#obviously i want money & resoucrs to go to the people that need it the most

[dangerliesbeforeyou]

sighhh so I just blocked a post from someone who was complaining about people donating to ao3 & implying that those people should be instead giving their money to fundraisers/charity And I'm sorry but are we still fucking doing the whole 'heartless! This man had time to build a beautiful birdhouse instead of solving this child's murder' shtick!?! Like fuck off lol

[nougatbit]

on copyright and the internet

i cannot believe how every single mep that has to deal with digital issues is more corrupt than the ones before them. they literally spend all their time meeting with lobbyists and condescending to people that actually know how the internet works, they don’t listen to independent experts because their personal oppinions about who deserves to make money or have freedom of speech are obviously much better. they all hate the internet and “young“ people because we threaten the big players they’re used to. it’s like they want to go back in time to the good old days when there was tv and radio and the local newspaper and the media were the only ones that could publish a political opinion.

and like on the point of copyright....in it’s current form it is stupid and meaningless. there has always been copyright infringement, always and there will also always be copyright infringement and in general it doesn’t harm the copyright holders imo.

because if i lend my friend a book they don’t need to buy it but they still get to read it, same goes for a movie or music or whatever. but today you can get a perfect AND permanent copy of any piece of media from the internet or even just a friends computer or phone which makes ripping easier than it used to be and also more accesible..but at least in my experience most people that “steal“ copyrighted materials don’t actually inflict monetary harm on the copyright holder simply because if they hadn’t had the opportunity to get the thing for free they wouldn’t have gotten it at all so there’s no money lost in the infringement.

if i illegally stream a movie that is not available in my country nobody lost any money because there was no other way for me to do this my only other choice would’ve been to not watch it. if a song isn’t on youtube or spotify and doesn’t play on the radio i won’t buy the album without knowing if it is any good to satsify my curiosity i’ll listen to a rip first. nobody lost any money... either i’ll rip the song or if i can’t i won’t buy it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .    

i buy things from small creators i want to support or things that i love and i won’t buy things that are ok but that i don’t really care or know about. the latter i might stream somewhere but if not then i don’t care and i still won’t buy it. and i think that’s what most people do and this hurts nobody because a big company doesn’t get money they wouldn’t have gotten anyways but it’s illegal because the law treats a digital copy like a physical one.

this is false. a physical copy only exists in a limited amount and has a material worth, a copy of a physical objects is always worse in quality which somewhat limits the amount of copies of an original you can make the process is also usually not really worth the effort. for the time and resources it’d take me to copy a book i could also just buy the book.

but a digital copy doesn’t have a material worth because there is no work or resources involved in making one and an infinite amount can be made without any loss of quality. the only material effort goes into the original every other unit is simply copied with one click. digital copies only have the worth of the intellectual property but how much is something worth if there is an infinite amount of perfect copies?

i wouldn’t steal a cd because even if the mp3 on it has basically no monetary worth, the disc does but if i “steal“ an mp3 then i stole something that has no monetary worth because infinite supply meets a finite demand.

and ironically the music industry makes a large part of it’s money not with the music it sells but with the licensing fee that customers pay for every cd, dvd or flash drive they buy.

because in the recent past politicians and the copyright holders as well as publishers agreed that you couldn’t make all these things illegal but that a general fee could be used to reimburse them for possible infringements that could potentially be commited with these technologies.

but today the traditional big players are apparently not in favour of such compromises any more. as the new eu copyright reform shows.

they fear for their position and income because their products like newspapers or classic tv programming are not doing as well as they used to and the big publishers no longer have monopolies. the reasons for this are obviously varried and a little too much to go into but the main issue is that because of this ongoing loss of influence and income these companies and the institutions they are connected with on a bureaucratic level hate new forms of media and their creators and are very willing to throw small independent creators of their own contend under the bus to maintain their economic position.

since publishers and large copyright holders do not have any interest in developing new forms of media but instead fight to regress into a time when they had absolute power their lobbying can be assumed not to be in favour of any media industry that has emerged or started to be successful in the last 25 years. and since the responsible eu politicians are more or less bought by these interest groups it is clear what goals their legislation strives to achieve.

obviously there are big problems with google, facebook, youtube an co. from a number of standpoints and their monopoly positions in regard to the services they provide on the internet is deeply troublesome but since they are currently the only platforms for small, indeoendent creators to publish their work, work which is only protected by copyright in theory since these creators are self published and as such do not have a  big publisher with the resoucres to deal with possible copyright infringement.

the new copyright law is designed to further the financial gain of very few european publishers even more so than the actual creators and copyright holders represented by those publishers at the expense of every single person not represented by those publishing houses.

since the law puts the responsibility for any occuring infringement on the site it was commited on and not on the person that commited it the law forces sites like youtube and facebook to screen all content for infringement. for already existing contend this is probably going to be similar to the events of youtube’s adpocalypse or tumblr’s adult contend ban which is bad but with possible room for case by case review after the original blocking of the contend in question.

however in the case of new uploads it can be expected that the sites will employ automated filters to screen all content very harshly BEFORE it is posted to escape any legal repercussions since they are now liable for all content on their site. this is extremely problematic.

as we know automatic filters are many things but they are far from accurate. since this will all take place before posting it is unlikely that a manual review will be possible since a failed srceening will result in a deleted draft/ no post being made and a nonexistent post cannot be reviewed by a real person.

the filters will therefore be overly strict to begin with so that the sites can be sure nothing slips past and block additional legal content because there is no technical way to make a filter that actually works well since it is nearly impossible to spot the difference between allowed/forbidden use of copyrighted materials  e.g. parody or pastiche. this will make fair use cases defacto illegal and uphold the classic entertainment industy at the cost of independent artists and reviewers and the freedom of speech.

since blocking of contend in fair use cases now rests on the goodwill and tolerance of the rights holder especially in case of already published material but also if something makes it past the filter and is uploaded. because no site will stand up for a post that garners a manual complaint by the rights holder if the site is liable for a possible infringement and the original author won’t be powerfull enough or have enough money to afford going to court ofer this issue. as the law is very impercise this could also mean that sceninc shots that contain any copyrighted materials in the background could also be affected.

all of this means that the ability to speak about any copyrighted materials or to speak in the presence of copyrighted materials is solely dependent on the rights holder and an imprecise technology. one is assumed guilty unless proven otherwise.

link tax, another big change of this reform forces any site that displays a link to copyrighted materials that contains any part of said material to pay a fee to be allowed to do so. this mainly impacts links to newspaper articles and limits access to information in the hopes of saving the newspaper industry but esspecially to improve the income of the Axel Springer publishing house which wants to protect it’s place as the biggest digital publisher in europe.

the last problematic part deals more with the relationship between publisher and author and allowes publishers to keep more money to themselves that they were previously required to give to the original author unless explictely agreed upon differently by the author. this gives the publishers even more power.

it is unclear how this regional law will be implemented to be compatible with the constitution or the global nature of the internet. and it will severly limit access to information and opinions or criminalize the people that work around these limitations e.g by using a proxy server.

and it has the potential to render europe completely meanigless on the internet by blocking innovating concepts and technologies from being able to be developed.

but hey the 1970 were great and i’m sure nobody minds going back in time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯