I think the image is pretty clear, EU users will no longer be able to use Reddit.
Internet users in general have become used to unlimited free content and use. Unfortunately free platforms are paid for with ads and the revenue per user, with the exception of a few behemoths, is very slim. It is pretty easy to put things in the red if you decrease the value of ads and increase general legal compliance costs. If your bank account isn’t full of money, it is over when derived providers shut down your accounts.
There have been a lot of accusations made about companies which have chosen to block EU users. The companies choosing to do so are optimistic that they may be able to open to EU users in the future. They respect the laws of the EU and expect the system to continue to exist for some time. Unlike, say, a large number of countries where the sitting head of government could be publicly hung and no one would be surprised.
One thing I could imagine happening if the EU's attempts to regulate the internet become too onerous is that companies like reddit would simply pull any legal presence out of Europe and ignore European law. That would leave the EU with only nuclear options for enforcement like a Great Firewall of Europe or trade sanctions against the US.
Disclaimer: I might or might not agree with EU but I think I see the mechanism of action.
Now, the thought about "the EU attempting to regulate the internet" is rather myopic. EU is not initiating anything, the EU is simply continuing a process which was started long ago.
This is part of the same copyright enforcement continuum which ("long" ago) caused the US organization MPAA to work with the US government to exert political pressure on Sweden to shut down the The Pirate Bay (BitTorrent tracker).
The argument then was The Pirate Bay was helping people distribute copyright-protected content while getting money from this process.
Now, there are companies which do substantially the same thing: users upload copyright protected content to the service, the service disseminates the content back to users while the service is monetized e.g. with advertisements. In some cases the content is individual pictures, in some cases music tracks or albums or even entire movies.
Now, either this mechanism as a whole is OK or it is not OK. The EU is basically saying that the mechanism is not OK within EU regardless of whether the company is from USA or not.
If you observe this development over time, it has been about tightening of copyright enforcement everywhere. From that perspective it makes sense to tick-tock two of the biggest players in turn, to tighten the law in one, then make the other one follow.
I hope I'm wrong. Looking forward to see Mickey Mouse in public domain.
> Now, the thought about "the EU attempting to regulate the internet"
The EU has put out a series of regulations and proposals including this, GDPR, and the proposed terrorist content regulation. It looks like a pattern to me. I know the EU is not the only government trying to do this sort of thing, but so far, it seems to have had the most impact.
This isn't just about copyright. It seems to me that it's a popular opinion in Europe that American internet companies have too much power, and the EU ought to rein them in any way it can.
I don't think this is the same. The pirate bay is just straight up infringing causing lost sales. Reddit or memes/derivative works in this sense don't directly impact the work unless there are serious branding issues that result from it. The profit Reddit gets in this case isn't really due to the work in a way that takes away from the original creator, and it may benefit them. Many indie games would love to go viral and reddit. It's more trying to control all forms of hosting.
Oh, and you don't want mickey mouse in the public domain. We already have characters like him in it, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer versions of superman are in it, and you can go buy a DVD for under $10 usa that has hundreds of public domain cartoons.
What happens when something is put in the public domain is often no one has any incentive to care for, advertise, curate, or promote the characters. Yes, you can view the content for free, but it's almost always done in a basic or slapdash form, maybe a bad vhs rip or ebook with scanning errors. You often very rarely see actual new works based on the properties, because no company has an existing interest to keep the brand fresh.
Honestly copyright is the only reason some characters even endure. Woody Woodpecker would have died out had lantz not sold the shorts to universal, for example.
> Oh, and you don't want mickey mouse in the public domain.
I do. I don't care about Mickey Mouse per se, but I don't think copyrights should be indefinite, or substantially longer than an average human lifespan. Mickey Mouse is 90 years old. Its creator has been dead for 52 years.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether that should happen now (90 years after creation), in 10 years (100 years after creation), two years ago (50 years after the death of the author), or some other roughly similar timeframe, but creative works should pass into the commons after the creator has had a reasonable opportunity to profit from them.
Aren't you basically saying that long copyright terms stifle creativity by encouraging brand owners to reuse existing characters ad nauseam rather than coming up with new ones?
Upload filters ala Google’s ContentId. The impact will be similar to Youtube in the short term. Since Reddit is GIFs not audio it will be topical things like FIFA replays etc.
The ultimate goal is to lay ground work for filtering/shadow banning political content. But that will happen slowly, not overnight.
This helps big tech players at the little guys' expense. Big companies can build their own content filters. Small companies can't, and are forced to buy content filtering software or services from the big companies.
There's a big difference between a DMCA system where the content host has the responsibility to take down copyrighted content in a reasonable time frame, while having safe harbor protection in cases where content gets through, versus a "non-safe harbor" law where you literally cannot allow any copyrighted content _on upload_, or you can be held liable. It would be impossible to decide who owns what, even for Google, and so they would need to have some other system that is not user generated content (who knows what).
User-generated content is the life blood of the web, it's why everyone can communicate and we have this new world, we simply need it I think. I really disagree with others who try to frame this as if Google and Reddit are simply another company trying to defend their turf. This is a real blunder for the EU and completely misinformed IMO
I hope so... among many other more significant things on the web, and I say that as a current EU citizen - the people creating these laws need to see them fail hard.
Having the best intentions is not enough when defining laws for complex technology with broad application, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of it and the scope of it's reach - they clearly do not.
I see this as them mainly attempting to create a moat around the European internet, to create a space for European companies to have a competitive advantage. This seems to have been a trend over the last 20 years I have been observing at least. The goal is simply to make things difficult enough that is is far less worth someone's time unless Europe is their primary market. Unfortunately all Europeans wind up paying a heavy price for this mentality when it is applied to extremes, especially since it will still be only large companies that will have the resources to actually adhere to the law enough to avoid incredible risk of exposure.
In other words, I think the motivations here have very little to do with author's rights and everything to do with lobbying for European business.
Why can't reddit pay some pennies for the link to appear on their site? Is it easier to cut all EU citizens? They have ads on their site. Why can't this lead to higher prices of ads on their site?
not even google with their endless cash can figure out how to walk through the logistics of this. And then the sites themselves will have to figure out ways to pay for everything that is payable in their articles.
They can have the link anyway - that's not restricted. You can link all you want to whatever you want.
My guess is it would mean things like news publishers would send copies of the main text to reddit and reddit would be required to filter out comments that contain some significant chunk of them unless there's some agreement made. Currently most paywalled articles have the entire text pasted into a comment within.
