I work at the European Parliament, and in 3 years of debate about the law not a single person or organisation has brought up people putting content from other platforms on FB as something that this supposedly addresses.
In fact, it's all about the music industry wanting higher licensing payments from YouTube: At least as much per play as e.g. Apple Music pays. They call the fact that they're not getting that today the "value gap" – THAT'S the undisputed reason/justification for this law (just google the term).
There's another independent criterion that will cause lots of trouble/legal uncertainty:
1b. Regardless of (1), can you prove you made "best efforts" to acquire licenses for the content that was later found on your platform.
It's not specified who you should be seeking deals with, how you're supposed to know ahead of time what a user will upload, how you're supposed to identify the true rightsholders of an uploaded work, etc.
That criterion must even be fulfilled when you're less than 3 years old, by the way!
> I don't think any content-sharing platform should profit from copyright infringement
That is not a requirement to fall under Article 13! Are you maybe mistaking "copyright-protected material" for "copyright-INFRINGING material"? Every creative text and photo is "copyrighted material", so this covers any for-profit UGC platform.
MEP Reda proposed making the above change in the text, that proposal was rejected. So the broad coverage is intentional.
> Every EU law needs the approval of a majority of directly elected MEPs.
The problem with this is that MEPs are elected generally rather than for a specific competency, and then you get stuck choosing between different types of foolishness.
To use an example from the US, the Democrats have generally been the party of Hollywood and proposed a lot of problematic copyright legislation, and a lot of bureaucratic means-tested social assistance programs and loan interest subsidies that do things like inflate housing, medical and education costs. On the other hand, the Republicans have a preposterous position on climate change and the current Republican-controlled FCC is more like Verizon-controlled. So who should I vote for if I want to have a carbon tax but get rid of DMCA 1201?
A solution to this might be something like voters electing representatives on a per-committee basis, but that isn't currently what happens.
> So who should I vote for if I want to have a carbon tax but get rid of DMCA 1201?
You make sure there are opposing parties. Like the house and senate controlled by different parties. It forces them to argue and fight and compromise, but the end results are better.
This seems mostly like a fallacy of the mean. The compromise between two positions is not necessarily the best, and may be worse than either of the two.
Compromise is a necessary part of any democratic system, but because it is necessary to represent all of the constituants and balance their needs. It does not mean that it results in better decisions on any particular issue nor does it provide a good way for an individual to get a cross-section of their viewpoints represented fairly.
The average voter knows even less about how the EU works than they do about their own country. The press rarely covers EU business, except for ECB policy.
People treat them as some sort of low stakes national election and they generally penalize the governing party (let's send them a message) and the small parties get a boost. They have no idea which parties/coalitions exist at the European level and where the national party they're voting for fits.
In sum, it's a big joke, to an even larger extent than democratic elections usually are (as argued in books such as Democracy and Political Ignorance or Against Democracy).
Some of that is due to the national press (the UK for example has a disgraceful sector, the result of a classist society unbefitting of a modern country); some to voters who have forgotten the lessons of the past. Democracy, like most of civilization, has to be earnt anew every day.
in theory. eu parliament elections are no different than national elections: they are partisan and considered a gauge of the general elections and usually it becomes a dumping place for former national politicians. there is a huge disconnect between MEPs and citizens of their country. practically only lobby groups can be bothered and have the opportunity to lobby their causes. i have not heard (or told) a single word about gdpr or this new regulation from our MEPs. i very much doubt most of them know what they are voting for
All i read in your post is "citizens don't care". Every democracy will fail if citizens don't care. And I understand its natural to care less about stuff further away. But we need to organize some way how to live together, with democracy least bad option we have. We better make it work somehow.
Its fair to say that the EU is not generally seen as a big democracy, but as a large administration that lives in the background, kind of like NATO or the UN, so people don't expect to engage in EU politics in the same way they do with national politics. It is more problematic for example that the reasons why with the EC is proposing the laws are not clear, rather than why the MEPs voted for them.
Nationalism is the problem behind that, not the solution for it:
Legislative processes in the EU are woefully under-covered by the press. That's because newspapers have offices full of reporters to work on national political stories, yet send only one person to Brussels to cover all issues there. (That in turn is one factor leading to EU political jobs being way less glamorous and desired, which in turn has an effect on who even gets sent there in the first place, etc.)
It's no wonder that when everyone's horizons end at their national borders the supra-national body will operate under too little scrutiny. We need to start thinking European – the alternative, going back to trying to regulate things like the internet in 28 different ways on a single continent, is just not a reasonable option.
> Legislative processes in the EU are woefully under-covered by the press. That's because newspapers have offices full of reporters to work on national political stories, yet send only one person to Brussels to cover all issues there.
Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?
I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time.
If you’re in the US: do you want legislation to happen federally, or at the state level?
It all depends on the scope of the legislation. I have a small business that sells food EU-wide, and that’s only possible because the law is aligned. It’s enough work to get certified as organic once. To do it 18 times over would be prohibitive. Same with packaging and labeling, T&Cs, payment systems, etc.
Other whole areas have stayed national, such as criminal law or most social issues (gay marriage, abortion, unemployment benefits, defense, pensions).
I can’t see a discernible difference in how much of the legislation I like that correlates with where they originate. Or, if anything, it seems like EU stuff tends to be more pro-consumers. C. f. free roaming, passengers’ rights in air travel, car emission standards.
The EU is actually somewhat more responsive if you want to talk them, if only they constantly feel threatened in their very existence.
>I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time.
That’s IMO the fundamental flaw of the EU — they want to be the “United States of Europe” but unlike the USA, there’s far too much history and non-shared heritage between the countries for them all to effectively shed their heritage and reshape into a cohesive whole.
> Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?
Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...
We are in the middle of a transition. Consider the history of the European nation-state: it took about three centuries for France, Germany, Italy and Spain to solidify into what we now regard as nations. Still today, we have significant problems with regionalist movements almost everywhere. One could even argue the UK, that shaped the structure of relations between nation-states so much in centuries past, never even reached the full ethnically-defined description of nation-statehood...
We are now trying to further aggregate and streamline these already-shaky constructs, something we have to do if we want to have any hope of resisting demands by global superpowers. It will be a long process and it's clearly not finished yet. It might even entail the deconstruction of the ethno-state as commonly conceived, like the move to statehood did away with things like city-states and regional dialects. Instead of 28 countries, maybe we should have 100 regions. We don't really know yet.
But it's a path we just have to walk, unless we want to be a satellite territory where bigger powers come to clash - which is basically what we had become in the '60s and '70s, when the Cold War happened. We had state-sponsored terrorism across all of Europe; half the continent was literally enslaved and the other half was doomed to nuclear holocaust. Nobody who really remembers how it was, can possibly want that again.
> Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...
Some people just want these important decisions done at the national level, hence Brexit.
Please. Brexit is due to a number of factors, most of them fairly irrational and built over decades of lies from the British press and British politicians. The people shouting to “take back control” don’t know what that “control” even means, and most of them are completely ignorant of how their own government operates, let alone the EU. They were really complaining about the under-representation of English grievances in British politics, about the distance between London and the rest of England & Wales.
Unless, of course, you mean corrupt oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch and Arron Banks, who simply want to cut any political power to size to protect their own interests. They indeed want decisions to be taken at the lowest possible level.
> Please. Brexit is due to a number of factors, most of them fairly irrational and built over decades of lies from the British press and British politicians. The people shouting to “take back control” don’t know what that “control” even means, and most of them are completely ignorant of how their own government operates, let alone the EU.
Quite the assertion, and ironic with Project Fear in full swing. There is of course the question of how much understanding is needed of how the EU works to want to take back control. 'Can national laws override an EU law? No? We need control!'
Is it so hard to acknowledge that people you politically disagree with might actually have valid reasons and not be the vegetative idiots you assume them to be?
As usual, one wants all the benefits without its disadvantages, no matter how impossible that is.
I'd like for the EU to transform more into a state, but that will be hard unless the local powerful are willing to give up their power. The concessions that had to be made to get as far as the EU is today are also part of what is holding it back. Thankfully a significant veto power will remove itself from the EU in the coming months.
A huge reorganization such as setting up a proper new state seems easier with help of some disruptive event like e.g. a war or imminent war, something I hope the EU won't have any opportunity to take advantage of.
> I'd like for the EU to transform more into a state, but that will be hard unless the local powerful are willing to give up their power. The concessions that had to be made to get as far as the EU is today are also part of what is holding it back. Thankfully a significant veto power will remove itself from the EU in the coming months.
Okay...I'm assuming you're based somewhere in the EU. As far as you can tell does the average German want to be i the same state as the average Greek? Do Germans want to be in the same state with the French. I'm not so sure...I can imagine Germany, Austria and Switzerland working reasonably well as a single state. The same could be said about Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
I'm sympathetic to your overall reasoning. When I look at the US it feels like a minor miracle that it has held together for as long as it has. I'm rather skeptic about the possibility of the EU ever approaching anything like that kind of union.
US speaks a common language and has common culture and well-working federal level public oversight. Federal-level elections are prestigious, the best policians are not local, but federal, and can talk to voters in all of US.
Literally none of that is true in EU. It’s not that miraculous that US holds together; it would be if EU could function the same way as a democracy.
Note that several polls over the last view years have found a large minority of people in the US (between 25-40%) view secession favorably, with higher support among millennials.
It’s a bit like with casual racism or sexism: there is a disconnect between the younger generations’ outlook and the older ones’. Stereotypes are hard to die.
If you're unhappier with the national decisions (e.g. Trump) than regional ones, regionalism starts looking better and better... I'd bet that's almost all the reason behind it, not some kind of deep ideological stance on governance.
I’d say it’s essential for a functioning democracy to have all decisions made under scrutiny. Whether that’s local or not doesn’t matter, scrutiny matters. And for better or worse, we only have somewhat functioning local scrutiny.
These days anyone who criticizes EU is labeled Putinist, “populist” (case in point: comments around here), far-right etc., but there are legitimate concerns with how EU works:
- There’s precious little public oversight, as parent post described.
- Fixing that is hard. This isn’t US, but a mishmash of countries that don’t have all that much in common: not language, not culture, not shared historical experience (e.g. “eastern” countries are bitching about EU’s heavy-left leaning because they lived through socialist experiments that young Westerners are enamored with, and are vary of repeating them; southern states don’t see economy performance the way Germany does; Poles know Russian aggression all too well and value US military presence way more than most of EU, and so on and so on).
- Cyclical course corrections, so typical for functioning democracies, are non-existent, because voting can influence precious little: voters only have direct control over EP, which is mostly a rubber-stamping body. You can observe it with this directive: wasn’t EP initiative (because at the EU level, legislative/law-making and executive branches are merged). EP still voted for, despite massive opposition, but with caveats. Didn’t matter: backdoor discussions ended the way they ended - including EP position being... not entirely compatible with plenary vote. This is typical, the EP representatives in the trialogues aren’t bound by previous EP vote and see making a deal, no matter how bad, as necessary. Next step is EP approving the result. It is extremely rare for a plenary to reject trialogue output. It probably won’t happen even with this mess, but there’s a chance it might, this time. If it does, it will be championed as the process working (people on HN said that last month when the news hit that talks broke down... not so much). For things that are not this important to this many people on the right side of the political spectrum, it just doesn’t happen.
> the alternative, going back to trying to regulate things like the internet in 28 different ways on a single continent, is just not a reasonable option.
But this was working fine! The way that it was "regulated", was that it basically wasn't.
Ineptitude in regulation seems like a feature, not a bug, when the regulation that people try to pass ends of being horrible.
28 countries acting ineffectively to regulate the internet is something that I support, not oppose.
>Nationalism is the problem behind that, not the solution for it
I dont think nationalism plays into this. If we didnt have a supra national body with that kind of power we wouldnt have article 13. Quite a few of the regulations where proposed on national levels first, like the link tax in Germany, and rejected there. It was similar with providers being forced to collect your browsing history. The constitutional court ruled it illegal in Germany and it was then proposed via the EU and enacted there.
I see absolutely no reason to enforce any regulation that is not aimed at enabling a united market across the member states. The EU is an economic union not a United States of Europe.
The link tax was not rejected in Germany, in fact it's the law of the land there. When it failed to lead to the expected riches, the lobbyists behind it switched their attention to the EU level.
It could well be argued that all Internet regulation has to do with enabling a united market.
They changed the content of the Leistungsschutzrecht in the last phase to allow for the citation of short text segments. Its a lex google news not a link tax as it was first proposed.
>It could well be argued that all Internet regulation has to do with enabling a united market.
At the core it is a regulation about how to combat copyright violations. The argument that there needs to be one legalsystem across the EU in order to enable a united market is thin imho. Especially if the united market doesnt even have a united tax system.
> It's no wonder that when everyone's horizons end at their national borders the supra-national body will operate under too little scrutiny.
This is not necessarily true. The early United States had a relatively weak Federal Government precisely because States had quite a bit of scrutiny. It's only after the past 100 years that the U.S. Federal government's power has increased substantially.
The point I'm trying to make here is that a true union among states is not easy, but it does not necessarily lead to undue power over the long term. We'll all probably not live long enough to see how it plays out in the EU, but there is precedent for this type of coordination throughout history.
On the face of it, the fix is rather simple: Vote for politicians who listen at least as much to civil society as they do to corporate lobbyists.
Unfortunately, the political system currently structurally incentivizes the opposite, especially at the EU level, about which there is little reporting because that is all organized at the national level. If Julia Reda weren't an MEP and hadn't been sounding the alarm for years now, the first you heard about Article 13 may have been after the final vote in which an even worse version of it was enacted.
At this point, the Greens/EFA group in the EP is the only one which has even taken the time to build infrastructure to voluntarily track (necessary to even hope to achieve any kind of balance!) and transparently publish their lobby meetings online. (Here's an ugly backend view, the pretty one is on individual MEPs' websites: https://lobbycal.greens-efa-service.eu/all/)
The 30 million figure was a downright lie by UK music publishers – it includes the entire lobbying budget (for the year 2016, bizarrely) of any industry association Google is listed as being a member of, which for some reason even includes the political think tank of the German CDU party, whose politicians are actually BEHIND the law, not opposed to it.
Here's an in-depth factual analysis of copyright lobbying:
> The limited information which is available about lobby meetings shows the intense level of lobbying taking place on the Copyright Directive, but it also interestingly exposes that the biggest lobbies were not in fact big tech companies and their associates, as many headlines claimed, but the publishers, creative industries and collecting societies.
In one vote in the EP, something similar was proposed as an alternative:
* Make (big) platforms provide APIs with which rightholders can check new posts for their copyrighted content and request either removal or monetisation
* Give uploaders 48 hours to contest removal requests before they are honoured, during which their uploads stay online, but may be removed from search results
* Once an infringement is identified and not contested, all earned revenue goes to the rightholders
That's rather sensible. However, it was voted down in favor of just making platforms legally liable for all uploads. https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/ (The "EPP group" proposals won – that's the Parliament position, not to be confused with the Council's, which are yet to be fully reconciled).
I'm strongly considering voting straight Pirate Party for the EP from now on. Copyright and internet freedom seems to be by far the most important concern for the Europarliament these days.
The big problem is to get the majority of voters on board.
In fact, it's all about the music industry wanting higher licensing payments from YouTube: At least as much per play as e.g. Apple Music pays. They call the fact that they're not getting that today the "value gap" – THAT'S the undisputed reason/justification for this law (just google the term).
(Facebook, by the way, also has a content filter: https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/330407020882707)