Article from Reason by Scott Shackford.
Despite many, many warnings from technology companies and scholars that they were going to wreck the internet, European Union lawmakers have passed a host of new regulations greatly expanding online copyright enforcement demands.
Last week the European Parliament approved a heavily amendedversion of the European Copyright Directive by a vote of 438 to 226. Tech companies and digital activists have been warning all summer that this will demolish online sharing in order to serve the financial interests of entertainment and media companies.
Two parts of the bill, Articles 11 and 13, have drawn the most fire. Article 11 has been derisively described as a “link tax.” It would give media outlets the power to demand licenses (and therefore charge fees) for sharing even small snippets of content from news stories, even just preview images or a couple of sentences. Scholars have warned that this could have a devastating effect on information sharing in education and science, and on sites like Wikipedia. This section has been amended to allow for hyperlinks to other pages, but Cory Doctorow notes that the law is still vague about what constitutes a link. In Germany and Spain, which passed similar laws, simply linking to news stories was forbidden without paying the licensing fee. (The laws also completely failed to help media outlets make money. Indeed, they lost even more readers)
But most of the attention is on Article 13, which forces online platforms to create an automated database-centered system of content filtering to try to block copyrighted content from being uploaded to the internet. Many countries (including the United States) have laws that can be used to compel online platforms to take down copyrighted content. This is different. Article 13 demands that platforms must implement technology that prevents copyrighted material from being uploaded in the first place.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By Edi Wibowo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
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How a out politely of course, suggesting that the European Union, which has had some valid ideas to, in this case, take a long walk on a short pier.
It’s inevitable. Big government cannot help itself. It believes it exists to “help” the people, “protect” them from all manner of perilous conditions and acts. Collectively, Britain sensed the trouble ahead and opted to exit, long before this minor threat was seen. Reminds one of our own net neutrality battle.
Whena country makes laws regarding the internet which conflict with the laws of the country where an internet company/platform (not sure of the terminology) is based and operated from,isn’t there a way to exempt that business from the new laws? And why aren’t they automatically exempt since they aren’t a member of the country creating this conflict? As an American, I don’t accept that EU has the right to tell me that I can no longer share what I please and will not pay extortion … pardon, ‘tax’ to do so
If I understand the E.U. form of government correctly, these people making decisions that become the law for the entire E.U. are not even elected as they are in the U.S., so this looks more like extortion or at least wrongful application of business as well as the consumer; but since this is totally different, and is the reason ‘www’ stands for ‘world wide web’ is because this does not cover just Europe. So how do they expect this regulation to cover only the EURO nations without affecting other world nations? Chuck Adkins