The European Union’s parliament has voted in favour of copyright laws that critics say effectively ban memes, as well as cripple the ability of non-tech giant sites to accept content contributed by users and force sites to pay if they so much as link to legacy media.
The European parliament finally voted in favour of Articles 11 and 13, the legislation passing with 348 votes in favour and 278 votes against; “establishment” and centrist parties generally voted in favour of the legislation, while right-wing Eurosceptic parties and some far-left parties largely voted against it.
Article 11 allows search engines and news aggregators to be sued if they show snippets of information from other sites without paying them, even if going so far as to consider a link to be qualifying form of copyright infringement, the law accordingly being dubbed a “link tax”.
Article 13 holds websites accountable for content uploaded by users, meaning that sites can be sued if a user uploads copyrighted material to their platform. Complying with this law is likely to require AI filters that search for copyrighted material and stop it from being uploaded – tech which only a handful of Silicon Valley giants happen to have.
Although politicians in favour of the laws have said that memes will be excluded from the restrictions, it is likely that companies will be forced to err on the side of caution when it comes to filtering out potentially infringing material, meaning that memes could nonetheless be flagged.
When asked about the possibility that filters would prevent parodies being uploaded to sites, German copyright lobbyists GEMA gave rather worrying answers that seem to betray a poor understanding of technology:
AI can recognize faces, preferences and even park your car. It should be easy to differentiate between a pirated original work and a legitimate parody.
Since sites such as YouTube are already notorious for completely ignoring parody and fair use rights in their copyright detection systems, this may not bode well.
Whilst the laws do not affect non-EU companies as such, with the continent and its individual nations desperate to build their own China-rivaling great firewalls and other censorship infrastructure to block copyright infringement, porn, criticism of the great replacement and other such evils, it seems no stretch to think non-compliant sites overseas will eventually be subjected to blocking.
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OI! You gotta loicense for that meme?!
Copyright laws are such huge horseshits. It’s so case-by-case that it might as well not exist. But hey, gotta keep up with the capitalist charades!
EU is huge horseshit.
and here i thought ..google was..
April Fool’s come early..
The clown sightings was just the beginning.
Sucks to be European right now. Next stop US, just stay away from Asia.
The law actually effects everyone not just EU peeps, say a massive American streamer decides to do a house tour. He’s walking around and showing off stuff, and there is a poster of Frozen he walks past that. Disney now owns and profits off that and they can also sue depending oh bad they think the “damage is”.
This law is a lot worse than people think.
You bet your gentile ass we would sue that goy!! It’s a cash crop!!!
@Schlomo – Jews are involved in the sex trafficking of underage goyims girls to the Arabs to increase the coffers of Jewish Gold. Oy Oy!!!!
Kikes like you should be necked and your mutilated genitals fed to pigs. The day of the shoah is coming shylock heeb. May you jEWs get what’s coming to you.
an american owned company suing an american over a european law? no.
except all that s♥♥t originates from murica. so its Europe being next stop. but you’re right. both should stay away from asia
I actually ended up reading the whole proposed article. Now known as article 17 as it moves into law.
before you think i am defending the law. No I am not. I protested againsts it. It’s a bad idea in general when the laws this article rely on still have terms from 2001, Like cd-rom and cd-r.
but here’s what i got from reading the article.
-First point being. Every country have some freedom how they implement the changes.
second point. The original text was changed and it isn’t as out there. Some countries will use it to full extend but some might not use it fully.
-Memes are ok, They fall under lawful use, freedom of expression and fair use.
It is a parody or commentary and non-profit. if website removes them, they are responsible of violating your rights.
-If a company wants specific website to remove their content. They are responsible for providing metadata that can be used to detect said material. If the metadata sucks, it’s on the company.
-If material is lawful and is removed. The website is responsible of recovering the material
and to my understanding you can now blame youtube rather than UMG, for example, for removing lawful material.
-Union countries are required to assist websites to implement proper system and working licensing system.
here are few points that i wasn’t aware of before going deep into the text.
It is still very very bad idea and I think two years to implement this crap is way too little.
what a fucking mess.
I think we already knew that fair use isn’t explicitly banned in the law, but the problem is that they’ll need AI filters to avoid legal liability and they can’t distinguish properly between infringement and fair use.
Hopefully you’re right about the companies claiming infringement being responsible for providing the metadata used for detection. And hopefully they need to contact sites with said metadata. That at least would set the law up to not be a clusterfuck. But it’s still a disgrace of a law, that will obviously target fair use.
I honestly think all these loose qualifications/justifications in the law are just a way to force it through, and once they do, the politicians have set a precedent of putting the burden of proactive detection and liability at least partially on the websites. Reasonable people have always thought that it’s crazy and unacceptable to put a legal burden on websites and fine them for user uploads unless they explicitly ignore a request from the copyright holder to take down the material… That’s my take anyway, I barely follow any of this.
The biggest problem is the copyr—wrong layers tend to be assholes for lack of a better term.
>Memes are ok
But what is a meme, did they added a definition for it?
>if websites remove them, they are responsible of violating your rights
>If material is lawful and is removed. The website is responsible of recovering the material
These two points sounds really vague, can I sue a website just because they removed my content?
I completely agree with you. The are many dark areas in the article.
There is an exception in the article that exclude quotes, critique, reviews, caricatures, parodies or pastiches from
The new amendments rely on old copyright text which has been in place since 2001.
To my understanding you can imagine it like youtube, where content keeps getting false flagged. Now law requires them to do better job protecting your rights.
Whatever that means in the end.
There were few idiotic points in the law that said something along the lines “do their best to prevent copyrighted material from being uploaded”
How do they define “do your best”?
Once again i must add that I am againsts this law in its current form.
and I am not a professional so I cannot promise my understanding of the text isn’t flawed.
In the end, what ever youtube has said. Google will be making s♥♥t load of money selling their filters to external websites.
I want to fight the person who came up with this retarded ban.
I want to eviscerate the SOB.
ANTISEMITE!!!!
Christ Killing Juden Rat!
The government simply ignored a petition with over 5 million signatures and said that all were bots and people were bought by American companies. They even think that democracy has been threatened by that.
eu government is a parasitical caste that is really removed from reality
5 million signatures matter jack s♥♥t when compared to hundreds of millions. they are less than 1%. nobody should listen to a vocal minority. welcome to reality.
They listened to 4,6 million, of which 80% voted in favor, when it came to abolishing summer/winter time, and pushed it into parliament in record time, where it almost might have taken effect this year (now moved to 2021 to give countries time to plan ahead and decide which to stick with). Fewer people gave a s♥♥t, nobody protested.
@00:29
they pretended to listen.
whenever they have an easy win they’ll take the credit to boost the illusion that people’s opinions matter, and whenever they don’t like something they’ll ignore it or subvert the movement behind it to then point out that it’s unfit.