The EU Could Vote To Wreck the Internet Tomorrow (vice.com)

The EU is preparing to vote Wednesday on sweeping new copyright guidelines that could dramatically reshape the internet and potentially harm your ability to share content online. From a report: As noted previously, the proposal is being driven by rights holders frightened by technological change, including brick and mortar publishers eager to blame companies like Google for their failure to evolve in the modern internet era. And while the EU's new Copyright Directive may be a well intentioned effort to modernize EU copyright rules, it still contains numerous provisions that could significantly harm the open internet. Most of those provisions remain largely intact despite a July vote that sent the proposal back to the drawing board in the wake of widespread activist backlash. The most problematic provisions of the plan include new licensing fees for sharing anything more than "insubstantial" portions of content. Such a "link tax" could prove costly for small news outlets, and, depending on final wording, could put volunteer-centric organizations like Wikipedia at risk since the original proposal failed to include a noncommercial exception.

The most controversial component of the plan mandates that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption (read: most of them) would need to employ automated copyright systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works at the website owner's expense. As we've consistently highlighted, such filters routinely don't work very well.

Comments

As a EU-citizen in the EU...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm ever more strongly inclined to have them push through the most obviously lobbied-together most atrociously anti-free-speech filtering censorship everything for all websites accessable from the EU. And I warmly invite every website inside the EU to shut down on user content as much as possible and every website outside the EU to block anything EU by geoIP.

Burn it down. Burn it all down. If that doesn't get my fellow EU-citizens up in arms against the EU, well, then what will?

Good law

[DogDude]

I think this is a good law. It finally makes the "social media" sites police what's on their servers. They can and they should. They make have to make a few billion less dollars than before, but tough shit. I know exactly what's on my web server, and I'm responsible for it. These giant web sites can very easily do the same.