European copyright rule fiasco

Tranquility

Well-Known Member
Since FC is over three years old, it might be subject to the new European Union copyright rules if they pass. Those rules will pretty much eliminate much of the content posted on FC. I have no idea if we are large enough for the copyright owners to care; but, if they do...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/final-version-eus-copyright-directive-worst-one-yet

Read the whole thing as it is a pretty good article that explains things. Some of the issue:
Article 11, which allows news sites to decide who can link to their stories and charge for permission to do so, has also been worsened. The final text clarifies that any link that contains more than "single words or very short extracts" from a news story must be licensed, with no exceptions for noncommercial users, nonprofit projects, or even personal websites with ads or other income sources, no matter how small.
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Amazingly, the tiny, useless exceptions in Article 13 are too generous for the entertainment industry lobby, and so politicians have given them a gift to ease the pain: under the final text, every online community, service or platform is required to make "best efforts" to license anything their users might conceivably upload, meaning that they have to buy virtually anything any copyright holder offers to sell them, at any price, on pain of being liable for infringement if a user later uploads that work.
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Under the final text, any online community, platform or service that has existed for three or more years, or is making €10,000,001/year or more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily. This is impossible, and the closest any service can come to it is spending hundreds of millions of euros to develop automated copyright filters.
 
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