[sarcasmic]

I doubt most of those people who've bought into the notion that small businesses like Reddit and nonprofit services like Wikipedia would be affected have read the relevant text, considering the text specifically says nonprofits and small businesses are exempt [1] from the rules of Article 13 (the takedown one).

I'm also puzzled by the people saying it's difficult to comprehend. The hardest part is mentally joining the diffs in amendments to the static copy before a document is updated. EU legislation is not nearly as weasely as US, and likes to use precise terms it defines earlier in the document. Such is the case with the terms 'information society service' and 'online content sharing service provider' [2], whose exact definitions are relevant.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488844 [2] search for 'Amendment 150' in http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&langua...

[paganel]

Reddit is not a “small business” anymore, it hasn’t been one for quite some time now. Let alone the fact that it’s the fourth most visited website in the United States, it’s now mentioned almost everywhere, from SEC press releases, The Economist articles or “Cahiers du Cinema” movie reviews (the last one really puzzled me as the current batch of Cahiers du Cinema writers are pretty anti-US and anti-technology).

[dijit]

EU has a proper definition of what a small business is:

> SMEs are defined by the European Commission as having less than 250 persons employed. They should also have an annual turnover of up to EUR 50 million, or a balance sheet total of no more than EUR 43 million (Commission Recommendation of 6 May 2003). These definitions are important when assessing which enterprises may benefit from EU funding programmes aimed at promoting SMEs, as well as in relation to certain policies such as SME-specific competition rules.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/structural-business-statis...

[paganel]

Am on mobile and I’m too lazy to link, but I’ve found stories about Reddit having already reached $100 million in yearly turnover, which means that they’re no longer seen as a SME based on the second part of your post.

[dijit]

Yes. But the term is not ambiguous as the parent seemed to indicate.

[ascar]

According to Wikipedia Reddit had 230 employees 2017, so they are scratching the threshold or are already over it.

[wvenable]

...and suddenly Reddit falls to 249 employees...

[PunchTornado]

wikipedia is nonprofit so it is not affected.

[woolvalley]

And the EU didn't apply SME carve outs to the GDPR, really showing how much of a big company regulation lock in it was.

[wongarsu]

If you're tiny you get out of a few GDPR regulations, like having a data protection officer. Also the GDPR mostly calls for reasonable and appropriate measures, which are terms that scale with company size (measures reasonable for a hairdressing salon are not appropriate for a fortune 500).

Making even further cutouts for SMEs seems unreasonable, after all the individual citzen has similar impact from a data breach in a medium sized company compared to a data breach in a large enterprise.

[sarcasmic]

To add to my earlier, as a personal note, this is frustrating to me, because the text is clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name, while exempting pretty much all of academia, hobbyist sites, small businesses, intranets, and content platforms that don't actively promote and significantly profit off of their collection and curation of low-effort, low-remix, non-OC, verbatim reposts of someone else's copyrighted content.

Yet, through the lobbying of interested parties the message becomes deliberately muddled. Sites like Reddit spread the FUD because were it not for their status as a small enterprise, the letter of the law could threaten their business model of aggregating large amounts of user-submitted content and profiting off of ads surfaced adjacent to them -- ironically, the old Reddit before ads would likely be exempt entirely. They see this law as an existential threat and lobby against it; this I can understand.

What puzzles me is parties like the EFF and Wikimedia Foundation spreading the FUD. Wikimedia would clearly be exempt. What gives?

[dannyobrien]

Hi, I'm Danny O'Brien -- I work at EFF on Article 13.

So we talk a little a bit about this earlier this week: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/yes-eus-new-copyrightd...

I've mentioned this in Hacker News threads before, but here are the few things to bare in mind.

Firstly, the SME exemption (as well as the specific exceptions for Wikipedia and Github) was put in at the last moment in an attempt to win enough votes to get the Directive through the plenary following widespread opposition. It only exists in the European Parliament text, which is currently being negotiated with the original Council text. The news from the trilogues is that there's lots of lobbying to get it removed.

The exemptions sound good for Github and Wikipedia on paper: but Github and Wikipedia are the services that currently exist, and have been effectively grandparented in. It doesn't speak for all the other potential services that we can't describe, because they don't exist yet -- and won't exist if there's a liability regime that would have stopped Github and Wikipedia in their tracks if it had written before.

Thirdly, we know from experience that these exemptions don't work. In the European Parliament text, we have a blanket liability regime, which means that rightsholders can sue you, or your provider, by default. You can argue back, "oh it's okay, we're covered by this exemption", but you have to prove that you're really covered by the exemption -- and the expression of that exemption in each of the 28 implementations of the Directive in the member states. It creates a default of liability, and then fences of a small section of the Internet where you may be protected.

In the mean time, you -- as a person who hasn't paid up for a licensing arrangement with the major rightsholders -- will be on the receiving end of repeated orders to take down content, with the understanding if you don't successfully argue against that exemption, or the moment you cross that SME line, you'll be liable to an unbounded extent.

Why would you take that risk? How could you protect yourself against that risk?

Also note that many of these exemptions are expressed in the Recitals, which merely indicate the spirit of the law, the specific rules for transposition in the Articles themselves. Generally speaking, if you are threat-modelling new law, you might as well ignore the Recitals, because there is a substantial lobbying and legal community who have a big financial incentive to guide lawmakers, and deploy lawsuits in such a way as to sideline those non-binding commitments.

The exemption language was an attempt by lawmakers taken aback by the force of the opposition to Article 13 and 11, to both win over votes in the Parliament, and stop GitHub, Wikimedia and its users from complaining. The reason why Github, and Wikimedia and their users continue to complain is that they don't believe they can act in the future as though these exemptions will really work for them — and they have an interest in maintaining the rest of the Internet ecosystem, which will be still left out in the cold.

Remember too, that almost every platform we use to communicate online has been accused (and sued) as a method to encourage infringement. The music industry attempted to sue the MP3 player out of existence as an infringing device (https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-music-diamond-multime... ), the movie industry sued YouTube claiming that it was primarily a device for piracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

[chrisweekly]

^ This should be the top comment. Thank you for the excellent summary, and for fighting the good fight!

[repolfx]

Are there really specific exceptions for Wikipedia and Github? How does that work? They can't be named explicitly in the law, surely?

[sarcasmic]

The relevant quote from this version [1] is:

>"The definition of online content sharing service providers under this Directive does not cover microenterprises and small sized enterprises within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and service providers that act 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. 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] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&langua...

[pmontra]

> online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned,

Does the service trust the uploader about this? There will inevitably be disputes about that self declaration.

It's also impossible to know which are all the rightholder of a piece of content. There might always be one more making a claim later on. Any system, automated or manual, is going to have many false positives and negatives.

On the other side, this system is already in place for traditional media. It's dealt with litigation. Again, no need to create special legislation for the internet. The blame must be passed over to the content creator, not to the distributor. This means that the creator must be identifiable, to know who to sue.

However this means that the supposed rightholder is going to automatically sue a zillion of people, with false negatives. This is unfair. I propose that in case of false negatives they lose the right on the content.

An example.

It's May and they play the final of the Champions League (this is about the EU). People will post the highlights. The rightholder will manually identify some hundreds of those videos, sue the uploaders and win. This will teach people not to upload those kind of videos next time. But if they sue a guy because they mistake him playing with friends as the Champions-League final, they'll lose all the rights on it. They'll be very careful about who to sue, people will be careful about what they upload, I won't see highlights anymore on YouTube but I can live with that. It seems fair for everybody.

The part about losing the rights is not going to happen though so I wasted your time, sorry.

[repolfx]

Wow. That doesn't even make sense: "service providers that act 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"

Are they really assuming all online encyclopaedias are non-commercial?

[hpcjoe]

Since Github is now part of Microsoft ... it's kind of hard to see them as SMEs, based upon the text of the articles.

[dingaling]

> Why would you take that risk? How could you protect yourself against that risk?

Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

Flickr, Smugmug and other enthusiast photo gallery sites seem to have walked this line quite successfully. Imgur and its ilk haven't because they've never really had a reason to care. Now they do.

So YouTube wouldn't be the massive entity it is now if it were truly YouTube and forbade uploading of any derived content. But perhaps that would be better.

MP3 sites might be more like SoundCloud with original content.

I find it difficult to be moved by the protests of people who just want to post other people's creations. Link to it, don't copy it.

[zorga]

> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

And what magic spell do you expect publishers to cast to distinguish the two when you allow users to post content? Do you have the faintest idea how absurd what you're saying is?

[Kalium]

> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

How would a company go about being certain of this, do you think? I can't think of a way to do it with uploaded content that doesn't have a nasty error rate. Obviously it becomes trivial if you take the Netflix approach and source everything from the owners directly, which means working only with the biggest providers who have legal departments and such. With restrictions like this, even SoundCloud can't exist - almost everything on there is a derived work!

Have I missed something? Can you help me understand how a site can be certain it hosts only original or otherwise authorized content without taking a Netflix-type approach? I would love to be wrong, and for there to be an easy, cost-efficient approach that offers a suitably low error rate and enables protecting content creators while preventing abuses.

[AsyncAwait]

> Host only original content of which you or your registered users are the declared copyright holders.

Good luck proving what copyright everything that your users upload has. Such systems cost billions of dollars to develop and are prone to abuse.

> it were truly YouTube and forbade uploading of any derived content

Most content is in some way derived. Forbidding such things would effectively eliminate gaming channels, political channels, music channels, review channels, podcasts etc.

> MP3 sites might be more like SoundCloud

You do realize the RIAA is not particularly happy about SoundCloud either, right? And much content on there can still be described as 'derived'.

> I find it difficult to be moved by the protests of people who just want to post other people's creations.

I find it difficult to be moved by copyright maximalists, who used other people's work to get where thy are, but now insist that they should profit from a piece of work 70+ years after the author is dead.

[ddingus]

No memes = no culture.

I am opposed, and will remain so, until such time as the big players either demonstrate real harm, or recognize the many benefits they get.

And they do benefit significantly.

What they claim is always the same,"billions lost", yet fail ti explain where all that money actually comes from.

Entertainment dollars for the vast majority are largely fixed. There aren't those dollars actually out there.

What I find particularly onerous is the idea of not actually being able to put material out there intended to be shared freely. Did that make it into this mess?

[int_19h]

It's not just about hosting. It's about linking, too.

[AsyncAwait]

> the text is clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name

Google and YouTube already do this via ContentID, a system which only abuses small time creators. I don't see how expanding this EU-wide helps small businesses. Do you?

> What gives?

Room for abuse? Who do you think pushed for this? It wasn't your friendly neighborhood photographer. It was the RIAA/MPA etc. Just look at the DMCA.

> What puzzles me is parties like the EFF and Wikimedia Foundation spreading the FUD

What puzzles me is why would anyone who is not a dinosaur gatekeeper be for this?

[cronix]

> What puzzles me is parties like the EFF and Wikimedia Foundation spreading the FUD. Wikimedia would clearly be exempt. What gives?

I think they're making a moral or equality standing. If it's wrong for one company to do something just because they're large, why is it ok for another org to do the same just because they're "small"? And what do small companies strive to be? Usually bigger companies. The law doesn't make sense to begin with. By exempting smaller entities, they're basically saying it's not "really" illegal and it's more of just a free money grab to take from larger producers. You basically said it yourself when you said it's "clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name". And why are they "targeted???" Because they have deep pockets, and that's it. This has nothing to actually do with copyright other than a subjective means to go after some companies while exempting others. It's either wrong, or it's not. The size shouldn't come into play.

[jhasse]

To compensate for all the other advantages huge companies have over small ones.

[skewart]

> the text is clearly worded to target the likes of Google and YouTube without calling them out by name

Have you read the text? Nowhere does it target only the likes of Alphabet (Google and YouTube). The exemption threshold for small companies (50m revenue, 43m balance sheet, or 250 headcount) is orders of magnitude below Alphabet's revenue and headcount. Sure, hobbyists and truly small companies are exempt, but the threshold is so low that far far more companies than just the tech giants will be affected.

[kodablah]

Surely you can recognize targeting hosts of small business's content and traffic sources is essentially targeting small business. I would imagine this only frustrates you because you are not one of those small businesses leveraging the services of larger ones. Intent notwithstanding, who is really going to be harmed? Who is really going to be helped? Are your answers to those just hopes and is it fair for your hopes to affect the rest of the pragmatic internet?

[Recursing]

How is Reddit a small business?

[sarcasmic]

They're supposedly under 500 employees, which is the EU threshold for small and medium enterprise. They prominently mention their small business status in their post. It's likely that their assertion is deliberate.

[abc-xyz]

Reddit having under 500 employees is beyond ridiculous.. it might be understandable if they were a honorable company that protected people's privacy, but they're the complete opposite, and they even go out of their way to make it near impossible for 99% of their users to download a video on their site (kinda hypocritical).

If Reddit didn't exist and their traffic was driven to niche forums/websites then you could expect hundreds of thousands of jobs.

[why_only_15]

So it's great that Reddit exists because now you don't have to have hundreds of thousands of people maintaining these small websites and have hundreds of people maintaining one website.

[abc-xyz]

It would be great if they were a honorable company (ideally a non-profit org) that protected user privacy rather than taking great pride in violating it.

And I don't think it's great that you have one site controlled by an evil company and filled with low quality content/discussion about every niche topic when you could instead visit 2-10 websites about the niche content you care about.

[ndnxhs]

Employee count seems like a really bad way to measure business size. A hardware store business with only a couple of stores could hit 500 and still be virtually unknown to everyone but a business like reddit owns one of the biggest websites in the world with an almost global impact.

[hyperpape]

If the law so clearly excludes Reddit, why are we reading this blog post? Is your claim that Reddit is confused about the law? Or something else?

[zamalek]

The requirements are unreasonable no matter the size of the company. A perfect copyright filter is impossible. No matter how many resources you throw at the problem, content will spill through the cracks.

The directive outlaws content sharing websites, regardless of who's running those websites.

[ddingus]

Reddit is not a small business.