On 21 December 2016 at 02:53, Newyorkbrad newyorkbrad@gmail.com wrote:
I think it might be useful to focus on how any of the proposed changes to the law would affect Wikipedia/Wikimedia specifically, apart from the broader philosophical discussion. Is there a good link for exactly what changes to the safe harbor laws are being considered, as opposed to the more general statement that there's a discussion of scaling them back?
The Guardian article I linked outlines the problem as the record industry sees it.
The actual problem is that the record industry makes much less money from streaming than it did in the 1990s from CDs, and they consider this everyone else's fault and responsibility to fix, as if boom-times income is right and natural.
I've yet to see a coherent clearly-stated proposal on the safe harbor. But per the Guardian article: they fundamentally dislike the fact that YouTube doesn't have to license content first, and that people can just upload it and *then* they need to send a notice. They would really really like a permissioned Internet.
They previously considered Spotify streaming inherently evil as well, until they bullied Spotify into revenue guarantees to the major labels (but not the minor ones). YouTube has consistently refused any similar revenue guarantee arrangement - although it's gone well out of its way to work with them, e.g. content ID on audio.
- d.