Proposed bills rarely go anywhere, and so do not count as on-topic for HN unless there is something intellectually interesting about them—which there rarely is, since the reason they get picked up and broadcast is always sensational. This one is described as a "discussion draft", so it isn't even a bill.
there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things. This is a great example.
Additionally today they announced that while profits on stock trading (specifically derivatives) can be taxed fully, losses can only be accounted for upto 10.000€
Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013.
This kids, is what it looks like when a government is too scared to solve bigger structural challenges (digitization of the beauraucracy, switch to electromobility, better competitive environment for startups, questionable pension system, unneccesarily high taxes that keep leading to surpluses, I could go on) - and instead keep themselves occupied with non-issues that are PR heavy. Schade.
Compared to the US, Germany is more regulation heavy in general. Many of those regulations seem fine or even great, there are definitely ones that weird me out a bit as an American living here though, like legally enforced quiet hours on Sunday, days where it's illegal to dance, and really just the large amount of government-religion interaction.
The US has lots of overbearing regulations and laws relating to "moral" stuff such as drinking and nudity. In many places in the US, it's illegal to drink alcohol in public [!!!]. That's pretty fucked up, not being allowed to drink a beer on a park bench. And don't get me started on the puritan anti-nudity laws...
I don't know. The US does seem to also have its fair share of strange, overbearing laws to the point where you can easily find "weirdest us laws" lists online:
Those are generally on the books because they are unenforced, so nobody even thinks to remove them. Were they enforced, they'd be struck quickly. Sometimes that even happens.
Are the ones in Germany enforced? Honest question, I don't know, and I'm interested in the answer.
Dancing Ban? Usually not unless you're either A) a very big venue or B) a public place like a school. But for either cases it wouldn't matter much since most of them are closed on those days since they are usually national holidays anyway.
You are severely misinformed if you believe these to be mandated by law. Also missing from US law: parental leave and sick days. None of these things are mandated, they are purely up to individual companies to optionally provide, which just isn't good enough in the rest of the world.
And even so. Do you want the US to be ranked together with developed nations or places like Papua New Guinea and ...
Huh, turns out that's the only other country listed besides the US that has no paid maternity leave.
In the US, the government dictates what hours you're allowed to drink, and in buildings that serve alcohol, you frequently need a license to be able to dance in those same places - even when there is no alcohol being served at that time.
There’s a difference between business licenses and making dancing itself illegal. I don’t know if that’s a real law somewhere in Germany, but it’s definitely further along in restricting personal freedom than requiring a business license to allow dancing in a club that serves alcohol, and I’d be surprised if Germany doesn’t have similar laws.
Although I imagine there could be some very conservative local jurisdictions, in the US, that outlaw dancing in some ways as well.
Having something be licensed simply means that it’s now illegal for you to do that thing.
It’s a euphemism.
Honestly, I feel it must be unconstitutional to outlaw protected expression by people simply because they are standing in a building in which other people serve alcohol at other times.
Dancing itself isn't illegal, just doing it publically, on those days. It's rarely enforced, many places have exceptions that it's allowed unless the local church mess is disturbed due to noises.
>there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things.
As unnecessary as it might seem, however, it is not bizarre. This piece of legislation was not cooked up overnight, as you suggest. Basically, this is how the start of enacting Article 13 aka 'meme ban' looks like.
I'm pretty sure this is just a consequence of that EU copyright reform that passed some months ago (article 11&13/15&17). At least the linked article talks about it (in German).
The EU can't make laws themselves. The way they work is by requiring member states to make laws and this is Germany's.
Correct, it is the national implementation implementation of an EU directive.
And to the other point: There are two kinds of EU law. Regulationsa and directives. Regulations are direct law in all member states, directives need national implementation.
The small chunks won't matter to a judge because the intended result is to have the resulting ensemble displayed as a single, larger image again. The intermediate steps of breaking it up and reassembling it are irrelevant technical details that will be abstracted away.
Well, the gap between the letter of the law and the spirit of it is quite narrow in most cases because of how the law is written in an abstract form and applied to a real case. Intent matters, not just the execution. If you know that something is unlawful, but you take deliberate steps to (seemingly) circumvent a rule while effectively breaking it with the result of your action, you're still on the hook. I find that people generally underestimate this aspect of how law is applied to the real world.
There is a certain extend where the judge can easily see that you're just trying to bullshit around the law itself.
In this case, the most likely outcome is that the judge will rule that breaking the image into 128 pixel squares and then reassembling them is simply the same as displaying the full image by intent. The result is the same so you broke the law.
i.e. JPEG macroblocks? Sounds like a challenge for a metamemetic image meme-image–macro meme image codec(MIM-I–MIMIC) format to lampshade the absurdity of all of this.
(No, I ain't gonna write it. But I did just give all y'all an acronym for it, and I ain't gonna ask any of you to write it, either. However, I do dare challenge you to come up with some recursive derivation of the acronym, tho!)
If the link tax ("Leistungsschutzrecht") gets implemented on a European level, I also hope that Google (and all other search engine provider) then just return search results with the maximal allowed word count.
I don’t understand all the mock outrage; memes are already illegal in most cases at any size and copyrights are currently being enforced with takedowns in some cases. It seem like the title & text is trying to be intentionally inflammatory. It’s already illegal to use someone else’s image without permission, unless you’re covered by fair use (which memes are not automatically). Memes just happen to not be very enforceable by anyone who’s not a large corporation. The text seems to suggest that Germany is proposing an exemption to copyright infringement when the images are small enough. Isn’t that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now?
> Isn’t that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now?
Maybe? 128 pixels is a vanishingly small amount as display pixel density continues to rise. That's under an inch on many displays.
Not to mention, while no fair use defense is automatic (fair use is a defense against copyright lawsuits in court), memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories.
I'd guess that small (or just large & blurry) is the idea -- to make the criteria for the exception depend on having the quality be less than the original. Still, small and legal is better than illegal?
> memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories.
I feel like the problem with that claim is the parody and/or critique is very commonly not related to the subject of the image in any way. It seems strange to claim I should be able to fairly use a copyrighted picture of a famous person in order to comment on memes, or vegetables, or (super commonly) as a completely random funny backdrop to a saying.
The ideas behind the parody and critique exceptions in fair use is that you can use a picture of Patrick Stewart to make comments about Patrick Stewart's acting or something he said in an interview, not that you can use a copyrighted picture of Patrick Stewart to comment on use of fonts on the internet, just because he happens to have a pose that makes the saying seem funny.
When I Google "memes" right now and look at images, I see an entire page of copyrighted images, and only one of them (out of 26 images on the first page) has text relevant to the image. The other 25 are not making a parody of the person(s) in the image, or critique something even remotely relevant to the image.
The recent tonal shift regarding online expression and copyright in the EU certainly doesn't suggest that the intention here was to increase internet users' rights.
I would say that's highly questionnable under Berne, and are fairly untested under US Fair Use protections.
As most of them are stills, and use the entire still, there's no defence of a partial use of the work. Under Berne the key test would be if it was prejudicial to the copyright owner's economic rights, and it would be hard to argue the image had no economic value if it was being used in a popular meme.
I do think the parent's comment that memes could be actionable in a great many situations in most jurisdictions but rarely get such in practice has merit.
>Under Berne the key test would be if it was prejudicial to the copyright owner's economic rights, and it would be hard to argue the image had no economic value if it was being used in a popular meme.
Isn't that backwards though? Doesn't the Berne Convention say that exemptions to reproduction of copyrighted works can't be prejudiced against the economic interests of the original author?
Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie, does it?
> Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie, does it?
That is faulty, incorrect logic, and the law (both US copyright and the Berne convention) does not agree with you. You don't have the right to decide what is in the interests of the Marvel franchise, Marvel does.
Images of Peter Parker are being actively used for ancillary marketing purposes, and they can easily show that infringing use of their copyrighted image is diluting their brand and/or causing some financial harm.
BTW I'm not worried about Marvel, I'm more worried about the many smaller independent businesses, and individual creators, that lose control of their work and have no practical legal recourse.
>You don't have the right to decide what is in the interests of the Marvel franchise, Marvel does.
That doesn't sound right though. Wouldn't this mean that any time a large corporation used somebody's copyrighted works that they're stepping on a huge minefield, because it's now up to the individual to decide what is in their interests?
I'm pretty sure that even US copyright law weights whether the potential copyright infringement creates an alternative product for the market.
>and they can easily show that infringing use of their copyrighted image is diluting their brand and/or causing some financial harm.
That's trademark law not copyright. It's a different matter, because trademarks have to be actively defended.
>I'm more worried about the many smaller independent businesses, and individual creators, that lose control of their work and have no practical legal recourse.
Then you're worried about the wrong thing. They will never have practical legal recourse as long as the legal system is based on spending a lot of money. We can't even get criminal law to work with this. What's the chance that we would get civil law to work with it?
> Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie, does it?
Most memes are full reproductions of photographs, not smaller sections of larger works like a still from a film. And I suspect Getty would argue pretty successfully that the online use would indeed compete with their licensing of the image on a website for their photographs for example.
I googled it before I commented, and I can't find any lawyers who agree with that. They all say it might be possible, but that fair use is definitely not automatic, and that the best course of action is always to either acquire rights explicitly, or only post images that you have explicit rights for.
1. Yes, fair use is not an automatic pre-emptive validation of copyright infringement. Rather it is...
2. Under US law, an affirmative defence: "A new fact or set of facts that operates to defeat a claim even if the facts supporting that claim are true." (https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Affirmative+D...) That is, ajudication occurs in a legal (or criminal) case.
3. Also US law: there is a four-part test for fair use for fair use, the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount of the work utilised, and the impact on the market of the original. Not all, or indeed any one test need be met for fair use to be found.
4. There is a parody right which has been argued, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, for fair use. I won't get into the argument but suggest: https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/parody-f... which begins "It has been a long-standing practice to poke fun at our cultural icons, symbols, public figures and celebrities." Commentary by way of analogy or reference is also a long-standing tradition, which it could be argued that memes extend.
I'm not claiming these rights are absolute or uncontroversial. However they've been argued and asserted, and there is basis for a fair-use defence of virtually any meme use, so long as it's not injurious to the original.
The case of whether or not unpopular, fringe, or extremist-group adoption of specific images, concepts (a difficult case under copyright), characters, symbols, etc., might be considered injurious, and prosecutable via copyright, is ... an interesting question.
> However they've been argued and asserted, and there is basis for a fair-use defence of virtually any meme use, so long as it's not injurious to the original.
Yeah, fair use definitely has been used successfully. And in many meme cases I'd agree the meme is not necessarily injuring the original. (Though note, lack of injury is in no way sufficient to justify copyright infringement.) But I would speculate(!) that meme images being irrelevant to a photo undermines the fair use defense, that using a copyrighted photo to comment on something other than the subject in the photo means that use of the photo is not "commentary" relevant to the photo that supports fair use.
Copyright, again, in US law (applies to many though not all HN readers) is hinged on a Constitutional justification "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (Art I, Sec 8, Clause 8). That is: to provide a benefit to the public.
An element of which, this house argues, is the enjoyment of and illumination provided via, Internet memes.
The reason people are outraged is because in practice memes were permitted. These new rules create more enforcement, which means that in practice people will likely have less freedom.
No, memes have not been “permitted”. Something is not legal just because you don’t get caught or sued. Memes that try to use frames from movies have been handed takedown notices. Other memes just haven’t been handed takedowns because the owner isn’t making enough money to make a legal defense worthwhile. It’s not ethical to claim it’s permitted just because someone can’t defend it.
>No, memes have not been “permitted”. Something is not legal just because you don’t get caught or sued.
All that matters is whether this happens much in the real world or not. The world's most draconian laws mean absolutely nothing if they're not enforced.
>Memes that try to use frames from movies have been handed takedown notices.
And the banana you ate contained radioactive isotopes, but you didn't hold off from eating it because of that. Something that's a rare occurrence doesn't change how people behave.
>It’s not ethical to claim it’s permitted just because someone can’t defend it.
I believe that our current copyright system itself is unethical. There is absolutely no point at which "copyright needs to extend 70 years beyond the author's death" and "copyright laws exist to further the advancement of science and culture" intersect. I'd even argue that these copyright laws are what hinder the advancement of science and culture. Memes don't mean much if they don't get shared and if sharing them is something people will get in trouble over then they just won't share memes.
Also, I'd like to point out that this copyright system has also created a variety of companies and people who abuse the system for monetary gain, yet there's essentially no recourse to be had.
No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?
Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.
If it's not clear (the article does say "if not[,] you will need to get a license from the creator"), it's because most memes and GIFs take a copyrighted image/clip before adding a caption to it.
E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek".
> E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek".
The image doesn't supersede Dawson's Creek. My understanding is that this template is lampooning overwrought acting on the show. Isn't this covered under transformational fair use in the United States?
Device pixels (resolution) or viewport pixels (like in CSS)?
I mean OS manufacturers could just change the way viewport pixels are calculated in their viewport rendering, which makes the law redundant. And relying on device resolution doesn't make any sense for modern devices with hidpi displays.
They are probably considered neutral public forums even though they may operate a for profit business. I believe laws such as this will generally apply to the content creators, although public forums will usually have to cooperate with authorities who request assistance in enforcing the law.
This is good, of course. I am curious: while a typical user of imgur would clearly be non-commercial, would imgur itself be at risk for hosting the material? Or does Germany have a “safe harbour”-like concept for platforms that host user content?
Well, commercial use of memes, like, say a company liek Reddit or Imgur that profites from the use of memes (let's not go into their revenue or business model in detail now). So in reality ALL memes are commercial (unless you host yourself, I would guess).
It could be that the ad
agencies are using the memes not to pay for the images. Maybe the photographers that used to work for them complained and got this law.
I don't see why you'd need a new law to prevent the unlicensed use of a copyrighted work in an ad; I'm pretty sure that's been illegal for quite some time now, including in Germany.
IMO: this is a good thing, memes are addictive and worse still they’re often themselves advertising on commercial sites. I’m glad something is being done.
Who's pushing for this? Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.
It's like media industries love to hurt themselves. They've already brought back mass piracy by fragmenting streaming services, next they want to kill any chance of their content going viral I guess.
> Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.
Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising.
Anyway, the "Germany to ban memes" is just a spin on the story to generate clicks and outrage (similar to the EU copyright directive some time before). This legislation is about commercial use of images. The 128x128 pixels is what the law would consider a "thumbnail" image that can be used without explicit license from the copyright holder.
Perhaps a more correct headline would be "Germany to unban memes smaller than 128x128 pixels".
> Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.
Most of the time I don't know where the meme's graphical content is from so it's not really advertising the source. But by the same token of course the meme is not harmful to the the content owner's economic interests.
This is just a consequence of the copyright reform by the EU that passed. Remember article 11 and 13? (15 and 17 when passed.) This is it. The EU can't make laws themselves: it gets the national governments to make the laws and this is the one for Germany.
The EU is a nightmare of over regulation. No wonder the U.K. is leaving. They can’t just leave people well enough alone.
Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal over the entire page on their image only URLs. I feel like I can’t escape the EU’s ruination of the Internet and I have never stepped foot in the bloc.
I strongly disagree. There might be a tendency to over-legislate in some areas (after all, there is now an exposed central authority that can be lobbied by special interest groups) but on the whole, the EU has been a strong positive influence on the continent of Europe and Britain is facing a serious self-inflicted wound as a result of Brexit. I say this as somebody who has dual citizenship in both a EU country (Italy) and the UK.
The EU has a huge problem of people who have absolutely no idea what they're voting for. The cookie law was a very obvious example of that. The EU parliament is a mix of politicians who vote for what they want and ones who very obviously vote for whatever their party's or their corporate connections want. The moment any kind of technology is involved, the first group doesn't know what they want and so the second group can out-vote the crap out of them.
So yes, they have done a lot of good, but only in fields they understand. In fields they don't, however, they are a much too powerful weapon in the hands of (effectively) the highest bidder.
In what way is the "cookie law" a result of voting for whatever their party's or their corporate connections want? Which corporations benefit from that?
The cookie law is so incredibly stupid and ineffective, my best explanation for it is that it was made by people who didn't actually want more privacy for users, and the ones who did, voted for it because they didn't understand how useless it was.
The EU has important geopolitical reasons for existing on the continent of Europe.
However, the UK does not share the history of the continental countries of being occupied by their neighbours.
The compact "I surrender much of my sovereignty for security from being periodically exterminated by my neighbours" - has a very different balance on the scales for the country of the UK than it does for countries with a recent memory of occupation, that have seen large percentages of their populations dying from violence in continental wars going back centuries.
I agree with your observation that the UK has never been occupied, but disagree that the UK can afford to disregard continental matters. The UK has deployed soldiers to fight and die in continental Europe since the Middle Ages, and the last World War heralded in a period of untold suffering for civilian populations on the Home Front, all of whom were well within the reach of industrial-era weapons and legitimate targets within the remit of the doctrines of Total War.
It’s not for no reason that the past 300 years of British foreign policy has revolved around the principle of ensuring that no continental power could rise up to the point of posing a threat to her navies. Admittedly, this is now truly superseded, but it should bear an impact on people’s decisions.
> Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal
I find it hilarious how companies allegedly afraid of the big bad fines by the EU continue to use a non-compliant solution for a problem they created themselves.
It's cargo-culting of the stupidest way of (barely) solving the problem. American lawyers trying to interpret EU regulations never worked well it seems.
> I have never stepped foot in the bloc
It's not like the rest of the world doesn't have to obey several American laws as well.
The hope behind GDPR, as with the earlier "cookie law" was that businesses would respond by improving their revenue models and data practices. Instead businesses have responded by making the UX shit for their users whilst claiming they had to do it to follow the law.
I wonder if this stupid compliance trick works: encode the image in base64 (or whatever, maybe something more dense), output that as plain text in the page, tell users they need to install a browser extension that recognizes these parts, decodes them and puts the image in place of the text.
Just for kicks the browser extension is open source and is maintained by anonymous..
It sounds like you're falling into a common pitfall of interpreting laws in terms of purely technical details rather than their intent.
I recommend reading What Colour are your bits [0].
The major point that it tries to get across is that as software devs, we think in terms of data and computers. The law doesn't. The law says "you can't have an image like X", and you immediately think "hah, well, arbitrary base64 encoded data isn't an image." The law doesn't care about that though. If the law says you can't display an image like X to users, then it doesn't matter what weird layers you go through. It doesn't matter if you stitch together 1 million 1-pixel images, or if you have them install a browser extension, it just matters if you intended for them to be able to see that image, and then they could see that image.
The blog-post I linked does a much better job of explaining this, and I recommend reading it.
It would be correct, tautological even, to say in German "Deutsche Richter haben die Intelligenz einer Kartoffel". But that doesn't translate to "German judges have the intelligence of a potato" but to "German judges have the intelligence of a kraut".
In other words, no, that is not how the law works.
I mean, if you're up for working around the law rather than obeying it, assembling 128x128 tiles into a bigger image by tacking them together in HTML is far easier.
