The EU's Copyright Directive, Article 13
Next week the EU parliament will vote for their new copyright directive. In general it contains some good ideas, but also some extremely bad ones, such as article 13. It will require all uploaded content to be scanned, and deleted if it might contain references to other copyrighted material.
The issue here is the word might. Due to the possible fines for companies that accidentally leave up something that contains a copyrighted work, they are incentivized to act more harsh than often necessary. It's safer for them to delete everything that looks like it might infringe copyright than risk the fine.
This could be disastrous for the Internet as we know it. And this is why many movements are speaking out against it. One such example would be the open letter to EU parliament. More information is available on https://saveyourinternet.eu/resources/, and you can find much more about it all over the Internet if you search with your favourite search engine.
What's your opinion on article 13, and have you done anything to make your voice heard?
This is some bad stuff, I hope the last minute outcry can stop it.
I don't understand why the saveyourinternet.eu page doesn't include the rejection of article 11. Article 11 will allow copyright holders of any type to ask for money for linking to their content. So for example, if you post a link to Tildes, using the title of the article you are submitting might be enough to ask Tildes to pay for copyright to the source.
Even if the title is not copied, just the link might be enough as well, as far as I know. There is more info about all this on this page.
In Spain, our just ousted government already implemented something like this a few years ago and was asking aggregators to pay. At first, they were asking for 0.5 euros for every active daily user, which for one of the affected aggregators was about 2 million euros a year. When it was clear that wasn't going to happen (their income was 100k euros), the editors (who are the ones assigned to collect the tax foe everyone, even bloggers, for example, since the tax is non renounceable) negotiated and offered a payment of 15k euros, which is basically 20% of their income, which the aggregator said couldn't pay either. This legislation hasn't been put into effect yet, so nothing has happened yet.
A month or two ago, the Supreme Court buried the law because of a technicality (it didn't account for how it affected to families with 3 or more children), but the plan was to keep going with this. The new government might have a different view (especially now that they want to attract voters), but the minister of Culture has somewhat traditional values regarding the internet, so who knows. (Also, he might just resign soon since it has just been made public that he evaded paying about 200k euros ten years ago...).
Edit: And yes, I have written to my MEPs using the saveyourinternet.eu form and adding the information about article 11.
Edit2: I forgot to mention that as a result of that legislation the Google News division in Spain shutdown and left the Spanish market in December 2014!
Edit 3: grammar!
duuuuude why do people who have no idea how the current world works continue to create legislation?
why dont they just have the industry write the laws themselves like in the US, everything is perfect here!
I'm pretty sure you're joking (or high), but in any case this law is exactly what copyright holding groups would want. European policies are not free from criticism, and in this case I wouldn't be surprised if there was corruption involved to get such an absurd law this far along.