This is the best thing for innovation on the decentralized web, the focus on websites in the legal text will force platforms down on the protocol level.
I wish this was true, but I'm very doubtful it will. (I work on the Copyright Directive at the EFF).
The problem is that the supporters of Article 13 strongly feel that sharing or allowing to share any material without a license is a moral and legal failing. This is why an exception for small European services was so controversial (and the primary reason the negotiations dragged on for so long). To them, SME exceptions are the equivalent to saying that there should be an exception for punishment for robbery by people who don't profit too much from it. They've been saying that this is another conspiracy by tech companies, who will immediately set up thousands of small European businesses to continue their immoral piracy.
What that means is that the decentralised Web is going ot be immediately targeted. It will be framed as a lawless area, where the principles we "all agreed on" in the Directive -- to require licenses and auto-delete anything which might be copyrighted by somebody in the world -- are now being abused by those who create these tools to evade the law. The more successful as an alternative to US companies, the more this criticism will be expressed.
Remember also that the Directive has to be transposed into national law, and the exceptions will be heavily lobbied over in those jurisdictions. It's very unlikely that France, for instance, will build strong exceptions into its law.
I realise this sounds like a lot of predictions, but we faced a similar effect in the 2000s. Lawmakers were told that stopping commercial piracy (which was said to be funding terrorism) was the goal. But when the laws were proposed, the language they used was "commercial-scale" infringement, because the rightsholders didn't just want to stop people making and selling fake DVDs and CDs, but also Internet tools and services that could conceivably be used to make multiple copies. "Commercial-scale" just became a synonym for "a service on the open Internet".
there is enough FUD regarding "deep" and "dark" web and the contagious mentality that, decentralized networking cant possibly be any thing but criminal [if your hiding then you must be doing something wrong] I think it would only be a matter of time until peer to peer networking [read as deepnets and darknets] will be somehow subject to egregious legislation. Look at what has happened with torrent networks over the recent years. A lot of people think torrent is only for pirating and nothing else.
Yes and no, I'm the author of the P2P tech behind notabug.io, d.tube, and other sites, (https://github.com/amark/gun) so I have some experience with this:
- It works as well as WebRTC does. But browser vendors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) have kept WebRTC crippled. Firefox is doing work to make this better.
- When WebRTC fails (which is like 60% of the time), you have to fallback through a DHT of IPv6 peers.
According to the law, I believe, any one of those peers could be liable.
As a result, anybody who has a consistent IPv6 address or domain winds up needing to run a peer-specific "blacklist" of :( :( :( DMCA take down or else they could possibly be sued or have their door smashed in.
We're trying to make this better by creating a network of WebRTC DHT signaling peers called AXE (check the github for more info).
This will let users comply with the law (even be protected by things like GDPR) and then transfer data directly to their friends (not using any middleman service) and this data can stay protected with encryption (see our WebCrypto wrapper that makes this easy, https://gun.eco/docs/SEA ).
This will be the best way for users to stay legally compliant while not screwing over people's freedom and property-rights.
Veering off topic... I haven't found WebRTC to be that crippled by browser vendors. The fact that Apple didn't just give it the middle finger actually surprised me. I use it successfully for some things and lament that some users fall back to TURN (blame the ISPs), but w/ the webrtc adapter it works well. I too was experimenting w/ distributed signaling of late w/ IPFS [0]. That is quite crippled as well.
I'm not too concerned w/ end users' troubles with the law in a P2P sense. Even though the laws are ridiculous, it would be another level of ridiculousness to apply them to peers in such a system, akin to making Tor exit nodes and relays responsible for following this or the GDPR.
Yep, and also support services. A service that made it easy for you to host Mastodon (and lasted longer than 3 years); or a Mastodon instance that had a Patreon attached.
We'll fight like hell to make sure these get excluded, but given the battle over excluding SMEs, it would be a tough fight. And the chilling effect would be considerable — you can expect to get automatic legal letters from rightsholders claiming that you were already liable unless you paid them licenses, and the sort of takedown blackmailing you see happen on YouTube. Even if you're legally in the right, it takes a lot for a volunteer operator to stand up to that kind of intimidation.
stretching out a bit here i think a chat app, that destroys "offending" content, such as [https://pastebin.com/] could be safe, but if that app allows copy pasta that might be a problem, lets say song lyrics, or movie subtitles, or leaked manuscript, or moviescripts.
The problem is that the supporters of Article 13 strongly feel that sharing or allowing to share any material without a license is a moral and legal failing. This is why an exception for small European services was so controversial (and the primary reason the negotiations dragged on for so long). To them, SME exceptions are the equivalent to saying that there should be an exception for punishment for robbery by people who don't profit too much from it. They've been saying that this is another conspiracy by tech companies, who will immediately set up thousands of small European businesses to continue their immoral piracy.
What that means is that the decentralised Web is going ot be immediately targeted. It will be framed as a lawless area, where the principles we "all agreed on" in the Directive -- to require licenses and auto-delete anything which might be copyrighted by somebody in the world -- are now being abused by those who create these tools to evade the law. The more successful as an alternative to US companies, the more this criticism will be expressed.
Remember also that the Directive has to be transposed into national law, and the exceptions will be heavily lobbied over in those jurisdictions. It's very unlikely that France, for instance, will build strong exceptions into its law.
I realise this sounds like a lot of predictions, but we faced a similar effect in the 2000s. Lawmakers were told that stopping commercial piracy (which was said to be funding terrorism) was the goal. But when the laws were proposed, the language they used was "commercial-scale" infringement, because the rightsholders didn't just want to stop people making and selling fake DVDs and CDs, but also Internet tools and services that could conceivably be used to make multiple copies. "Commercial-scale" just became a synonym for "a service on the open Internet".