I've just noticed something when reading the EU copyright reform. It actually all sounds pretty reasonable. Now, hear me out, I swear that this will make sense in the end.

Article 17p4 states the following:

If no authorisation [by rightholders] is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:
(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and
(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event
(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the
notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b).

Article 17p5 states the following:

In determining whether the service provider has complied with its obligations under paragraph 4, and in light of the principle of proportionality, the following elements, among others, shall be taken into account:
(a) the type, the audience and the size of the service and the type of works or other subject matter uploaded by the users of the service; and
(b) the availability of suitable and effective means and their cost for service providers.

That actually does leave a lot of room for interpretation, and not on the lawmakers' part.. rather, on the implementer's part. Say for example devRant, there's no way in hell that dfox and trogus are going to want to be tasked with upload filters. But they don't have to.

See, the law takes into account due diligence (i.e. they must give a damn), industry standards (so.. don't half-ass it), and cost considerations (so no need to spend a fortune on it). Additionally, asking for permission doesn't need to be much more than coming to an agreement with the rightsholder when they make a claim to their content. It's pretty common on YouTube mixes already, often in the description there's a disclaimer stating something like "I don't own this content. If you want part of it to be removed, get in touch at $email." Which actually seems to work really well.

So say for example, I've had this issue with someone here on devRant who copypasted a work of mine into the cancer pit called joke/meme. I mentioned it to dfox, didn't get removed. So what this law essentially states is that when I made a notice of "this here is my content, I'd like you to remove this", they're obligated to remove it. And due diligence to keep it unavailable.. maybe make a hash of it or whatever to compare against.

It also mentions that there needs to be a source to compare against, which invalidates e.g. GitHub's iBoot argument (there's no source to compare against!). If there's no source to compare against, there's no issue. That includes my work as freebooted by that devRant user. I can't prove my ownership due to me removing the original I posted on Facebook as part of a yearly cleanup.

But yeah.. content providers are responsible as they should be, it's been a huge issue on the likes of Facebook, and really needs to be fixed. Is this a doomsday scenario? After reading the law paper, honestly I don't think it is.

Have a read, I highly recommend it.
http://europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...