tux99 wrote:
It didn't pass parliament, it only passed in the rights committee. Discussion and voting in the main assembly still hasn't happened yet.
That's right, thank you for correcting that.
In the last days I tried to imagine what would happen if the law proposal was approved. My answers are below. I am no lawyer, so pick all of this with an appropriate dose of salt. I used most of the links I posted above to get an understanding of this.
What will happen to LinuxMusicians? (and similar forums)
This is a forum, so a website that "allow users to post content in such a way that the public can access it", to use Dr. Christina Angelopoulos words [1]. So, under the law proposal, it has to be considered an "Online Content Sharing Service Provider". So, what happens if a user posts some copyright infringing material in this forum?
a) Since LinuxMusicians is not a for-profit organization, LinuxMusicians falls under the exceptions of the law, so it has
not to be considered liable.
b) Article 13 would also not consider LinuxMusicians liable if, even if it was a for-profit organization, it could demonstrate that all possible measures to prevent copyright infringing materials were in place (i.e. content filters). Given that this is a moderated forum, and the law does not mandate a particular kind of content filter, the moderators can be considered "content filters' (thing they indeed are). So Linux musicians would
not be considered liable.
c) Whatever the case, LinuxMusicians will
not be hold liable if the suspected infringing material is promptly removed.
For all forums similar to this one, operations should continue as always: Article 11 and Article 13 should not actually matter. However, I see an increased legal risk whenever points a) and b) above could be made hard to demonstrate, for example:
c) the website is not registered as a non-profit and it displays ads: might need to demonstrate in court that the website is acting in a "non-commercial purpose capacity".
This could be enough to make unlawful lawsuits as this one more frequent:
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=18660
What will happen to forums owned by for-profit organizations?
This is the case for, for example, Ubuntu Forums (Canonical). If they are moderated, it counts as they have a manual content filter, so they should be safe, much like as above (with the added lawsuit risk).
What will happen to blogs?
If there aren't means for users to upload content (for example, comments) then they are not "Online Content Sharing Service Providers". Hence, they totally fall outside the scope of the law.
If they display user uploaded content, they will be exempted as soon as they are non-profit endeavours.
If they are operated on a for-profit basis, then they need to implement content filters, that can be very well manual moderation.
Again, liability of the provider is avoided by removing the suspected infringing material.
What will happen to self hosted software repositories?
Much like with forums, they are exempted if they belong to non-profits, or subjects acting in a "non-commercial purpose capacity".
If not, they need to implement content filters on the user uploaded content (commits) in order to not being accounted liable in case of breaching content. Manual auditing of commits, which is the normal praxis, qualifies as appropriate content filtering (as I understand).
Here the impact of an eventual unlawful lawsuit created only to be disruptive is quite high though, I believe, as in all the cases in which proper content filtering or non-profit operation is a bit "grey" the only way to avoid liability is removal of the suspect content, which might mean entire version rollbacks as far as software is concerned.
What will happen to software development platforms?
If they are non-profits, they are exempted. If not, they need to implement content filters. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and the like cannot manually audit every single hosted project, so they will need an automatic filtering mechanism. I think these platforms are at the highest risk of having their business model very significantly impacted.
What if software development platforms are severely impacted?
Self hosted repositories (perhaps gitea is a good way), federated through a non-profit system akin to gitpub, should be a workaround.
What will happen to social networks?
Non-profits, such as Diaspora, should be exempted. All others will need to implement automatic content filtering, as that is the only one that is practical for them.
tux99 wrote:The main purpose of art 13 is to establish pre-emptive censorship technology that in the future can, and certainly will, be used for political censorship.
I understand that this is a topic that touches our sensibility, but I would appreciate if we could keep it on topic by sticking to the known facts about the proposal, their possible impact on Open Source and Communities, and avoid any speculation on what driving forces might be behind that (or reserve it for another thread).
[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comment ... el_bently/