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As usual with upcoming legislation, FUD predominates in the conversation. A reasonable person may be used to parties with vested interests to exaggerate or misrepresent facts, but it's unfortunate when parties from whom you may not expect a clear bias continue to perpetuate uncertainty and doubt.

Article 13 states that the measures to seek rightholder approval for user-submitted content "shall be effective and proportionate, taking into account, among other factors" the nature and size of services, whether they're a small and medium business, the sheer volume of material uploaded, and the cost burden of such an effort.

Furthermore, it refers to a precise definition of the sort of enterprise that is to be impacted by this regime -- those that provide "public access to a large amount of works or other subject-matter uploaded by its users which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes", exempting a variety of others. This leaves ample leeway to require a more rigorous scheme from hosts as big as YouTube while being more lenient with a hobbyist forum.

Article 11 states that the copyright protection of journalistic articles from aggregators will expire at the end of the following year from the article's publication. It reaffirms the right of publishers to decide how they wish to profit from their work -- if they choose to make it available for the aggregator at no cost, that is their right as well.



> It reaffirms the right of publishers to decide how they wish to profit from their work -- if they choose to make it available for the aggregator at no cost, that is their right as well.

That's exactly what the Spanish law has forbidden, with disastrous effects for local media when Google withdrew. I'm not familiar with the text of the Article 11 proposals, but I doubt it includes provisions excluding such a transposition into national law; it's obviously the only way for any implementation of the directive to have any teeth.

Of course, the immediate effect is that the aggregators would refuse to pick any local content and would display only 3rd party sites, from outside the countries afflicted with the toxic link syndrome.


OK could you point to anything that outlines actual criteria for classification because the language you included from Article 13 in your comment is not restrictive in any manner.


Original text [1], changed by amendments [2]. Relevant definition:

Amendment 150, Proposal for a directive, Article 2 – paragraph 1 – point 4b (new):

> 'online content sharing service provider' means a provider of an information society service one of the main purposes of which is to store and give access to the public to a significant amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users, which the service optimises and promotes for profit making purposes. Microenterprises and small-sized enterprises within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and services acting in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned, such as educational or scientific repositories, shall not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive. Providers of cloud services for individual use which do not provide direct access to the public, open source software developing platforms, and online market places whose main activity is online retail of physical goods, should not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive;

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... [2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&langua...




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