When I call them morally bankrupt, its because of the social manipulation, meddling with democracy and selling of user data, not so much the fact that they allow people to share images of Yoda. But I guess I could have made that a little bit clearer.
I don't personally think the laws are wrong though. I'm a content creator myself, and while much of the code I write is open source, and I'm happy to see people use it to build cool things, I also don't want anyone to steal it and pretend it's their own, and I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared.
So I like the law, and I think it should apply equally to you as it should to a social media company. Reddit shouldn't be above the law, and it makes me proud to be a European citizen when our politicians stand up and tell these companies that they aren't.
> I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared
If you can't handle things like this, you basically can't handle platforms that allow others to share things openly. You'll never have an open environment for anyone to create platforms if you also want to pick and choose communication outlets because it effectively devolves to prior restraint like it has here.
Freedom comes at a price, be it sharing your stuff or whatever, and every effort to curb its ills, no matter how noble, reduces the freedom. Sadly, the rest of the world has to suffer these freedom tradeoffs so some can feel proud they are standing up to some companies they don't like.
Github is a platform that allows anyone to share my things openly. It also lets them contribute or perhaps even take ownership of the work if we agree it's better off in their hands.
Do you believe Github should preemptively filter content you are trying to git push? You're ok with me uploading all of your copyrighted photos to my GitHub page with the laws that exist today? Do you believe GitHub profits off of their popularity (driving more private repo and enterprise sales) built on a platform that allows users to upload copyrighted content? Is your answer going to be the same as the ones making judgements on GitHub while clutching this new legislation?
I do not think your politicians are "standing up" for you or any other content creators. They are standing up for the big copyright industries who have basically captured European politicians (to a much greater extent than they captured America's).
The general approach that Europe seems to take is to protect old industries from any challenge, even at the expense of new industries. I see that as a big reason for the sad state of the European tech industry. Europe is falling further and further behind America and China in terms of tech industry leadership and relevance, and with each new effort to "stand up" to tech companies Europe makes it harder for small tech startups. Where is the European answer to Reddit, or to Google, or Facebook or Tencent or Weibo? At this point it looks like European politicians have given up and are just trying to get as much money out of foreign tech companies as they can.
> I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared
Reddit/etc make money because of their platform not content. All of the content on reddit is available via api for free. So its definitely not the content.
> When I call them morally bankrupt, it is because of meddling with democracy
To say that, you have to affirm that the people in your democracy are unable to decode various forms of information. It happened in East Germany because East Germany didn’t have the freedom of information, so people were gullible (or so said historians). Your remedy is to... what, shut down Reddit, so only information controlled by the state is published.
Despite being a bad idea from the get go, let’s analyse what people usually criticize as fake news. Statistics about criminality. Statistics that don’t comfort the idea that women are oppressed. Remember that you can write a 10-page document citing sources and having it backed by 5 scientists across the world and be fired by Google for fake newsing.
So in the end you’re just advocating to shut down information that doesn’t comfort your ideas. And you’re using the argument of « morally corrupt » for it.
I don't personally think the laws are wrong though. I'm a content creator myself, and while much of the code I write is open source, and I'm happy to see people use it to build cool things, I also don't want anyone to steal it and pretend it's their own, and I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared.
So I like the law, and I think it should apply equally to you as it should to a social media company. Reddit shouldn't be above the law, and it makes me proud to be a European citizen when our politicians stand up and tell these companies that they aren't.