I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
EU Copyright Directive and Article 13 change would require mandatory pre-screening filters for copyright, but where? What would happen in the U.S.?
The EU Copyright
Directive threat thickens.Now EFF offers
a letter from a number of Internet personalities, indicating that in Europe, at
least, filtering would be mandatory.
Perhaps
worse is a “link tax” proposal which would apply to any news snippet or quote
used to attract attention to a link to a news story, as explained here by
Jeremy Malcolm.
In Europe, a
publisher would not be free to offer its material to a “creative commons”.This has already happened in Spain, which caused
Google news to pull out.
What is
behind this? Why shouldn’t a publisher
who owns his material offer it for free if it wants?In fact, I’ve been criticized for competing
with myself by offering my book text free online, when the publisher price (except
for Kindle) is way too high (and I’m getting calls from companies offering
deals to somehow buy down these list prices – another business model).One time I had a conversation with Mark Cuban
(Blogmaverick) about this by email, and Mark said bluntly that many
establishment publishers would view me as unfair competition because I have low
costs (no unions, no employees, no guilds).I think it’s rather silly to imagine that “Do Ask Do Tell” could
threaten the financial viability of Marvel and Disney and billion dollar movie
blockbusters.(Cuban would probably be a
decent POTUSAnd, Oh yes, I did tweet
that Marvel could use David Hogg as a new superhero playing himself.I am hardly a threat to any studio.)
Then, let’s
remember the Righthaven mess of about a decade ago, where a copyright troll
sued bloggers for unlicensed quotes (and photos) from plaintiff small-town
newspapers, under a theory that the troll was protecting old fashioned
newspapers from going out of business.
“Protectionism
doesn’t protect.”I just tweeted that.
It really
does sound as though the mandatory filters in EU would prohibit an author from
posting his own content for free if it were sold in book form through normal
publishing (even self-published).
But what
sounds more relevant is the question as to where the directive would take
effect.
Would a platform
have to filter all content if it could be viewed from inside the EU, or could
it block a site that had not been screen from viewing in the EU altogether?Or would this only apply to content uploaded
by users or customers within the EU? I
am trying to find out. It’s relevant
that EU law doesn’t have a “fair use” doctrine like the US.
Furthermore,
despite all the attention to large social media platforms, who do have the resources
to do some automated filtering (however fuzzy and inaccurate) hosting
providers, who service customers who run their own websites (often with
Wordpress) could not possibly screen all content before posted for hypothetical
copyright infringement of some EU publishers.
In the U.S., major media have paid zero attention to this issue, so far.
In May, 2017,
Jeremy Malcom of EFF had warned of a preview in the US to what has blown up in
Europe: the concept of an “imaginary value gap” among legacy music and film
sites and probably book publishers, having to compete with lower cost content
that piggybacks on establishment work.
Oh, “Article
13” reminds me of “Article 15” when I was in the Army.No, I never got one, and no, it won’t ruin
your life.
Update: Later June 14 Ars Technica's Glyn Moody writes this "only" applies to providers like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter who sequence content for users. This would not seem to apply to hosting providers. The link is here. The writer's own blog posting on Blogger is here.
EFF tells me the rules would apply worldwide to any content if the company had assets in an EU country. But it's unclear if the company could break off EU assets into separate companies, or the law would apply at the holding company level. Axel Voss, architect of Article 13, seems hostile to protecting user generated content if it costs publishers anything, since platforms can leverage it so much relative to "legitimate" content. He seems to want to go after fake news, too; link.
This is obviously not very well thought out by anyone.
Major Update: June 20
A committee in Brussels passed both Articles 11 (link tax) and 13 (filtering) today, but a final vote in the EU Parliament probably won't happen until December, Verge story.
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