If Reddit and other similar sites want to make a point, a banner won't be enough. They need to do the unthinkable: Block all access from the EU.
If the legislation as written is going to make it impossible to do business in the region, then that's what these companies are facing eventually anyways. This sucks for them, sucks for users, sucks for everyone. So let's have a taste of what that looks like. A preview.
Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram, TwitchTV, etc. All the websites where the content is made by users. As a group, shut down for 24 hours within the EU, instead displaying a simple page explaining the problem and what can do done about it.
Until they're willing to do that, the users don't know or care what they're talking about. Legislators are relying on a population who is too distracted to care what they're doing. Well, fine, let's take away the distractions.
There used to be a thing called Usenet but since the users couldn’t be monitized and sold for profit it fell prey to market forces. And there’s slways irc.
It couldn't be monetized, true, but the way I remember it netnews was still supported in the US until it became too politically hot to handle. See this ancient article for ex,
https://mashable.com/2008/06/10/child-porn-usenet/
IRC, like social networks, is slways tough to rank due to lack of structured data. I don't believe Usenet suffered this proform.
Re: Facebook I agree it has hurt, nay scourged, the Web—that's undeniable—but that has also created room to innovate how we share content on the surface web.
I enjoyed YouTube until I tested the effectiveness of ContentID and was banned under their ToS. May they burn in hell under the new EU regs.
No, why would they, especially if they aren't based in the EU? You don't have to worry about them throwing you in jail or fining your little forum. In the worst case, someone might report you and you'll get a warning. At that point you can choose to ignore it, block EU countries or try to comply.
If they're not for profit, the regulation won't cover them as I read it. Not will it cover them if they make money but have under 250 employees and turnover under €50M.
I doubt most of those people who've bought into the notion that small businesses like Reddit and nonprofit services like Wikipedia would be affected have read the relevant text, considering the text specifically says nonprofits and small businesses are exempt [1] from the rules of Article 13 (the takedown one).
I'm also puzzled by the people saying it's difficult to comprehend. The hardest part is mentally joining the diffs in amendments to the static copy before a document is updated. EU legislation is not nearly as weasely as US, and likes to use precise terms it defines earlier in the document. Such is the case with the terms 'information society service' and 'online content sharing service provider' [2], whose exact definitions are relevant.
Reddit is not a “small business” anymore, it hasn’t been one for quite some time now. Let alone the fact that it’s the fourth most visited website in the United States, it’s now mentioned almost everywhere, from SEC press releases, The Economist articles or “Cahiers du Cinema” movie reviews (the last one really puzzled me as the current batch of Cahiers du Cinema writers are pretty anti-US and anti-technology).
EU has a proper definition of what a small business is:
> SMEs are defined by the European Commission as having less than 250 persons employed. They should also have an annual turnover of up to EUR 50 million, or a balance sheet total of no more than EUR 43 million (Commission Recommendation of 6 May 2003). These definitions are important when assessing which enterprises may benefit from EU funding programmes aimed at promoting SMEs, as well as in relation to certain policies such as SME-specific competition rules.
Am on mobile and I’m too lazy to link, but I’ve found stories about Reddit having already reached $100 million in yearly turnover, which means that they’re no longer seen as a SME based on the second part of your post.
If you're tiny you get out of a few GDPR regulations, like having a data protection officer. Also the GDPR mostly calls for reasonable and appropriate measures, which are terms that scale with company size (measures reasonable for a hairdressing salon are not appropriate for a fortune 500).
Making even further cutouts for SMEs seems unreasonable, after all the individual citzen has similar impact from a data breach in a medium sized company compared to a data breach in a large enterprise.
To add to my earlier, as a personal note, this is frustrating to me, because the text is clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name, while exempting pretty much all of academia, hobbyist sites, small businesses, intranets, and content platforms that don't actively promote and significantly profit off of their collection and curation of low-effort, low-remix, non-OC, verbatim reposts of someone else's copyrighted content.
Yet, through the lobbying of interested parties the message becomes deliberately muddled. Sites like Reddit spread the FUD because were it not for their status as a small enterprise, the letter of the law could threaten their business model of aggregating large amounts of user-submitted content and profiting off of ads surfaced adjacent to them -- ironically, the old Reddit before ads would likely be exempt entirely. They see this law as an existential threat and lobby against it; this I can understand.
What puzzles me is parties like the EFF and Wikimedia Foundation spreading the FUD. Wikimedia would clearly be exempt. What gives?
I've mentioned this in Hacker News threads before, but here are the few things to bare in mind.
Firstly, the SME exemption (as well as the specific exceptions for Wikipedia and Github) was put in at the last moment in an attempt to win enough votes to get the Directive through the plenary following widespread opposition. It only exists in the European Parliament text, which is currently being negotiated with the original Council text. The news from the trilogues is that there's lots of lobbying to get it removed.
The exemptions sound good for Github and Wikipedia on paper: but Github and Wikipedia are the services that currently exist, and have been effectively grandparented in. It doesn't speak for all the other potential services that we can't describe, because they don't exist yet -- and won't exist if there's a liability regime that would have stopped Github and Wikipedia in their tracks if it had written before.
Thirdly, we know from experience that these exemptions don't work. In the European Parliament text, we have a blanket liability regime, which means that rightsholders can sue you, or your provider, by default. You can argue back, "oh it's okay, we're covered by this exemption", but you have to prove that you're really covered by the exemption -- and the expression of that exemption in each of the 28 implementations of the Directive in the member states. It creates a default of liability, and then fences of a small section of the Internet where you may be protected.
In the mean time, you -- as a person who hasn't paid up for a licensing arrangement with the major rightsholders -- will be on the receiving end of repeated orders to take down content, with the understanding if you don't successfully argue against that exemption, or the moment you cross that SME line, you'll be liable to an unbounded extent.
Why would you take that risk? How could you protect yourself against that risk?
Also note that many of these exemptions are expressed in the Recitals, which merely indicate the spirit of the law, the specific rules for transposition in the Articles themselves. Generally speaking, if you are threat-modelling new law, you might as well ignore the Recitals, because there is a substantial lobbying and legal community who have a big financial incentive to guide lawmakers, and deploy lawsuits in such a way as to sideline those non-binding commitments.
The exemption language was an attempt by lawmakers taken aback by the force of the opposition to Article 13 and 11, to both win over votes in the Parliament, and stop GitHub, Wikimedia and its users from complaining. The reason why Github, and Wikimedia and their users continue to complain is that they don't believe they can act in the future as though these exemptions will really work for them — and they have an interest in maintaining the rest of the Internet ecosystem, which will be still left out in the cold.
>"The definition of online content sharing service providers under this Directive does not cover microenterprises and small sized enterprises within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and service providers that act in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned, such as educational or scientific repositories. Providers of cloud services for individual use which do not provide direct access to the public, open source software developing platforms, and online market places whose main activity is online retail of physical goods, should not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive."
> online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned,
Does the service trust the uploader about this? There will inevitably be disputes about that self declaration.
It's also impossible to know which are all the rightholder of a piece of content. There might always be one more making a claim later on. Any system, automated or manual, is going to have many false positives and negatives.
On the other side, this system is already in place for traditional media. It's dealt with litigation. Again, no need to create special legislation for the internet. The blame must be passed over to the content creator, not to the distributor. This means that the creator must be identifiable, to know who to sue.
However this means that the supposed rightholder is going to automatically sue a zillion of people, with false negatives. This is unfair. I propose that in case of false negatives they lose the right on the content.
An example.
It's May and they play the final of the Champions League (this is about the EU). People will post the highlights. The rightholder will manually identify some hundreds of those videos, sue the uploaders and win. This will teach people not to upload those kind of videos next time. But if they sue a guy because they mistake him playing with friends as the Champions-League final, they'll lose all the rights on it. They'll be very careful about who to sue, people will be careful about what they upload, I won't see highlights anymore on YouTube but I can live with that. It seems fair for everybody.
The part about losing the rights is not going to happen though so I wasted your time, sorry.
Wow. That doesn't even make sense: "service providers that act in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders"
Are they really assuming all online encyclopaedias are non-commercial?
> Why would you take that risk? How could you protect yourself against that risk?
Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.
Flickr, Smugmug and other enthusiast photo gallery sites seem to have walked this line quite successfully. Imgur and its ilk haven't because they've never really had a reason to care. Now they do.
So YouTube wouldn't be the massive entity it is now if it were truly YouTube and forbade uploading of any derived content. But perhaps that would be better.
MP3 sites might be more like SoundCloud with original content.
I find it difficult to be moved by the protests of people who just want to post other people's creations. Link to it, don't copy it.
> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.
And what magic spell do you expect publishers to cast to distinguish the two when you allow users to post content? Do you have the faintest idea how absurd what you're saying is?
> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.
How would a company go about being certain of this, do you think? I can't think of a way to do it with uploaded content that doesn't have a nasty error rate. Obviously it becomes trivial if you take the Netflix approach and source everything from the owners directly, which means working only with the biggest providers who have legal departments and such. With restrictions like this, even SoundCloud can't exist - almost everything on there is a derived work!
Have I missed something? Can you help me understand how a site can be certain it hosts only original or otherwise authorized content without taking a Netflix-type approach? I would love to be wrong, and for there to be an easy, cost-efficient approach that offers a suitably low error rate and enables protecting content creators while preventing abuses.
> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.
Good luck proving what copyright everything that your users upload has. Such systems cost billions of dollars to develop and are prone to abuse.
> it were truly YouTube and forbade uploading of any derived content
Most content is in some way derived. Forbidding such things would effectively eliminate gaming channels, political channels, music channels, review channels, podcasts etc.
> MP3 sites might be more like SoundCloud
You do realize the RIAA is not particularly happy about SoundCloud either, right? And much content on there can still be described as 'derived'.
> I find it difficult to be moved by the protests of people who just want to post other people's creations.
I find it difficult to be moved by copyright maximalists, who used other people's work to get where thy are, but now insist that they should profit from a piece of work 70+ years after the author is dead.
I am opposed, and will remain so, until such time as the big players either demonstrate real harm, or recognize the many benefits they get.
And they do benefit significantly.
What they claim is always the same,"billions lost", yet fail ti explain where all that money actually comes from.
Entertainment dollars for the vast majority are largely fixed. There aren't those dollars actually out there.
What I find particularly onerous is the idea of not actually being able to put material out there intended to be shared freely. Did that make it into this mess?
> the text is clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name
Google and YouTube already do this via ContentID, a system which only abuses small time creators. I don't see how expanding this EU-wide helps small businesses. Do you?
> What gives?
Room for abuse? Who do you think pushed for this? It wasn't your friendly neighborhood photographer. It was the RIAA/MPA etc. Just look at the DMCA.
> What puzzles me is parties like the EFF and Wikimedia Foundation spreading the FUD
What puzzles me is why would anyone who is not a dinosaur gatekeeper be for this?
> What puzzles me is parties like the EFF and Wikimedia Foundation spreading the FUD. Wikimedia would clearly be exempt. What gives?
I think they're making a moral or equality standing. If it's wrong for one company to do something just because they're large, why is it ok for another org to do the same just because they're "small"? And what do small companies strive to be? Usually bigger companies. The law doesn't make sense to begin with. By exempting smaller entities, they're basically saying it's not "really" illegal and it's more of just a free money grab to take from larger producers. You basically said it yourself when you said it's "clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name". And why are they "targeted???" Because they have deep pockets, and that's it. This has nothing to actually do with copyright other than a subjective means to go after some companies while exempting others. It's either wrong, or it's not. The size shouldn't come into play.
> the text is clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name
Have you read the text? Nowhere does it target only the likes of Alphabet (Google and YouTube). The exemption threshold for small companies (50m revenue, 43m balance sheet, or 250 headcount) is orders of magnitude below Alphabet's revenue and headcount. Sure, hobbyists and truly small companies are exempt, but the threshold is so low that far far more companies than just the tech giants will be affected.
Surely you can recognize targeting hosts of small business's content and traffic sources is essentially targeting small business. I would imagine this only frustrates you because you are not one of those small businesses leveraging the services of larger ones. Intent notwithstanding, who is really going to be harmed? Who is really going to be helped? Are your answers to those just hopes and is it fair for your hopes to affect the rest of the pragmatic internet?
They're supposedly under 500 employees, which is the EU threshold for small and medium enterprise. They prominently mention their small business status in their post. It's likely that their assertion is deliberate.
Reddit having under 500 employees is beyond ridiculous.. it might be understandable if they were a honorable company that protected people's privacy, but they're the complete opposite, and they even go out of their way to make it near impossible for 99% of their users to download a video on their site (kinda hypocritical).
If Reddit didn't exist and their traffic was driven to niche forums/websites then you could expect hundreds of thousands of jobs.
So it's great that Reddit exists because now you don't have to have hundreds of thousands of people maintaining these small websites and have hundreds of people maintaining one website.
It would be great if they were a honorable company (ideally a non-profit org) that protected user privacy rather than taking great pride in violating it.
And I don't think it's great that you have one site controlled by an evil company and filled with low quality content/discussion about every niche topic when you could instead visit 2-10 websites about the niche content you care about.
Employee count seems like a really bad way to measure business size. A hardware store business with only a couple of stores could hit 500 and still be virtually unknown to everyone but a business like reddit owns one of the biggest websites in the world with an almost global impact.
The requirements are unreasonable no matter the size of the company. A perfect copyright filter is impossible. No matter how many resources you throw at the problem, content will spill through the cracks.
The directive outlaws content sharing websites, regardless of who's running those websites.
This is actually a significant problem with the way many EU directives are written. Wording is often loose, sometimes vague, and subject to considerable interpretation. Perhaps deliberately so.
To be fair, it is a really difficult thing to read and comprehend. I've read the whole proposal around May this year, and it is tough. When I did get to the articles 11 and 13, a lot of the stuff people were really warning against wasn't even there.
It was in a reference to another law, already passed years ago and only referenced by its number. So you had to look that up and any references it had, too.
And at the end of it, you're still left with a deep unease that you've probably missed a lot of data and meaning because these things don't seem to be written in a way non-layers can understand.
> Reddit ... the websites where the content is made by users.
Except for /r/WorldNews or /r/news or /r/programming or ...
The phenomenon certainly exists where hundreds of people will debate an article without ever reading more than the title and maybe seeing a picture. Sometimes the entire article will be copied into the discussion, even. Whether this phenomenon causes harm and requires correction is unclear.
Yes, and take a look at the norm: link to external content. Debate about that content.
Reddit's whole business model requires that other people create and host the content.
There's nothing wrong with that. Bars hire bands to come play, lots of business models revolve around using other people's works. But at what level should royalties come into play? Certainly never isn't the answer. Only the most unhinged reading of the EU legislation thinks it applies immediately at linking.
The norm is to link to external content but I doubt the norm is to click on it. Most people vote based on the title so absolute garbage articles make it to the top that aren't worth clicking and then the new reddit UI makes it much harder to get to the external link and very easy to just jump to the comments.
Arguably the external content is next to worthless to reddit because they could just make the website text and image posts only and nothing would be lost.
You should have replied to my upper level comment, where I was pointing out this phenomenon. At the level you commented, I was agreeing with the other person that this phenomenon, while lamentable, is not the norm. While I have no data to back that up, at the very least it is not the intended or canonical reddit experience.
More to point, I think the phenomenon is somewhat irrelevant to what the EU is trying to achieve, which is what I was alluding to. Even the intended experience of Reddit is to profit off the creations of others without paying royalties. There is obviously arguments to be made on whether that is good or not. The EU seems to believe that it is not just and probably does not believe that moving to a more just approach will not destroy Reddit.
Even better might be to force all the EU into a single thread about the legislation. Then Reddit users can whip other Reddit users into a frenzy, as Reddit does best.
Or it might devolve into political debate with an unhealthy mix of bot generated content and trolls.
So what do we do about big countries that does military and political pressure on smaller countries enforcing their copyright laws? The Pirate Bay comes to mind, as does Kim Dotcom. I'm sure there are more but I'm not that interested in the movie garbage from Hollywood to keep up.
That the EU starts doing copyright law like this is due to pressure and lobbying mainly from USA.
Actually most of the lobbying pressure is coming from big copyright companies inside the EU like record companies and associated groups, "Big Content" companies.
They have already "militarized" copyright enforcement in Germany with GEMA (though not in the Kim DotCom way)
Poorly worded. And shouldn't have backed down. If it were me, I'd say something like:
> We're sorry. Due to pending legislation in the European Union Parliament, we will soon be unable to maintain this website for European users. Today, we are testing our block and giving a users a preview of what it's going to look like. We're sorry that this is interrupting your usage- we don't want that to happen either.
> There is still time to prevent this from becoming permanent. Click here to learn more about why this is happening, and click here to contact your MEP to ask them to please help prevent this from happening.
> Again, we are so sorry that we've had to block you today. We hope you'll help us fight to keep the internet open.
But then, I'm Canadian so most of my sentences start with "Sorry".
Is there actually an alternative to sites like Reddit blocking EU users if the new law is passed?
Best I can think of based on what I know about the law is that perhaps links can't be active for EU users until the domain they go to has an agreement with the site and goes onto the whitelist. This would need to apply to both comments and stories, based on my what I know.
Would it? Some, maybe. But it really depends how it's implemented. Take the Canadian approach of starting with "We're Sorry", and explain that this is a test of how things will soon be given pending legislation.
that would be a rash decision. But i would like to see twitter move in that direction: make all tweets copyrighted, and require a fee every time they appear in newspapers.
It might even spur new European based social media companies that aren't full of American politics 90% of the time. To make Reddit useable I essentially have to filter out most of the website.
Also for a long time I've been frustrated with the content policing that American companies enforce on European users. As a German user I have always been confused by the fact that a topless woman is going to get her account closed while some guy with a burning cross in his backyard and a swastika on his forehead can post merrily.
Maybe the result of this is social media in Europe more closely aligned with people's values over here. I've never been a fan of Zuckerberg's 'connect the world' mentality.
> If Reddit and other similar sites want to make a point, a banner won't be enough. They need to do the unthinkable: Block all access from the EU.
What they need to do is work together in a unified manner like the media and the politicians have done. Instead, they are bickering and fighting against each other while the journalists and politicians form a unified front against freedom and free speech.
> Legislators are relying on a population who is too distracted to care what they're doing.
Exactly. They rely on a lazy populace and of course relentless anti-tech propaganda from news organizations.
Reddit replacing all of Reddit for EU users with a page explaining how to contact their government officials is the only thing that will work. Users won't be bothered for anything less.
> Blocking entire geographic regions is the worst possible response.
I agree when it's only on principles (not everyone there is guilty). However, blocking entire geographic regions is entirely reasonable for small businesses unwilling to comply with those rules. I'm glad that governments haven't completely disallowed companies the freedom to choose their regions. I have no doubt this will be attempted at some point via treaty.
> Or for some websites, simply ignore the EU regulations.
They'll be fined millions of not billions. The interest will add up on the fine if they don't pay, then assets will be ceased. This isn't a reasonable way to do business in Europe. Either follow the law or effectively shut down.
We're not just talking about "violating laws". That happens all the time, mostly accidentally. We're talking about a company that willingly ignored the laws, was sued in Europe, fined millions, doesn't pay, all European assets have been ceased and now operates by "lol come and take it".
Most companies don't have European assets, so yes "lol come and take it" is valid. There are many companies in the world that could explicitly and willfully violate every aspect of European laws and there is nothing that can be done about it. The other post was essentially saying there is no recourse to companies that do not have have European assets.
There are multiple things that could be done. The EU could deny entry to employees of the company. They could ask the country of the company to press charges there. Of course the country could also ignore the EU, but than it would risk its good relationship with the EU.
For most websites outside of the EU that is of no concern. For some reason every website that will never do business there seems to be concerned about the EU regulations. A large portion of the internet will never have to comply.
Again that is my point, most companies don't. The small amount that do will have to. There is a huge amount of companies that will never target Europe. They will never do business or have a presence there. The regulations are irrelevant for them.
I've noticed this persistent attitude that somehow eu regulations are globally applicable, in reality they are not.
A lot of the GDPR hysteria is from sites that are not located in Europe and do not target people from there (HENCE not subject to the regulation; which hasn't helped with all the BS "Unavailable for legal reasons" or similar knee-jerk reactions)
No, your local news site won't get fined by the EU
I'm forgetting the legal terms here, but this is not a direct legislation by the EU, rather, every country "should" individually draft legislation corresponding to it.
> They need to do the unthinkable: Block all access from the EU.
This seems like a deeply cowardly move. The courageous and virtuous move is to simply ignore the law and continue as usual - to challenge the state to do what, if we all unite in support of each other and our basic freedoms, it will be unable to do.
There's a difference between taking action to make society irregular (ie, violation regulations) and merely breaking the law. Sometimes the latter is the right thing to do.
I completely agree if they can reasonably risk it. However for those that feel similarly about the expanse, overreach, and unjustness of the GDPR, are they similarly courageous in ignoring the law? If their motives are the exact same as here (i.e. about internet freedom from egregious oversight, not bottom line)? I'd say so in the interest of consistency, many would say not just because they like one imposition on the internet and not the other.
My comment is about consistency of acceptable response, not about my personal GDPR beliefs. The GDPR has been debated ad nauseam on this board that I don't think a subthread about it here has value.
The problem is that corporations are fundamentally organs of the state. This inevitable authoritarian spiral was entirely predictable at the start of "Web 2.0", as it is a bad technology designed around centralizing third party intermediaries. Unfortunately, the lure of scalable riches caused most to look the other way.
One thing I don't understand is how you prove your from the EU. I route most of my internet traffic through various VPNs. I'm in the U.S., but am increasingly more often hit with EU specific guidence. Prove I'm from the EU (or US) - you can't.
If the legislation as written is going to make it impossible to do business in the region, then that's what these companies are facing eventually anyways. This sucks for them, sucks for users, sucks for everyone. So let's have a taste of what that looks like. A preview.
Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram, TwitchTV, etc. All the websites where the content is made by users. As a group, shut down for 24 hours within the EU, instead displaying a simple page explaining the problem and what can do done about it.
Until they're willing to do that, the users don't know or care what they're talking about. Legislators are relying on a population who is too distracted to care what they're doing. Well, fine, let's take away the distractions.