    
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    European automakers stung by Daimler profit warning
    
    Shares in Europe's largest automakers fell sharply in early trading on Thursday after Daimler issued a warning that its profits would be hit by new Chinese tariffs ...
    
    Financial Times
    
    4 hours ago
    
    Daimler profit warning sends car shares skidding
    
    Shares tumble after the German carmaker says Chinese tariffs on US vehicle imports would hit its sales.
    
    BBC News
    
    2 hours ago
    
    Daimler issues profit warning on back of US-China trade dispute
    
    The Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler has become the first major company to issue a profit warning after being hit by the escalating trade war between the US and ...
    
    The Guardian
    
    5 hours ago
    
    Daimler blames profit warning on US-China trade war
    
    Mercedes parent Daimler has become the first major company to issue a profit warning in the wake of China raising tariffs last week amid the tit-for-tat initiated by ...
    
    Financial Times
    
    Today
    
    Donald Trump Is the Perfect Scapegoat for Mercedes
    
    German carmakers are a handy whipping boy for Donald Trump. The presence of so many BMW, Mercedes and Audi vehicles on American roads is prima facie ...
    
    Bloomberg
    
    5 hours ago
    
    2 0 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 15:44 GMT Duncan Macdonald

Not yet final

It is still possible for the European Parliament to say no to this rubbish. The JURI committee is not the full Parliament and the MEPs can still override the committee. The various ~~content providers~~ copyright cartels still need to convince or bribe the MEPs not to override JURI.

9 0 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 16:18 GMT Zwuramunga

.eu

404 NOT FOUND

4 0 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 16:25 GMT earl grey

Hands off my pronz

And my tentacles. She knows.

2 1 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 16:55 GMT Daggerchild

Lots of lovely sticks! No carrots?

So, is there a rule yet that sets up penalties for erroneous automatic takedown demands from rich media empires?

Does this mean Slashdot won't be able to quote El Reg articles in their summaries, in Europe?

10 0 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 16:55 GMT Anonymous Coward

Google being allowed to police itself on YouTube is ridiculous - their copyright system ignores blatant infringement constantly, while non-infringing Youtubers, i.e., actual users generating "user-generated content", receive inscrutable and unreviewable "copyright strikes" regularly. Obliging them to do more of the same is a terrible compromise.

8 2 Reply
1. Wednesday 20th June 2018 17:37 GMT Mage
  
  re: Google being allowed to police itself on YouTube is ridiculous
  
  Agreed.
  
  I've no idea what the workable solution is, other than human moderation of EVERY upload and thus a per item upload charge.
  
  Google wants free uploads and little checking to maximise advert revenue.
  
  3 0 Reply
Wednesday 20th June 2018 18:52 GMT whitepines

Don't like it? Don't buy Big Media garbage. Don't pirate it either!

Make your own content instead. Support the artists directly under license terms that are more fair for society.

When copyright has become a giant noose that is strangling society, the only reasonable option is to embrace free software / free culture projects. Anyone saying otherwise is trying to to sell you something (or sell you, or both...)

5 2 Reply
1. Wednesday 20th June 2018 21:32 GMT Mark 85
  
  Make your own content instead. Support the artists directly under license terms that are more fair for society.
  
  Nice idea... lovely. So if you create some content and it gets ripped off, who protects you? The catch on the protection is if the country where the piracy is done cares. Look at the stuff being ripped off by the Chinese for example.
  
  5 1 Reply
  1. Thursday 21st June 2018 08:58 GMT Graham Cobb
    
    So if you create some content and it gets ripped off, who protects you?
    
    No one does. Sorry -- that is the way the world has changed. Wake up, smell the coffee and get a new business model. There are other ways to make money from your talent and the material you have created than getting paid for copies.
    
    Copyright (the law) and business models around talent and content have always been reinvented every 20 years due to changes in technology. Just think about the impact (on both laws and business models) of piano rolls, phonographs, radio, TV, VCRs, etc. All those took away someone's existing exclusive rights and forced them to change their business model. Some of them went out of business and some others were more successful. That is business.
    
    Cory Doctorow has a great example: think about music hall artists. They used to have control over the only way to be entertained by them: you had to buy a ticket to get into the theatre. It means that success rewarded not only being able to sign and dance but also charisma, stage presence and good looks. Then radio came along and everyone could get the entertainment for free. All of a sudden success rewarded a good voice (and a talent for ending up in the newspapers). Dancing, charisma, looks became much less relevant. Some performers lost out very heavily, and others saw much increased success. No one succeeded in getting the new reality banned.
    
    5 1 Reply
    1. Thursday 21st June 2018 09:54 GMT Skwosh
      
      Oh yeah – Cory Doctorow, I remember him – his website has a shop now.
      
      Things change.
      
      There was this thing called the industrial revolution.
      
      History moving forward.
      
      Big factories, pumping out crap into the air and the rivers – horrible unsafe working conditions – large companies making lots of money exploiting the easily exploitable and dumping their externalities on the rest of society.
      
      Presumably the thinking at that time was that if you can't make it with your outdated agrarian labouring skills then you need to adapt. If the air is a bit poisonous then just man up because this is how things are now – work with it – don't hark back to a bygone age when the air was breathable, the rivers had fish and kids didn't need to work 18 hour shifts on dangerous machinery just to eat.
      
      You can't turn the clock back man.
      
      Things changed again though – as they do.
      
      Incidentally, have you not noticed that things have started to change in the world of digital content?
      
      People are paying.
      
      Spotify. Netflix.
      
      There's even money in recorded music again.
      
      Extraordinary.
      
      Lots of creative people in the music and TV production world busily and happily adapting to this new reality.
      
      1 0 Reply
    2. Wednesday 11th July 2018 08:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      "Then radio came along and everyone could get the entertainment for free."
      
      Actually, in many countries outside US radio (and later TV) were for a long time state managed, and you had to pay to use them (in many, you still pay TV licenses or the like).
      
      In US, the "free" contents started to be paid by advertised exactly back then. But still artists had control on their performance - broadcasting enlarged the audience. True, it changed the business model also, but RCA didn't have people bringing radio transmitters into theatres to broadcast shows without the performers permission.
      
      Recording technologies, when they became cheap enough for the consumer marked, became the real issue for copyright owners. Still, even the illegal copies market didn't have the size, reach and protection of YouTube today.
      
      1 0 Reply
2. Wednesday 4th July 2018 07:59 GMT pater_suspiriorum
  
  IP needs to be abolished completely.
  
  0 1 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 01:45 GMT Anonymous Coward

Copy & Paste Journalism

I wasn't paying much attention to the effect on Google; they're a mega-corp so good luck with that. What I found more interesting is looking at all the ways publishers can negatively effect their competitors. There's an awful lot of copying, snippets true, going on out there. If published snippets can be detected, and they can in roughly the same way as music, what happens then? Plagurism is very much alive and well.

0 1 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 04:44 GMT Claverhouse

It is modern democratic governments who have done the most to expunge freedom of speech, in both the last 50 years of the 20th and the first two decades of the 21st. In America under both BushObama & Trump. Partially because most of the democracy doesn't give a fuck about all these things and just wants people like Snowden to shut up and stop being traitors.

Modern democracy wants the freedom to watch what is put before them to be watched. People in tyrannies in the 18th century had more 'freedom of speech'. When Fred the Great came across a poster criticising him he merely ordered it to be placed lower down so more people could read it. If Obama had come across such, the Secret Service would have been all over it.

4 1 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 07:06 GMT Frank Fisher

This is worse than you think.

A net curtain is descending across this continent.

8 2 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 07:09 GMT Dodgy Geezer

Did the EU just 'break the internet'?

Er... probably not. To do that it would need to mess up TCP/IP, or the DNS system.

Causing problems for hyperlinks would damage the 'World-Wide Web', however. I had hoped that a technical crew such as El Reg would appreciate the difference....

4 0 Reply
1. Thursday 21st June 2018 13:19 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
  
  Re: Did the EU just 'break the internet'?
  
  It is IPv6 that messed up TCP/IP, not politicians.
  
  0 0 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 07:10 GMT RobertLongshaft

Think about it.

The globalists took a pasting in the Brexit and 2016 US elections, the lost because they could not control the narrative on the internet. This is the way they take control back, this is another slow drip on the way to global slavery.

Globalism is corporatism wrapped up in soft socialism, you think these parasites want whats best of the normal everyday people of Europe? They only care about their slaves being obedient in future.

Pro Europeans are turkey's voting for Christmas, most of them are too wrapped up in the emotional narrative of collectivism.

5 5 Reply
1. Thursday 21st June 2018 08:13 GMT Dodgy Geezer
  
  ....The globalists took a pasting in the Brexit and 2016 US elections, the lost because they could not control the narrative on the internet. ...
  
  Interesting. They control the narrative on the media totally but that didn't seem to help them. All that happened was that people became deeply suspicious of everything they said...
  
  1 0 Reply
2. Thursday 21st June 2018 08:27 GMT Frank Fisher
  
  Yup
  
  Correct. wrote about it here nine years ago - http://www.frankfisher.org/the-battle-of-climategate-is-over-the-battle-for-the-internet-has-begun/
  
  0 2 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 08:39 GMT mark l 2

How does this new law benefit EU citizens? All it does is allow big media corporations to be able to continue to line their pockets.

It will just create an environment where any website that lets you upload your own content deletes anything that could possibly be infringing 'just in case'.

EG. At current you could upload a video to Youtube of your kid dressed as Batman and call the video title 'Batman' and the video wouldn't be deleted. But in a situation where Google might be fined for allowing videos which possibly could be infringing, your video with the title batman gets automatically deleted as because they have to ensure anything potentially infringing doesn't get published.

8 1 Reply
1. Thursday 21st June 2018 08:47 GMT Frank Fisher
  
  State corporatists gonna state corporate
  
  2 2 Reply
2. Thursday 21st June 2018 09:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Actually, it always worked that way. Just, until a few years ago, a video of your kids dressed as "Batman" and titled "Batman" would have been inflicted cruelly on only the few relatives so unfortunate to have to spend an evening with you with no excuse to leave.
  
  That was also true for many other amateurish movies, songs, fanzine, etc. So no much damage done.
  
  But now Google & C. have made available the tools to distribute them to a worldwide audience - and also make money from it, and that completely changes the landscape. Thereby yes, using someone else's work and ideas, and publishing it worldwide, even if you're using your kids, may infringe copyrights.
  
  We could discuss how long a patent or copyright should be valid, but they were created for sensible reasons - and it's clear that if people copy them it's because they perceive a value - why should they appropriate that value at will? Why spend time, energy, money and other resources to create value that will be appropriate by others too lazy and/or incompetent to create it themselves?
  
  2 1 Reply
This post has been deleted by its author
Thursday 21st June 2018 11:01 GMT Boris the Cockroach

On the plus side

no more of those downfall parodies where Hitler has his subtitles replaced..

Maybe that was the cause...... knowing that the great unwashed could take video of the great and worthy and make them look like utter chumps (instead of them actually proving they are utter chumps...)

2 0 Reply
Thursday 21st June 2018 12:43 GMT Astara

Google: get out of Europe

Seriously. The EU copyright laws are not the same as those in the US.

If the EU wants to put the onus on websites instead of those actually doing the wrong -- it is up-ending safe-harbor for hosts of interpersonal communication. It's requiring pre-censoring which always gets it wrong part of the time as well as becomes a tool for political and ideological censorship.

There are enough false positives to worry me. From my own created art -- that someone filed take down notices against to harass me until I contacted google's legal department, to some claiming ownership of the "Happy Birthday" song.

With an extension of copyright on the horizon -- AGAIN. It becomes clear that "Imaginary property laws are no longer benefiting society at large, but the rich elite. In the past this has caused depressions, oppression and violence. Is that what it takes to stop this type of abuse?

If content owners want complete control of "their content", don't share it with the world. It brings no benefits worth the cost of those most selfish.

6 0 Reply
Friday 22nd June 2018 20:21 GMT Jwilsonwest

Share buttons

So if I'm wrong here, example sky news, the sun, daily mail etc have share buttons to twitter, Facebook etc so a surfer can share that story with headline title, image and brief description to a social network? So these media companies need to remove all social network buttons from their pages, these shared links create millions of clicks per day to their websites, to then be bombarded with forced videos to watch first while eating the customer's data allowance on their mobile? Doesn't make sense to me....!

0 0 Reply
Sunday 24th June 2018 17:12 GMT Jwilsonwest

Share buttons

So these news paper sites that have share buttons to share their content to the likes of Facebook LinkedIn twitter will be removing these buttons? And miss out on the millions of clicks back to their sites?

0 0 Reply