This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas. YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability. They might be able to automate, but it depends on the jurisdiction. For example, the US has fair use laws. A person may copy a segment of a copyrighted work to comment on it. There are territories in the EU where they can't. How does YouTube filter this?

If the new product was produced in the US and references material from the EU, should YouTube allow the content to go public? According this and GDPR, the EU has the ability to cross territorial boundaries. So YouTube now has to ban such a work in the US even though our legal system allows it.

Essentially, YouTube will have to create a new process where by all content must go past the censors, who are probably people and not machines. Otherwise YouTube will quickly die due to death by a thousand fines. So much for a free and open exchange of ideas.

> This can have a chilling affect on content creation, and thus the dissemination of ideas.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.

> YouTube will have to create a filter that covers their liability

I believe they already did that for some years now.

Here is an analogy - imagine we crack down on theft at the source by massive fines for receiving stolen property. Sounds good? Try to sell anything secondhand then.

Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!

That is exactly what secondary liability does.

Except this isn't backed up by empirical evidence, in reality flea markets and used good stores are widespread despite the existence of laws against trafficking in stolen goods. Just because you can imagine a bad outcome doesn't mean it's inevitable or even probable.

You missed the point - those laws have limits to secondary liability based on knowledge precisely because of that! At worst they just need to return stolen goods even if they paid for them. I am pointing out how draconian and stupid the law is. A law with similar strictness would destroy secondary markets.

This law requires websites to /know/ the copyright to be covered. And that is an impossible task if no false negatives are accepted. Old usenet pirates would use base64 strings to spread contents and there are countless ways to obfuscate to algorithms while remaining human recognizable. Which means to remain safe one needs to not even accept and display text input from users.

Copyright databases would be of no help here given both automatic copyright and the ease of dodging hashes. And a complete set would be massive and hillariously defeat the point by giving any implenter all of the media in the world.

Given that it is inevitable that it will have a bad outcome. Even if it is left to rot on the books it becomes a tool of tyranny via selective enforcement.

> I'm not sure it's reasonable to conflate ripping off creators by enabling massive commercial use of unauthirized copies of their original content with actually creating something.

Here's an example: What about movie review channels like Wisecrack, Film Theorist, Cinema Sins, Filmjoy etc.? While discussing movies, they naturally have to show excerpts: short clips of the movie that relate to their explanations. Those guys are absolutely "creating something". And if anything, they're driving more people to watch those movies. A five-minute analysis of a movie is usually not a valid substitute for watching the actual movie.

I imagine that many of these channels will become unavailable in the EU in the near future. Time to get a US-based VPN.

And of course, say you negotiated a license with some other content creator that says you can use their work in yours.

How can YouTube check that?

They can't and flag and take down your video until you prove it. The burden is on the uploader not the distributor. Which we know how Youtube is with that...

> This can have a chilling affect on content creation

It in no way prevents anyone from creating content and publishing it on their own website.

You make it sound like the youtubes of this world are necessary for content creation.

As many probably realize, the fact that "online videos" == Youtube for many members of the general public means that it is by far the number one source for both posting and watching videos online in a self-reinforcing loop. I think that it cannot be overstated how much the existence of platforms like that (e.g. video sharing websites, 2D art websites, music boards) drive non-professional creators to create, given the fact that for the first time, they can actually get an audience. So it is not so much that Youtube and similar platforms are necessary for content creation (which is a ridiculous claim that no one made), but that the absence of such platforms seems likely to result in the previous system where media was very rarely shared by the non-professionals.

If you are arguing that massive content consolidation platforms such as Youtube do not have a highly significant impact on content creators as a group though, then I do not know what to say to that.

You can sell your farm fresh strawberries in the backwoods of Alabama, doesn't mean you'll get any traffic that'll grow your business/platform/identity.

You're forgetting that everybody are liable under a law like this. Including reddit, and hacker news itself

Not everybody, a small minority of the planet actually (the EU is a mere ~6.7% of the planet's population). The ideal solution if you're a US service like HN, is to ignore EU laws like this, as HN is governed by US law. For YouTube, it's a lot more difficult.

Put simply, if you're a US (or Australian, or Brazilian, or Japanese, etc) service: tell the EU to go fuck itself. US courts will laugh at their attempts to enforce EU law over US law.

Keep your servers in the US, if that's where you're located. If you have no need to do business in the EU, then you have almost nothing to worry about. The EU's reach largely stops at its borders unless you're operating in their jurisdiction.

For my service as a US operation, EU copyright law is meaningless. I'll continue to allow EU users to sign up, and entirely disregard EU law.

Ultimately the only way the EU can truly enforce their backwards policies against a global Internet, is to set up a Chinese firewall and hold EU persons as captives of that creeping authoritarianism.

Read the next sentence. "even legal uses of copyrighted content"

In practice, this constitutes the abolition of the "fair use" doctrine on the internet.

Beyond the chilling effect others have mentioned, it also adds a huge barrier to entry for any Youtube competitor

You're making the paper producer liable for what someone writes on it.

using your analogy, youtube would be the paper maker and most importantly, the newspaper that publishes those words.

rightly, they're going after the newspaper.

it's disingenuous to suggest youtube only makes tools for video content distribution whilst omitting the fact that they are the only consumers of those tools.

Do you think that if I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Times that included plagiarised content, that they could, should and would detect that prior to publishing?