Interesting share. The EU has some crazy politics.

Has this letter been put together with developments since the 20th January in mind? Here's an example article showing the directive has stalled due to a lack of support, including a switchover of support from some countries such as Germany who used to support it but now no longer do. There are a few articles along these lines since the 20th: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/music-to-youtubes-ears-article-13-in-trouble-as-european-copyright-directive-progress-stalls/

Article 13 clearly demonstrates that the EU doesn't represent it's citizens but influential lobbyist such as big IP holders instead.

Just an idea. Wouldn't it be wise to investigate the possibilities to circumvent this article e.g with pods outside the EU or something like the Freedombox project which has Diaspora as a planned feature.

Germany recently reached an agreement with France about Article 13 so yeah it's back on.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190204/09090341521/article-13-is-back-germany-caves-to-france-as-eu-pushes-forward-ruining-internet.shtml

The currently agreed version is actually really bad - it removes all provisions for smaller or not-for-profit platforms

@Ian, yes it actually got worse. As Germany caved into France and agreed to make it worse. All smaller open platforms would practically be impossible to run. It's a disaster.

If passed this will affect not just EU users of social networks. It will give reasons to move everything related to social networking and content distribution from EU-based hosting providers elsewhere. I wonder what Hetzner and the like think about this. This is literally their money.

@Ian Rawlings Your information is already outdated. Read this, for example.

@hq @Alexander [ru] It doesn't matter where there server is located. When the administrators and/or users are located in the EU, then European rules do count. Otherwise I would love to move my systems outside of the EU now.

@Michael Vogel I am pretty sure if this is passed it won't matter much if users and server admins are EU citizens as long as the service itself (or part of it) is hosted in EU and the hoster gets abuse report.

This happens already and I suspect we'll see more of automated abuse reports triggered by probling/scanning/crawling. They already do this for torrents and it isn't a good idea to have VPN hosted by Hetzner for example.

The EU puts at risk every citizen in the EU by screwing their livelihood !

How do we find out, who voted how, so we can make sure, not to elect the supporters of Art. 13?

@hq I think that we (the community of developers and administrators of these networks) should ask a lawyer about how to behave accordingly to the law. Everything else doesn't make sense, I think.

I guess my last comment got deleted for the "March on Brussels" bit, haha! Oof. Alright. Well somehow I'm still in this thread and I still want it to be known that I strongly disapprove from the far side of the Atlantic.

@Hartwig Thomas - have a look at https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ - there you can find a list of all MEPs, their affiliation and their previous voting. I just wrote to all German MEPs. And got two replies!

A lawyer has assisted with writing the German version of this letter, but that's about all a lawyer can do at this point.

No lawyer will provide formal consultation on how to behave based on something that is a proposal for a directive, because that's not an actual legislature, but only a draft for a proposal. Lawyers can assist after the EU has accepted the Directive, and after the Directive has been turned into legislation in your member state. However, that's a bit late.

If you have established relations to a law firm, they might agree on some informal discussions about such proposals, which is what happened here, but it's unlikely that you'll find a lawyer agreeing on offering you informal consulting as the first service.

So what do we do then, we have to implement a content filter?

Article 13 is not forcing anyone to implement upload filters.

Article 13 changes liability laws to make platform providers liable for any copyright infringing content the moment it has been uploaded, even if the platform provider is not aware of said content, or is not aware that the content is infringing someone's copyright. You do not have to implement upload filters, but that's the most likely outcome, as there is no other way to prevent people from uploading infringing content.

We setup a catalog that has a API that any service provider can send a hash to and receives back the information and a 1 (blocked for upload) or 0 (good to upload)?

This is completely unpractical. Even if you would depend on an API that tells you whether a piece of content is "copyrighted" or not, you would have to block any uploads not explicitly whitelisted by said API. Otherwise, from a legal perspective, if Article 13 would become actual legislation, you would be fully liable for anything that passed through the filter as "unknown", because "whoopsie, our API didn't show the content as copyrighted" is not a valid excuse.

Besides, there is no reliable way to identify content. You can't merely take the sha1 hash of a file, because it would change every time a re-encoding happens, if metadata changes, or whatever. Large networks have developed proprietary methods of identifying copies of known-bad content to block specific terrorist materials, as well as known child pornography, but these technologies are not accessible to anyone but those developing it.

Taking said terrorist content as an example, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (which is a group founded by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube) claims that their software can filter out 99% of the copies of known-terrorist content. There are two issues, though: there are 1% of false-negatives, and there is unknown content. Keep in mind that Article 13 is not about terrorist content, but about copyright infringement. Imagine an artist releasing a new song, and someone immediately uploading an illegal copy of the music video to PeerTube. The administrator of that PeerTube node would be 100% liable for the copyright infringement, even though the freshly released song may not be known to any "copyright filter" yet. This is plain stupid.

There is no way to comply with the regulations proposed in Article 13, except for blocking everything that is not 100% known to be non-copyright infringing. Even changing small things like the JPEG quality, adding a label, cropping to a different aspect ratio, ... would all cause that piece of content to no longer be identifiable as "good", and thus would be blocked.

The internet would be a really fun place if that happens, wouldn't it?

(~ds)

---

@hartwig@diasporing.ch You can't, because there hasn't been a vote on that. However, saveyourinternet.eu lists MEPs currently known to be supporting Article 13.

Just wrote to the 50 German MEPs supporting article 30.

In German.
Mentioning that that article would destroy something specific I manage.

Let's see.

30 -> 13.
Sorry.

Comments not adding anything substantial to this discussion, only intending to troll or insult people will be deleted. This is valid for everyone, including @Cy.

Hi @hck@pluspora.com - same here. I got two replies so far, both from MEPs opposing #13

@Christian Frank : you had better luck than I had: no replies received by me up to now.

Anyway: lots of thanks for that link!

Oh, I didn't know you could delete someone else's comments. I apologize for impersonating the dearly beloved "Whatsername" and saying terrible insults that totally aren't true about the venerable "Whatsisface." I truly do think that letter is way too verbose though, and no member of the EU Parliament is going to bother reading past the first paragraph, around the mounds of angry hate mail that they're receiving alongside it. That's no excuse on their part, as any who vote for this are fully culpable for the racketeering that threatens to destroy places like diasp.org, but I think a more effective and less wanderingly noncommital letter might be warranted.

Also I want my letter back.

#ACTA13 will only impose more internet censorship

I truly do think that letter is way too verbose though, and no member of the EU Parliament is going to bother reading past the first paragraph

You underestimate politicians. So far, I have received 7 responses, only 2 of them were build with text blocks, the other 5 mails were rather personal and probably hand-written, and all of them are far longer than your troll-letter. ;)

It's probably due to my fever and that I can't sleep that I come up with silly questions. Anyway what does Article13 mean for encryption? I was looking at an Infographic of affected businesses and one group is email and messaging. Some of these services such as Signal have encryption by default. Will Open Whistle System be forced to remove that encryption to make sure that all traffic is in compliance Article13?

Another case and possibly another answer. Diaspora has E2E encryption between pods how does the admin protect his/her pod from incoming traffic let's say from my personal pod?

@hq Is there a compiled list of mail adresses of all MEP (possibly grouped by language)?

@utzer There is always the alternative of civil disobedience, instead of running to lawyers.

^

Anyway what does Article13 mean for encryption?

Nothing.

how does the admin protect his/her pod from incoming traffic let’s say from my personal pod?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Federation filters!

Is there a compiled list of mail adresses of all MEP

No, not really.

This conversation will be filtered out as already pointed out, for everyone's sake. The Spectacle is revealed.

Is there a compiled list of mail addresses of all MEP (possibly grouped by language)?

From what I've seen the last time someone asked the European Parliament for such a list in machine readable electronic form they were granted the request and then sent a file which had most of the members' email addresses filtered out.

I was looking at an Infographic of affected businesses and one group is email and messaging.

These services can fall under "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". E.g. Telegram channel or WhatsApp chat can be used to "distribute" copyrighted content. In fact awful lot of services can be fit into this definition - if you have some project/website with discussion forum attached then someone just might upload something copyrighted.

Here we have certain laws making service owners responsible for certain content even if it was published by users. It can be used for malicious purposes - a bad actor uploads forbidden content and files complaint, if moderation is not fast enough to catch this before/if complaint gets through then the service can be taken down even before the owner knows it.

(For the record, all responses here from this account were written by @Dennis Schubert. Will use my private account from now on, just to make that clear.)

I don't see how diaspora* or Mastodon or anything else like that could survive as a. Whole something like this. And I just started a node in both of these. What will we have to do if Article 13 is passed? Will we have to set up filters for uploads and filters for free rated posts coming to the pod because they might not have been caught the first time or were done by a pod that blocks the EU?

I'm in contact with a couple of MEPs, some pro, some against, but all of them have said that the provisions of Article 13 would not affect not-for-profit services, such as Diaspora* or Peertube.

Having said this, I haven't been able to verify this in the legal text available on the internet so far.

have said that the provisions of Article 13 would not affect not-for-profit services, such as Diaspora* or Peertube

That's a common excuse, and while it's legally valid, it misses some points. As soon as a podmin receives a single cent donation, and is not explicitly recognized as a non-profit org by their local tax authorities, this single cent "donation" is a legally relevant financial transaction, and by definition, that pod would be for-profit.

Given that asking for donations is nothing uncommon, but founding an actual non-profit org to run a pod is, most pods can easily be legally defined as for-profit.

@Dennis Schubert - I fully agree with you, I'm just repeating what MEPs tell me - the quote I got was "und zum Zwecke der Gewinnerzielung bewirbt", which would certainly not include donations. But. I haven't managed yet to get access to the full text of the Article in its current form, so I can't verify the claim.

Nevertheless, we'll need to continue to lobby our MEPs to reject the compromise! One Email at a time

@hq One of my servers will now be completely sponsored, since someone will host it on one of his systems. Question is, if this then still is "non-for-profit" or not.

@Michael 🇺🇦 Receiving goods is also a form of transaction, so most likely, the answer is "yes, that's for-profit", but that's a gray area. You're probably relatively save if that "someone" is a person, but if that "someone" is a company, then you're goofed.

Yep. IMO: "not for commercial purposes" ("nicht zum Zwecke der Gewinnerzielung“) puts admins and owners way too much at risk of being sued.

"Not primarily for commercial purposes" ("nicht zum vorrangigen Zwecke der Gewinnerzielung“) would be ok for a certain service I offer and which I mentioned to the MEPs as my example of a service severely affected by article 13. And it might be acceptable to some of those running EU based diaspora pods etc..

We'll see.

@hq It's a company.

Meh ...

In no European country, there is a legal distinction between “not for commercial purposes” and “not primarily for commercial purposes”. I'd rather not fight a case in front of the ECJ just to clarify that, if we can avoid it...

I'd also try to avoid that. I'll try to post two links to German Wikipedia to show where the difference I tried to talk about might be in German tax law.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewinnerzielungsabsicht

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebhaberei

Please consult a German tax lawyer, or the German tax authorities, so they can explain to you why this is simply not true. This is way too off-topic for this thread.

@Dennis Schubert : Sorry!

In no European country, there is a legal distinction between “not for commercial purposes” and “not primarily for commercial purposes”.

I’d go with a company can gift things to people they do not employ without any consequence.

Charitable status?

IMHO, the best way to follow the actual status of Article13 and the whole European Copyright Reform is by checking the Twitter account of Julia Reda regularly. She is MEP for the European Pirate Party (PPEU) and Vice-Chair of GreensEP group and deeply involved into this matter.

https://twitter.com/Senficon

Guess who I'm gonna vote for in the upcoming European Parlement election in May.

Update: https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/eu-copyright-final-text/

@hq BTW: Under https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ you can get a list of all members of the European parliament. Just click on your countries flag.

I just wrote a mail to all German members to clarify my standpoint as a coder of a decentralized social network.

I suggest that you all do the same. And I suggest to not use some standard text, but to use your own words. I guess that this will have more effect.

So far I only got one answer and it turned out that the MEP was actually against art.13 instead of for it, as listed.

Thanks @Michael Vogel People on this thread should at least consider posting that information.

For me, Article 13 is essentially a control function in order to be able to control the very last areas of the giant WWW. A socio-ecological view of that one must control everything and everyone is not rich either. Do politicians and law-makers learn nothing from the past ?! Apparently not, therefore, be set in concrete terms to tighter controller of upload, Social networks, the internet is 2.0 indeed already well in focus, if one can say so, as well as decentralization areas yes also fall in with him to really what I have called in depth to control every last remaining corner. Not OK for me. Even if I like to "cover up" here, but in the end it boils down to it.

Because if you look at the policy and the related, how the thing is developing Germany should seriously admit that it has no digital connection, even if they have now appointed "tech cities", fiber optic expansion - sticks continue the telecommunications companies are still Disagree and play rather small child the bucks. To give only a small spot to it.

Sorry, you can only say that. The decentralized platforms are far from the last, I guess.

At least that does not really affect me, because I do not live in the EU :D

greets from Norway

Since I don't live in EU I am not limited with constituency so I wrote my personal message to MEPs of six EU countries.

I honestly feel this is affecting everyone who uses the Internet.

Link to the unofficial consolidated version trilogue outcome of Article13 as distributed by Julia Reda:

https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Art_13_unofficial.pdf

With regards to having pods hosted outside of the EU, where would one stand if for example, the physical location of the servers is within the EU but the company responsible for them is not?

Neither the providers location, nor the server's physical location is relevant in legislative actions. The user's location is.

Making laws is one thing, enforcing them is another. I can't see how an EU law can be enforced for a pod that is hosted outside the EU where EU citizens have an account.... Yes they can send threatening letters.... but if the podmin flips the bird EU can't do much, can it...

So we get people to use VPNs... OK...

@robb oh yeah, and it's totally not like the EU as serious relationships with lots of countries, and it's totally not like lots of US companies cared about GPDR because otherwise, they'd either have to lock out EU users or face a serious legal risk. ;)

Nobody likes a bully

@Dennis Schubert Let me be clear that I am as much as you against the implementation of Art13.
There is a huge difference between US multinationals that actualy make a LOT of money from EU customers (like facebook and google) and a Asia or South America based and maintained pod. Not to mention the fact that (at this moment) pods are not-for-profit. If I would be outside EU based and have EU citizens as podmembers, I would flip that bird to any bark-letters from the EU.
What would be more problematic is when posts from pods outside the EU are seen on pods within the EU. And this is normal behavior since a post could contain hastags that are followed by EU users on EU pods....
It will be next to impossible to filter out those posts on EU pods...

I went to yesterday's demo in Cologne - next direct actions are planned for March 23rd, EU wide - check https://savetheinternet.info/demos!

I'm probably teaching everybody to suck eggs (I'm #newhere ), but I thought that this EFF article was helpful.

Germany plays the big tech companies completely at the expense of the users. No wonder the protests are getting louder on the internet, the users and users are getting active and the politicians meanwhile try again and again some of these demonstrators, who had called them so friendly as "bots" (thanks!) No idea about the net and its culture Anyone who uses it and, on the other hand, Article 13 should be enforced is called a bot!) and thus not "heard". This is getting worse in Europe.

No wonder that many users nowadays also raise and raise the issue of decentralized systems.

@grenville@tovari.ch Your link to the EFF article is really helpful. Many Thanks :)

As far as I am aware, the Article 13 only applies to commercial providers. That would mean that providers of alternative social networks, such as #diaspora pods, are not affected as long as they don't pursue a commercial interest.
I could even imagine that, with Article 13 in effect, more people are switching to alternative social networks with non-profit background to host their content. That would be even good news for diaspora...

you can host his own content ? and his own social network ?
if the podadmin ask money , it become "commercial provider", no ?

@Eckhard I strongly suggest reading previous discussions before commenting.

Which previous discussions do you mean, @Dennis Schubert?

Hm. Looking at your pod, it seems a lot of comments went missing. Weird. Here is the full history - including comments explaining why the exceptions are a joke.

Comments on joindiaspora seem to match pod.diaspora.software. I see Dennis Schubert explaining,

"That’s a common excuse, and while it’s legally valid, it misses some points. As soon as a podmin receives a single cent donation, and is not explicitly recognized as a non-profit org by their local tax authorities, this single cent “donation” is a legally relevant financial transaction, and by definition, that pod would be for-profit."

and telling people to talk to their lawyer on both threads.

Thanks for the link, @Dennis Schubert. I had some issue with federation last month, thats maybe the reason I didn't get all the comments.

So... if Article 13 becomes thruth, I could either officially found a non-profit organization, or refuse any donations.

Or, the hard way, shut down the pod :(

Now it is here and we can move our pods to Amazon AWS or Ms azure and they have do deal with all the copyright sh**.
Let's see what this does to open Plattforms and backup services. Especially do I have to give a license to the backup service owner? Are we still allowed to encrypt our stuff?

Still I see that it doesn‘t affect non-profit parties/organisations. When I understood correctly from this discussion, it only seems to be an issue that non-profit and for-profit cannot clearly be differentiated as soon as a pod receives donations and is not an officially registered NPO.

But wouldn‘t it be possible to register an non-profit association (something like „diaspora e.V.“) with respective terms and statutes, where pods can join as members? Wouldn‘t that solve the problem for most of us?
As a side effect, the membership fees could help to sponsor some development effords or the like...

No, that wouldn't work, as that non-profit org wouldn't run the pod, their podmin would. The non-profit org neither owns the server, nor is it responsible for it, both of which can't be fixed for obvious reasons. A imaginary "diaspora e.V." could collect donations, but as soon as the money is transferred to the podmins, the situation would be exactly the same: a not-legally-non-profit person receiving money.

A possible workaround would be to have that e.V. pay for the servers directly, but that would put the pods into 100% dependency of that e.V., effectively creating a single point of failure for those pods, governed by a central entity (that e.V.).

Still a long way to go, approval by the states, implementation, lawsuits, ....

In the short term the more interesting question will be how well the pirate party does in the EU elections

#article13

Given the second in line and Reda's exit.... I hope "Die Partei" does much better.

2Die Partei" is only a VOMEDY Project, n o t a real politcal party, so far, afak.. But mayybe sooner or later..... ahahahahahahaha.. maybe they might somewhen start trying 2 become real POLITITICIANS??? Will they but tell us, when this point will happen, this maybe Switching point, or will it re,ain COMEDY ndevertheless???

What about moving pods out of the EU? And what is the impact to US managed pods?

Moving servers outside the EU doesn't work. When the administrator and/or the targetted group is European, then european rules apply.

@utzer perhaps so, but still a no-go for me.
Anyhow, I'm waiting to see the regional candidates, I was pretty pleased with my choice last time.