The European Digital Single Market directive on copyright
This is not law yet, but extremely worrying and we may need to take action before the key EU Parliamentary debate goes ahead.
As I understand it, there are two basic areas that are of most concern. If this becomes Law:
All online platforms operating in the EU would be obliged to monitor and prevent any copyright work from being uploaded to their site (consider for a moment the technical & administrative challenge to achieve that, and also how you might define a copyright work and how that might apply to snippets, mash-ups or memes …)
All links to copyright content would be subject to a “link tax” (yes you read that correctly!) - a mandatory fee paid to the originator for which the originator may not be able to opt out of (e.g. so Alphabet won’t be able to opt out for links to YouTube videos, or any news site opt out for non-profits). This is intended to support genuine news journalism, but of course it depends how generally the law is worded.
I can barely believe the second proposal is real … but it is! I understand you won’t even be able to show a ‘one-box’ preview of something without being liable to pay a fee!!
You can just imagine how this might impact independent Discourse forums that are run on a shoestring!!
Sites such as Github are very concerned about how this may impact them. Can you imagine the potential damage to the open-source community?
I don’t claim to be an expert, but please start informing yourself about this and if you are within the EU, consider contacting your MEP to voice your opinion ahead of the debate on June 20th:
Yep, those were the 'tubes that inspired my post. He’s a great commentator but sometimes he veers slightly too far to the right for me (and some of his followers are awful)
Before seeing those 2 vids, i never even knew about UE’s wishes. And after trying to read the proposals (though i am biased now – i watched the videos before reading the laws) i think that what he said is quite on point.
If those becomes a law probably a lot of online platform will shut down they’re service in the EU. It is really stupid. How about facebook and reddit then? Reddit is made 99% of links.
They will simply refuse to support links to sites that charge. This will lead to a unilateral special deal for them and further shut out small competitors. It’s awful.
If you are an EU citizen haven’t contacted your MEP please do so today asap - fill their email!
Another article I found quite good:
But this is the best summary material I could find:
If the E.U. wants to play that game, then I don’t mind just blocking the entirety of the E.U. for my sites. Enough is enough. Good grief.
Things are just getting too ridiculous, are they trying to enforce this on sites outside their borders like the GDPR too? One of these days, the EU is going to tear the internet in half.
Privacy is important, particularly in an era where Google, Facebook, etc. have completely run off and decided to do whatever they want with people’s data, but the GDPR does set a scary precedent of extending a region’s laws past it’s borders.
Articles 11 (the link tax) and 13 (copyright monitoring and detection) are very problematic in that sense. Although, they’re arguably bad, even in the EU.
I’m not quite sure on the limitations of them, as they’re constantly changing as they pass through the EU and they make alterations here and there.
I can sort of understand privacy, although perhaps breaking people’s reliance on the tech giants might be a better approach, if only that ever worked, but some of these things put unworkable constraints on sites.
I’ll pass on commenting on China, although I’m somewhat surprised it’s still connected to the outside world at this point. Even Github got blocked by them and it’s far from a mainstream site.
