I’m also on the other side of the pond and while I think this seriously hinders Google/Youtube and other similar platforms I’m not sure how it will affect OnTableTop at all. Other than not using the small clips from shows that they have done in the past. Pretty sure that 99% of the content that is produced by OnTableTop does not infringe on copyright.

The more damaging thing for OnTableTop might be Brexit but that’s a whole other can of worms.

I’m pretty certain that the EU has never supported the “fair use” policy employed by content creators in the US. To date, it hasn’t stopped people in the EU from creating memes, sharing stock photos and everything else we’re told is under threat now. There are specific exclusions to EU copyright law, that allow works to be reproduced for reasons such as:

• art. 5.2(c) reproductions by public libraries, educational institutions or archives for non-commercial use
• art. 5.3(c) press reviews and news reporting;
• art. 5.3(d) quotations for the purposes of criticism or review;
• art. 5.3(f) uses of political speeches and extracts of public lectures, to the extent justified by public information;
• art. 5.3(i) incidental inclusion in another work;
• art. 5.3(j) use for the advertisement of the public exhibition or sale of art;
• art. 5.3(k) caricature, parody or pastiche;

Article 13 is basically a means to force platform publishers such as Facebook, Youtube et al to take down copyright-infringing material more quickly and to be legally responsible where such infringements occur. At present, they simply shrug and say “not us, it’s the user who uploaded it”.

I’m sure there will be plenty of inappropriate uses of Article 13 and – like Cheri Blair claiming “invasion of privacy” when the amount tax-payers were subsidising her shoe-buying habit became known – it will probably be abused by people looking to shut down dissent/argument/political discourse.

But the basic laws of copyright have always applied to internet postings – they just haven’t been applied.

I’m not saying that Article 13 isn’t badly drafted and open to abuse. Just that it’s not the “end to the internet” that Google/Youtube/Facebook insist it is.

Thing about this is that corporations like to use laws of area that has most strict and most draconian ones world wide so anyone who claims that this doesn’t apply to them because they don’t live in EU area are dead wrong. This is why those two articles are serious matter to everyone no matter were you live and hurts content creators on sites like Youtube. It has already been bad because of broken and easy to abuse copyright bots are but now things could get even worse.

@robert – I’m not sure this applies; unless things have changed legally in the last few years, the content creator – i.e. the person taking the photo/shooting the video retains the copyright, not the person who created the game/minis. Many years ago, I wrote some software for tracking football scores. I approached every football team in the league and asked for permission to use their team colours as icons/logos. Some were very protective, as you can understand. But I was told (by the FA no less) that if I went to every ground and took photos of a player from every team, I could use the photo as a generic representation of a player from that team without requiring a licence. In the same way a newspaper can show photos of a player scoring a goal without having to pay image rights to Chelsea/Man City, whoever, because their team strip/logo appears in the photo.

I think the same rights would apply re: game playthroughs, photos of miniatures etc.

A few years back I also co-created some unique toys (which Mattel paid for us to fly to LA to demonstrate) and worked with a few people to have photos taken (to create what’s called a “sizzle” in the trade). As I didn’t specifically employ the person taking the photos, they retained all rights. What I didn’t realise what that, after the toy option was turned down by Mattel and I asked them to remove the photos they had taken from their online portfolio site (to retain the option to present to other toy companies in future) I had no legal discourse to require them to do so: they were the copyright holder of the images, even though the content within them was not theirs.

There’s a world of difference between infringing copyright and trademark, just as there is in informing through media and “passing off”.

It’s noticable that the most vocal opponents of Article 13 are the companies like Youtube and Facebook et al, who are most likely to bear the brunt of this kind of ruling. Personally, I don’t think memes are suddenly going to disappear overnight (I can’t decide if this is a good thing or not). I don’t see that BoW/OTT would be adversely affected by this ruling (though GW might try to get a bit “heavy” attempting to shut down sites that are critical of them, while carrying their imagery).

@blinky465 That is what i’m not sure about.  If I make a video of me playing a computer game, the computer game company still owns the copyright to the graphics, code and music… if the computer game has licensed music from a band, that music is still under the copyright of the band/record label.  While I own the copyright of the video I make, I don’t own the copyright of what I used in the video.  Under this new legislation, it seems that Facebook/Youtube are now obligated to compensate the computer game/music company or take the video down… whether this could apply to board games/war games?  I don’t know.  I could be very wrong.

The issue I have with articles 11 and 13 are two fold.

Firstly, while the motives, if you believe politicians, is to “protect creators” it is highly unlikely that this is the case.  The man behind it all, a one Axel Voss, has been on record suggesting that perhaps YouTube shouldn’t exist.  When he speaks about protecting creators, he like to talk about “young, independent creators” when actually his bill, even with the revisions it received, actually protects large corporate channels; companies large enough to have their own legal teams who can ensure copyright compliance BEFORE upload whose content YouTube can trust to be free from copyright infringement.  YouTube have already said that the bill, as it has been passed, may restrict them in their ability to host content from everyone.

Secondly, while the article does indeed make provisions for satire and parody the practicalities of this are much more difficult and will likely just lead to mass censorship by social media companies simply to protect themselves from lawsuits.  While it is technically possible to develop content filters that can look for copyrighted material, these algorithms are massively complex and expensive, far beyond the reach of companies like Beasts of War to develop.  This leads to three outcomes:

1. Beasts of War continue as normal but are massively exposed to the risk of lawsuits.
2. Beasts of War no longer allow users to upload any images to their site because they cannot control what is uploaded.  Also their own content may have to change to only include their own original footage and not contain any images from other companies.
3. Silicon Valley tech giants licence out their own content filter algorithms that companies like BoW can use but which potentially places an additional cost on licensees.

Because of the sheer volume of data uploaded to the net, filtering will necessarily be algorithmic and algorithms cannot detect context which means parody and satire will be blocked.  It is also likely, in my opinion, that algorithms will never be able to identify context because to identify context actually requires a level of subjective and emotional input, it’s not a purely intelligence/logic based decision.  This means that for all intents and purposes, the provisions for Satire and Parody are in fact moot.  The proposal that filtering should be a two stage process with a human element that can quickly identify any satirical or parody content blocked by the algorithm to be unblocked and made available shows a huge lack of understanding on the part of the people proposing the bill.  There are 300 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every single minute.  Just think of the armies of people required to manually review that in order to determine context and then calculate that into a financial cost.  It’s completely untenable, it would put social media out of business or they would cease to be free services.

On top of these issues you can then add to the mix the probable inconsistencies between EU states because it’s a directive, it’s not a law, each nation must pass their own laws to meet the criteria in the directive meaning requirements will be subtly different in each zone and social media will end up catering to lowest common denominator.  On top of this we see time and again that governments constantly over reach and expand laws to take away more and more personal freedoms.  Two perfect examples of this are hate speech and indeed copyright laws.  If you look at the original copyright laws in the US, Micky Mouse would have in the public domain decades ago, but it keeps getting expanded, generally to protect corporate interests.  Hate speech, whether you agree with the principle or not, is an ever growing, ever expanding definition that seems to be encompassing more and more fringe subjects and further regulating what it is and is not acceptable to say.  It’s in the nature of government to act this way, to expand their level of control, and the EU copyright directive will not be any different.  The EU is not on the side of the people nor is it on the side of independent creators.  It’s a global corporatist’s wet dream and this directive is intended to protect the entertainment industry, not small YouTube creators.  It might take a while before we see it but I genuinely believe this directive will hurt Beasts of War.  I also think it will hurt Beasts of War irrespective of whether the UK leaves the EU or not – once it’s codified into British law, does anyone really believe that parliament will repeal it?

And before anyone criticises me for being overly pessimistic, when was the last time a politician, by their actions, gave you a reason to feel optimistic?