This may be the end of European forums...

@DroidOne
Re Transferring Ownership:
Discuss with your lawyer if it would be possible to inform users about the transfer via email and ask them to either accept or deny within 30 days.
Those that deny will be deleted, those that accept will be transferred.
Those that do not reply in any way do get their login details (email, password) encrypted with the decrpytion key being sent to them via E-Mail, all other personal data does get deleted.
 
Kintaro said:
Here I can read AND ("and which have") and not OR... so IMHO if the website has a turnover below 10M € is enough.
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Im afraid @Kirby is right. NEW sites are only exempt if they meet all of the requirements:
  1. public in the EU for less than three years .. AND
  2. annual turnover below 10 million.
So if your site does not meet both requirements, then you are not exempt. i.e. the liability regime set in paragraph 4 applies to your site.
 
webbouk said:
Just another in the long list of reasons to leave the EU
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The nature of these directives is that, regardless of location, businesses are obligated to follow them if serving content to European users. So "leaving the EU" is irrelevant, unless you're implying all influential EU member states should leave due to this, and if they felt that then they wouldn't have voted for and created the legislation in the first place.
 
Shelley said:
Nothing good comes from joining/being a part of the EU.
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Your video is literally a perfect example of European democracy. You wouldn't be allowed to say that in the House of Commons. Half of that is personal insults and not political opinion. Another quarter is just completely wrong. The fact that he was allowed to continue with his speech without formal interruption is a perfect example of democracy in the EU.
 
Alfa1 said:
It doesn't matter what the point is. Completely irrelevant even. The only thing that matters is the result which is quite different.
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Well yes, of course in this case. The law, or the point of the law, is irrelevant when the point of the website is to break the law and get away with it. We saw that years ago with the original incarnation of Napster which was set up to illegally share digital audio, peer to peer.

The copyright law was irrelevant at first because they got away with it. Then the law became relevant when they were shut down, which was obviously a good thing if you respect the right of artists to receive recompense for their work and not have their intellectual property stolen.
 
RobinHood said:
Well, the day has arrived. The first victim of Article 13: "Never Gonna Give You Up" is not available in EU countries anymore.
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Still available here in the UK, I am so relieved!


200701
 
Mr Lucky said:
Well yes, of course in this case. The law, or the point of the law, is irrelevant when the point of the website is to break the law and get away with it.
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Why are you assuming that this will only hurt website who are trying to break the law? That makes no sense to me.
The issue I am raising is exactly the opposite: its good to have a law that makes it more difficult to steal content. Its not good if the law will make innocent webmasters collateral damage. Can you 100% guarantee that anything posted on your site in the last decade by your members is 100% not copied from anywhere else? If you cannot guarantee that, then by your line of thinking you are a thief and should be punished with a large fine. Without warning!

If you think that is fair then I disagree with you. The onus will be on you to review all your posts. I know you only have 400k posts, but that is still not feasible to comb trough. I have millions of posts. And even if you would inspect every post, then thow can you know that a text is copied? Some members post the same to several sites. So which site holds the copyright? The site that makes the complaint first? Who is stealing from who?
 
Additionally: the law needs to be feasible. What good is a law that cannot realistically be implemented?
With the hate speech law at least we know that we need a reporting system which automatically moderates the post until a moderator reviews the complaint. And send an email to the reporter with the result of the complaint. This can be done.

With the copyright law we need to somehow magically scan all posts for copyright breaches. It seems to me that this is impossible. And if we cannot scan to protect ourselves from millions in fines, then what do we do to comply with the law?
 
Alfa1 said:
Why are you assuming that this will only hurt website who are trying to break the law? That makes no sense to me.
The issue I am raising is exactly the opposite: its good to have a law that makes it more difficult to steal content. Its not good if the law will make innocent webmasters collateral damage. Can you 100% guarantee that anything posted on your site in the last decade by your members is 100% not copied from anywhere else? If you cannot guarantee that, then by your line of thinking you are a thief and should be punished with a large fine. Without warning!

If you think that is fair then I disagree with you. The onus will be on you to review all your posts. I know you only have 400k posts, but that is still not feasible to comb trough. I have millions of posts. And even if you would inspect every post, then thow can you know that a text is copied? Some members post the same to several sites. So which site holds the copyright? The site that makes the complaint first? Who is stealing from who?
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These are all valid concerns. I had them when I ran forums. I gave the forums up, as these worries plus the usual hassles involved in providing a place for people to communicate online (i.e., people themselves) outweighed any financial or personal benefit I derived from running the forums.

This, ultimately, is the only question that matters: Is it still worth it to you?

You're right that if continued regulation (clear-headed or not) proves to be the tipping point that prompts site owners to make the decision that I did, the world will have fewer Internet forums. But you know what? I learned that, despite the members who will tell you how much value your forum offers, ultimately the person who cares most about your forum is you. The members can and will go elsewhere/find other things to do, remarkably quickly. And everyone involved may actually be better off, including you.

There was, after all, life before "social" sites, which have arguably served to make people more isolated and lonely.
 
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Why would you elect these idiots and their stupid laws... oh wait. I forgot you EU plebs don't have any say in anything anymore, not even leaving as the people voted without some convoluted political deal in place first that no one asked for :D

Reap what you sow. A unelected bureaucratic hell. I though the USSR taught us about that already?
 
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As far as demented bureaucracy is concerned I have always regarded --- sometimes in personal dealings with --- the abhorrent USA as the last pits of inefficient hell; not to mention their bewildering stupid mass of law and profound love of procedure over function.

And make no mistake, you nor any other American citizen, can have no more effect on the decisions of your rulers than ordinary people of any other place. The USA is the New USSR.


Sentenced to Life Imprisonment:

France -------- 466

Russia ----- 1,766

USA ----- 161,957


Guess where Suslov and Vyshinsky would feel most at home ? And with the extraterritorial grabbing of the Australian Mr. Assange for dubious offences, N. V. Krylenko, he who enunciated the doctrine of... the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment.
 
Alfa1 said:
With the hate speech law at least we know that we need a reporting system which automatically moderates the post until a moderator reviews the complaint. And send an email to the reporter with the result of the complaint. This can be done.
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That's not enough. The offending content could be a post, a signature, content of a profile field, a profile post, media comment, an attachment, smth. uploaded to your server through a backdoor, content being shown in a widget, etc.
So simply flagging a post for moderation will not be enough, you will need to have a system in place that is capable of blocking any URL at webserver level.

It seems to me that this is impossible.
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It is impossible. The only option would be to proactively get licenses for every content on your website from collecting societies like VG Bild-Kunst, VG Wort and so on.
Though that is prohibitively expensive (I've got a quote for one of our forums just for images: 10x the amount of revenue we generate) and normally doesn't make sense at all as the amount of unlicensed/illegal content is usually very, very small.
 
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Kirby said:
That's not enough. The offending content could be a post, a signature, content of a profile field, a profile post, media comment, an attachment, smth. uploaded to your server through a backdoor, content being shown in a widget, etc.
So simply flagging a post for moderation will not be enough, you will need to have a system in place that is capable of blocking any URL at webserver level.


It is impossible. The only option would be to proactively get licenses for every content on your website from collecting societies like VG Bild-Kunst, VG Wort and so on.
Though that is prohibitively expensive (I've got a quote for one of our forums just for images: 10x the amount of revenue we generate) and normally doesn't make sense at all as the amount of unlicensed/illegal content is usually very, very small.
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So what's the solution?
 
Claverhouse said:
As far as demented bureaucracy is concerned I have always regarded --- sometimes in personal dealings with --- the abhorrent USA as the last pits of inefficient hell; not to mention their bewildering stupid mass of law and profound love of procedure over function.

And make no mistake, you nor any other American citizen, can have no more effect on the decisions of your rulers than ordinary people of any other place. The USA is the New USSR.


Sentenced to Life Imprisonment:

France -------- 466

Russia ----- 1,766

USA ----- 161,957


Guess where Suslov and Vyshinsky would feel most at home ? And with the extraterritorial grabbing of the Australian Mr. Assange for dubious offences, N. V. Krylenko, he who enunciated the doctrine of... the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment.
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Communicating online, especially via Internet forums where we're often talking with people we don't know and in real life would never tolerate or waste our time on, is a recipe for controversy/disaster/arguments/etc.--just the type of stuff that ends up in harassment, stalking, unhealthy fixation, hate speech, etc., if it doesn't start there. Sort of throws the whole idea of forums into question, doesn't it? "Seemed like a good idea at the time...."

wrong.webp
 
jauburn said:
So what's the solution?
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Well the ideal solution is that as mentioned in the post, we could easily get limited licenses to use content. I do this re: music and am in communication with licensing orgs to help, and make this are realistically achievable.
 
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