Here we go again...
I'm just gonna copy-paste some of my previous comments on this after reading the article in question:
Note that if the IP or Facebook or something falsely accuses someone of copyright infringement and removes something from the net they will be punished for it (it says so in the article) so they can't just ban anything that they aren't certain of. This also means that in the future if Youtube continues their bullshit "we got a note from username HitlerSatan2 that they are the copyright holder of your video 'Just me playing my ukulele in my room' and therefore have demonetized it" automatic function they are going to have to pay. That sounds like an improvement to me. Furthermore, in the future they need to have a human being involved with taking stuff down and can't have an automated "take down everything" function.
And the regulation only concerns websites with more than 5 million unique users per month*, so if you have your own little web page then chances are that you will not be held liable for the copyrighted stuff that some random visitor posted there, while big corporations like FB and Google with millions of users will have to actually clean up their shit.
Also, if you can't contact the holder of the copyright you don't need to remove the thing so most of the stuff that will be taken down is just something owned by major corporations that aggressively defend their copyrights, like record labels or something and even they can just decide to want the ad money from the Youtube views rather than having the vid taken down.
(Seriously though, if you read the actual article you can see that it's not as bad as people make it out to be. It's just depends on what the final form is and how will the nations in EU implement it. After all, the latest EU gun law was made by demand from Britain to toughen up the gun laws but as a result in some of the EU countries it just became easier to get guns so this can go either way as well.)
Page 120 and onwards are Article 17 (formerly known as article 13.)
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2018-0245-AM-271-271_EN.pdfIf I got this right (and I'm not certain) Google and Reddit and such are only liable for stuff on their websites though this likely means that the search engines are going to try to prune out the results.
Anyway, there's also this little bombshell in the article: "...and in light of the principle of proportionality, the following elements, among others, shall be taken into account: ... the availability of suitable and effective means and their cost for service providers."
Which means that if the corporation says "fuck it, we got millions of users and if the moderators in our subreddits aren't doing their work to clean up copyrighted material you can't expect us to hire a million people to do it fast and efficient." So most likely you can still shitpost on Reddit and all they'll do is ban the users and subreddit if you make something so bad that it catches media attention. ...Like they already do.
Because unless you make it so that you can't post links and pictures at all, then EU is going to have to accept that there is a lag involved in moderators and administrators going through the stuff on the websites and hiring enough people to do it would bankrupt them.
As long as Reddit and Google and whatnot can prove that they ARE in fact doing SOMETHING active to protect copyrights then it'll be considered "good enough" as far as the article goes.
But that's my interpretation. If EU tries to take a harder stance then this will go to courts and companies will just block EU access rather than risk paying. Especially since if you actually made the meme/picture/song and they delete it because of a copyright claim (like Youtube does frequently when people troll the system with false accusations) then the corp will have to pay you if they automatically destroyed it without trying to find proof of the claims.
*In practise, anything made for Finnish users is going to be below the line and unaffected by the new regulations.
