Articles 11 & 13 from the EU Copyright Directive

[Walter]

But I don’t really understand how allowing copyright material to be posted on your forum is taking all precautions you can imagine.

On a forum with many thousands of posts per day and with chat threads with more than 30 000 pages we simply dont have enough moderators to be able to catch all issues, some slip through. If you have a large enough forum I can guarantee you that you also have some issues.

Now that I have seen your forum, sorry, but I have threads with more posts than your whole forum. We simply play in another league and therefore have other problems as small forums.

 

[MySiteGuy]

I haven't overlooked that, and I'd like to see them still carry on doing that, and we can all benefit from it. All I'm saying is Youtube needs to be responsible for not allowing the illegal activity to take place.

ie, does Youtube need the illegal activity to function?

And just how does Youtube accomplish this? There's simply not way to review every submission, and even if they could there's no way to know which violate someone else's copyright. Ultimately, it should be up to you.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Thanks, good article but nothing to do with copyright at all, I'm glad they remove videos that incite violence are not safe for children etc.


Yes I saw the phrase "The algorithm errs on the side of false positives:" Presumably the program cannot be 100% correct and I would agree erring on the side of false positives is better, but then I would. I can understand people thinking otherwise. It's like the old law argument"better to lock up one innocent man than let 100 murderers and rapists go free..." Will always be an interesting discussion of law and ethics.

The old saying is the opposite of what you posted. Its supposed to be "its better to let 100 guilty people go free than lock up one innocent man."

 

[imno007]

On a forum with many thousands of posts per day and with chat threads with more than 30 000 pages we simply dont have enough moderators to be able to catch all issues, some slip through. If you have a large enough forum I can guarantee you that you also have some issues.

Now that I have seen your forum, sorry, but I have threads with more posts than your whole forum. We simply play in another league and therefore have other problems as small forums.

Right. Not to mention that looking at the internet as a whole as a bunch of disparate sites/communities, all under perfect control by their respective owners/webmasters, places where everyone always adheres perfectly to the letter of the laws of every single country and jurisdiction of the world, is maybe missing the mark a bit. Some people seem to think that over 3 billion people (by current estimates) can get together in an online space (the internet) and everything they do and say can be perfectly controlled under the rule of law. If you imagine something like that happening in the brick-and-mortar world, you get something like China. You can't control people's actions to that extent without extensive surveillance and tracking, which will inevitably have an impact on free speech and privacy. Maybe the internet as a whole will end up being a much more "law abiding" place, and maybe that can only be a good thing in some people's eyes, but it sure as hell won't be as much fun for the rest of us. Not to mention the impact it might have on people's quick and easy access to news and knowledge in general. Do any of us want an internet without Wikipedia, for example? And what about news? Studies have shown that without news aggregation services like Google News, search times increase and people consume less news overall. (Although I'll admit that might not be all bad where some people are concerned, ha ha.)

But probably to no one's surprise, in countries where Google has withdrawn Google News over the past several years, rather than pay a "link tax," as they have done in Spain and Germany, studies have shown that it hurt publishers more than helped them. Here's an article from way back in 2014, showing the result in Germany:

German publisher caves to Google News after massive traffic drop

After a two-week run, Axel Springer will let Google put portions of articles in search results

www.theverge.com

This is something companies like Google could do again: require EU companies to opt-in to services like Google News, by agreeing to forfeit any fees the law might normally allow them to collect - or suffer the traffic drop.

 

[dknife]

Is there any good source of requirements for this regarding site owners? It's hard to find anything that is fairly detailed. Does it:

1. Apply to forums hosted outside of the EU where the forum owner is not an EU member either but has content uploaded by an EU member
2. Apply to forums owned by an individual that does not make profit and is not a business

I understand the 3 criteria for start-ups but you have to meet all 3 so forums older than 3 years are included irrespective of their size. Which just leaves the questions above.

 

[Mr Lucky]

The old saying is the opposite of what you posted. Its supposed to be "its better to let 100 guilty people go free than lock up one innocent man."

True, but I disagree with that old saying so I have a new one.

Seems to me there are very strong and passionate arguments on both sides, I would have thought rather than arguing completely one way or the other, some compromise would be useful. If we all accept that copyright infringement is a bad thing, then the premise of the law is good no? So there argument should be about how it is humanely and sensibly enforced rather than just arguing against copyright protection.

However (sadly) I know there are a lot of people who believe an artist's work should be freely taken and used willy nilly, as if making a meme is an excuse or claiming only a few seconds were used. For those who do think everything should be free and copyright has no meaning whether it's digital audio, software, images, books, lyrics then they are the people actually responsible for this type of law being even considered.

 

[imno007]

However (sadly) I know there are a lot of people who believe an artist's work should be freely taken and used willy nilly, as if making a meme is an excuse or claiming only a few seconds were used. For those who do think everything should be free and copyright has no meaning whether it's digital audio, software, images, books, lyrics then they are the people actually responsible for this type of law being even considered.

Actually, using only "a few seconds" is probably going to be covered by fair use in the US and most countries, so thankfully it appears that even most lawmakers and judges are perhaps not as zealous as you are. However, when all is said and done, this conclusion from Wikipedia on the subject says a lot about the whole matter:

Fair use is decided on a case by case basis, on the entirety of circumstances. The same act done by different means or for a different purpose can gain or lose fair use status. Even repeating an identical act at a different time can make a difference due to changing social, technological, or other surrounding circumstances.

Fair use - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Mr Lucky]

Fair use is a defence not an excuse. It is in regard mainly to education, reviews, parody and news, not merely he proportion of a work that is stolen without any of those mitigating factors.

- just look at laws and test cases on sampling in music. It's just a big myth you can use 7 seconds or whatever.

 

[imno007]

Fair use is a defence not an excuse. It is in regard mainly to education, reviews, parody and news, not merely he proportion of a work that is stolen without any of those mitigating factors.

Yes, a defense: a legal defense. A don't need an "excuse" as long as I have the former and a judge agrees with me.

You're starting to sound suspiciously like an old southern preacher at his pulpit....

 

[Mr Lucky]

as long as I have the former and a judge agrees with me

Who wants the expense of going to court though? How about just not stealing in the first place

You're starting to sound suspiciously like an old southern preacher at his pulpit....

How 'bout just not stealing in the first place y'all it says so in my bible an' Jesus never stole no pitchers from the internet and made no memes.

 

[imno007]

Who wants the expense of going to court though? How about just not stealing in the first place



How 'bout just not stealing in the first place y'all it says so in my bible an' Jesus never stole no pitchers from the internet and made no memes.

You're just being obstinate now, my friend. Obviously what is and isn't illegal and "stealing" is not agreed upon by all in all cases, and obviously the law is not always clear-cut on the matter. It's legal and not stealing if a court says so, and that's the bottom line, whatever you say, and vice versa. And you're not guaranteed to get the same judgement from one court to the next. So maybe the laws need to be a little more clear cut. Whatever. I'm disussing what is and isn't legal, and you seem to be trying to steer the conversation more and more to what you consider is and isn't moral - which is even more ambiguous than the law on the matter.

 

[Kalo]

Here's a ridiculous fact how on the 26th of March 2019 the vote in favour of articles 11 (15) and 13 (17) passed!!!

The vote in question was not passed unanimously but rather went through by five votes. Now, some members of parliament from Sweden have stated that they didn’t mean to vote of the legislation and tapped on the wrong button.

They claim that their intention was only to open a debate on the subject and regret the outcome. While it would seem odd that a member of the European Parliament would vote on legislation by pushing the wrong button, the outdated method of voting has to be taken into account.

First, one must consider the way the question was framed. Members of parliament were asked to vote in favor of voting down in favor of passing the entire Copyright Directive bill without any further debate. The vote was, in essence, to not refrain from voting on articles 13 and 11 and instead pass the entire directive at once. What they thought they were voting on was to not vote on the entire bill being passed without review.

This, on its own, would be confusing to most people, even members of the European Parliament. Unfortunately, it seems that the votes cannot be changed or recalled and that motion will pass.

This does go to show the flawed nature of the political system when a bill that will affect all of Europe is passed uldue to poor framing of a question and the pushing of the wrong button.

Article 13 News: Swedish Legislators Say They Passed the Directive “by Mistake”

''Members of parliament were asked to vote in favor of voting down in favor of passing the entire Copyright Directive bill without any further debate.''???

It was definitely one of the most important votes since the creation of the internet and the person who formulated the question unintentionally or intentionally framed them?


The Guardian also has a say on this:

Before the final vote on the directive, MEPs had a vote on whether to allow one last batch of amendments. If that vote had passed, a separate vote on articles 11 and 13 would have been allowed, in which MEPs could potentially have voted to remove the controversial clauses from the final directive.

The vote on whether to allow the batch of amendments failed by five votes, 312 to 317. But shortly after, in the European parliament’s official voting record, 13 MEPs asked for their vote to be recorded differently: 10 said they meant to support it, two meant to oppose it, and one meant to not vote at all. If those were counted, the result would have gone the other way. Despite the updated record of votes, however, the initial result still stands.

Since no vote was held on the specific amendments, there is no way to know whether MEPs would have removed the controversial provisions if they had had the chance to. But opponents of the copyright directive, and of articles 11 and 13, are angered by the error. “The vote they clicked on is the vote they got,” wrote Mike Masnick, of the tech culture site TechDirt. “It is frustrating beyond all belief that we ended up killing the open internet through tricking a bunch of MEPs by switching the voting order.”

MEPs accidentally vote wrong way on copyright law


It's covered much better on TechDirt:

What happened was that in the middle of a sitting meeting, it was decided to make an adjustment in the order of voting in itself. This did not appear in a clear way where the President was also somewhat confused.

Indeed, soon after that some others admitted to voting incorrectly, believing they were voting for something else.

A few hours later, the EU put out the official voting record which includes an astounding 13 MEPs who said they voted incorrectly. Ten of them said they meant to vote for amendments. Two of them said they wanted to vote against it. And one did not want to vote. As you can see in the screenshot below, everyone next to the "+" would have voted for the amendments if they had actually realized what they were voting on.



All told, that would have shifted the vote and allowed for a vote on amendments. By a slim majority, the law would have been opened up to deleting Articles 11 and 13. In other words, whoever changed the order of the vote pulled a fast one and got the EU Copyright Directive approved... despite the EU Parliament not clearly agreeing on that. If you're wondering what can be done now... the answer is not much. According to the EU:

MEPs may still issue corrections to their vote in case of mistakes, which will however not change the outcome

The vote the clicked on is the vote they got. It is frustrating beyond all belief that we ended up killing the open internet through tricking a bunch of MEPs by switching the voting order. Incredible.

Enough MEPs Say They Mistakenly Voted For Articles 11 & 13 That The Vote Should Have Flipped; EU Parliament Says Too Bad

 

[Robust]

A far cry from the early days of setting up a simple forum for people to chat about their hobbies and interests. I don't think the beurocrats understand the impact of their decisions. All the GDPR has really done is generated a mass of extra clicks as people robotically click away at the popups and carry on regardless.

I don't think you understand what the GDPR is.

Absolutely. The kind of tech involved with filtering out content before it gets posted is not something the average person or small business will ever have access to. I doubt the geniuses behind XenForo could even come up with something like that within a reasonable amount of time. This will do nothing but hurt a lot of people and really, only the corporations that own content have anything to gain from it.

Correct. And that's why they don't expect SMEs to use that kind of tech. The article has a clear "proportionate and appropriate" clause in it that everyone seems to miss, and instead everyone is just getting their news from the media and other sites paraphrasing the article. Has anyone even read it? The EU has a history of supporting SMEs and having proportionate legislation that doesn't hurt small businesses. The EU, very obviously, is not expecting every company to have advanced AI copyright detection technology. It should be a red flag to you that you're missing something as soon as you realise that issue.

Article 13 is very small, so it's not like it's not understandable. Here:

1. Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate.

[2. ...]

3. Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate, the cooperation between the information society service providers and rightholders through stakeholder dialogues to define best practices, such as appropriate and proportionate content recognition technologies, taking into account, among others, the nature of the services, the availability of the technologies and their effectiveness in light of technological developments.

 

[Lukas W.]

The EU has a history of supporting SMEs and having proportionate legislation that doesn't hurt small businesses. The EU, very obviously, is not expecting every company to have advanced AI copyright detection technology.

If anything, the EU has a history of slaughtering small sites in their crossfire when they try to target large ones, which, time after time, just dodge away, as the laws are so ambiguous, that they can always wind themselves out. What is "proportionate legislation"? Seeing how many sites went down over something (comparatively) trivial as the GDPR, Article 13 is gonna be a slaughterhouse for small websites, especially now that they dropped their explicit definition of the borders for small sites. We are, as usual, left with the vagueness of not having any clear definition on where the actual line is. If you look at the people who made the law, you'll realize very quickly, that their definition of "proportionate" is very likely a whole lot different from yours. And it takes one judge with a bad day, to make their interpretation to come to life, and not yours. Are you willing to take that risk? Many are surely not.

The EU, very obviously, is not expecting every company to have advanced AI copyright detection technology.

"The EU", or more precisely the collection of people that made Article 13 an actual thing, has very obviously no idea what they were actually passing when they voted for it. It's unfortunate that Axel Voss gave most of his interviews in German, but if you find a translation of it (or honestly, his few english ones are indicator enough), just give them a watch, and you'll see what these people are expecting and how unworldly their view of the internet actually is. And that they are so ignorant and contempt of forcing their view on everybody, that they sacrifice a whole generation of voters, to bring it through. The passing of Article 13 has been, in my honest opinion, a failure of democracy.

 

[Robust]

Seeing how many sites went down over something (comparatively) trivial as the GDPR

There are only two reasons a site would go down, or block EU users, over the GDPR:

1. They didn't bother read about what the GDPR is or what the point is, got scared over media coverage, and closed shop / limited access because they couldn't be bothered to actually read up on it.
2. Their data practices are so grossly negligent that they couldn't comply with the basic standards the GDPR sets on data processing, and they can't be bothered to clean their data practices / need to continue abusing user data as part of their business model.

The GDPR has no extensive clauses in it that makes compliance hard. Many sites didn't have to change anything except add a few paragraphs to their privacy policy, boilerplate stuff generally sufficed. The GDPR's policies are just good practice handling of data, things any reasonable business should've already been doing.

We are, as usual, left with the vagueness of not having any clear definition on where the actual line is. If you look at the people who made the law, you'll realize very quickly, that their definition of "proportionate" is very likely a whole lot different from yours. And it takes one judge with a bad day, to make their interpretation to come to life, and not yours. Are you willing to take that risk? Many are surely not.

I think you're being a bit hysterical here. The EU does not function like the US, and EU directives are not like legislation or US law. It is vague because it is a directive. The exact implementation is down to member states in the form of national legislation. The entirety of Article 13 is a few paragraphs, partially for that reason. The Article sets out problems and solutions more than it does comprehensive and verbose legal text. The EU's history of treatment towards SMEs and aim to make large businesses accountable, and their repeated mention of appropriate and proportionate and availability of technology, is sufficient to say that the interpretation I gave is what they're trying to do here. The aim is to protect rightsholders against businesses that have the means to prevent infringement of rightsholders' on their services, but choose not to because it's more profitable not to,

In fact, my old quote of Article 13 is outdated. Looks like the passed text is actually even clearer.

4. If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:

(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and

(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event

(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b).

5. In determining whether the service provider has complied with its obligations under paragraph 4, and in light of the principle of proportionality, the following elements, among others, shall be taken into account:

(a) the type, the audience and the size of the service and the type of works or other subject matter uploaded by the users of the service; and

(b) the availability of suitable and effective means and their cost for service providers.

6. Member States shall provide that, in respect of new online content-sharing service providers the services of which have been available to the public in the Union for less than three years and which have an annual turnover below EUR 10 million, calculated in accordance with Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC (20) , the conditions under the liability regime set out in paragraph 4 are limited to compliance with point (a) of paragraph 4 and to acting expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice, to disable access to the notified works or other subject matter or to remove those works or other subject matter from their websites .

Emphasis mine. This makes it even more clear. If your site is less than 3 years old pretty much nothing changes compared to now - you only act when you receive a notice per infringement. If it's older, then term (b) is the only possible issue here which could mean you have liability, which indicates efforts should be made to prevent further infringement. Point (a) should probably be discussed with a lawyer, heck the whole thing should.

Best efforts after notice from rightholders to prevent further infringement for a forum with well below that turnover count would, imo, be automated text scraping for keywords. Automated image processing would not really be appropriate, and the article itself mentions that such technologies are currently being developed by researchers. Automated text processing is relatively trivial to bring up flags, and some similarity detection stuff which you can probably fetch off GitHub. I'd argue even that's potentially overkill, but hey.

There's nothing in there that's unreasonable. There are 3 simple points to shield from liability, and all 3 are feasible and relative to size. Section 5 makes it clear the size of the service and the availability and cost of effective methods for the service provider should be factored in. Obviously a forum isn't meant to blow its entire income on that.

Ultimately, I'd say it's complicated and people should contact an actual legal professional that isn't gambling off fearmongering to make some quick bucks like consultants were around the time of the GDPR. It's definitely nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.

 

[Lukas W.]

If your site is less than 3 years old pretty much nothing changes compared to now

Of course it does. By the time it actually comes into effect, any site currently existing is either already or close to being three years old. It'll literally affect every single existing site either instantly or closely after taking effect.

is sufficient to say that the interpretation I gave is what they're trying to do here.

Trying is exactly what happened here. Nothing more. Article 13 is gonna be used as stepping stone for all the hungry lawyers out there to come after the last people they haven't been able to reach with their lawsuits before: The platform holders.

If a best effort in your opinion is to take the copyrighted material off the site upon request of the copyright holder, then it is exactly the current state of law. There's no need to pass again what is already in effect.

If anything, most of these formulations are a complete backfire. It is way easier to control the entire dataflow of a small platform compared to a large platform. If we're speaking of a few dozen pictures a day, one can easily argue that it is proportional enough to check them for copyright, even manually, should need be. If you are a large platform with thousands of such, suddenly it doesn't seem very appropriate anymore to check them all. The smaller your platform becomes, the more appropriate it becomes to expect of you to control every single content created for copyright.

 

[Robust]

Trying is exactly what happened here. Nothing more. Article 13 is gonna be used as stepping stone for all the hungry lawyers out there to come after the last people they haven't been able to reach with their lawsuits before: The platform holders.

If a best effort in your opinion is to take the copyrighted material off the site upon request of the copyright holder, then it is exactly the current state of law. There's no need to pass again what is already in effect.

It's not my opinion, it's bolded in the quote I provided. It's literally in the passed text. And I added that only applies if you're less than 3 years old:

Emphasis mine. This makes it even more clear. If your site is less than 3 years old pretty much nothing changes compared to now - you only act when you receive a notice per infringement. If it's older, then term (b) is the only possible issue here which could mean you have liability, which indicates efforts should be made to prevent further infringement. Point (a) should probably be discussed with a lawyer, heck the whole thing should.

Parts (a) and (b) apply, and the burden is reversed, in comparison to what already applies. Paragraph 5 also applies, which adds that the size of the service provider, and the availability and cost of means for the service provider should be considered when deciding whether paragraph 4 obligations were met. Since 4(b) indicates methods of detection after being provided with "the relevant and necessary information", and paragraph 5 indicates the methods should meet those conditions I already mentioned, it seems to suffice (to me, at least) the text processing method I mentioned would be sufficient.

If anything, most of these formulations are a complete backfire. It is way easier to control the entire dataflow of a small platform compared to a large platform. If we're speaking of a few dozen pictures a day, one can easily argue that it is proportional enough to check them for copyright, even manually, should need be. If you are a large platform with thousands of such, suddenly it doesn't seem very appropriate anymore to check them all. The smaller your platform becomes, the more appropriate it becomes to expect of you to control every single content created for copyright.

Depends how small you are. If you can manually process all the images in 5-10 minutes or so each day, sure, maybe. But it's not going to be expected to do a manual review of all content daily, and have the memory to identify which is infringing rights of rightholders "that have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information".

I said the same with GDPR, I'll say the same here, if a forum owner is sufficiently concerned they should see a lawyer. My personal stance is that the act is over-exaggerated in the media to cause fear-mongering. Unironically, I'd suggest that people avoid armchair lawyering and see someone actually qualified to interpret the directive in good faith (rather than trying to make a quick buck, like "GDPR consultants" did). Compliance is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be, and there's no reason to think that forum owners are expected to comply by anywhere near the same means as a giant like YouTube, which processes much more protected content to many more people with much higher income and is owned by Google which is a giant in AI as well. That's just an absurd thought.

 

[Lukas W.]

You see, the problem is less the, excuse the language, ****ty formulation of these legislations, but the actual damage that is caused by them. We've clearly seen different extends of what they cause, but I've seen many good communities (and many of them without any income) shut their doors, because it was impossible with their means and resources to figure out whether they are affected and to which extend. And GDPR had been the tamer of the two horses.

To think that Google should be able to detect all copyright infringement, as the people who came up with these legislations have frequently stated they do, is as absurd as to expect car companies to switch to electrical cars within the next two years. Despite their resources and efforts, the result will be even more intrusive and error prone content filters, which lead to even more frustration amongst the consumers and producers, and to the public in general.

At the end of the day, it's the consumer who's gonna feel the most impact. When his favorite sites shut their doors, cause they couldn't make sense out of these legislations, and when their favorite content creators decide, that it's simply no longer worth bothering with all the false positive filter results that we have today already. And that this all has been passed despite the biggest protests is the icing on top of that pile of weknow what.

I don't question the intents of Article 13. I welcome the intent of giving copyright holders more means to fight for their rights. But at the end of the day, the collateral damage that has already been caused (in the form of loss in trust into democracy and the EU) and that will be caused (as beforementioned) is what'll have to be outweighed by the actual benefits of this legislation. And it doesn't take an expert to see that it never will be able to.

 

[imno007]

It's not my opinion, it's bolded in the quote I provided. It's literally in the passed text. And I added that only applies if you're less than 3 years old:



Parts (a) and (b) apply, and the burden is reversed, in comparison to what already applies. Paragraph 5 also applies, which adds that the size of the service provider, and the availability and cost of means for the service provider should be considered when deciding whether paragraph 4 obligations were met. Since 4(b) indicates methods of detection after being provided with "the relevant and necessary information", and paragraph 5 indicates the methods should meet those conditions I already mentioned, it seems to suffice (to me, at least) the text processing method I mentioned would be sufficient.


Depends how small you are. If you can manually process all the images in 5-10 minutes or so each day, sure, maybe. But it's not going to be expected to do a manual review of all content daily, and have the memory to identify which is infringing rights of rightholders "that have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information".

I said the same with GDPR, I'll say the same here, if a forum owner is sufficiently concerned they should see a lawyer. My personal stance is that the act is over-exaggerated in the media to cause fear-mongering. Unironically, I'd suggest that people avoid armchair lawyering and see someone actually qualified to interpret the directive in good faith (rather than trying to make a quick buck, like "GDPR consultants" did). Compliance is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be, and there's no reason to think that forum owners are expected to comply by anywhere near the same means as a giant like YouTube, which processes much more protected content to many more people with much higher income and is owned by Google which is a giant in AI as well. That's just an absurd thought.

I'm not going to get into a protracted argument here, because frankly I can't be bothered to much care any more at this point, because what's done is done and we'll all have to live with the consequences and see how it plays out. But suffice to say, in my opinion, one of biggest problems with these laws - or excuse me, "directives" - is exactly that they are so brief and vaguely worded, and that they put all the onus of responsibility on platform owners and administrators. And you speak about a platform like Youtube as if it's completely divorced from all the thousands of not-so-rich people who contribute (legitimate) content to it, who make all or part of their living from it, as if the measures this "giant in AI" will have to implement to comply with these laws won't negatively impact very many of those people who depend on it to put food on their tables. You can't possibly be naive enough to think that automated filtering on that level will only catch "the bad guys." But I hope it is as you say and that it will all turn out to be a bunch of nothing much at all, like the GDPR (for most people). The difference between the two, though, is that these latter directives aren't about protecting the interests of all the little people of the world: they are all about protecting the bottom-line of corporations, and those corporations have both the influence and pockets to wield these directives like a hammer to squeeze every dime they can out of every one they can. It will be very lucrative for the lawyers, we all know that, but let's be real, most people running sites can't afford their own lawyers to fight back. So your advice that any forum owner "sufficiently concerned they should see a lawyer" is a bit elitist. Maybe you're doing well enough that it's nothing to call up a lawyer for some expert legal advice whenever needed and to come to your rescue every time someone decides to try to put the squeeze on you, and good for you if that's the case, but a lot of people don't have that luxury.

 

[dknife]

I still can't figure out if I'm responsible as a service provider with a server in the US but with users globally, including the EU. If I am then I am not sure I could continue operating as I can't possibly keep my site live knowing that there's some vague law that may possibly apply to me depending on how some law makers in another country decide how big or small I am and how much I'm supposed to be responsible without any actual criteria, that can change over time depending on some technologies that may be available that I haven't implemented.

I simply run a community as a person, not a business that has no commercial income yet there's nothing I'm seeing that might prevent me from being fined some ridiculous amount that would bankrupt me and my family due to some user posting something I wasn't aware of, or equally having to prove in court with a lawyer that I am in fact small enough and have few resources available to be able to sufficiently combat possible copyright infringement on my site which again would likely bankrupt me and my family.