Article 13: R.I.P. Internet?

Please read the following very carefully if you're not yet informed about the new EU copyright directive that has just been voted in by the European Parliament.

_{source: The Blue Diamond Gallery}

March 26 2019 will be a dark page in the internet's young history, as it marks the day that the EU's new copyright directive has been voted in. It's not a law yet, just a "directive"; it's now up to the individual member-states to implement their own localized laws to uphold this directive, so the actual texts will differ slightly from country to country. It has taken several revisions, but with 348 votes for, and 274 votes against, the directive has now been set in proverbial stone.

Of the many copyright changes proposed, two articles in particular have been criticized heavily, at long last even by Google and YouTube when they finally woke up to the massive consequences these two articles would have for their business. I'll point you to the excellent video on this by Sargon of Akkad linked below this article; whatever my opinion on the political views of our libertarian brothers and sisters, no one can deny the passion they have for the mother of all freedoms, the freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Sargon has gone out of his way to defend this right for all of us and he has my sincere gratitude. Watch his excellent video for more details please.

From the BBC News website:

Article 11 states that search engines and news aggregate platforms should pay to use links from news websites.

Article 13 holds larger technology companies responsible for material posted without a copyright licence. Tech companies already remove music and videos which are copyrighted, but under the new laws they will be more liable for any copyrighted content.
_{source: BBC News - 26 March 2019}

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

The hyperlink (HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol for Pete's sake...) is the very foundation of the free and open sharing of information on the internet; with article 11 that's finished. If anything, this looks like it'll assure that only large companies will eb able to pay for their links. Does it mean that I would have to pay for the link above, to the BBC News website? I don't know yet, but it wouldn't surprise me anymore.

But the real kicker is of course article 13. Now, if an individual like me uploads copyrighted material, I'm the one held responsible; article 13 transfers this responsibility to the platform I uploaded it to. At first sight this sounds great, as individuals seem to be let of the hook here. But that's not the end of it; this will demand from platforms like YouTube that they check all uploads for copyright-infringements to prevent thousands of law-suits against them every day. It's not possible to manually check the many hours of content uploaded each minute, so they'll have to use a blanket filter to just reject any suspicious content, regardless if it falls under fair use or not.

What strikes me here is the tone of the BBC article I linked earlier; the news is brought to us like there's nothing to worry about here. They stress several times that memes are exempt, and mashups and reviews and... But there's no filtering software yet that can decide on a genre or decide if something is educational or just a straight rip-of. Companies like YouTube will have no other choice than to just reject all suspect content... I wonder, did the internet as we know it just die..? Can't wait for a decentralized Web 3.0 to really take of ;-)

_{Article 13 Cometh (#SaveYourInternet)}

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