How EU's copyright reform (Article 13 and link-tax) will ruin gaming for Europe

[k4far]

What will be the result of EU's Copyright Reform for gaming community in Europe?


DIRECT QUOTES! ▀
interpretations and comments! ▀




ARTICLE 13 CURRENT PROPOSAL SAYS THE FOLLOWING:

Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, part 1:
Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject- matter uploaded by their users[...]

The concept covers both internet ACCESS providers and online social networking platforms such as Facebook.

“Hosting” covers any service (“cloud” storage, hosting a website, hosting a blog, etc). The wording “store and provide to the public access” implies that the intermediary is a publisher and would therefore be liable for all infringements of all laws that may be committed by their users.

Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, part 2:
[...] shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers.

Legislators are not being clear! The CJEU ruled that a social network “cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work”. Filtering has been repeatedly judged not to respect basic human rights (Case C275/06 Promusicae v Telefónica).

The problems with ContentID (although the same analysis would apply to similar use of similar technologies) has been extensively researched by EDRi member Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/ youtubes-content-id-c-ensorship-problem

Paragraph 1, Sentence 2:
Those measures such as the use of effective content recognition technologies shall be appropriate and proportionate.

Legislators suggest that the providers find “appropriate and proportionate” solutions to avoid explicitly requiring the use of technology that the Court of Justice has already rejected this proposal. Citizen's fundamental rights are entirely ignored in this provision because of the lack of clarity to where the responsibility lies. You can be fined I can be fined the website we were using can be fined, fine for everybody.

Paragraph 1, Sentence 3:
The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter.

The proposed measures will require monitoring and filtering of anything that European citizens upload to content-sharing services. We are given no clues at all as regards what a “proportionate” approach might be. This is probably because it is impossible to implement in the first place.

Paragraph 3:
(...)shall facilitate,where appropriate, the cooperation between the information society service providers and rightholders through stakeholder dialogues to define best practices, such as appropriate and proportionate content recognition technologies, taking into account, among others, the nature of the services, the availability of the technologies and their effectiveness in light of technological developments.

The proposal is about the removal of content on the basis of mandatory filtering of users content, even if that content is entirely legal!

In the context of this extreme intrusion into their freedom of communication, users are excluded from any “dialogue” to define any “best practice” in this globally “worst practice” of filtering and blocking of communications.







SCARE!



What if you are a website where people can post comments ex. ExclusivelyGames.com:

• You HAVE TO build a mechanism that will detect and filter out contents that are a potential "piracy", "plagiarism", and difficult to define ever-present "controversy".
• You are taking FULL FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS OF USERS visible on your website.
• You will be forced to pay the LINK TAX to websites for linking to their articles (no exceptions) - if you wish to criticize Kotaku or Polygon they will be making a ton of money in the process.

What does it all mean for internet users:

• Every single of your comments will have to get verified before it gets published.
• Sharing content, posting links, making and upload might quickly get you in LEGAL TROUBLE..
• It will be really difficult for you to find things that you are interested in. Because of the LINK TAX search engines will be blocking access to smaller websites that do not have linking licenses resulting in smaller businesses being disadventaged from the beginning.

What is going to happen to content creators, Youtubers:

• Traffic to your channel will plummet because of less visitors from the regions affected by the Articles 11 & 13.
• If in your review you decide to include a picture of a quote out of game cutscene. It will be considered a copyright violation and automatically removed before it even becomes visible. You might end up in week long copyright dispute before they let you upload your content to the public.
• Any reviews/satire/parodies you are making will not be allowed. Fair use will completely stop working you will be a subject to AUTOMATED MODERATION that can't distinguish between fair use and copyright violation.

Our Ability To Post Content On The Internet Will Be Limited By A Censorship Machine

Some of the content uploaded on the Internet infringes the copyright of rightholders (which are often not the content creators but intermediaries and investors such as recording or film studios) and content creators complain that due to the digital evolution, they make less money than they used to (the so-called ‘value gap’). This does not reflect the reality accurately, specifically in the case of the music industry that year after year announce that their incomes keep increasing. However, what they claim is that some platforms (YouTube, Vimeo… ) do not pay them enough when they stream copyrighted content: that is what they call the “value gap” (the gap between what rightsholders think would be fair as a compensation and what platforms pay them).

Article 13 claims to address these problems but does so it in a way that hampers the way the Internet has been functioning so far by asking platforms to put in place costly and opaque solutions to pre-screen our content. This proposal would require intermediaries such as Facebook and YouTube to constantly police their platforms with censorship machines, often with no human element involved in the process. It will mean that you will no longer be able to upload or enjoy the same content as you used to, as automated blocking is likely to stop (legitimate) content of ever making it online. Analyses by EDRi of the European Commission and JURI proposals show the underlying threats in Article 13’s logic.

And what’s worse: none of the versions of Article 13 make life better for creators. Article 13 actually makes no mention of creators: only rightholders.

[Courtneylius]

Topic closed. Clear violation of CoC. Please consult CoC before posting in the forums. Thank you.

https://www.exclusivelygames.com/for...ode-of-conduct

[grayfox313]

Can we not fight like children? Let's try and make this site/forum not like that others, filled with trolls and jerks. Shitposting is fun and all, but let's keep it off here. Can we please play nice?

[k4far]

You're a damn troll. You didn't even bother to read the actual Council on copyright in the Digital Single Market LINK that I gave you.

Please bother to read actual first post I did include direct quotes so you do not have to look for them, mind doing the same or I am supposed to find things to back Your arguments.

[zeorhymer]

Where does it say "small and micro platforms excluded" and if it's true, how do they plan to define small and micro - releasing any law binding papers without defining what things are is gross incompetence. Would you mind posting parts of actual legislation and commenting on them to back your claims up? As for hyperlinks, you wrote "accompanied by individual words" how do you plan to practically interpret this?

You're a damn troll. You didn't even bother to read the actual Council on copyright in the Digital Single Market LINK that I gave you.

[k4far]

PSA: What is the purpose of this thread?



Saskia TheDorkyDane

Try to focus on discussing the effects the directive on Exclusively Games that includes: our thoughts about the fragments of the directive itself if we would like to talk about some specific parts of the legislation. Avoid speaking about EU as the main subject it's not the point of this thread! Do not give your opinions on EU/European Communities, state of the Union etc. We are not here to talk about the organization behind the laws and it's problems! Do not use words like ("left", "right", "political views"). We are here to try to predict what the future might be like for Exclusively Games and it's not necessary to share our personal views. You can quote fragment of the paper and talk about it, just like that, really!

This is the short list of what the updated Article 11 and 13 does.

• Small and micro platforms excluded from directive’s scope
• Hyperlinks, “accompanied by “individual words” can be shared freely

Where does it say "small and micro platforms excluded" and if it's true, how do they plan to define small and micro - releasing any law binding papers without defining what things are is gross incompetence. Would you mind posting parts of actual legislation and commenting on them to back your claims up? As for hyperlinks, you wrote "accompanied by individual words" how do you plan to practically interpret this?

[k4far]

Saskia, consider not using terms affiliated with political views like "....wing". It's sort of a welcome to fully political discussion. If you read the first two pages it's a pretty normal not entirely political discussion. I consider politics a poo throwing fight where we are trying to antagonize each other for our views. Let's not get to that it's heavily opposed to the idea of escapism. Some might argue this thread itself is not right to be here and they might not be wrong I will agree with anything the management of this website will decide to do. So please, everyone end your "isn't that politics" let Moderators speak up about this and if they consider it wrong they will act for sure.

[k4far]

If some moderstor sees your post here after what Saskia wrote they will consider this all politics it was going pretty fine. Please consider deleting we can talk about this elsewhere <3

[k4far]

Dorky if we talk religion and stuff like that it will get this thread closed because this website is about escapism which stands for staying away from politics for nervous.

[TheDorkyDane]

xadu

Don't ask me about the specifics, but we are locked out of it. The EU has done something to lock us out of it so our police can't access their data base. Which yes, is fucking stupid, especially in our current climate.


And well, the reason they locked us out. Basically, EU countries had a deal doing the refuge crisis, we would each take in a specific amount of refuges, and Denmark agreed to that and we upheld our part of our bargain.
Suddenly, the EU demands we take in MORE "Refuges." ... They don't even call it refuges anymore, even they have to call them immigrants, they wanted to force us to be part of this immigration plan of the EU and we said. "NO!"
They wanted us to be a part of this "Opt out." agreement which would hand over a lot of power to it, also well one of our demands to joining to EU in the first place was that we would NOT be part of this agreement. It was our original demand, and it still holds water.
We even had a public vote if we should go with or not go with the deal, if we said no, we would loose a lot of benefits. We said no, and we lost the benefits.
The EU legit is a bunch if bullies just bullying the countries that wont go along to what-ever they want.

So yeah, the EU is trying to gain control of EU countries.

The question though is whether EU countries are going to cooperate or not, and well we increasingly had enough. The chances of individual countries just going with it are less and less likely.

[xadu]

>we lost our right to be a part of interpool

Can't be. Interpol is not an EU office. It is independent. This is the world map of countries belonging to Interpol:

[k4far]

I love your country after reading this. Fuck those banking goblins.

[TheDorkyDane]

I am actually in an interesting position in regards to this and... Well, I am almost looking forward to see how my country will handle it. If it wasn't so bad... It is going to be a shit show.

I am from Denmark! Denmark is a part of the European union.

HOW-EVER! There are two things that makes us very different from other EU nations.

One!

We have always been a thorn in EU's side, when we joined it was on a couple of agreements. Among them that we would NOT be a part of their valuta, that there would be NO military, that we would remain a sovereignty.
The EU has of course kept pushing us, kept insisting we should hold votes to overturn this, we had a votes, but they remained EU negative, we have always refused to play along to the tune of the EU, it is still the same today.
I think the most obvious example is that they demanded we took in more immigrants than first agreed and we said. "NO!" and we kept saying "NO!" which is how we lost our right to be a part of interpool (No seriously.)
But yeah, our politicians actually has a spine and consistently says. "NO!" To the EU, and they hate us for it.

Two!

Denmark as one of the few European countries actually have free speech laws, and is very protective of them, we call it "Ytringsfrihed."
This article 13 is in a direct opposition to our own laws, it is in a direct opposition to our values.

Quite frankly, with these two things combined I cannot imagine my country nor government going along with this. It is going to be a SHIT show!


So yeah, that is an aspect people forget. Each individual country will have to go along with this. Some countries like French, Sweden and Germany with weak governments will probably bend backwards to do it.
Other countries how-ever, with a stronger sense of sovereignty, such as Denmark, Hungary, Italy and Polan.
There is no way they are going to go along with this, seriously. Another attempt to censor us?!

the EU has been bullying its smaller nations for a long time, and we are growing increasingly SICK of it.

So yeah, if article 13 goes through... Looks like it will... the yellow west uprising is going to spread exponentially, trust me.
Smaller nations which already were fed up with the EU is going to get furious and say. "NO!" and place that on top of the looming Brexit.

..... I am indeed hoping the EU is going to go down in a burning fire... It could happen. They are NOT on as stable grounds as they think they are.

[k4far]

I have to agree with Phabe Jewell on this.

[Phabe Jewell]

political opinions and actual copyright issues are different