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IMPORTANT - Art. 13 UE and itch.io

A topic by Marius87 created Sep 12, 2018 Views: 725 Replies: 12
Viewing posts 1 to 4

What is Article 13?

Article 13 of the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on copyright in the Digital Single Market, is based around the relationship between copyright holders and online platforms, like itch.io, compelling the latter to enforce tighter regulation over protected content ("information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders").

According to the Article, those platform providers have to “take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightsholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightsholders through the cooperation with the service providers.”

How will you solve it?

Youtube has the same problem, but they are using an AI system to check the videos. this is not possible with a game with a lot of files. And "report abuse" it's no more ENOUGH.

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Well first to understand is that EU users will be effective by this not US. The US has other laws that clash with article 13 but still yes i can see how this is confusing. If EU law is pass then itch.io can do two things:

1) Make a US version and EU version

US version stay the same while EU version is more with the laws of that land.

2) Still remind worldwide with a requirement

So we developers have been under a honor system to credit people in our game. If the law pass itch.io can add like a credit system like in newgrounds to offset the law. There is no way for a robot to look into a game credit so it would be the responsibility of the developer to credit or else no game will get lunch.

The report button is still a good system because copyright holders can ask itch.io to remove it. That is the system EU wants. If a credit system like newgrounds is added it is easier for copyright owners to spot people who stole it. This can also be used to track games that use copyright owner's name, itch.io can have a system where the name of the person request to not be on any game he did not upload or something then a bot can take it down faster.

The only problems it would face is people uploading copyright images/video/music under fake names. Still that is something all sites face even youtube.

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Warning. The report button is what the EU DOESN'T WANT.

With this new rules, the EU want that the big copyright owners, check the products BEFORE the upload/public page. If they say "ok, you can pass",  the service provider (itch) can show it. This is the big problem. Or the service provider have to use an IA system. This is the law (saddly).

Your mistaken youtube big money robots to "what the law actually says":

"Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers"

What this means is that copyright owners must have an easy way to contact the site owner. No more "click this but also this" kind of madness. This also means no more sites that do not respond to email of copyright owner like APK-Pure does. No more finding the site server like godaddy to remove the site.

I know what they are talking about because my own games have been stolen and I face the same problem. This law gives us power over the scammers. The only reason why every news media said memes or other stuff you or me do not own are a bad thing is because it also says to give as much information for the copyright owners. This is why I suggest the credit system like newgrounds to give much information before people  uploaded works that do not belong to them.

Also companies have bots that can find all disney, marvel, anime, etc looking around the net 24/7 . So it is impossible to hide anything from them.

Admin (1 edit)

Disclaimer: we're still going over it to fully understand how it will affect us in the future. We have no intention of blocking EU users from accessing itch.io.

From what I understand, itch.io classifies as a "small enterprise" and is not subject to the regulations being announced . The regulations are effectively designed to attack large internet companies. These laws do set a dangerous precedent though, since if they were expanded then it could only enable the larger platforms to continue operating with their capital and block out smaller platforms from ever starting

If we grow past the threshold then we will investigate adding automated content filtering services. Something like this will most likely come from a third party service that is in compliance, since burden it would place on us to run ourselves would be great.

Regarding the link tax (article 11), we're still investigating it but it appears to be  very bizarre and ignorant of how the internet works. At this point, it seems that if external sites want to participate in this system then we'll give them the tools to block their links from appearing on our site.

the link tax (art. 11) should not be a problem.


But... is itch a small enterprise? Really? it's the biggest website of videogames uploaded by users

Admin(+1)

Yeah, according to thresholds they set we still classify as small enterprise with room to spare. I think they really are focused on targeting much larger companies with this legislation.

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where are the thresholds? I didn't find them...

no reply?

These laws do set a dangerous precedent though, since if they were expanded then it could only enable the larger platforms to continue operating with their capital and block out smaller platforms from ever starting
Wouldn't an expansion like that conflict with laws to prevent monopolies / unfair competition / cartels, though, just because it would make it unfeasible for small companies to keep up? Wouldn't be surprised if the regulations only applying for big companies is exactly for that reason, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a class-action lawsuit coming up if they tried pushing the regulations in a direction that would make it unfeasible to run small enterprises period... several countries have umbrella organizations that keep an eye on things like this on behalf of small enterprises.

It's still a worrying development, though... GDPR was kinda grounded in reality and was addressing a real problem that people were having, and then the EU drops something like this less than a year later.

yes. it's a stupid law. But the law is the law. I don't find where it talks about "only the big company". Where is it? And... is really itch a small company? Really?! It has too many games and devs to be "small"

Technically Itchio's creators are customers, too... itchio is a service that lets people buy and sell stuff, it's not a company that hires developers to make stuff. Only people that are on Itch's payroll directly counts towards its size.

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yes, I know. And the law made is for this kind of websites. It's for websites where the users can upload stuff.  but @leafo  said that it's ONLY for BIG websites. But I dunno where he saw it

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