The EU just announced a vote is happening in June that's going to make some big changes to Copyright laws, and forums. This will effect our website, at least for those who fall under EU jurisdiction. But it might go farther depending on who hosts our stuff. I don't know much about the backend of our site, but what can we expect of they pass this law that requires people to have to get permits and pay taxes to post links? The law being reported on by a Youtuber. Law as writen. This link opens a PDF.
from what I can gather, this directly targets protected and copyright material. To what extent is hard to glean through the veil of legalese and my own unwillingness to fully dip into the vat, but I don't think it will significantly impact the site as it seems to mostly be directed at places like youtube and video sharing sites that have a tendency to skirt copyright laws by ignorance and non-policing. I'm not sure to what extent, but best case scenario I think will have no impact on us, worst case scenario I think Youtube and possibly Google will simply choose to deny the EU access to their websites.
They want people to get a permit to be allowed to post links. I think that's going to deeply effect our ability to shitposting in the derailment thread. I do hope the result of this is companies just saying "Fuck it!" and withdrawing from the EU zone of influence. The other option is doing what everyone just did with the new EU privacy law, which is make everyone everywhere sign on to it to comply.
While Xenforo is based in the UK, the departure from the EU may solve that issue. As far as I know that is the only non-NA based part of our site, and they are only the developers of the software that we use on here. That said what the EU does as far as limiting their own citizens is up to them but a US hosted site owned by US citizens makes for a really hard case to be filed in any court. Bottom line I have no worries at all on it and am not loosing any sleep over any sort of remote chance of an issue happening.
to be able to post links to Copyright protected material. Everything I read in that document makes it clear this is intended to be a way for copyright holders to be able to better protect and litigate for interest in their material specifically. Though I don't doubt it'll be aggressively misused because this is people we're talking about, and it could very well end with, the World Wide Web Except for the EU, I doubt it'll significantly impact us in general. Except maybe those of us who happen to be stuck in the EU.
Wait, do we have any poor EU members left? I mean, other than the Swedes. Poor Swedes. The only thing I worry about is the providers of services adopting the rules so the can stay in the market the EU controls. Which could affect us.
Because they've had so much success with it up to now, even with the legal framework I give it maybe a 40% shot of actually doing what it says it's going to do, and that's being fairly generous. Trying to uphold those rules without legal backing is liable to just make them look foolish(er) and end up right back where they started, with fewer clients.
Well, here's the impact of the rules they're voting on and then the segments of law that are their source linked below each entry. I love it when others do the heavy lifting g when it comes through reading through all of this. It'd be easier if I wasn't on mobile. If this hastens the death of the EU, though, maybe it won't be such a bad thing after all. As long as it dies with the EU.
I actually am infuriated that this passed. Apparently there's one more vote to pass pass it into law. See what happens.
They say this, but then they also demand that every single upload to the Internet goes through an IP content filter to check for IP infraction. You know how bad language filters are on false hits? Now imagine a system that flags content for IP abuse. Oh, and each false hit threatens to cost a company or network 4% of their annul turn over. The EU are morons that don't understand anything.
