EU approves controversial Copyright Directive

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https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/1784 ... 3-approved

I just love how copyright laws like these are passed to change the way we view and upload content and allowing an abusable system for copyright trolls to exploit and the fact that fair use laws are underenforced. "sarcasm self-test complete."

Next on the list, Trump takes a look at what Europe is doing and decides to revive SOPA.

I like old books that are hundreds of years old. I like the feel, the smell of historical books. Several years ago, Google created an interesting tool called Google Books. They partnered with major libraries throughout the world and began scanning in these books from rare archives. The tool provided me the ability to scan and read very rare books from around the world. But then the lawsuits came.

The Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers separately sued Google in 2005 for its book project, citing "massive copyright infringement." Google countered that its project represented a fair use and is the digital age equivalent of a card catalog with every word in the publication indexed.[9] The lawsuits were consolidated, and eventually a settlement was proposed. The settlement received significant criticism on a wide variety of grounds, including antitrust, privacy, and inadequacy of the proposed classes of authors and publishers. The settlement was eventually rejected, and the publishers settled with Google soon after. The Authors Guild continued its case, and in 2011 their proposed class was certified. Google appealed that decision, with a number of amici asserting the inadequacy of the class, and the Second Circuit rejected the class certification in July 2013, remanding the case to the District Court for consideration of Google's fair use defense.

In 2015 Authors Guild filed another appeal against Google to be considered by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Google won the case unanimously based on the argument that they were not showing people the full texts but instead snippets, and they are not allowing people to illegally read the book. In a report, courts stated that they did not infringe on copyright laws, as they were protected under the fair use clause.

Authors Guild tried again in 2016 to appeal the decision and this time took their case to be considered by the Supreme Court. The case was rejected, leaving the Second Circuit's decision on the case intact, meaning that Google did not violate copyright laws. This case also set a precedent for other case similar in regards to fair use laws as it further clarified the law and expands it. Such clarification is important in the new digital age as it affects other scanning projects similar to Google.

Other lawsuits followed the Authors Guild's lead. In 2006 a German lawsuit, previously filed, was withdrawn. In June 2006, Hervé de la Martinière, a French publisher known as La Martinière and Éditions du Seuil, announced its intention to sue Google France. In 2009, the Paris Civil Court awarded 300,000 EUR (approximately 430,000 USD) in damages and interest and ordered Google to pay 10,000 EUR a day until it removes the publisher's books from its database. The court wrote, "Google violated author copyright laws by fully reproducing and making accessible" books that Seuil owns without its permission and that Google "committed acts of breach of copyright, which are of harm to the publishers". Google said it will appeal. Syndicat National de l'Edition, which joined the lawsuit, said Google has scanned about 100,000 French works under copyright.

In December 2009, Chinese author Mian Mian filed a civil lawsuit for $8,900 against Google for scanning her novel, Acid Lovers. This is the first such lawsuit to be filed against Google in China. Also, in November that year, the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) accused Google of scanning 18,000 books by 570 Chinese writers without authorization. Google agreed on Nov 20 to provide a list of Chinese books it had scanned, but the company refused to admit having "infringed" copyright laws.

In March 2007, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, accused Google of violating copyright law with their book search service. Rubin specifically criticized Google's policy of freely copying any work until notified by the copyright holder to stop.

Many of these lawsuits had a chilling effect on expanding this collection of rare books. What I find appalling is the ability of people to claim copyright even though they had no material link to the creation of these works. (copyright trolls).

So I agree with Aspiegaming that the EU approval of controversial Copyright Directive will have a very chilling effect on the power of the internet. Many countries have very different interpretation of what constitutes copyright.