Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Not in our name: Why European creators must oppose the EU's proposal to limit linking and censor the internet; BoingBoing, September 10, 2018

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing;

Not in our name: Why European creators must oppose the EU's proposal to limit linking and censor the internet


"The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

These two proposals are:

1. "Censorship Machines": Article 13, which forces online providers to create databases of text, images, videos, code, games, mods, etc that anyone can add anything to -- if a user tries to post something that may match a "copyrighted work," in the database, the system has to censor them

2. "Link Tax": Article 11, which will only allow internet users to post links to news sites if the service they're using has bought a "linking license" from the news-source they're linking to; under a current proposal, links that contain more than two consecutive words from an article's headline will be illegal without a license."

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