Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/21/death-of-an-artform.html
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MELT THE SWITCHBOARDS, SAVE THE INTERNET!
That’s not working, we need an alternate model to attack these fuckers.
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Maybe they’ll just be so overwhelmed with violations that they’ll realize what a huge mistake they’ve made.
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So it must block any copyrighted content??
My tongue is made of glass.
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I am suitably convinced by all these stories that this legislation is so hopelessly misguided that they won’t be able to come anywhere close to implementing it even if they do pass it.
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They don’t have to implement it completely, just to have it available as a threat. Another tool in the corporate/state toolbox for discouraging challenges to their power. See: universal criminality
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I guess the other solution is to block all EU addresses until they come to their senses.
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This might be a problem for Minecraft servers (it depends how the servers deal with mod content), but it’s unlikely to impact most game companies like Blizzard. They’d only have issues if they, like Valve, distributed user-created content for multiplayer games. That’s fairly rare. Most companies prefer to let users deal with mod distribution themselves. So it’s the fans that will get hosed - as sites like Moddb that host mods would be impossible, if they’re responsible for making sure there’s no copyrighted content. The problem would make Youtube’s content matching algorithms look like child’s play. Because you’d potentially have video, audio, text, images (which are likely to be cropped and altered) and 3D models that could be infringing - all put into a package, possibly in proprietary format (and different for different games), possibly protected from being opened up and examined. So any sort of site that does mod hosting would definitely be dead. Game companies would simply not make games that allowed the distribution of user-created content within the game, which wouldn’t be a huge impediment.
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“Realise”, yes; “Admit”, no.
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s:| They’ll just take that as evidence of how badly needed the law is.
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This! It’s older than 19th century though. It goes back to Byzantine times at least.
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To the extent that healthy fan communities are good for the game’s producers, it’s not just the fans that will get hosed.
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They didn’t make any mistake. They know exactly which side their bread is buttered on.
It’s plain old corruption and it’s depressing.
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I have been thinking about this. The EU has a history of trying to regulate the internet in byzantine, clumsy ways, and the internet tends to acknowledge these attempts (e.g. with those stupid “cookie law” popups, and the even more stupid GDPR popups) without actually doing a goddamn thing differently, because, what, Luxembourg’s Data Protection Agency is going to crack down on your Taiwanese cooking blog?
OTOH, there’s the “right to be forgotten” (aka “right to Streisand effect”) regulation, which on the face of it is just as apocalyptic in its implications, but everyone seems to have agreed from the start that it only applies to Google.
My guess would be that if this copyright directive comes into effect, everyone will go into “wait and see” mode – there’s a big difference between copy-pasting a dumb popup script and redesigning your whole system – and when nothing happens, they’ll forget about it. It’s pretty obvious that if you set up an easy-to-use form for bullshit takedown requests, that’s when you will start getting bullshit takedown requests. If you don’t have the form, and EMI has to pay a lawyer to send you a letter through the mail for hosting a video where someone walks past wearing a Beatles shirt in the background, they’re not going to bother.
I can almost see that having a silver lining. Perhaps what we’ll see is that very large internet companies (like Facebook and Twitter) start getting treated as the state-level actors that they are, and having to implement courts and bureaucracy that make them about as fun and cool as a welfare office. And the cool thing will become to use email instead, because that’s below the radar and you can post whatever you like.</wistfulfantasy>
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Well, except that a) it would just impact EU hosting of mod content, so as long as the mods are hosted elsewhere, it wouldn’t impact the games - unless we’re talking about games with fanbases disproportionately in the EU, b) fan communities aren’t necessarily mod communities as c) most games aren’t designed to support modding and d) there’s little desire to mod most games - only certain types of games that are very popular tend to get modders (so it’s most likely to impact larger, established game companies like Blizzard, not upstarts in this respect).
What it’s not going to do is privilege large game companies like Blizzard because only they will have the resources to do the copyright filtering - I can’t imagine any game company will have, or want to spend, the resources on something like that when distributing user-created content is a small part of very few companies’ strategies to begin with. Any impacts are going to be highly unpredictable and largely effect certain types of games.
“your favorite game”
All my favorite games have been bought from GOG. How will they be affected?
fuck it I’m joining them. I 'll claim infringement on “fighting back” fight back" and anything suggestive of doing so . I will also claim infringement on Groucho Marx’s moustache sorry Papasan.
C’est la Vie
Freedom fFghters
Is it too late to copyright copyright filters? Or the copyright concept itself?
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