Today, 2018-09-12, a European Parliament committee has approved new copyright rules, that will forever change the internet.
The majority of the politicians in the committee decided that the interests of a few large music and publishing companies is more important than the interest of the common citizen, and did vote in favor of the new laws including:
- Article 11 – Websites that link to content providers have to obtain a license to allow for the title and or a small excerpt to be used – think of Google paying for every search result they show to you.
- Article 13 – “online content sharing platforms” (social networks like youtube, facebook twitter, but also open-source software portals such as those that we opensource devs use to bring you the software the internet runs on) have to “implement measures” to prevent unauthorized content to be shared. This means automated (unreliable) filters, that will automatically block memes, screengrabs, reaction videos, or functions that might look similar in opensource software. Furthermore those filter will build an infrastructure that can easily be abused for further censorship.
Those measures are introduced due to the lobbying of publishers and old-media companies, despite offers like Spotify, apple music, google music, youtube music, Netflix, amazon prime, and many many more having shown that there is ways for media companies and big-time creators to make money in the modern world, and despite piracy numbers going down since those platforms have been created.
The ones profiting from this aren’t the millions of content creators who have created the richness of information that the internet is today – those will have their life made a lot harder – the profiteers of this new law will be the old-media content publishers who went obsolete when they slept through the dawn of the internet, the ones who until now don’t understand digital media, and those who cling to the control of media.
There is a last chance to stop this.
The draft now will be negotiated behind closed doors, and there will be a final
vote on the results of this negotiation in January 2019.
To avoid this YOU will need to step up! You will need to get active, go to protests, write to your MEPs, write to your parties, to the politicians, be vocal about it, speak with others about it, post, like and share the shit out of material about this, make sure it is publicly seen that you don’t agree
At this time it is very unlikely that this will get turned around at the final vote, which makes it even more important that people inform themselves, and that people get loud about this.
There is one more option before that last ditch, if enough MEPs disagree with the negotiation mandate of the committee, this would cause another vote on the negotiations, this will create a new deadline during which new amendments (such as deleting the articles in question) could be brought in.
For this to work all of us that includes YOU need to do our best to convince the MEPs, our representatives in the Parliament to go that route.
Make no mistake, there aren’t many chances left to turn this around, this is your call to arms.
Do yourself a favor, learn more:
https://saveyourinternet.eu/
Peter Petermanns Devedge 