Can Europe Export Privacy Rules World-Wide?

Kyle

ULTRA-F###ING-MAGA!
PREMO Member
Google on Tuesday will appeal an order to extend the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” to its search engines across the globe, arguing before the EU’s top court that the order encourages countries to assert sovereignty beyond their borders.


National laws used to stop at the border. In cyberspace, they increasingly stretch around the world, as regulators in Europe, the U.S. and Canada have started asserting legal authority over the internet across country lines.


That is thrusting global tech firms like Google, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. into a potentially costly legal morass, and setting the stage for conflict over who will—or should—regulate everything from free speech and privacy to cybercrime and taxes.


The Google dispute before the EU’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg is the highest-profile case yet to test where jurisdiction begins and ends when it comes to data. Google is appealing a 2015 order from France’s privacy regulator, CNIL, to extend the EU’s “right to be forgotten” to all of its websites, no matter where they are accessed. CNIL fined Google 100,000 euros ($116,295) when it didn’t comply.


France argues that the right—which allows individuals to request removal of results that include personal information from searches for their own names—is empty if it can be dodged by spoofing one’s location, for instance by connecting to a VPN. Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., GOOGL +0.12% says France’s demand risks allowing the censorship laws of dictators and tyrants to dictate what people around the world can see online.






https://www.wsj.com/articles/local-internet-laws-threaten-to-go-global-1536490801
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
New EU copyright filtering law threatens the internet as we knew it

The controversial provision in question is Article 13, which requires internet platforms to filter uploads for copyright infringement. If it seems as though Article 13 has sprung up out of nowhere, blindsiding people, it’s because it quite literally has. “It wasn’t going to be in the final draft but it was reintroduced on GDPR day [May 25th, the day GDPR went into effect],” says Cory Doctorow, who is organizing against the proposal with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow — whose copyleft views are well known — calls the rest of the EU proposal “a pretty unobjectionable, technical set of revisions to a pretty important statute that has gone long in the tooth.”

For anyone who’s been on the internet long enough, the problem with Article 13 is pretty clear. It’s YouTube Content ID but for the entire internet. Axel Voss, the member of European Parliament who is taking the lead on the copyright bill, has argued that the actual proposed language never mentions a filter, although that just raises the question of what using “effective technologies” to prevent copyright infringement means, other than filtering. Although the most recently revised language exempts sites such as “online encyclopaedias,” clearly aiming to exclude the likes of Wikipedia, Voss has said in the past that he cannot predict which platforms will be affected.

Remember the time YouTube Content ID took down a video with birds chirping in the background because an avant-garde song in its copyright database also had birds chirping in the background? Remember the time NASA’s videos of a Mars landing got taken down by a news agency? Remember the time a live stream got cut off because people started singing “Happy Birthday”? And all this happened despite the fact that Google is really good at what it does.


IP based filtering ..... for those that know what a VPN is they can by pass EU Filters ... until the EU starts blocking VPN's


Get ready for a world of "link taxes" and copyright complaints over memes.


Groups like the Wikimedia Foundation have also come out firing against the proposal, stating it’s “detrimental to the efficient and effective global online collaboration that has been Wikipedia’s foundation for the past 16 years.” The Foundation notes that the costs of compliance could have a particularly-profound impact on smaller startups.

“Automatic content detection systems are very expensive,” notes the organization. “Requiring all platforms to implement these filters would put young startups that cannot afford to build or buy them at a tremendous disadvantage. This would hurt, not foster, the digital single market in the European Union, as it would create a tremendous competitive advantage for platforms that already have implemented such filters or are able to pay for them.”

Numerous other flaws have been routinely highlighted by critics and activists.

For example, Article 11 of the proposal was constructed with an eye on making companies pay when they use even short snippets of text from news publications. Affectionately dubbed a “link tax,” the misguided plan is being driven by a handful of publishers that believe that Google and Facebook are somehow unfairly profiting off of their work.

Under this part of the proposal, websites that share content would be subject to licensing fees for sharing anything more than “insubstantial” portions of content, something that also puts resources like Wikipedia at risk since the proposal fails to include a noncommercial exception.

Similar efforts in Spain and Germany have failed, leaving China as the only major nation that believes automated wholesale copyright filters are a good idea. Spain’s implementation of this concept resulted in Google News shutting down in the country entirely, resulting in publishers actually seeing a notable decline in overall traffic.
 

vraiblonde

Board Mommy
PREMO Member
Patron
I think we already knew that the EU is run by "dictators and tyrants". Why is this surprising?

You know, Europe could opt out of the WWW pretty easily. They could set up their own intranet and restrict whatever they want to (before the citizens rise up, burn them out of their government offices, and put their heads on pikes).

Isn't globalism fun?
 
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