As the EU Copyright Directive was approved, Germany admitted it requires copyright filters, putting it on a collision course with the EU-Canada trade deal

[doctorow]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/17/careful-what-you-wish-for.html

…

[Ooghar]

They didn’t fat finger it, they did as they were supposed to and then looked for some way to get some cover for the decision.

[anon41977465]

Filters are great! Filters do nothing but improve things. Have you ever had filtered coffee? Now that’s really living!

[Scurra]

So the UK government has announced that mandatory “porn” filters will come into effect on July 15th (in an hilarious GDPR-breaching email.)
But they have also had to exclude platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram from the filter because otherwise they’d have been insta-blocked to everyone.
It strikes me that this might be a foretaste of what is to come - there is the possibility that those copyright filters won’t actually be enforced on the big platforms because otherwise they would all be closed down straight away. It’s merely those upstarts who want to do something small or quiet, out of the way and not in any way threatening any of the copyright giants who will be squashed. Oh, wait, late-period capitalism again, right?

[peterrisser]

What would happen if the platforms just stopped serving the EU? There’s nothing that forces them to provide content. Just stop. Sure, they’d lose a little revenue in the short run, but I guarantee that the uproar would be astounding and a ‘fix’ would probably be implemented pretty damn quick.

[politeruin]

Of course we want creators to be paid but i’d still like to know how, on god’s green earth, this can possibly be implemented by any organisation smaller than facebook, amazon, google and a handful of others? Let’s ask creators how content ID is going so well for them but if you wanted to entrench the big players in perpetuity then this is surely the way to go about it.

[Entity447B]

Might work.

I’m not sure that handing over power to Google, Facebook and chums will help deal with the EU’s perceived democratic deficit, though.

[anon41977465]

But since the platforms get the benefit of the being the only ones with the ability to put filters in place this serves their interests by helping block competition, so what you’re really asking is what would happen if the platforms decided to lose some revenue to get rid of something that served their interests and the answer is they wouldn’t.