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?
