Everything online is “copyright-protected”. Copyright automatically applies to anything fixed in a tangible medium of expression. So it applies to any service that lets you share content.

Copyright enforcement has always been about going after big abuses. With some incredibly rare exceptions, generally speaking, nobody has ever been at serious risk for sending one copy of a movie or music CD to a friend. There is too much sharing and too many individual parties to chase after every way people technically violate copyright law.

Many of the cases out there involved people sharing on a large scale. Examples like The Pirate Bay or Sci-Hub or Aaron Swartz, which involve distribution of large amounts of content to large numbers of people.

The smaller the platform, the less anyone will care about it, even if it is distributing a little bit of copyrighted content. Small scale copyright violation is so widespread, and the benefits of fighting individual cases of it so small, that there's simply no value to taking it on and they aren't bothering.

I once clicked on a Torrent for a Disney movie. A day later, I received a notice from Comcast that I have 1 out of 5 strikes of accessing copyrighted content, and if I hit 5, my internet access will be terminated.

ISPs will be forced into doing more of this if piracy becomes large scale decentralized, which it will.

Copyright enforcement is about ambulance chasing. Small time channels, like game streamers, who happen to have captured a game that has a music soundtrack, have received DMCA takedown requests.

What we're witnessing here is a misplaced "I hate big tech, so therefore I support anything I perceive as targeting them" resulting in collateral damage that makes every one else's life harder, benefiting mostly rent-seeking big publishers.

The decentralization-will-fix-it cryptoanarchy workaround is a pipe dream. Every so often people imagine an unbreakable piracy distributed darknet will circumvent laws and make piracy safe and convenient for everyone, but the reality is, as soon as it becomes the dominant form, the powers that be will turn their attention to it, and the attempts to crack down on it will be far far more invasive and surveillance heavy.

Just ask Napster, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa, Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, all of which were brought down by injunctions.

>Just ask Napster, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa, Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, all of which were brought down by injunctions.

All of those were commercial outings trying to make money out of their proprietary piracy client software, the open source versions are still around, and even very old networks like ed2k is still up and running. The current 'dominant form' is bittorrent, and from what I can tell it is doing just fine.

Doing fine, as in, a tiny insignificant chunk of the userbase of the major consumer platforms use them. They are not serving most people, and are frustrating to use.

Left out of this discussion is simply some Chinese company, like Douyin/Tiktok just hosting a Youtube competitor, and hoisting a giant middle finger to the EU. The EU will have to erect their own great firewall to stop it.

So you suggest that, in order to compete with China, the EU should allow Google to violate copyright law at large? I don't feel like this is a compelling argument, as it suggests the rule of law should simply be dismissed for any business which might have a competitor in China.

And yes, the networks that survived are small, and not making money, which is the correct outcome for a network built on wide-scale abuse of copyright. Your response backs up my point, about how the media goes after large scale infringers, rather than worrying about small-time offenses.

No, I suggest that modern copyright is a regressive system, and the enforcement mechanisms being imposed on behalf of wealthy publishing guilds is essentially regulatory capture that pretty much increases the risk of greater surveillance and policing in general. If you look at DMCA takedowns on YouTube, the obvious pirates are caught pretty quickly, I know, because I frequently search for marvel movies clips, and they disappear almost within hours of me finding them. The disturbing cases, which you claim won't happen, are small time channels where people's content is flagged because of fair use, even 15 second clips of background music for an intro get a take down request. Seriously, do you think 15 seconds of someone's song on a title sequence is going to deprive the originator of someone paying to hear his full song?

That the over-policing of copyright will cast a chilling effect on independent media creation, that it will affect fair use and transformative works, and that the EU copyright laws will cause all online providers to err on the side of false positives. If you think automated takedowns, de-monetization, and capricious account bans are bad now, just wait until platforms are put in the untenable position of facing either huge fines for under policing, or lesser punishments for over policing.

I already told you that distributed networks have been taken down by concerted government action. Torrent sites have been shutdown. People have been charged during the Napster-era for hundreds of thousands of $$$ for songs on their hard drive. Here, how does this back up your point: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...

As I pointed out, my ISP, Comcast, is already deep packet scanning network traffic and automatically flagging what it things are pirate activity.

You continually confuse real piracy, like someone uploading a whole movie or album, duped from pristine original source -- what I'd call bootleg copies, with stuff like a kid uploading a dance video to a backing track and going viral. Do you really think someone singing karaoke or dancing to a 30 year old song means that person should have their video taken down?

Even song covers, some girl or guy practicing singing, and and playing music on their own piano or guitar, gets taken down. I think that's absurd, especially for music decades old that was released before the singer was born. Artists being sued for sampling or chord sequences, against, a travesty. I've a big fan of Kirby Ferguson's _Everything is a Remix_, which points out that some of the biggest complainers of infringement of their work, are in fact, thieves themselves.

If YouTube becomes too hard for Europeans to publish on, because it turns into a hyper-curated nanny state, my point is, people may turn to TikTok, Bilibili, or others which will happily host the same content, but whose government cares little about helping to enforce foreign government ideas about IP. The end result of this law will be that it will be ineffectual in reducing piracy, but will be very effectual in casting a chilling effect on actual indie producers, and make it incredibly hard for competitors to YouTube start up in Europe.

Limit copyright to 14 years, the original duration (28 with renewable). That was the law for the first 180 years of copyright. Given the hyper-speed of internet time, if anything, copyright duration should be SHORTER not the century long disaster it is now. If you limited copyright to a much shorter term, I might be convinced to buy into your overly restrictionist stance, but as it is, lifetime+ copyright + orwellian enforcement mechanisms is a bridge too far.

Also, you do realize that most of the people concerned about losing the most money to copyright infringement are big international media companies and guilds, like Disney, or MPAA, RIAA, GEMA, etc and that you're essentially defending Disney Corp's right, whether you realize it or not, to block Star Wars parodies and fan films. Or GEMA's right to block your daughter's violin cover. Unless you think algorithm filters are going to magically determine 'fair use' between a kid cover, or a fan film, and a true bootleg, the end result is going to be platforms over-filtering.

I'll also point out that Max Schrems, whose strongly campaigns for GPDR and against Google and Facebook, actually is vehemently against Article 13, and backs mine and EFF's position.

10-15 years ago there were a lot of stories about teenagers getting sued for ridiculous sums for sharing a song.

yet nothing in the reform prevents laws which base the fines on missed revenue.

There's been a lot of shady copyright trolling against bittorrent users.

The last part depends highly on your location. In Germany there are law firms specialized in watching popular torrents. They make millions from threatening users with legal proceedings and if you leech popular content you're more likely than not to get a letter from them.