'Leaked' EU digi wish list: Junkets for Eurocrats, sops to copyright and telcos The EU will tackle copyright infringement and revisit telecoms regulation in 2016, along with a raft of new bureaucracy and spending. Controversially, it aims to further “harmonise” VAT and contract law across EU member states. The draft appears to have been written before last week’s decision by Commissioner Vestager to file …
Google does a good job of filtering pornography uploads to YouTube but refuses to apply the much easier technical challenge of filtering unlicensed music or movie uploads to YouTube.
Wait, what? That is exactly what the ContentID system does.
And how is that a much easier technical challenge? Google can rely on users to report porn, because the average Joe knows it when he sees it. That's basically free. To filter unlicensed works, Google must scan and fingerprint every licensed music and movie in the universe and compare them to the the fingerprint of each uploaded video. And from what they claim, 5 hours of video are uploaded to the site every second.
> "the Bulgarians didn’t put their prices up, which is what normally happens in a market when demand flares."
Read that as "a market which demands flares", and wondered...
a) whether flares were still popular in Bulgaria.
b) whether they were inexplicably back in 'popular' fashion (hence the likely price-hike).
In my defence, I've mostly stopped paying attention to fashion, and I've already had a drink.
I mean DRM obviously is one of the big problems in the whole area here.
DRM means that in order to use the material you need to break the DRM. Even playing DRM "protected" files means you need to install software working against your interrests, which is fundamentaly incompatible with your right of "integrity and confidentiality of information processing equipment" as declared by the constitutional court in Germany.
That would be "sales tax" in language that anyone can understand and as pointed out above where is it mentioned?
Good luck though with that one. The US can't do it so I doubt the EU could besides I thought they had to keep out of direct taxation level setting by general treaty. Laws are one thing, messing with taxation is another 8)
Cheers
Jon
Would a simple solution be that any online service that you wish to geo-block must also be offered in all regions of the EU? So, companies can still charge their differential pricing but they can't stop any EU citizen from viewing it, so long as they are offering it as a service in one country?
Eg. Sky Now online service is available in the UK and not the rest of the EU (I don't actually know if this is the case but for this example let's say it is). With my idea, they must also offer the service to all other countries in the EU. They could charge £10pm in the UK, €20pm in France, €25pm in Germany or whatever.
I wonder if that would work?
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