Article 13: A great day for decentralization and Steem?

in #steem5 years ago

The EU passed a copyright law today that makes platforms responsible for filtering and removing copyrighted material which is obviously bad news for the large platforms who are nearly entirely made up of this kind of content in one way or another. You can read more about some of the details and possible effects here at a wired.com article.

What does this mean for Steem though?

Firstly, let's have a look at the legislation loopholes that @markkujantunen pointed out the other day in his article on the topic. The exemptions he cited were:

  1. existed less than three years,
  2. have an annual turnover of less than €10 million, and
  3. have less than 5 million unique monthly visitors.

And as he rightly expressed, that is every Steem platform including Steemit.com itself. Although, Steem just crossed the 3 year point, there are definitely fewer than 5 million unique users (even with all the alts) as there are about 1,2 million and, the platform itself makes zero income. Zero. At least for now. At some point however it will start generating more revenue as it is going to a paid advertising model but I think it will be a little while before it is reaping anywhere close to 10 million worth.

Who owns us - Nobody or Everyone?

The next thing is that while Steemit is an interface like Busy, Steeve.app and Partiko - Who owns the blockchain? Umm... we do? The thing on Steem is that once it started and the witnesses began witnessing, the ownership of the Steem platform was released into the wild and as long as there is one witness, it will live. It is the people here who are the owners and it is they who power and create for it. There is no government or board of directors and the distributed nature of the users means that there is no way to wrangle them all.

Now, what does this mean for content? Who knows but when it comes to the internet and legislation, the governments continually dare people to innovate their rules into obsolescence - and time and time again, that is just what happens. While the centralized platforms are going to be forced to comply because essentially they are brick and mortar businesses, the decentralized networks are going to flourish and multiple like a virus.

The changes in laws and the filtering requirements is going to exacerbate the already tenuous situation with banning, demonetization and shadow banning on the centralized platforms and will put contributors in a more precarious position than ever before. They are going to be forced by these types of legislation changes to find new ways to express themselves and of course, earn.

The influx of digital refugees

Steem is a likely contender to start taking in digital refugees who have been forced out by the authoritarian governments of the laws and platforms that once welcomed them in to build the cities. And, as long as Steem can scale, there will be plenty of houses available for them to find a new home in a new city that welcomes their kind, creators, earners - people.

These types of changes in legislation are what is going to not only bring Steem into the sphere of global attention, but force it to develop and decentralize at an increasing rate. While content creators are one thing though, there is much more to it than that as developers and consumers are going to come in too as they are going to find less opportunity and less content to serve their tastes on the other platforms while the decentralized communities flourish and grow in strength.

What this means is that even the advertisers are going to start wanting in heavily as they rely on attention and eyes on their content which means, they have to be where people are consuming. While Steemit might be a catch all, many other interfaces are going to develop that are much more niche content orientated that will keep them small enough to fly under some of the legislative radars but large enough to be compelling and sticky for users.

Don't just Hodl, Pown.

While this is not going to be an easy changeover an there are going to be lots of hurdles, what all of these draconian measures will lead to is a revolution of thought process by the average users that makes them rethink just what the internet is and more importantly, what it could be. The process will lead to the realization that decentralization and personal ownership is the way to go as well ramp up the tokenization of the online world massively.

Like I have said before, ownership is a very important concept and everyone who owns Steem is a a facilitator of the new world of personal finance and banking. This will raise more and more questions into other areas including tax, governance and especially, just what the banks are getting up to with their middleman ways.

As I see it, these law changes have to happen in order for people to suffer enough to look for alternative methods and, Steem is an alternative method that is going to start collecting masses of value and traction the more oppressive the legislation becomes.

For Steem

One of the factors that needs to be taken care of and is being taken care of is the continual decentralization of both the governance structure and the resources in the system as the more hands that hold the reins and hold the coins, the smaller the targets become. This is happening through the reduction in costs to process transactions for witnesses through the increased efficiency of the chain, this is happening with the separation of the wallet, it is happening with the increase in applications, through the people buying in and of course, all the people who do actually create original content too. One day, that original content could be worth a lot more than it is now, especially since there are ways to use it and get paid for it no matter where it appears.

You see something going on here with copyright? When it comes to tracking it, blockchain is the only technology that can and a user could essentially take micro-payments wherever it appears on the internet but, they have to be able to weave a blockchain and a currency through it and for the most part, the centralized platforms are not equipped for this kind of change and, their users definitely aren't.

The conversation continues

While some people are angry at the changes in legislation, these things are necessary to further the discussion rather than keep accepting an oppressive status quo. This is going to increase the awareness of all the alternatives that are springing up that empower users rather than milk them from their cages and while there is a great deal of uncertainty in the process of it all, there is an enormous amount of opportunity.

That is the point of all of this; the responsibility to take opportunity into our own hands. There are so many streams of thought, technology and legislation that are converging on the same points of the future and that is, decentralization, tokenization and humanization of the internet.

Ready?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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Great article. Of course, once things like Steem/Steemit get on their radar (the refugee count gets big enough) there will be new laws crafted just for us.

there will be new laws crafted just for us.

Yep, that is when things really start getting interesting. Decentralize fast, understand the price and the reward potential.

More and more examples of the strengths of decentralization and blockchain that will continue to bring evolution to our experiences on the internet and how we engage!

Posted using Partiko iOS

Pretty cool.

Point 2 re: Turnover is likely to keep Steem / Steemit inc / Busy / whoever well away from breaching the rules for a long time yet.

From the wired article:

As you can probably guess, this means a huge number of sites – from fishing forums to niche social networks – that will need to install upload filters.

That sounds time-consuming and costly and will surely result in less content appearing on larger sites :)

The door is wide open for content creators, lets hope some big names walk through.

It is going to be messy when it all happens and I have a feeling that large sites might fragment themselves to find loop holes.

Unfortunately, all three requirements have to apply for the exemption. So if a platform is older than three years they have to seek license agreements with the content industry and install filters to prevent the upload of not approved content. This is ridiculous and will harm many small companies within the EU because they won't be able to afford installing these expensive filters.

this is something that throws in another issue though...

The only way a site that hosts user-generated content can avoid putting in place a upload filter is if it fulfils all three of the following criteria:

Who is hosting? The blockchain stores links to content.

Sue the host. Sue the blockchain :D

yes, indeed, that makes it even more complicated, the blockchain stores the text and links to content, so technically the frontends would need to implement said upload filters if they were located within the EU.

governments continually dare people to innovate their rules into obsolescence

the more hands that hold the reins and hold the coins, the smaller the targets become

So much to enjoy here. Once we win those people, they'll never go back. This is legislation that would've been devastating 5 years ago.


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I think perhaps only the front ends will qualify under the law once they individually grow to that level. Then they will have to take measures like Steemit has to remove content from the front-end. Steem is just a decentralized database.

I don't know if people fleeing social networks due to copyright bans is a good thing for us. But, this is just the latest step. They're censoring in all sorts of ways. We are too though. We have accounts that flag for all sorts of reasons. Now, that's not complete censorship...but it is decreased visibility. We aren't effected in the same way by big government and big corporations though.

We'll get our share of people leaving the standard networks I'm sure, but they'll go all sorts of different places.

They could just make a new fresh company and a new frontend to fall under the 3 year rule. Since content is stored on the blockchain not much changes for the end user other than the domain name.

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Great article! Clear and interesting!

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