Thursday, September 6, 2018

Wikipedia's warning: EU copyright changes threaten the internet itself; BoingBoing, September 5, 2018

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing; Wikipedia's warning: EU copyright changes threaten the internet itself

"In just one week, Members of the European Parliament will debate and vote on the new EU Copyright Directive, which contains two of the worst, most dangerous internet proposals in living memory.

One proposal, the Link Tax (Article 11), bans linking to news sites (but doesn't define "linking" or "news sites") unless the service you're using has paid for a license with all the "news sites" you might possibly link to.

The other, Censorship Machines (Article 13), forces online services to check everything a user wishes to publish against a database of "copyrighted works" (except anyone can add anything to these databases, regardless of whether they are copyrighted) and to censor anything that is a match or near-match for anything in the database."

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