back to article EU's YouTube filter plan was revised '37 times'

The European Union's plan to get YouTube clean up its act – the proposed updates to copyright for the Digital Single Market – went through 37 revisions before emerging earlier this month: and the movie chiefs were nervous. Wiggin’s partner and Brussels chief Ted Shapiro lifted the lid on the backroom wrangling that led to the …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "But nothing is totally straightforward in the EU, where application of the law is fairly arbitrary."

    "The last big push to overhaul copyright in Europe appeared on December 10, 1997. Working at breakneck speed, Brussels passed it into law in 2001. It then took five years to implement in the member states."

    So which is it, Andrew? Too much power to the member states, or not enough? Because that's what you mean above: I note that member states (NOT the EU!) too 5 years to implement the directive, and the member states (NOT the EU!) did it in different ways that you find arbitrary.

    So I'm very confused by your position, Andrew. Should I understand that now, your problem is that the EU is not centralised enough, that its decision should apply directly to the member states without their local parliaments having a say? And the Brexit is a good thing, because the UK leaving the EU is going to make it all less arbitrary and faster implemented?

    As much as I generally agree with your stance on copyright, I can't help finding your position on the EU rather difficult to understand.

    1. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      You're running ahead of yourself, AC.

      If you want to dismantle a society, a good place to start is might be by creating a supreme court that doesn't have to justify its opinions, and that can redefine right and wrong every few weeks, no matter how much contradiction and confusion this causes. For example:

      >>

      Firstly, any court at any level in any of the 28 EU member states can bounce an issue up to the ECJ. This means that a judge can wake up one day and “request clarification”. And increasingly they do. Secondly, the CJEU has engaged in an activist role, making law rather than interpreting it. It’s openly fed up with the lack of political progress in Brussels, in areas such as the single market. The combination of these two aspects – stupidity and ambition – creates a fertile ground for mischief. In the area of copyright, the CJEU has demonstrated this by developing a non-standard legal doctrine that’s not in the Berne Convention on copyright, but is one very much of its own devising. One that’s very likely based on a mistranslation, as we explained here. [ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/14/eu_court_stripping_copyright_protections_new_public_theory/ ]

      According to the man who wrote the WIPO book on copyright and is the Continent’s leading copyright scholar, Dr Mihály J. Ficsor, the CJEU has seriously fucked up by putting the Berne words in a different order to derive a new meaning. Rather than decide whether a possible infringement is at first “a new communication to the public” – which is the starting point world+dog uses –the CJEU now starts by mulling whether an act is a “communication to a new public”. And it’s tried to pin this down over several rulings, with bewildering results.

      << http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/08/eu_latest_copyright_ruling_hyperlinks_to_pirated_material/

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who cares it's all irrelevant in the long term, if your entire business model can be undermined by one person and a little bit of effort then your business model will probably be dead soon enough. There's only so long the state can protect dead models.

    Whether that's a good thing or not is neither here nor there, but when the trains coming towards you the smart money is on the person that gets out of the way.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The future

    All of this leads to the de-legitimization of intellectual property law. Massive noncompliance will ensue. The DMCA was the first rebar laid on the camel's back, what's come since has increased that weight exponentially. Eventually the camel, the rule of IP law, will collapse. Not good at all for small content creators and garage based inventors, but maybe the only way out for innovation.

    1. ratfox

      Re: The future

      I actually think that it's the small players who gain from the current situation. Look at what happened in Spain when Google closed Google News because they refused to pay for snippets. Traffic to news sites went down overall, but big sites saw an increase in market share, because people flock to them since they're famous brands. The small players got completely killed, though.

      The big players would likely say this is a good thing, because they regard small players as cheap and low-quality. Springer essentially have that argument against news aggregator: it forces them to compete for eyeballs with two-bit outfits who cannot offer quality journalism. It might be partly correct, but that would mean we need to protect big news organizations, not small players.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: The future

        One gives digital press publishers the right to ask Google for money for the snippets Google scrapes disappear from Google's search results.

        Just because the right exists doesn't mean they have to take it up. IIRC the Spanish situation wasn't that the sites had the option but Google had no option but to pay if it stayed. A situation where big publishers decide to demand money would benefit smaller publishers if they decided they were better off not doing so.

  4. Graham Cobb Silver badge

    Be careful what you wish for

    The "that's a nice link you've got there" protection racket (known more commonly as the link tax) will result in absolutely zero revenue for the publishers and will just result in the death of independent and investigative news. Which I think we can all agree would be a bad thing, whether you are an SJW or not.

    What news publishers should be fighting for is a significant increase in the hosting protection in the E-Commerce directive. The recent Facebook news censorship (the Napalm girl photo) shows that platforms today are insufficiently protected and hence are forced to act conservatively and censor news publications. That completely undermines the freedom of the press.

    Why are news organisations called "the press"? Because they owned their own printing presses and could literally print ANYTHING they liked, without needing permission from anyone else! Of course, if they violated laws or community standards they were held responsible. But only AFTER publication -- after everyone had a chance to read it. There are many instances of brave news organisations printing illegal or distressing material, or violating court injunctions, and some have even been killed for it. We cannot and must not allow press pre-censorship in the future.

    Unfortunately the future of news is on the platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc). Those platforms need to have the right, in fact the duty, to make visible everything a news organisation publishes. Even if it is illegal. And they must not be held responsible: the news publisher must be responsible.

    I am not saying that everyone should have the right to publish without interference. And I realise that determining whether someone is a "news organisation" or not is fraught with difficulty. But it is not impossible (we already have some laws which treat journalists differently from others) and the time of the experts in Brussels would be better spent on that problem.

    The "Napalm Girl" photo was a major factor in turning US public opinion against the Vietnam war. What is going to happen if the 21st century Syrian version of the Napalm Girl photo is deemed to be child abuse and blocked from Facebook and Google?

  5. phillupson

    "So which is it, Andrew? Too much power to the member states, or not enough?"

    To be fair, I think it's entirely possible to hold both points of view since the EU and its member states do, so how any mere mortal can reasonably define either point is beyond me. Is it a trading block, or is it a supranational Government? The EU thinks it's the latter but a good many of its member states think it's the former which is where most of the chaos and fuckups come from as far as I can tell. With regard specifically to IP law, that's a whole crazy can of worms all on its own, I mean how many of us have received a cheque from a job we quit 10 years ago? Unless you happen to be able to sing, dance or act, none of us.

    1. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      "I mean how many of us have received a cheque from a job we quit 10 years ago?"

      You do sound bitter. Creators are paid by usage. 40 and 50 year old music is making a lot of money for radio stations - some play nothing else. It seems only reasonable that the people who make those profits possible get something too. If an old book sells and everyone gets paid except the author, how is that less crazy? It is certainly less fair.

      If someone's work is still being used 10 years later and they feel ripped off, then either they were ripped off, or they're a lousy negotiator.

      1. Graham Cobb Silver badge

        Don't be silly, Andrew. There are many good arguments for copyright but the "old book sells and everyone gets paid except the author" one is absolutely not. When I sell my house for a massive profit everyone gets paid except the builder.

        There is no moral right to copyright. There is a purely pragmatic right, to encourage the creation of expensive to create but easily copied goods such as art or software. The argument is about what the terms need to be so that society is paying the price it needs to to encourage the creation of the goods it wants.

    2. P. Lee

      >it's entirely possible to hold both points of view since the EU and its member states do

      Well, it tells people its all about being a trading block while grabbing State powers.

      "You are a vassal state of the EU" would not go down well in most countries which have agreed to join the EU.

      "It is all about trade and free movement" implies a single government, but that is politically unacceptable - so we have a farce.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ancillary copyrights

    It's very nice to put it into law that publishers are allowed to ask money from Google. The problem is how to set the price.

    If this is decided by supply and demand, I'm guessing the price is going to benegative. As in, Google could demand money from publishers to display snippets in Google News, and a good part of publishers would pay up. And if a few do so, the others will be forced to follow up to keep their traffic.

    It's not completely theoretical: this is what happened with Google Shopping. It used to be free, as merchants would just send data to Google and Google would display their products. And four years ago, Google started demanding money, and merchants accepted by and large. (A big difference with the news business is that every single shopping site but Google was already asking for money, they were the last to switch to a paying model)

    Google is in the ad business, they know the value of a click. And they showed in Spain that they are not interested to pay. It so happens that they have not actually demanded money yet, and that may well be because the EU would immediately rule it illegal on antitrust grounds. But would the economics really be different with a dozen news aggregators having each a slice of the market? There are countries where Google is a small player, but even there, I don't think that news site ever get paid by aggregators.

    Tim Worstall has claimed a few times that Yahoo got paid for showing articles on their news site. It's unclear to me whether that's true or not, and it's certainly covered by nondisclosure agreements. But it does seem to be that news sites need aggregators more than the reverse, and the former asking money from the latter should be considered as a state-mandated subsidy rather than an economic transaction.

  7. Graham Cobb Silver badge

    Creating a new right just makes money for lawyers

    There is no evidence that a new "Related Right" is needed. Any publisher who wants to insist that Google pay before indexing their news can just block the Google spider using robots.txt. I have not seen a single claim that Google is ignoring a "keep out" notice in robots.txt.

    Until there is evidence that Google is ignoring robots.txt, the last thing we need is more special-case copyright law. This will just lead to unintended consequences as some troll sees a strange way to interpret the law and apply it to cases other than the news publishing which is being used to justify it. And no one can predict how the CJEU will end up interpreting it!

    The only people to make money from this will be lawyers, making weird arguments for judges to then make unintended rulings.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    37 iterations in short succession?

    I'm sure no industry lobbyists took advantage of that to insert consumer unfriendly loopholes.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When they said Geo-blocking would be removed originally, it was obvious they would remove that and bend to the will of the copyright cartels who use US government pressure to force their own agenda.

    The US in general has extended and screwed copyright law so much and tried to force that on other countries and the EU to the point that no one feels bad when they pirate stuff. Keep forcing laws for their own benefit and people will fight back harder.

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