Slashdot Mirror
How the EU Copyright Proposal Will Hurt the Web and Wikipedia (wikimedia.org)
Wikimedia, which operates Wikipedia, chimes in on the EU copyright debacle: Our movement is working to promote freedom online for the benefit of all. Our efforts in this public policy realm are all the more important in an era of increasing restrictions on free speech and free access to knowledge across the globe, which directly threaten the mission and vision of Wikimedia and its projects, such as Wikipedia. This is why we strongly oppose the proposed EU Copyright Directives and urge the Members of the European Parliament to reconsider proceeding with the version recently adopted by the Legal Affairs Committee. We are concerned because these flawed proposals hurt everyone's rights to freedom of expression and Europe's ability to improve the welfare of its citizens online. Next week, we expect the European Parliament to vote in plenary on whether to proceed with the version adopted by the Committee. If the Members of the European Parliament reject it, there will be another opportunity to fix much of the current proposal's broken requirements. Now may be the last opportunity to improve the directive.
The requirement for platforms to implement upload filters is a serious threat for freedom of expression and privacy. Our foundational vision depends on the free exchange of knowledge across the entirety of the web, and beyond the boundaries of the Wikimedia projects. A new exclusive right allowing press publishers to restrict the use of news snippets will make it more difficult to access and share information about current events in the world, making it harder for Wikipedia contributors to find citations for articles online. The proposal does not support user rights, is missing strong safeguards for the public domain, and does not create exceptions that would truly empower people to participate in research and culture. We believe that enactment of this copyright package will significantly decrease in the amount of content that will be freely accessible to all across the globe.
The requirement for platforms to implement upload filters is a serious threat for freedom of expression and privacy. Our foundational vision depends on the free exchange of knowledge across the entirety of the web, and beyond the boundaries of the Wikimedia projects. A new exclusive right allowing press publishers to restrict the use of news snippets will make it more difficult to access and share information about current events in the world, making it harder for Wikipedia contributors to find citations for articles online. The proposal does not support user rights, is missing strong safeguards for the public domain, and does not create exceptions that would truly empower people to participate in research and culture. We believe that enactment of this copyright package will significantly decrease in the amount of content that will be freely accessible to all across the globe.
Cut Europe off from the Internet.
THIS is what they really want.
$15 a Minute phone calls to Italy and only Government approved newspapers.
Galileo for navigation and no GPS.
Unpossible! We're told time and again it is only the dictatorship that is the USA that can restrict speech and promote hate, and that the anointed in Brussels are only pure and holy and love freedom for all...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
... right here:
... content that will be FREELY accessible to all across the globe.
Emphasis mine.
The content was not generated "freely."
Sources of information, particularly involving resources such as reporters, information systems, infrastructure, should be fairly compensated for expenses.
News and other content aggregators are doing little to no work and making money off other's IP.
We recently had discussions here on /. about copyright law that views this matter from a different perspective.
Lawrence Lessig Criticizes Proposed 140-Year Copyright Protections
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Probably not "communism", the "People" is of no importance *at all*. It's more like a form of textbook fascism.
> Wikipedia is it considers the cult games Osu! and Kid Pix as not notable and sent its deletionists
I see that there are Wikipedia articles for both. The Kid Pix article has been up for at least 13 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...!
I also see that for the past SIX YEARS it's been flagged as needing references. Each page has only a single reference, and the Osu page consists of a single sentence.
If you think these topics are important, important enough that they've been written about, spend 10 minutes on Google to find a few articles and add them as references. It's really not hard.
If you actually take the 20 minutes to READ the articles, you can then type some information from those sources into the Wikipedia article, so it'll be an article instead of a sentence.
You've had six years notice, how long do you need in order to spend a few minutes adding a couple links?
You know.. it just dawned on me when I read the name 'Wikipedia' in this headline: All this 'copyright' business isn't just about 'protecting IP' and monetizing everything in sight, it's mainly about controlling access to information, putting it behind access barriers that require money to bypass. This is essentially no different than what the Catholic Church would do in pre-renaissance times: if you were rich, you could learn to read, therefore you had access to education and information, and as we all well know, 'knowledge is power'. Now in the 21st century, which has the Internet, and where most everyone is literate, there is unprecedented access to information and self-education -- and knowledge is still power. While The Rich, Dominionists, and other so-called 'special interest groups' work in the non-digital world to limit access to higher education, all this 'copyright' action going on works to limit access to information and self-education in the digital/Internet world. Nicely played, Rich People, nicely played. That's the real reason why this needs to be fought against.
Probably not "communism", the "People" is of no importance *at all*. It's more like a form of textbook fascism.
Historically speaking, communism and fascism are forks of a GUI for a totalitarian operating system. Bringing this up tends to get both pissed off, which is part of why both are in (hilarious) agreement about glossing over the early history of fascism and its political roots, which is sad because a lot of historical irony is involved. (The main reason the fascists snagged support from the conservatives was more than anything else because the fascists rejected the idea that class warfare was necessary; it doesn't really look like anybody was particularly expecting capitalism to survive to the 21st century.)
You're focusing on the trees and ignoring not just the forest, but the entire Amazon Basin.
How Wikipedia handles things is completely irrelevant to the situation. This legislation affects literally everybody, possibly even outside the EU depending on how far they try to wave their reproductive pseudopod.
It's a shockingly stupid piece of legislation that in one move can easily make it not worth the effort to run *any* service *at all*. ESPECIALLY if that might even vaguely involve interacting with the public, cause you'll risk liability for anything any user does.
It is overwhelmingly cost prohibitive, puts too much burden on the service providers, and destroys free speech. With legislation like that, you may as well not even bother having the internet at all.
I agree that fascism has often prospered under a banner of communism - but can you cite even one instance of a nation that was actually even remotely communist, rather than just using the name as a convenient mask?
Remember, one of the key tenets of communism is that the workers own the means of production, and that is wholly incompatible with the government owning said means, unless you can make a strong case that the workers truly own the government.
Personally, I can think of only a small handful of countries (Iceland comes to mind) that could make an even remotely plausible claim to having a government truly owned by the workers. Certainly China, Russia, the United States, etc. could not.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Chile. The "not true communist" argument is an utter lie. All these nations have been as "communist" as can be.
Your copyright law and patents are still much worse than Europe's.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction