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Copyright Threats to FOSS: Copyrights on APIs and Upload Filter (for Code Also)

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  • No Allies for Oracle’s Win Against Google

    The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has received over a dozen amicus briefs in support of Google against Oracle in a long-lasting battle for Java API (software interface) usage. Among others, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Microsoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, Python Software Foundation, Developers Alliance, along with IP scholars, computer scientists, software innovators, start-ups, and investors raised their concerns about the rulings of the Federal Court of Appeals in 2014and 2018.

  • Support for Google mounts as its Oracle petition is considered

    Google’s argument that it used Oracle’s copyright fairly – with $8.8 billion in the balance – finds support as it hopes for US Supreme Court review

    Google’s petition for certiorari at the Supreme Court represents its last effort in a protracted copyright battle with software company Oracle. The near-decade-long conflict centres on Oracle’s Java programming application, which Google admitted to using...

  • Copyright reform: it’s the final countdown

    This Tuesday MEPs will cast the final vote in a long running process to reform the EU’s copyright law. Their decision will define whether consumers will be able to continue enjoying the internet as a place where they can easily share content with friends and family or be at risk of seeing their uploads systematically blocked by automated filters.

  • Swedish MEPs Announce Support For Article 13, Demonstrate Near Total Ignorance Of What It Actually Entails

    As MEPs get ready to vote on the EU Copyright Directive -- and specific amendments concerning Articles 11 and 13 -- many have not yet said how they are going to vote. However, two Swedish MEPs, Jytte Guteland and Marita Ulvskog, who many had believed would vote against the plan, have suddenly switched sides and say they plan to vote for it. In a rather astounding interview with reporter Emanuel Karlsten the MEPs reveal their near total ignorance of what Article 13 does and what it would require.

    Guteland spoke to Karlsten by phone, and he asked all the right questions. It's worth reading the entire conversation, but here are a few snippets with my commentary.

  • New Report: Germany Caved To France On Copyright In A Deal For Russian Gas

    In the hours leading up to the vote in the EU Parliament on the EU Copyright Directive, the German publication FAZ (which has been generally supportive of the Directive) has released quite a bombshell (in German), suggesting that the reason Germany caved to France on its terrible demands concerning copyright was in order to get France's approval of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia.

    If you don't recall, the German delegation had actually pushed back on the more extreme versions of Article 13 -- and, in particular, had demanded that a final version have a clear carve-out for smaller companies, so as not to have them forced out of business by the onerous demands of the law. However, after some back and forth, Germany caved in to France's demands, with many left scratching their heads as to why. However, some noted the "coincidence" in timing, that right after this, France also withdrew its objections to the pipeline which is very controversial in the EU (and the US, which is threatening sanctions).

  • EU Copyright Directive Vote, GNU nano 4.0 Released, Redox OS 0.5.0 Announced, Sailfish OS 3.0.2 "Oulanka" Now Available and Linux Kernel 5.1-rc2 Released

    Members of the European Parliament vote tomorrow on the Directive on Copyright. Those in the EU can go to SaveYourInternet to ask their representatives to vote against Article 17 (previously Article 13). See this Creative Commons blog post for more information. From the post: "The dramatic negative effects of upload filters would be disastrous to the vision Creative Commons cares about as an organisation and global community."

    [...]

    Sailfish OS 3.0.2 "Oulanka" is now available. Named after the Oulanka national park in Lapland and the Northern Ostrobothnia regions of Finland, this new version fixes more than 44 bugs. In addition, "With this new update you will find that the Top Menu has a new switch for silencing ringtones and there's a new battery saving mode to make the most out of low battery in those moments you need to stretch productivity. Email app supports now sending read receipts to inform that you have read the senders' email. Connectivity was improved in terms of firewall and global proxy. As for the user interface, home screen had memory optimizations for handling wallpapers, freeing memory for running other apps."

  • Inside GitHub’s fight to protect devs from EU’s disastrous Copyright Reform [Ed: Microsoft is a patent and copyright maximalist, this time it just doesn't suit one site.]
  • European Parliament to vote on EU Copyright Directive
  • How #Article13 is like the Inquisition: John Milton Against the EU #CopyrightDirective

    Fundamentally, policing of speech can happen at one of two points: before content disseminates, or after. Policing content after it disseminates involves human agents seeing and reporting content and taking action or requesting action. This can happen on a huge scale or a tiny one: Facebook’s content flagging system, obscenity law in much of the EU and USA, parents who object to books assigned in schools, and China’s 50 Cent Army of two million internet censors, all these act to silence content after it disseminates.

  • The EU votes on a confusing new copyright law Tuesday

    Both provisions are maddeningly vague—laying out broad goals without providing much detail about how those goals can be achieved. This is partly because the EU's lawmaking system occurs in two stages. First, EU-wide institutions pass a broad directive indicating how the law should be changed. Then each of the EU's member nations translates the directive into specific laws. This process leaves EU-wide legislators significant latitude to declare general policy goals and leave the details to individual countries.

    Still, if the legislation's goals are incoherent or contradictory, then something is going to have to give. And critics warn that the package could wind up damaging the Internet's openness by forcing the adoption of upload filters and new limits on linking to news stories.

  • Music Labels Forgot Their ‘Secret’ Article 13 Weapon, So Dan Bull Used it Against Them

    Music is widely acknowledged as one of the most potent and emotive ways to tell a story and send a message. Yet, inexplicably, no major artists in favor of Article 13 have used their talent to tell the world why it should pass. In that silence, UK rapper Dan Bull (with support from Grandayy and PewDiePie) has now seized the day - to explain why it shouldn't.

  • EU backs controversial copyright law

    The European parliament has backed controversial copyright laws which critics say could change the nature of the internet.

  • Even after today's EU Parliament vote, we can still kill Article 13 through pressure on German government to prevent formal adoption by EU Council

    Under normal circumstances, today's outcome of the European Parliament's plenary vote would mean we lost the fight against Article 13 ("upload filters") definitively because a 348-274 majority adopted the bill without amendments after an incredibly narrow 317-312 majority disallowed votes on individual amendments. The latter result indicates a majority against Article 13 was in striking distance, given that no amendment had nearly as much as momentum as the one that would have deleted Article 13 (now named Article 17). Some folks may have given up prematurely, but that's another story.

    If we organize another and even bigger round of street protests in Germany, work with opposition parties, and put maximum pressure on Merkel's junior partner (the Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD), we may be able to prevent Germany from allowing the directive to pass into law. But we only have two weeks to make it happen. Let me explain step by step.

  • EU’s Parliament Signs Off on Disastrous Internet Law: What Happens Next?

    In a stunning rejection of the will five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive in its entirety.

    There’s now little that can stop these provisions from becoming the law of the land across Europe. It’s theoretically possible that the final text will fail to gain a majority of member states’ approval when the European Council meets later this month, but this would require at least one key country to change its mind. Toward that end, German and Polish activists are already re-doubling their efforts to shift their government’s key votes.

    If that attempt fails, the results will be drawn-out, and chaotic. Unlike EU Regulations like the GDPR, which become law on passage by the central EU institutions, EU Directives have to be transposed: written into each member country’s national law. Countries have until 2021 to transpose the Copyright Directive, but EU rarely keeps its members to that deadline, so it could take even longer.

Mozilla and Others Respond

  • Mozilla statement on the adoption of the EU Copyright directive

    There is nothing to celebrate today. With a chance to bring copyright rules into the 21st century the EU institutions have squandered the progress made by innovators and creators to imagine new content and share it with people across the world, and have instead handed the power back to large US owned record labels, film studios and big tech.

    People online everywhere will feel the impact of this disastrous vote and we fully expect copyright to return to the political stage. Until then we will do our best to minimise the negative impact of this law on Europeans’ internet experience and the ability of European companies to compete in the digital marketplace

  • EU Puts An End To The Open Internet: Link Taxes And Filters Approved By Just 5 Votes

    Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the EU Parliament has just put an end to the open internet. By the incredibly thin margin of just five votes, the Parliament voted to approve the EU Copyright Directive, including the terrible versions of both Article 11 and 13. This is an inauspicious day and one that the EU will almost certainly come to regret. While we now need to see how each of the member states will implement the actual laws put forth in the Directive (meaning the damage in some states may be more mitigatable than in others), on the whole the EU Copyright Directive requires laws that effectively end the open internet as an open communications medium. Sites that previously allowed content creators to freely publish content will now be forced to make impossible choices: license all content (which is literally impossible), filter all content (expensive and failure-prone), or shut down. Sites that used to send traffic to news sources may now need to reconsider, as doing so will inexplicably require payment.

  • 'Dark Day for Internet Freedom': EU Approves Rules to Create Online Censorship Machine

    Articles 11 and 13, the two most controversial components of the copyright overhaul, were left unchanged after MEPs voted against allowing amendments that would have removed them.

    "Today's vote is a major blow to the open internet. This directive positions the internet as a tool for corporations and profits—not for people," said OpenMedia Executive Director Laura Tribe. "By approving Articles 11 and 13, the EU Parliament not only rubber stamped bad legislation, but also ignored the voices of millions of its own concerned constituents."

    As The Verge's James Vincent reported, "Article 11 lets publishers charge platforms like Google News when they display snippets of news stories, while Article 13 (renamed Article 17 in the most recent draft of the legislation) gives sites like YouTube new duties to stop users from uploading copyrighted content."

    Critics warn that Article 11 could ultimately become a "link tax," which would charge websites for linking to news articles.

  • Article 13: EU passes copyright directive which will lead to a more censored internet

    The European Union (EU) has passed all articles, including Article 13 and Article 11, of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. Article 13 of the copyright directive mandates that websites are responsible for keeping copyrighted materials off of their site – in the most absolute sense. Over the next two years, the directive will need to be written into law in each of the EU member states – thought none of the companies in any of the states know how they will comply with the coming laws. The EU’s actions today will lead to a more censored and less private internet with more surveillance. Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament that has been campaigning against Article 13 and Article 11 for years, summarized concisely in a Reddit AMA:

  • Article 13 is an attack on the open internet – Bits of Freedom

    Today, a majority of the European Parliament voted in favor of the new copyright directive and the controversial “Article 13”. Sold as the only way to prevent copyright infringement, the regulation will introduce algorithmic filters on all the major communication platforms, which will analyse and assess users’ every upload. This will have a huge negative impact on the range and quality of public discourse and entrench the existing tech monopolies.

CC's Response

  • A Dark Day for the Web: EU Parliament Approves Damaging Copyright Rules

    Today in Strasbourg, the European Parliament voted 348-274 (with 36 abstentions) to approve the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. It retains Article 13, the harmful provision that will require nearly all for-profit web platforms to get a license for every user upload or otherwise install content filters and censor content, lest they be held liable for infringement. Article 11 also passed, which would force news aggregators to pay publishers for linking to their stories.

    There was a potential opportunity to vote on amendments that would have removed the most problematic provisions in the draft directive, particularly Articles 13 and 11, but the preliminary vote even to consider amendments fell short by five votes, thus pushing the Parliament to move ahead and simply approve the entire package.

    MEP Julia Reda called the decision “a dark day for internet freedom.” We agree. There was a massive outpouring of protest against the dangers of Article 13 to competition, creativity, and freedom of expression. This included 5+ million petition signatures, a gigantic action of emails and calls to MEPs, 170,000 people demonstrating in the in the streets, large websites and communities going dark, warnings from academics, consumer groups, startups and businesses, internet luminaries, and the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. Even so, it was not enough to convince the European legislator to change course on this complex and damaging provision that will turn the web upside down.

New Copyright Threats to Free Software and the WWW

  • European Parliament approves controversial Copyright Directive

    “This is a very bad day for free expression, for copyright and democracy. Millions of people have voiced their opposition and thousands have protested against it. If copyright filters go ahead, large numbers of mistaken takedowns will impact what we do and say online. The EU Parliament has made a serious error of judgement here. We will go on doing everything we can to stop this being the disaster it promises to be.”

  • Controversial Online Copyright Law Article 13 Passed By EU Parliament

    n Monday 27 March 2019, the European Parliament passed the controversial EU copyright law. However, two clauses within the law, namely Article 13 and 11, are the cause of concern for millions of internet users in the EU.

  • Aren’t AMP Caches committing copyright infringement?

    Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are specially formatted web pages that companies like Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft copy off publishers’ websites and make available through their own AMP Cache web servers. There is no redistribution license agreement between the AMP Caches and the publishers, so how come AMP Caches aren’t considered copyright infringement on a massive scale?

  • Promoting open source innovation: Red Hat urges U.S. Supreme Court to support free use of software interfaces

    Red Hat recently filed an amicus brief (a "friend of the court" brief) in support of Google’s petition for certiorari, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn two rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Oracle v. Google. These decisions, we believe, incorrectly extended copyright to programming interfaces and created unhelpful uncertainty around the doctrine of fair use. If left uncorrected, the lower court rulings could harm software compatibility and interoperability and have a chilling effect on the innovation represented by the open source community.

    Open source software has been one of the great technological success stories of recent decades. The rapid pace of innovation resulting from the open source collaborative development model is facilitated by the ability to generally use interfaces, such as APIs for software libraries and web services, unrestricted by copyright protection. Unencumbered interfaces are vital to developing programs that interoperate with computer products, platforms and services. Interoperability is critical to innovation and a core feature of the internet and of internet-dependent devices and services.

  • A Worldwide Web of Digital Colonialism: The Internet into the Present (Pt 1/2)

    "That is also, in large part, based on some of the concepts and activism and work by Richard Stallman, who created the free software movement. So those three pillars are free software, free hardware, and free spectrum, or if you want to consider it Internet connectivity."

Latest links on copyright 'reform'

  • EU Parliament Adopts Copyright Directive, Including ‘Article 13’

    First up was a proposal to reject the entire Copyright Directive. This was rejected with 443 votes against and 181 in favor. A subsequent vote to allow amendments to the text of the directive was also rejected, although that was very close with 317 in favor and 312 against.

    Parliament then moved on to vote on the entire text of the Copyright Directive without any changes, including the renumbered Article 13 and Article 11.

    With 348 Members of Parliament in favor, 274 against, and 36 abstentions, the Copyright Directive was adopted.

  • Article 13: Europe approves controversial copyright law despite protests

    The backbone of the protests involves Article 13 - now renamed 'Article 17 in the revised text - which many have claimed threatens an open internet. It clamps down on copyright avoidance in such a way that it would make user-generated content almost impossible, and memes a thing of the past.

  • European Parliament passes new copyright rules

    New copyright rules have been passed by the European Parliament in Brussels overnight, making Internet publishers liable for content that is uploaded by users.

  • After yesterday's ACCIDENTAL vote, EU copyright bill faces three HUGE legitimacy issues--not counting lobbying and Putin's pipeline

    The lesson from yesterday's European Parliament vote on copyright reform is that no one is ever beaten unless he gives up the fight. In fact, the vote was not just very close on whether or not to allow amendments but it turns out we only lost the vote on whether to proceed to the votes on amendments because various MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong button, resulting in an incorrect 317-312 "majority" against allowing amendments! More on this further below.

    Going forward, there are actually some opportunities to derail or delay adoption of the directive by the EU Council (by simply delaying adoption into the new EUJ legislative term, new procedural opportunities would arise, and it shouldn't be too hard to delay adoption of an incredibly unpopular measure during the hottest phase of the election campaign). And even if this didn't work out, the efforts going into this would highlight and underscore the illegitimacy an ill-conceived bill with a view to national adoption.

    It's not even like we'd have to create facts that delegitimize the bill. The facts are already there, out in the open, well-documented, indisputable, and incontrovertible. It's our job--as the defendants of a reasonable, fit-for-the-future balance between traditional creativity and 21st-century creativity--to take those silver bullets and use them wisely, forcefully, and swiftly.

    We have some very powerful silver bullets and I want to focus on only the top three aspects here. I wouldn't emphasize the impact of "lobbying", or of alleged threats by conventional media. Both camps were quite aggressive in their ways, and threats that were made against Axel Voss MEP (and possibly others) are not just unacceptable: they're illegal, and I hope such behavior will have consequences. (I once received a threatening email in the United States when I was fighting there and in the EU against Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009, from someone who just identified himself as a Sun employee.)

Latest copyright twists

  • France wants urgent implementation of Internet upload filters: three government agencies to collaborate on this

    Without going into details here in public, I am in a position to tell you that there are certain dynamics in German politics across multiple parties that ultimately might prevent the German government from allowing the EU Council, where there is no qualified majority without Germany's support, to rubberstamp the triply-illegitimate current version of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market ("EU Copyright Directive"). I attended and was, without prior notice, invited to speak at a small impromptu demonstration in Munich last evening against the European Parliament's copyright vote.

    By contrast, the Macron regime, whose police forces commit extremely violent acts even against grandmas and other peaceful citizens joining the Yellow Vests protests, is as excited as government officials possibly could be about the prospect of filtering uploads by Internet users as soon as possible.

    Yesterday, Benjamin Henrion, the president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), alerted me to a tweet by French journalist Marc Rees according to which the French government will start with the promotion and definition of a legal framework for upload filtering technologies in a matter of days. As per my suggestion, Benjamin asked Marc Rees for the source, not because I doubted the accuracy of the information but because I did want to see the specific context.

  • Conservative MEP Zdechovský, change.org petition call on European Parliament to REPEAT copyright vote that went wrong

    While the proponents of Article 13 (now Article 17) such as the Macron regime are already pushing for the rapid implementation of Internet upload filters and putting pressure on Switzerland to adopt a similar set of rules (so as to avoid the relocation of many EU web servers to the non-EU member states in the heart of Europe), it may turn out soon that those people were simply jumping the gun. There are some dynamics, and this triply illegitimate piece of legislation can still be prevented from being passed into law if we all do what it takes. We'll see in the coming days whether the movement that opposed Article 13 (now Article 17) gets its act together. Most members of that movement apparently haven't understood the opportunities yet, but some have. There clearly are political and procedural ways to turn this around.

Today's EU (C) Links

Backlash ensues

  • Article 13: Swedish MEPs allow directive to pass by mistake

    The vote was, as they understood it, to vote in favour of voting down (see - confusing already) a plan to pass the entire bill without further debate. In other words, it was a vote to not-not debate Article 11 and 13 before voting for the bill in its entirety, not voting not to vote in favour of the whole thing without further discourse.

    Clear? No? Exactly.

    The Swedish contingent has filed notice that it meant to vote the other way, but sadly the vote will still stand, meaning some of the strictest copyright laws in the democratic world just passed because some of those voting didn't understand the question and now want to change their minds.

  • Austria plans de facto exemption of all startups from scope of Article 13 (now 17) of EU Copyright Directive: useless unless entire EU follows suit

    What makes it hard for me to comment on some developments regarding the EU Copyright Directive as harshly as I'd like to is that there are some Members of the Europen Parliament (MEPs) involved with whom I got along very well in other contexts. Otherwise I'd have voiced some outrage here over EP President Tajani's refusal to accept the SaveTheInternet petition signed by 5.1 million people, and I'd express outrage now over a proposal by Othmar Karas MEP, an Austrian conservative (but a different kind of conservative than Austria's chancellor Sebastian Kurz).

    It would be a better choice for Mr. Karas to support his colleague (from the same political group, the European People's Party) Tomáš Zdechovský's call for repeating the European Parliament vote on whether or not to allow votes on individual amendments than to toss out proposals that look helpful at first sight but are highly unlikely to solve the problem. That's what's called misleading voters, by the way. But I won't say anything harsher than that for the reason I gave further above.

On EU Copyright Directive

FSFE Retracts

  • Free Software Foundation Comes To Its Senses After Calling For EU To Fund Open Source Upload Filters

    Most EU digital rights groups are still reeling from the approval of the EU Copyright Directive and its deeply-flawed idea of upload filters, which will seriously harm the way the Internet operates in the region and beyond. Matters are made even worse by the fact that some MEPs claim they blundered when they voted -- enough of them that Article 13 might have been removed from the legislation had they voted as they intended.

    But one organization quick off the mark in its response was the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), the local offshoot of the main Free Software Foundation. Shortly after the EU vote, it issued a press release entitled "Copyright Directive -- EU safeguards Free Software at the last minute". This refers to a campaign spear-headed by the FSFE and Open Forum Europe called "Save Code Share" that sought successfully to exclude open source software sharing from Article 13.

Statement from FFII

  • FFII call on national parliaments to reverse soviet-style internet upload filters

    FFII is calling on angry protesters against internet upload filters to reverse the position of their country by calling for a vote in their national parliament. Council of the Ministers is an undemocratic institution where decisions on this particular subject are made by officials of the Member States’s ministries of culture. FFII call on national parliaments to ‘take back control’.

    The adoption of internet upload filters is a strategic mistake that will fuel the eurosceptics game at the coming elections. Boris Johnson’s reaction to european parliament vote yesterday left no doubt about it. Internet upload filters are a slippery slope. Another directive will extend automatic filtering to ‘terrorist’ content, ‘fake news’, and finally, political speech. Where does it end?

    The Council of Ministers is expected to formally adopt the directive as an A-item at the next meeting on Tuesday 9th of April.

    Benjamin Henrion, President of FFII, says: “It’s time for real European Democracy. You have next week to change the outcome. Call your national parliament now, and ask for a vote on internet upload filters!”

    He remembers 15 years ago: “Poland saved SMEs from the harmful software patent directive, any country can do it again. Merkel and Macron sold SMEs for a Russian gas pipeline, it’s time to fix the European democratic deficit and replace diplomats by a network of national parliaments. Ministers of Culture should not be allowed to dictate the position of a country. The CETA debate was the same undemocratic mess, it was barely discussed in 3 national parliaments out of 28, and a few unelected ministers decided on the positions of their countries.”

Florian Mueller's Latest

  • Swedish government may have to vote against copyright bill in EU Council: Riksdag Committee on EU Affairs will decide

    The triply illegitimate European Parliament vote in favor of a copyright bill requiring upload filters (as the French government, its #1 proponent, has since stated clearly and German EU commissioner Günther Oettinger considers "not entirely avoidable")=should be repeated as Czech conservative MEP Tomáš Zdechovský formally proposes. But in any event, it's not yet a "settled matter" as Mr. Oettinger, who initially came up with the ill-conceived proposal that led to this mess, just claimed in an interview in which he threatened sanctions against countries that might "water down" the text through the national implementation process. The EU Council still has to formally adopt the bill, and since it's clearly irreconcilable with the German government coalition agreement, let's see what happens.

The position of copyright maximalists

  • DSM Directive Series #1: Do Member States have to transpose the value gap provision and does the YouTube referral matter?

    As reported by The IPKat, earlier this week the European Parliament adopted the latest version of the new Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive).

    The IPKat will now run a series of posts discussing some of the key aspects of this new instrument which, following publication in the Official Journal of the EU, will need to be transposed by EU Member States within 2 years.

  • Report on Copyright and the Court of Justice of the European Union Event

    Tuesday 26th March was an eventful day for copyright in the European Union because the EU Parliament also adopted the Digital Single Market Directive (DSM Directive).

    However, the main reason why it was an important day was because our own Kat Eleonora Rosati held the official book launch for her new book, Copyright and the Court of Justice of the European Union, at the London offices of Bird & Bird LLP.

Updated Statement from FSFE

  • Copyright Directive – EU safeguards Free Software at the last minute [Updated]

    The original version of this press release urged the European Commission to act to avoid filtering-monopolies, but our description of our position on filters was unclear and incomplete. The FSFE is not, and has never been, in favour of developing "fundamentally flawed filtering technologies". The FSFE has been fighting against upload filters since the beginning, e.g., as a signatory of Copyright for Creativity or Create Refresh, and joined more than 80 organisations asking the EU member states to reject the harmful Article 13 (now, Art. 17). The FSFE will support solutions to preserve users' right to be in control of technology and ethical standards for service operators.

  • EU Copyright Directive Approved - Without Amendments

    Having followed the progress of this legislation over many months we have repeatedly pointed out that two of its clauses - Article 11, the link tax, and Article 13 (renamed Article 17 in the final legislation and a possible cause of confusion) which will almost inevitably lead to upload filters, is likely to have devastating consequences, see Final EU Copyright Directive Spells Disaster if you want the details.

    #SaveYourInternet had waged an effective campaign against Article 13, including a petition which attracted over 5 million signatures and demonstrations in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Austria and Poland where up to 200,000 people took to the streets in protest.

More on Article 13

  • Article 13 will wreck the internet because Swedish MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong voting button

    In the EU, if a Member of the Parliament presses the wrong button on a vote, they can have the record amended to show what their true intention was, but the vote is binding.

    Today, the European Parliament voted to pass the whole Copyright Directive without a debate on Articles 11 and 13 by a margin of five votes.

    But actually, a group of Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they'd intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13.

    We lost on a technicality, and there is no recourse.

  • The EU Copyright Directive: Winners, Losers, and What Happens Next…

    Three days have passed since the Copyright Directive was passed by the European Parliament, and more and more people are beginning to ask: what happens now?
    One thing is clear: nothing’s going to be to torn up, even though a whole new parliament is soon to be elected. It’s said that it takes as long to tear up a directive as it does to create one, and it’s taken many years to get to where we are now. Those most critical of the Directive find themselves clutching at straws, like the European Court of Justice maybe rejecting the directive. Or that the Council of Ministers, when meeting in a few weeks to formally approve the decision, will have changed their minds. It’s all a bit unrealistic.
    We can therefore conclude that copyright organisations have scored a massive victory, and succeeded in their lobbying work. They managed to establish a narrative that those who criticised the Directive were either reeled in by hysterical propaganda or were puppets of Google. But most of all: that this was a question of either being for or against cultural creators.
    The latter point became absolutely crucial.
    Among Swedish Social Democrats, this point was what led many to falter. Most clearly, Aleksander Gabelic spoke out sharply over the pressure he experienced from pro-copyright lobbyists. Certainly, he had received thousands of emails from citizens, but the pressure of cultural creators; the nightly conversations implying he was destroying everything for them, rattled him. Gabelic was absolutely convinced that the UN observer for freedom of speech was right in saying the directive was far too great a restriction on freedom of speech, but the pressure he was facing forced him to consider abstaining. He feared how cultural creators would interpret and spin his vote either way. Time and again during our interview, he emphasised that the Directive was not about being for or against cultural creators.

Some mainstream media coverage

  • EU lawmakers approve copyright reforms that could have a big impact on Google, Facebook

    European lawmakers have approved sweeping copyright reforms that could have far-reaching consequences for the business models of tech giants like Google and Facebook.

    The law is aimed at bringing the EU's rules on copyright into the 21st century to help artists and publishers whose works have been widely dispersed on the internet.

    A first reading of the new copyright directive was passed Tuesday in Strasbourg by lawmakers at the European Parliament. But it still needs to be ratified by ministers at the Council of Europe — this is the institution that brings together the different EU ministers according to their portfolios.

  • Europe's New Copyright Law Could Be Bad for Memes

    YOU MAY SOON see fewer memes online, especially if you live in the European Union. On Tuesday, the European Parliament passed a directive to overhaul copyright law in the European Union and put more pressure on the likes of Google, Facebook, and Instagram to keep copyrighted material like photos and videos off their platforms. Now it's up to each member country to write laws based on the directive.

    The laws will apply only in the EU, but it's possible that companies will try to comply with the directive globally, just as some companies, including Microsoft, say they are applying the EU privacy regulations outside of Europe.

    The most controversial part of the copyright directive makes platforms like Google and Facebook responsible for copyright violations in material posted by their users. Previously, users, not the platforms, were liable. A copy of the directive published by European Parliament member Julia Reda, a member of the Pirate Party Germany who opposes the legislation, says companies will need to follow "industry best practices" for preventing the upload of copyrighted materials. The directive is meant to only cover content-sharing sites. Changes to an earlier version of the proposal last year exempt smaller companies, business-to-business cloud services, open source code-hosting platforms, and not-for-profit online encyclopedias.

  • YouTube, Facebook and Google News will be 'directly affected' as Europe approves new internet copyright rules

    In the European Parliament, MEPs cast 348 votes in favour and 274 against the 'Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market', with 36 abstentions. The European Parliament said the directive aims to ensure that copyright law also applies to the internet. It added that YouTube, Facebook and Google News are some of the internet household names that will be "most directly affected" by this legislation.

    [...]

    Europe argues the directive aims to help musicians, performers and script authors, as well as news publishers, to negotiate better deals for the use of their works when these feature on internet platforms. It does this by making internet platforms directly liable for content uploaded to their sites. News aggregators will only be able to use very short snippets of text or otherwise may have to pay.

Europe’s New Copyright Law Will Spook Startups

  • Europe’s New Copyright Law Will Spook Startups

    Owen Williams is a self-employed journalist and developer building experiments in news and beyond at Charged. Previously, he was Head of Digital at VanMoof and an Editor at The Next Web.

    Earlier this week, European Parliament voted to ratify infamous copyright legislation that threatens to change the Internet as we know it. Both article 11 and 13 have wide-reaching consequences that affect Europe’s ability to compete as a destination for startups—the risks will simply be too high for even the “safest” of bets.

    Let’s recap what these pieces of new legislation actually do.

    Article 11 is a misguided attempt to help publishers better monetize their content: it requires anyone using a “snippet” of any journalistic content to purchase a license from the publisher. The law would affect anyone from Facebook or Twitter showing an excerpt of an article in your timeline, to potentially a site like Crunchbase simply quoting a headline.

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More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.