Its not about the pirates. Its about people who operate under fair use and fair dealing or the grey areas of the law.
On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether to accept two controversial proposals in the new Copyright Directive; one of these clauses, Article 13, has the potential to allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to effect mass, rolling waves of censorship across the Internet.The way things stand today,...
www.eff.org
Its a diabolically poor law, ripe for misuse, near impossible to implement technically. Just what you expect from a bunch of clueless politicians.
Content sharing sites
such as this forum will be directly liable en masse for any errors in rights management committed by their users. It also makes linking to content something you have to pay the site you are linking to for.
Link to a news story? Violation! Copy the first sentence from the article? Double Violation!
The only defence allowed is the implementation of an automated content take down service to allow rights holders to register, submit their content claims and remove any work they deem infringes their copyright. If the system takes longer than 1 hour from notice to removal, you are operating illegally. There is no right of dispute, no claim of fair use, satire, parody, no burden of proof.
Nobody running a small website like this can even attempt to build such a system - Youtube's ContentID system cost them $60 millon to set up.
To remain compliant, you'd have to shift to Reddit or another big platform. No choice to stay legal.
Then sit back and watch as, say, Boeing assert copyright on all images of Boeing aircraft, and you find the photo you took of a Boeing plane at the airport gets removed. That photo of a model you took and uploaded to Wikimedia as public domain is taken by one of the big picture libraries, then asserted as theirs, and now you can't post it anywhere because the automated content systems remove it.
This already happens to artists of all kinds in small numbers.
