There was no EU vs US competition. It was about what is and isn't relevant. Ie: GDPR compliant vs possible new EU CD compliance.
[snipped national/international politics -mod] What Octoprint has provided is wonderful and I hope some solution emerges. The global big players like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the like are busy censoring and not with an even hand. Technology, as great as it can be, has put a lot of power in a few hands and that seldom goes well. Good luck to all of us.
Indeed. We're all in the same boat Internet.
Does it help at all if the uploading user swears under penalty of law that the material uploaded is not under copyright?
-Bill
Apparently not. The EU and the recording industry et al are trying to remove the concept of "Safe Harbor" for website owners. They think that by moving the responsibility to the website owner they now have a target wallet to attack in case they feel like their precious intellectual property is being abused by those nasty end-users.
What would be excellent would be a global denial-of-service for anyone detected to be a lawyer, a member of the EU, a member of any recording industry, a member of any political organization and Paul McCartney. It would be a form of unwelcome mat put out for anyone who cluelessly makes life difficult for average citizens on the Internet.
Actually, I think you could probably get away with doing that legally by blaming it on a faulty upload filter. But in fact, everyone would subscribe to this same "filter" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
I've been thinking about this for days, and I can't seem to come up with any reliable solutions
Just look at Facebook as an example. It started out as a program called "LifeLog" created by the government so you would think, with all those resources, their algorithms would weed out the appropriate (or inappropriate) content, yet, even THEIR algorithms can't reliably spot copyright protected content, and have to rely on the original owners spotting something, and then complaining about it
So how is an owner/operator supposed to be able to handle such a massive task ?
I looked up "Fair Use" and, even that won't help, because it's part of US copyright law, not Germany... however, I did find this interesting bit...
According to settled German case law, in the case of an alleged infringement of copyright or related rights by making available via a website, a copyright infringement in Germany was committed if the content of the website was addressed to German users. The criteria are whether the websites provide their content in Germany language, using a â.de-Domainâ, or whether the entire appearance of the website is addressed to German users.
I found that here but I'm not sure if it's helpful. I don't speak legalese
And then this makes it even more confusing...
There is no centralised copyright agency or office available in Germany where works can be registered as is the case in the United States.
Contrary to industrial property rights, copyright arises with the creation of the work. There are no formal requirements to be met. A registration in an official register is neither required nor possible in order to obtain copyright protection.
So, if nobody is in charge, WHO decides if a copyright has been infringed ?
This whole thing is just crazy
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Lawyers representing the company owning the IP. And then you have to proof that you haven't.
And - a special case at least if you happen to run a website in Germany/as a German, I don't know about other countries in Europe - there are even lawyers specialized on hunting down the smallest infractions to competition law and sending expensive Abmahnungen (I think that's our version of a cease and desist) which is why we call them AbmahnanwÀlte (Anwalt = lawyer). Lack of proper legal notice, badly implemented GDPR, errors in the Privacy Policy, the list goes on. Anything like that and boom, you get a cease and desist in the thousands of Euros which you then have to defend yourself against (or cough up the money). If you ever wondered why I publish my address in the Legal Notice of OctoPrint's web presence including this forum it is because I'm legally required to do so and not doing it gives lawyers like that munition to extort money from me. And this new copyright directive will add another reason for this breed of bloodsuckers lawyers to make a dime - "I was able to successfully upload this copyrighted picture, so your upload filters aren't working - cease and desist, here's my invoice". I'm frankly more scared of AbmahnanwÀlte than the law here since they've turned this into a flourishing business with which they basically terrorize website owners. Which is why if this becomes the law, I'll disable uploads - I don't have the kind of money to be able to risk getting attacked for this. Long story short - as long as the law gives room of interpretation to these leeches, they will use it to extort money from website owners. Which the proponents of the new directive also keep forgetting, just as they keep forgetting that they made it so that any commercial platform older than three years has to comply, regardless of size ("But it's only against the big ones" - NO IT ISN'T, READ THE DAMN THING!)
Side note: the politicians have promised to do something against those Abmahnassholes for years now and it's still as bad as it was 20 years ago.
Not just uploads though, you have to disable text as well. Passages of text can also be copyright.
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I guess it comes down to how you define "upload" in that case (which Article 13 explicitly talks about), but of course you are right in that in the strictest definition of uploads we'll pretty much have to close this forum for good.
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So... the AbmahnanwÀlte are all coming from German-based IP addresses, right? And we have to register with the site in order to post/upload in the first place.
Why not do some due-diligence with something akin to CAPTCHA on registration?
- Is it a German IP address?
- It gets blocked for a manual inspection of the IP address by location
- You do your homework to find out who exactly this is by CIDR block
Oh, and update your TOS so that you can block anyone who you reasonably believe would proactively upload copyrighted content or who have shown in the past that they have done so on other websites. Now you're covered. They can't whine that you blocked the lawyers when they've proven by their past actions that they illegally post copyrighted content.
Actually, we have a clause in U.S. law called entrapment. If the lawyers themselves are committing illegal acts then they shouldn't be able to blame you for the fact that you allowed them to. In the absence of their illegal act no crime would have been committed.
The problem is that in germany you have mostly non fixed ip adresses.
Even at the cable providers they change after 6 month or so.
Telekom after a reconnect.
And yet, a law firm doesn't have dynamic IP addresses. They'll have actual I.T. geeks like Yours Truly who would have set that up for them. And they're guaranteed to have fixed public IP addresses so that they can have a WAN and many VPNs to support business.
Trust me, the CIDR knows who they are and this isn't as ephemeral as you're suggesting.
Vodafone too. Even the IPv6 prefix delegations change after a reconnect, unless you're on a business plan...
Okay, what about this part. It looks to me (who is not a lawyer, and doesn't understand the intricacies at all) like it HAS to be a .DE domain in order to apply to this law, whereas octoprint is a .ORG, meaning that it's NOT a German website, and is NOT aimed specifically at Germans
Considering the fact that it's in English should prove that point, shouldn't it ?
There are several interpretations fluctuating around the net, and one is that it is irrelevant if I'm targeting Germans or not as long as I am a German. Also all of this will in all likelihood change completely anyhow when the EU copyright directive becomes active like it is proposed now.
And I frankly don't want to rely on possible interpretations of a law when it comes to my savings.
[blocking IPs of lawyers and whatnot]
Sorry, but that is never going to even remotely work. There aren't lists or anything like that, CIDR is not what you appear to think it is and even if it was possible to do something like that it might even make me more attractive a target.
Please understand that I'm not going to experiment in any shape or form with ways around certain interpretations of a law. I pour a ton of myself into this project, but I draw the line where it comes to my livelihood, and that would be at risk here.
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If it weren't work Pencil Pushers. Our Lives would be much Simpler. If they keep going at the rate that they're moving at. Invention and Thoughts or Designs by the Commoner will sooner
than Later be Outlawed. This is just another example of the Monetarias Controlling those of us with an Actual Brain in Our Heads. Orwellian 1984 at its Finest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'd Love to See Google after the $1.8 Billion Dollar Fine that they just got from the EU. Decide to Shutdown all of their EU Servers for a week.
Just to watch the EU Politicians Scramble after the Riots started in the Streets over their Actions!!!!!!!!!
Maybe then they'd Get their Heads Out Of Their Asses for a Change!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Or this is all a misdirection, so they can pass some other law that they don't want people to notice; and they know that it will fail due to protests.
If I were in charge of Google, I'd probably think about doing that. But honestly, their annual advertisement revenue is important to them and they wouldn't want to drive potential ad clients to other services.
Google is a search service. They tech is to show people other people's content. Technically, there can be no such service if this law passes. The EU's internet would become either another AOL or revert to the 1980s with BBs and search tools like Gopher.
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