Is it possible that a small number of strategic EU legislative roles have been newly influenced/captured by special interests?
E.g. the Axel Springers of the world have long held certain positions. Why are they getting their way now, in 2018? Did legislation in EU or elsewhere set a recent precedent to lay the ground for this proposal?
This is just how long it took to get it through the pipeline. It was implemented first on a national level in Germany and Spain (with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them instead and in the end the German constitutional court ruled the law unconstitutional) so now they're attempting to get it in on a level where it's harder to remove because it needs international collaboration to do so. The downside for them is that it also needs international collaboration to enact, and thus we have more chances to prevent it at the european parliament level.
So do the right thing, call every MEP from your country that isn't an EPP member and ask them to a) be there at the vote (this is CRITICAL attendance really matters) and b) vote to allow changes to the law (tomorrow's vote is about whether the law continues to the next stage unchanged or whether changes are allowed - it's not about accepting or rejecting the law in general, just in its current form)
> with disastrous results - basically the publishers decided that it wasn't worth it for them to try to extract license fees because search engines started blocking them instead
You mean Google used their 90%+ market share to extort rights from publishers.
Look I'm not much of a google fan either but if you are a news aggregator or search engine and you have to figure out who owns each text snippet and what it costs and have an accounting and billing infrastructure to go with it, would you rather do that or simply not show the snippets? Google is one of the few entities who could afford to implement this, but as you say the giants with massive market share will just make a deal with the publishers to not pay the fees in exchange for exposure, and everyone else will be stuck with having to police their users in case they quote some news article. The main victims of this will be small forums and entities like wikinews. Google and Facebook will, as always, get away with it because the publishers depend on them. This law is disastrous for everyone else.
Nobody promised for news sources that their business model would be free of risk of changes. Same for news aggregator business model.
If it kills news aggregation and strengthens newspapers - I all in. Investigative journalism is needed for democracy and currently going extinct due to power shift from news sources to news aggregation - producing a news is way more costly then distributing it.
I don't think this will kill news aggregation, and I don't see how it will strengthen newspapers - the biggest aggregators will just strike a deal with publishers to not pay them anything in exchange for not delisting them. The smaller aggregators cannot afford to license snippets and aren't big enough to matter to the publishers so they will just stop publishing snippets. There is no case where publishers (and even less so investigative journalists) win from this. We've seen this in Germany and Spain where this was implemented in national law.
However, the actual victims of this are another group. The law specifies "commercial users" as ones that have to comply with this but does not define what "commercial use" is. In Germany, courts have ruled "commercial use" to be very broadly interpreted, and it would cover things like forums that collect user donations to cover server costs, or have advertising for the same reason. They are clearly not making money from news aggregation, but the way the law is written any kind of commercial use is the same and has to comply. So now they have to police all their users just to make sure they don't post a news snippet, and there is no minimal size for news snippets. So in the worst case you can no longer discuss news on a forum without making the forum operator liable for license fees to whoever published the news. As a forum operator, how am I supposed to know whether something is news or not? Do I have to screen every post and compare against a list? The law doesn't say. The committee proposed an exemption for user-submitted content but the proposer of the law shot it down. So now here we are. Forum operators have to police their users against unclear criteria or face legal liability. I think that's a chilling effect, and it has no upside.
If you want to strengthen investigative journalism, do exactly that - put more money into EU-wide funds to fund investigations, for example, or make it safer for them to report by implementing EU-wide protections for journalists (to prevent what happened in Poland from happening elsewhere for example). Or regulate ownership of mass media to prevent concentration of power. There's lots of things you can do on an European level to strengthen journalism and democracy. This is definitely not it.
It's possible but I think it has more to do with constantly chipping away. The more initiatives they push through the more brazen they get. GDPR was widely supported so now they go in for the kill.
I don't think that you should compare GDPR with this copyright stuff. GDPR is fundamentally about protecting normal people. This here is about propping up obsolete business models.
They are definitely comparable. First I don't buy that GDPR was about protecting normal people. It was a shot across the bows of Facebook and Google (but will actually end up working in their favour). The word for this is protectionism.
Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world. The data itself enables this too. The algorithms and learnings that come out of this can be applied in many spheres of interest and now all that is lost. It is a massive loss for innovation and humanity just as articles 11 & 13 will be.
People like GDPR because they have a kneejerk emotional reaction to it and they never consider the second and third+ order effects which are disastrous at best.
> Also as I just wrote on twitter it kills innovation. All the ad revenue is supporting some of the most cutting edge machine learning work in the world.
So what? What if instead of ad revenue it was financial fraud supporting some field of innovation, should we suddenly start being OK with it?
As I see it, GDPR is mostly just a harmonisation of privacy rights that already existed in several EU countries and in some cases (Germany?) have a long history. I find it implausible that it was intended as an attack against Facebook and Google, but I'll look into it if I get a chance.
I also find it implausible that online advertising is a major contributor to machine learning (ML). In the literature I've read, online advertising doesn't usually appear near the top of the list of ML applications. I can see that authors might want to avoid mentioning something that everyone hates, but most of the articles do mention the military applications, which aren't likely to make most people feel enthusiastic about ML either.
E.g. the Axel Springers of the world have long held certain positions. Why are they getting their way now, in 2018? Did legislation in EU or elsewhere set a recent precedent to lay the ground for this proposal?