Julia Reda is the Member of the European Parliament who has led the fight against Article 13, a proposal to force all online services to create automatic filters that block anything claimed as a copyrighted work.
Reda has written copiously on the risks of such a system, with an
emphasis on the fact that these filters are error-prone and likely to
block material that doesn’t infringe copyright.
Guess what happened next!
Topple Track (a notoriously sloppy copyright enforcement bot used by the major entertainment companies) got one of Reda’s posts
on the indiscriminate untrustworthiness of copyright filters removed
from Google’s index by automatically making a false claim of copyright
infringement.
THE RESULTS FOR THE VOTE ON EU CENSORSHIP AND LINK TAX.
This it the breakdown of MEPs via their country of origin.
ORANGE is GOOD.
GREEN is BAD.
BLUE is abstain.
PLEASE SPREAD AND REBLOG SO THAT PEOPLE CAN SEE HOW THEIR COUNTRY PERFORMED – EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT IN THE EU. THIS IS NOT AN EASY THING TO FIND.
France and Romania did the worst. If you live in these countries, your representatives were all for destroying the internet. You will need to work twice as hard campaigning your reps when this goes back for a second discussion in September.
Congratulations Sweden, Poland, Netherlands, Lithunania and Estonia.
THIS IS NOT OVER.
The legislation goes back for a re-do in September before we’ll have to fight this battle again.
HOLY SHIT, POLAND, SOMETIMES I LOVE MY COUNTRY SO MUCH ❤
As we have been covering in the last couple of weeks, a controversial EU
Copyright Directive has been under discussion at the European
Parliament, and in a surprising turn of events, it voted to reject fast-tracking the tabled proposal by the JURI Committee which contained controversial proposals, particularly in Art 11 and Art 13. The proposed Directive will now get a full discussion and debate in plenary in September.
I say surprising because for those of us who have been witnesses (and
participants) to the Copyright Wars for the last 20 years, such a defeat
of copyright maximalist proposals is practically unprecedented, perhaps
with the exception of SOPA/PIPA.
For years we’ve had a familiar pattern in the passing of copyright
legislation: a proposal has been made to enhance protection and/or
restrict liberties, a small group of ageing millionaire musicians would
be paraded supporting the changes in the interest of creators. Only
copyright nerds and a few NGOs and digital rights advocates would
complain, their opinions would be ignored and the legislation would pass
unopposed. Rinse and repeat.
But something has changed, and a wide coalition has managed to defeat
powerful media lobbies for the first time in Europe, at least for now.
How was this possible?
The main change is that the media landscape is very different thanks to
the Internet. In the past, the creative industries were monolithic in
their support for stronger protection, and they included creators,
corporations, collecting societies, publishers, and distributors; in
other words the gatekeepers and the owners were roughly on the same
side. But the Internet brought a number of new players, the tech
industry and their online platforms and tools became the new
gatekeepers. Moreover, as people do not buy physical copies of their
media and the entire industry has moved towards streaming, online
distributors have become more powerful. This has created a perceived
imbalance, where the formerly dominating industries need to negotiate
with the new gatekeepers for access to users. This is why creators
complain about a value gap between what they perceive they should be getting, and what they actually receive from the giants.
The main result of this change from a political standpoint is that now
we have two lobbying sides in the debate, which makes all the difference
when it comes to this type of legislation. In the past, policymakers
could ignore experts and digital rights advocates because they never had
the potential to reach them, letters and articles by academics were not
taken into account, or given lip service during some obscure committee
discussion just to be hidden away. Tech giants such as Google have
provided lobbying access in Brussels, which has at least leveled the
playing field when it comes to presenting evidence to legislators.
As a veteran of the Copyright Wars, I have to admit that it has been
very entertaining reading the reaction from the copyright industry lobby
groups and their individual representatives, some almost going
apoplectic with rage at Google’s intervention. These tend to be the same
people who spent decades lobbying legislators to get their way
unopposed, representing large corporate interests unashamedly and
passing laws that would benefit only a few, usually to the detriment of
users. It seems like lobbying must be decried when you lose.
But to see this as a victory for Google and other tech giants completely
ignores the large coalition that shares the view that the proposed
Articles 11 and 13 are very badly thought-out, and could represent a
real danger to existing rights. Some of us have been fighting this fight
when Google did not even exist, or it was but a small competitor of
AltaVista, Lycos, Excite and Yahoo!
At the same time that more restrictive copyright legislation came into
place, we also saw the rise of free and open source software, open
access, Creative Commons and open data. All of these are legal hacks
that allow sharing, remixing and openness. These were created precisely
to respond to restrictive copyright practices. I also remember how they
were opposed as existential threats by the same copyright industries,
and treated with disdain and animosity. But something wonderful
happened, eventually open source software started winning (we used to
buy operating systems), and Creative Commons became an important part of
the Internet’s ecosystem by propping-up valuable common spaces such as
Wikipedia.
Similarly, the Internet has allowed a great diversity of actors to
emerge. Independent creators, small and medium enterprises, online
publishers and startups love the Internet because it gives them access
to a wider audience, and often they can bypass established gatekeepers.
Lost in this idiotic “Google v musicians” rhetoric has been the threat
that both Art 11 and 13 represent to small entities. Art 11 proposes a
new publishing right that has been proven to affect smaller players in
Germany and Spain; while Art 13 would impose potentially crippling
economic restrictions to smaller companies as they would have to put in
place automated filtering systems AND redress mechanisms against
mistakes. In fact, it has been often remarked that Art 13 would benefit
existing dominant forces, as they already have filtering in place (think
ContentID).
Similarly, Internet advocates and luminaries see the proposals as a
threat to the Internet, the people who know the Web best think that this
is a bad idea. If you can stomach it, read this thread featuring
a copyright lobbyist attacking Neil Gaiman, who has been one of the
Internet celebrities that have voiced their concerns about the
Directive.
Even copyright experts who almost never intervene in digital rights affairs the have been vocal in their opposition to the changes.
And finally we have political representatives from various parties and
backgrounds who have been vocally opposed to the changes. While the
leader of the political opposition has been the amazing Julia Reda, she
has managed to bring together a variety of voices from other parties and
countries. The vitriol launched at her has been unrelenting, but
futile. It has been quite a sight to see her opponents both try to
dismiss her as just another clueless young Pirate commanded by Google,
while at the same time they try to portray her as a powerful enemy in
charge of the mindless and uninformed online troll masses ready to do
her bidding.
All of the above managed to do something wonderful, which was to convey
the threat in easy-to-understand terms so that users could contact their
representatives and make their voice heard. The level of popular
opposition to the Directive has been a great sight to behold.
Tech giants did not create this alliance, they just gave various voices
access to the table. To dismiss this as Google’s doing completely
ignores the very real and rich tapestry of those defending digital
rights, and it is quite clearly patronizing and insulting, and precisely
the reason why they lost. It was very late until they finally realized
that they were losing the debate with the public, and not even the
last-minute deployment of musical dinosaurs could save the day.
But the fight continues, keep contacting your MEPs and keep applying pressure.
Annabelle Narey hired a London construction firm called BuildTeam to do
some work, which she found very unsatisfactory (she blames them for a
potentially lethal roof collapse in a bedroom); so she did what many of
us do when we’re unhappy with a business: she wrote an online complaint,
and it was joined by other people who said that they had hired
BuildTeam and been unhappy with the work.
She posted her complaint to Mumsnet, the hugely popular, woman-centric
site. BuildTeam claimed that Narey’s message contained 11 different
libels, which she disputes. After a long wrangle (Narey says BuildTeam
sent staffers to her home to wave printouts of the complaint at her and
request that she remove it), Mumsnet and Narey declined to take the
complaint down.
But it’s disappeared anyway: in April (three years after Narey’s post), a
mysterious content-farm posted a copy of Narey’s post, then filed a
complaint with Google saying that Narey’s post infringed its copyright.
Google delisted the entire thread, making it invisible to potential
BuildTeam customers.
The duplicate post on the content-farm was signed by “Douglas Bush” of
South Bend, Indiana, but the site is registered to Muhammed Ashraf of
Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Mumsnet, anxious not to lose their Google rank, deleted Narey’s post.
BuildTeam says that they are just as mystified as anyone about this
mysterious American-Pakistani website that had such a tactically useful
complaint about its services to Londoners, which just happened to solve a
reputation problem that BuildTeam had struggled with for three years.
This kind of copyfraud is about to get a lot worse: The EU is poised to mandate copyright filters for all online media. Under this scheme, the Muhammed Ashrafs of the world could ensure that certain blocks of text never showed up on any website or service, by pre-emptively registering the copyright in them.
Which is bad enough when it’s copyfraud being committed by sleazy offshore reputation-launderers, but the political uses are much
scarier: how many times has an election turned on a critical piece of
media being released to the public a few days before the polls, and
going viral? Under the EU’s Article 13 proposal, politicians could avoid
this fatal embarrassment by wielding the EU’s omnipotent cyberweapon to pre-emptively censor any potential disclosure.
MEPs will go to a key vote on Article 13 on July 5. Save Your Internet
has everything you need to contact them and tell them to protect our
public discourse from criminals, fraudsters, political opportunists and
trolls.
Hope this will spread as much as save net neutrality posts
it’s way worse than that law actually, in US they “just” wanted your money, here the EU goverment wants to take our freedom without even giving a choice
SPREAD THIS
I’m just speechless. Dudes, this is wayyyy worse then The Net Neutrality bullshit in the US. Spread this like a wildfire! I don’t wanna lose everything I have thanks to this law!
Oh my gosh why am I only hearing about this now? Please everyone, spread this! Most of the time we talk about problems that are happening in the US but this time it’s in the EU and we need to stand against it!!
Please help if you can it’s going to make so much damage! Just for an example, both of my blogs will disappear if it isn’t stopped, ao3 will also disappear for european countries just like every website like these ones.
So please, help!!
Actually reblogging that one because 1) I checked the original poster and 2) I felt doubt when no french media outlet that wasn’t obviously alt-right dwelved on the subject, so here I go with a list of reasons this post is dead wrong.
1) made by a self-proclaimed fascist with a blog called “Think-critically” whose blog is full of racist, transphobic, fascistic, mysoginist content. Allow me to doubt.
2) the guy in the video is a friend of the EDL. You can see another of his videos from 2 days ago where Tommy Robinson, leader of this islamophobic group which is on numerous hate watch list, supports this channel’s messages.
3) EDRI and Techdirt are also websites associated with the alt-right.
4) From everything I’ve gathered about said article 13. It’s actually meant to stop, block and disable fake news campaigns. Like the ones Russia did in France in 2017, the UK during brexit, Italy, Germany, Poland, etc…. It’s a way to also put responsability on websites that host the information (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. All 3 having a pretty tulmutuous relationship with European countries (Read: don’t comply with the law and refuse to pay taxes)) as a deterrent to make sure they’re careful during election season (Which, to their credit, they were during the Irish referendum, blocking foreign media outlets). That means
5) The alt-right just got 30k Tumblr users to sign a petition against blocking Russia’s interference in our elections, dressed it up as a brave struggle for freedom (This will END the internet guys. Trust me on this one. They want to destroy it because….. BAD. Not GOOD.) And y’all not checking your damn sources played right into their hands.
In conclusion: Fuck Putin and fuck the Alt-right, go out and vote, check your sources.
The EU are not going to shut the Internet down omg! You just got trolled by the alt right. The only thing in the UK and Dutch press with regards Internet access is over GDPR – which is a good EU regulation designed to protect consumers. If there’s no news about it, then there’s a reason for that???
The English Defence League (EDL) are such a nasty racist bunch of fuckers, and now many tens of thousands of you have just given them and their fascist, xenophobic cronies at places like InfoWars your support because you didn’t spend 5 fucking minutes Googling the truth behind this post.
They deliberately put shit together that sounds legit. Don’t people think anymore??? Read up on something before you mindlessly hit the reblog button! There’s no excuse to not check something out!
Seriously people please research things yourself when you see them. A very quick google search brings up 1 article from a website I’ve never heard of. If international news sites like, to name a few, BBC and Al Jazeera, aren’t reporting it, it is probably not an issue.
(I know I joked about it earlier but, honestly, please do your own research)
okay these guys are obviously a terrible source for the information and they surely warped it, but article 13 is potentially still not great?? Cause I did doubt this shit too, and I DID put in the time to read parts of the proposal and more specifically Article 13.
Like it says in the image above, Article 13 is about the use of protected content (meaning copyrighted stuff?), and stopping people that don’t have the rights to it to post said content. If they implement upload filters to catch copyrighted material this could be the end of memes (okay not a great reason to not strengthen copyright laws, but man the internet would sure be a lot duller) and anything that uses copyrighted material to create something new? it could be a huge encroachment on many creative things i and most of us enjoy on the internet, and on things people on here use to make money
The proposal in itself is a great thing and a good step towards keeping things like fake news from happening, but Article 13 itself is not really part of that??
Agreed. I’ve both researched and contacted my MEPs about this and I’m still concerned. Yeah, the guy in the video is a pro-Robinson, ‘free speech’ conservative dude.That doesn’t mean the Digital Single Market legislation doesn’t have masses of flaws (also GDPR has had quite a few flaws already with EU residents being blocked from quite a few sites that have decided to just block EU users rather than deal with it).
I’m also not sure how so many people think no one is reporting it.
Some parts of the Digital Single Market might deal with fake news, but the concern is specifically with Article 11, dubbed the ‘link tax’ and Article 13, partially linked above which will either massive change how some websites and/or EU residents will be blocked.
My pro-Article 13 Conservative MEP had this to say about it:
“I appreciate your concerns regarding the new Copyright reform proposals. However, the objective of Article 13 is to make sure authors, such as musicians, are appropriately paid for their work, and to ensure that platforms fairly share revenues which they derive from creative works on their sites with creators.
In the text under discussion, if one of the main purposes of a platform is to share copyright works, if they optimise these works and also derive profit from them, the platform would need to conclude a fair license with the rightholders, if rightholders request this. If not, platforms will have to check for and remove specific copyright content once this is supplied from rightholders. This could include pirated films which are on platforms at the same time as they are shown at the cinema. However, if a platform’s main purpose is not to share protected works, it does not optimise copyright works nor to make profit from them, it would not be required to conclude a license.
Closing this “value gap” is an essential part of the Copyright Directive, which Secretary of State Matthew Hancock supports addressing (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/matt-hancocks-speech-at-the-alliance-for-intellectual-property-reception) . The ECR supports the general policy justification behind it, which is to make sure that platforms are responsible for their sites and that authors are fairly rewarded and incentivised to create work. Content recognition will help to make sure creators, such as song writers, can be better identified and paid fairly for their work. Nevertheless, this should not be done at the expense of user’s rights. We are dedicated to striking the right balance between adequately rewarding rightholders and safeguarding users’ rights. There are therefore important safeguards to protect users’ rights and to make sure only proportionate measures are taken.
As regards to Article 11 and the “link tax”, this remains under discussion. The objective is to enable the publishing industry and journalists to be given their fair share of revenue. However, as currently drafted it is too far reaching for the ECR to be able to lend its support to it.”
There is nothing in that on dealing with fake news or Russia and even the Conservatives – the profit focused authoritarians that they are – think Article 11 is too far.
For those interested in researching further, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593 is the legislation in question so you don’t have to scroll back up and https://saveyourinternet.eu/ gives scripts for contacting MEPs because seriously the wording of the legislation butchers the fair use of creative works that many of us rely on. It’s like youtube’s copyright claims issues (which has already been used by abusers to try to get personal details of people) on all the steroids from what I can see.
OTW Legal and our allies have been active in fighting on fan-unfriendly legal proposals in the EU. Since these proposals were introduced in 2016, OTW Legal has submitted comments opposing them and has joined in calls for action against them. We’ve managed to hold them off so far and encourage some revisions, but a key vote will be happening in the European Parliament’s JURI committee on 20/21 June that could have a significant impact on the Internet and fan sites. In particular, two provisions of the current proposal would be bad for fans. Article 11 would impose a “link tax” that would make it more expensive for many websites to operate, and Article 13 would impose mandatory content-filtering requirements on websites that host user-generated content. These provisions have been hotly debated and revised a bit since the last time we reported on them. (For more on recent revisions and debates, see these discussions by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Hogan Lovells Firm) But despite revisions, they’re still bad deals for fans. Importantly, they don’t preserve the “safe harbors” that websites rely on to operate, and they don’t include user-generated content exceptions.
Without safeguards for user-generated content, Article 13 would require your favourite websites to implement systems that monitor user-generated content and automatically remove any content that could potentially infringe upon copyright, giving publishing giants the power to block your online expression. Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, GitHub, Soundcloud, etc., could be required to block the upload of content based on whether it has been “identified” by big corporations, rather than based on its legality. The law is still being debated, and it is difficult to predict how it would impact the OTW’s projects, including the Archive of Our Own, if it is passed. Regardless of how this vote comes out, the OTW will work as hard as we can to keep the Internet fan-friendly. But we need your help. The most effective thing you can do right now is contact your Member of European Parliament. You can use one of these tools to e-mail your MEP or call your MEP to tell them that having user-generated content on the internet is important to you.
Here’s what you can tell them: Without safe harbors for user-generated content, Article 13 of the Copyright Directive would stifle free expression on the Internet. We don’t want mandatory filtering. Algorithms don’t understand limitations and exceptions to copyright like parody, public interest exceptions, fair use, or fair dealing, and we don’t want our non-infringing videos, website posts and art blocked because of a biased algorithm created by big corporations. We want the law to protect user-generated works, not harm them.
OTW Legal will keep fighting for fan-friendly laws!
Please signal boost if you can’t help directly!
If any of my followers are in Europe, please help protect the AO3 (and other fannish archives as well)!
Have to admit I’m a little surprised to see that there’s not really any posts going around about the copyright reforms the EU is currently working on. So let’s break it down Tumblr style, it works for Americans right?
Here’s a bit of a snippet of Article 11 and 13 which are quite dumb and should be evident why it’s not only dumb but also just plain doesn’t work.
Article 11.
“Anyone using snippets of journalistic online content must first get a license from the publisher. This new right for publishers would apply for 20 years after publication.
“
This includes posting it on social media. And every repost of that post. Basic internet savvyness should at this point tell “That is incredibly dumb and how the fuck are you even going to get that work?” Well you won’t simply put. It could in theory benefit large news organizations. But a consequence is that real news would have a much harder time to spread and leave a vacuum for false stuff to fill. Because lord knows we need to leave the goal open to troll farms.
But let’s look at something even dumber.
Article 13.
“Internet platforms hosting “large amounts” of user-uploaded content must monitor user behavior and filter their contributions to identify and prevent copyright infringement.
“
So stuff like Imgur would have to scan for infringement, identify it and prevent it. Because we all know that Youtube’s copyright infringement system works so well.
Both of these hits social media pretty hard. Would have serious negative effects on startups and really hurt freedom of expression. And they have even been tried throughout europe already and FAILED. Hard.
Pretty much anyone with basic internet knowledge, IT experts, humanitarian groups and free speech advocate organizations are against this loudly. EFF who is usually based in the US made a Brussels office to throw a wrench into this. But you know what the real kicker is here? The EU parliament is pretty good about listening to people. Even if this has kindof flown under a radar for a lot of people enough of a wrench was thrown to slow down the process and cause pretty intense debates.
So what can you do who happens to live in the EU and not be particularly happy about these things. Well here are two links for online petitions. The first is for “the link tax” and the other is about the “censorship machines”, the latter of which is very memey.
Save the meme will advice you to call your MEP (Member of European Parliament) and it would not be a bad idea to read up a bit on what you’re complaining about. This is a pretty easy to digest read. https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
Hope this will spread as much as save net neutrality posts
it’s way worse than that law actually, in US they “just” wanted your money, here the EU goverment wants to take our freedom without even giving a choice
SPREAD THIS
I’m just speechless. Dudes, this is wayyyy worse then The Net Neutrality bullshit in the US. Spread this like a wildfire! I don’t wanna lose everything I have thanks to this law!
Oh my gosh why am I only hearing about this now? Please everyone, spread this! Most of the time we talk about problems that are happening in the US but this time it’s in the EU and we need to stand against it!!
Please help if you can it’s going to make so much damage! Just for an example, both of my blogs will disappear if it isn’t stopped, ao3 will also disappear for european countries just like every website like these ones.
So please, help!!
So glad to finally see a post about this! I was seriously considering making on myself. If you’re in the EU, please do your research on this and consider contacting your MEP.
This is an important issue and has been since the draft legislation was first kicking around a couple of years ago. By all means, call or contact your MEPs and complain.
However, here are some info links that don’t come with affiliation to the guy who called EDL co-founder Tommy Robinson “a political prisoner”:
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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