Unfortunately, that’s in itself fake news. The link tax won’t help fight fake news – it will make the problem worse.

The two main reasons are:

1. Putting a price tag on spreading articles from legitimate press publications (or at the bare minimum, adding legal uncertainty) is guaranteed to end up decreasing the circulation of professional news. The visibility of other sources will in turn be boosted, including fake news and propaganda.
2. The link tax will disadvantage small, new and independent publishers who rely on being listed in aggregators and having their content shared on social media. As a result, innovation in the sector and media pluralism will be harmed, which will impede the diverse and vibrant news ecosystem we need to effectively counter fake news.

Academic consensus against

In an open letter released on Wednesday, 169 scholars (including professors of journalism studies) say the plan will “play into the hands of producers of fake news” because it will “restrict further the circulation of quality news”, and thus “not guarantee the availability of reliable information so much as the dominance of fake news”.

Previous studies found that the link tax “may well set back the function of the press as public watchdog” and ”will not foster quality journalism”.

Journalists oppose it

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project calls the link tax “a giant step backward in the fight against misinformation”, because it “would severely limit the ability of OCCRP and other independent media organizations to provide accurate and fair reporting”.

A coalition of innovative publishers representing hundreds of news outlets – who the Commission claims would benefit from the link tax – are likewise fighting against the plan, warning that it will “stifle media pluralism” and have “serious negative effects on the quality of the press”.

After years of experience with the similar German law, the journalists’ association DJV concluded: “Best abolish it”.

Competent conservatives disagree

Dorothee Bär, Germany’s new Digital Minister and a member of the staunchly conservative CSU, said that she rejects the extra copyright for news sites because it “hasn’t stood the test” and “doesn’t work”.

The CDU’s internet policy spokesperson in the German Bundestag – a fellow party member of both Günther Oettinger (who originally proposed the law) and Axel Voss (who is pushing to make it even worse) – likewise recognises the link tax as “extremely dangerous” and “a bad proposal”, correctly warning that it may lead platforms to remove real news and thus elevate dubious sources.

Jumping on the buzzword bandwagon

The Commission’s own high level expert group on fake news and disinformation did not recommend the neighbouring right. This supports the suspicion that it was included not for factual reasons, but in an attempt to jump on a buzzword bandwagon to shore up support for the Commission’s struggling proposal.

When the neighbouring right proposal was originally presented, combating fake news was not given as a motive. Adding it as a retroactive justification, unsupported by a proper impact assessment, is mission creep that’s in conflict with the much-touted principles of “better regulation”.

What to do instead

If the Commission is serious about fighting fake news, it needs to correct its course on the neighbouring right immediately.

• The “presumption rule”, an alternative proposal supported by the Greens/EFA group as well as former Parliament rapporteur Therese Comodini and multiple member states in the Council, would help publishers enforce existing copyrights without sabotaging the circulation of legitimate news.
• The Greens/EFA group today launched a report on alternative models of financing investigative journalism, which suggests a number of policy solutions.
• Regulating ad targeting, as I argued in Parliament last week, may be the best option: Ending the profiling arms race, in which internet giants gather ever more data on us in order to ever more precisely target ads, would not just protect our privacy and eliminate one way of delivering fake news to those most susceptible to it, but also return a share of the advertising market to content businesses like the news.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Lead image: Alan Levine, Flickr

Originally published on Julia Reda’s blog

The post “Fake news” is the newest, fakest justification for the EU link tax appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Julia Reda: Free software development as we know it is under threat by the EU copyright reform plans.

The battle on the EU copyright reform proposal continues, centering on the plan to introduce upload filters. In short, online platforms would be required to monitor their users’ uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering. As most communication online consists of uploads onto different platforms, such “censorship machines” have broad consequences, including for free and open source software (FOSS) repositories.

On these platforms, developers from across the world collaborate on software projects that anyone can freely use and adapt. Automated filters would be guaranteed to throw up many false positives. Automatic deletion means uploaders are presumed guilty until proven innocent: Legitimate contributions would be blocked.

The recent outcry about this in the FOSS community is showing some results: Our concerns are getting lawmakers’ attention. Unfortunately, though, most are misunderstanding the issue and drawing the wrong conclusions. Now that we know how powerful the community’s voice is, it is all the more important to keep speaking up!

Why is this happening?

The starting point for this legislation was a fight between big corporations, the music industry and YouTube, over money. The music industry complained that they receive less each time one of their music videos is played on a video platform like YouTube than they do when their tracks are listened to on subscription services like Spotify, calling the difference the “value gap”. They started a successful lobbying effort: The upload filter law is primarily intended to give them a bargaining chip to demand more money from Google in negotiations. Meanwhile, all other platforms are caught in the middle of that fight, including code sharing communities.

The lobbying has engrained in many legislators’ minds the false idea that platforms which host uploads for profit are necessarily exploiting creators.

Code sharing

There are, however, many examples where there is a symbiotic relationship between platform and creators. Developers use and upload to software repositories voluntarily, because the platforms add value. While Github is a for-profit company, it supports not-for-profit projects – it finances its free hosting of open source projects by charging for the commercial use of the site’s services. Thus open source activities will be affected by a law designed to regulate a fight between giant corporations.

In a recent blog post, Github sounded the alarm, citing three reasons why upload filters are a terrible fit for software projects:

1. Code needs to be filtered under this law because it is copyrightable – but many developers intend for their code to be shared under an open source license.
2. The risk for false positives is very high because different parts of a software project may be covered under different license terms, which is very hard for automated technology to adequately handle.
3. Automatically having to remove code suspected of infringing copyright may have devastating consequences for software developers who have built on common resources that they may find suddenly vanishing.

Concerns are being heard

In their latest draft, the Council of the European Union seeks to exclude “non-for profit open source software developing platforms” from the obligation to filter uploads. This amendment is a direct result of the FOSS community’s outcry. However, this exception would not cover for-profit platforms like Github and many others, even if only a branch of their operations is for-profit.

Rather than questioning the basic principle of the law, politicians are trying to quell criticism by proposing more and more specific exceptions for those who can credibly demonstrate that the law would adversely affect them. Creating such a list of exceptions is a Sisyphean task sure to remain incomplete. Rather, upload filters should be rejected as a whole as a disproportional measure that endangers the fundamental right to free expression online.

We can do it!

To achieve this, we need your help. The FOSS community can’t just solve problems with code: It has political clout, strength in numbers and allies in the Parliament. We have already started to effect change. Here’s how you can take action right now:

1. Sign the open letter at SaveCodeshare.
2. Use Mozilla’s free tool to call MEPs.
3. Tweet at the key players in the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee via FixCopyright.

Technical Sidenote:

• Fundamentally, three players are involved in the legislative process. The Commission drafted an initial legal proposal, which the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union can propose changes to. Within the Parliament, this legislation is first discussed in the Legal Affairs Committee, with each political group nominating a negotiator. Once the Committee has voted to approve the compromise established by the negotiators, it will be put to vote in the plenary of the Parliament, before negotiations begin with the other institutions. The exact legislative path so far can be found here.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

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Julia Reda: Ever since the European Commission presented its hugely controversial proposal to force internet platforms to employ censorship machines, the copyright world has been eagerly awaiting the position of the European Parliament. Today, the person tasked with steering the copyright reform through Parliament, rapporteur Axel Voss, has finally issued the text he wants the Parliament to go forward with.

It’s a green light for censorship machines: Mr. Voss has kept the proposal originally penned by his German party colleague, former Digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger, almost completely intact.

In doing so, he is dismissing calls from across the political spectrum to stop the censorship machines. He is ignoring one and a half years of intense academic and political debate pointing out the proposal’s many glaring flaws. He is discarding the work of several committees of the Parliament which came out against upload filters, and of his predecessor and party colleague MEP Comodini, who had correctly identified the problems almost a year ago. He is brushing off the concerns about the proposal’s legality several national governments have voiced in Council. And he is going against the recently published coalition agreement of the new German government – which is going to include Voss’ own Christian Democratic Party – where filtering obligations are rejected as disproportionate.

Photo © European Union (used with permission)

[Read Axel Voss’ compromise proposal PDF]

This is a “compromise” in name only. Mr. Voss’ proposal contains all the problematic elements of the original censorship machines idea, and adds several new ones. Here’s the proposal in detail:

1. Obligatory impossible-to-get licenses

The proposal says: All apps and websites where users can upload and publish media are required to get copyright licenses for all content. These platforms are considered to “communicate to the public” all those user uploads, which means that the platforms would be directly responsible for copyright infringements committed by their users, as if it were the platform’s employees themselves uploading these works.

This is a bizarre addition to the Commission proposal, which would be impossible to implement in practice: Who exactly are the platforms supposed to get those license agreements from? While there may be collecting societies representing professional authors in a few areas such as music or film, which may be able to issue a license covering the works of many individual authors, other sectors do not have collecting societies at all.

Imagine a platform dedicated to hosting software, such as GitHub. There is no collecting society for software developers and nobody has so far seen the need to found one. So where will GitHub, which undoubtedly hosts and gives access to (copyright-protected) software uploaded by users, get their copyright license from? They can’t enter into license negotiations with every single software developer out there, just because somebody might someday upload their software to GitHub without permission. And without that impossible-to-get license, this law says they will be directly liable as soon as somebody does upload copyrighted works. That’s a sure-fire way to kill the platforms economy in Europe.

And these impossible-to-get licenses cover only non-commercial use: If the platform acquires a license as prescribed, then non-commercial uploaders won’t be liable. Uploaders acting for commercial purposes however, such as companies with social media accounts, can still be sued by rightsholders.

2. The censorship machine is here to stay

The proposal says: All platforms hosting and providing public access to “significant amounts” of user-uploaded content have to prevent copyrighted content that rightsholders have identified from being uploaded in the first place.

There are only two ways to do this: (a) hire an army of trained monkeys to look at every individual user upload and compare it manually to the rightsholder information or (b) install upload filters. The article that creates this obligation no longer mentions content recognition technologies explicitly, but they are still mentioned in other parts of the text, making it clear that filters are what Voss has in mind.

There is no definition what “significant amounts” are supposed to be. The Commission was widely criticised for requiring censorship machines on platforms with “large amounts” of content, following the misguided idea that only large companies with significant resources available to dedicate to the development of upload filters host large amounts of content, completely ignoring the wide diversity of popular specialised platforms out there: Community-run platforms like Wikipedia, niche platforms like MuseScore (for sheet music) and many startups host millions of uploads, but would struggle to implement or license expensive filtering technology.

Why Voss believes replacing the word “large” with the potentially even broader “significant” is supposed to improve anything remains completely unclear.

3. A tiny problem with fundamental rights

The proposal says: The filtering measures must not entail any processing of personal data, in order to protect users’ privacy

The only indication that Mr. Voss has paid attention to any of the public criticism at all is that he acknowledges there may a tiny problem with fundamental rights. Indeed, the European Court of Justice has in the past ruled that an obligation to filter all user uploads violates the fundamental rights to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom to conduct a business. Voss picks one of those fundamental rights seemingly at random and adds a provision aimed at protecting it. Admirable as this may be, it is also in direct contradiction to what comes next:

Because filters will invariably delete content that is legal, for example under a copyright exception, users are supposed to have access to a redress mechanism to complain about overblocking. But how exactly is the platform supposed to offer the user that redress if it is not allowed to process any personal data? Simply recording which user’s uploads have fallen victim to the filter already requires processing of personal data. How can a user complain about a wrongful takedown if the platform is not allowed to keep records of what the filter deleted in the first place?

It gets better: Guess who should decide about what happens with the users’ complaints about wrongful takedowns? The rightsholders who asked for the content to be blocked in the first place. Surely they will turn out to be an impartial arbiter.

At least, users are supposed to be able to go to a court if the redress mechanism fails. However, this may end up being ineffective, because copyright exceptions do not constitute legal rights against the rightsholders, so a court may decide not to require a platform to reinstate previously deleted uploads, even if they were legal under a copyright exception.

What users need is a clear legal rule that the copyright exceptions constitute users’ rights – just like the previous copyright rapporteur Therese Comodini had suggested.

4. Very specific general monitoring

The proposal says: Checking all user uploads for whether they are identical to a particular rightsholder’s copyrighted work does not constitute forbidden “general“ monitoring, but is “specific“.

EU law forbids any laws that force hosting providers to do “general monitoring”, such as checking every single file uploaded by every user all of the time. Voss simply postulates that upload filters would not break that rule and writes that only “abstract monitoring” should be forbidden, which presumably means randomly looking at uploaded files without looking for anything in particular.

This argument has already been dismissed by the European Court of Justice: The European Commission tried making it in defense of upload filters in the past – and lost (Paragraph 58 of this French-language Commission contribution to the European Court of Justice case Scarlet vs. SABAM).

5. Few exceptions

The proposal says: The filtering obligation should not apply to Internet access services, online marketplaces such as ebay, research repositories where rightsholders mainly upload their own works such as arXiv, or cloud service providers where the uploads cannot be accessed publicly, such as Dropbox.

In a last-ditch attempt to redeem himself, Voss provides a welcome clarification that the obligation to filter does not extend to certain businesses. But this exception, not legally binding since it is in a recital rather than an article, does not apply to the obligation to license.

The listed platforms would still have to get licenses from rightsholders provided that the user uploads are publicly accessible, because they would still be considered to be communicating to the public. But how are these platforms supposed to shield themselves from lawsuits by rightsholders if they can’t get a license for all possible content that may be uploaded? They will have to resort to a filter anyway.

6. Critical parts remain unchanged

Large parts of the most widely criticised elements of the Commission proposal were left completely unchanged by rapporteur Voss, such as the infamous Recital 38 (2), where the Commission misrepresents the limited liability regime of the e-commerce directive, essentially stating that any platform that so much as uses an algorithm to sort the uploaded works alphabetically or provides a search function should be considered as “active” and therefore liable for its users’ actions. The only change that Mr. Voss has made to this section is cosmetic in nature.

* * *

It’s not too late to stop the Censorship Machines!

Fortunately, Axel Voss does not get to decide the Parliament position on his own. He will need to secure a majority in the Legal Affairs (JURI) committee, which will vote in late March or April. Two other committees have already come out strongly against filtering obligations, and several JURI members have tabled amendments to delete or significantly improve the Article.

Now it’s time to call upon your MEPs to reject Mr. Voss’ proposal! You can use tools such as SaveTheMeme.net by Digital Rights NGO Bits of Freedom or ChangeCopyright.org by Mozilla to call the Members of the Legal Affairs Committee free of charge. Or look for MEPs from your country and send them an email.

But most importantly, spread the word! Ask you local media to report on this law.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

The post Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament’s copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1/ The current legislation under review by the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy regarding “neighboring rights”, to be voted on by the European Parliament in late March 2018, has little if anything to do with author rights

2/ All arguments about protecting revenue streams for publishers indicate that the true purpose is to fortify the rights of publishers (who have arrogated to themselves the rights of authors)

3/ The arguments from the public domain side against this legislation are equally problematic and suspect for the same reason that author rights are not part of the rationale for propping up the knowledge commons against the disputed proprietary rights of publishers

4/ The central issue, which is also hidden in plain sight, is – after all – the moral rights of authors (“Lockean natural rights”) as established in the Enlightenment and as enshrined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886)

5/ Both the EC and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have shown no interest in addressing this set of rights, given the inherent abstract nature of such rights and given that both are operating on behalf of industry in a global IP campaign that resembles the “weaponizing” of IP rights

6/ Given that economic data (or any empirical proof) confirming that free copying of works or appropriation by platform cultures benefits the author is impossible to produce, whether justified through the murky term “transformative use” or “discoverability”, all such arguments, as used on both sides of the debate (by publishers to e-license copyrighted works and by advocates of Open Access to justify authors giving their works away for nothing) devolve to mere speculation based on the bias of the beneficiaries

7/ Given the origin of copyright in the Venetian Renaissance, via the granting of privilegio to authors for books published in the Republic of Venice, and given the almost immediate arrogation of privilegio by printer-publishers in the Republic of Venice, the arguments associated with “neighboring rights” today merely revisit historic arguments waged then against the damage done to authors and presses through illegal copying

8/ What has not advanced, and what needs to be fully disclosed, is how mass digitalization from both sides of this battleground has forced the lion’s share of authors today into a class conveniently labeled the “precariat” by critics of capitalism for the benefit of a global “vectorial class”

9/ What is less obvious regarding this widening chasm between the precariat and the vectorial class is that almost all academic proponents of fortifying the knowledge commons through an enforced neoliberalized open-access regime for scholarly works are part of the global vectorial class by virtue of participation in the production of platform cultures that decimate author rights from the so-called non-profit side, while “Capital” takes care of the destruction of author rights on the for-profit side

Photo by Spongehoe

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Julia Reda: For months now I’ve been raising the alarm about the plan to limit the freedom to link that has been slowly but surely making its way through the EU legislative process.

The European Commission and the publishing lobby have accused those of us fighting to save the link of exaggerating the danger that the planned extra copyright for news sites poses.

The link wasn’t under attack, they assured us. But it has now become undeniable that it is.

Breaking the web

Today, a new lobby joined the fray – but apparently didn’t get the memo about sugar-coating the game plan. In an open letter published in Le Monde – but, fittingly, behind a paywall – large news agencies including Germany’s DPA und France’s AFP call for the extra copyright to also extend to their products. They mince no words describing what they demand politicians crack down on:

They offer internet users the work done by others, the news media, by freely publishing hypertext links to their stories. […] Solutions must be found. […] We strongly urge our governments, the European parliament and the commission to proceed with this directive.

There it is, black on white: They fully expect and intend for this law to break the core functionality of the web. They want to outlaw pointing to their articles without their permission. They want to charge for incoming links.

The letter suggests their concern is primarily with links from two particular sources: Facebook users and Google. But the law doesn’t discriminate – all links to news websites on the web would be affected by it in the same catastrophic way.

Killing innovation

Prof. Höppner, a professor of commercial law and IT law, and the lawyer for German publishers in a case against Facebook and Google, was similarly forthright at a hearing at the European Parliament last week:

This is a prohibition right. It is a right that makes sure there are not platforms coming up everywhere and anywhere that take advantage of content that has been published and make their business out of it. The first and foremost goal is to prevent these exploiting businesses – simply not have them.
(Watch the video recording )

This exposes the other goal the big publishing conglomerates hope to achieve: Killing off competition in the news sector. They don’t even want to give innovative startups the chance to pay their link ransom – they want to stamp them out.

Big publishers want to turn back time to an era in which people were loyal to a single newspaper they had a subscription to. They want visiting the front pages of their brands’ websites to be the only way we can find out what’s happening in the world. That requires eliminating apps and sites that provide what many readers prefer: A selection of links to news from multiple sources tailored to one’s personal interests.

Big publishers vs. everyone else

The fault line here does not run between journalism and online platforms, as lobbyists like to paint it: It’s between a few giant publishing houses and everyone else. Aggregators and social networks have created a level playing field that has allowed smaller, independent and special-interest news sources to grow. These sites reach the majority of their readership via links on social media and search engines, rather than through direct visits to their websites.

Unsurprisingly, innovative publishers and startups are up in arms, warning that the planned law, promoted as ensuring media diversity, would end up achieving the exact opposite: media concentration.

Requiring permission for links and suppressing new ways to stay informed: The extra copyright for news sites is nothing short of an attack on the open and decentralized web – in concert with the plan to force online platforms to install censorship machines.

It’s true that the news industry is in financial trouble. We need to think creatively about how uncompromising, in-depth journalism can be funded in the future – we certainly need it more than ever. But breaking the web and killing innovation is unacceptable, and would actually backfire on quality journalism and reduce media pluralism.

There is an alternative

The European Parliament and the Council will make a decision soon – between this law and a sensible alternative. Called the “presumption rule”, it would help publishers enforce existing copyrights without restricting linking.

The presumption rule fulfills what the European Commission has all along claimed to be the purpose of the law. Now that no doubt remains that the publishing lobby’s intentions go much further, the Commission needs to put its cards on the table: If it continues to push for the neighbouring right, it confirms that it too wants a “link tax”. If the goal is merely to allow publishers to enforce copyright, like they say, they should support the presumption rule.

The crucial vote is coming up in the Legal Affairs Committee (see the schedule here). In that committee, the conservative EPP group, the spokesperson for the liberal ALDE group and French S&D group members support the extra copyright. In the Council, the governments of France, Germany, Spain and Portugal are pushing for it.

If you are against this plan, the SaveTheLink campaign has a tool to contact your representatives – and spreading this article via links is and will stay free.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

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Calling for action to protect open wifi networks, the Pirate Party’s Julia Reda writes how collectively built-up, not-for-profit wireless networks like Freifunk provide Internet access to refugees, “allow[ing] them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.” In the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, where activist-coordinated refugee solidarity groups support housing projects, there is a growing need for internet connectivity and regular maintenance. Working in a similar ethos, Exarcheia Net provides internet access and technical support to 10+ locations around Exarcheia – facilitating internet access for over 1,000 people.

Alongside this work, James Lewis, the initiator and facilitator of Exarcheia Net, is supporting community members in establishing cooperative networks. But the objectives of Exarcheia Net go beyond providing Internet connectivity to these places and include the following:

• providing internet access and service infrastructure for grassroots institutions like cooperative and non-profits,
• creating and maintaining associations to facilitate the sharing of Internet access among groups of people,
• piloting and prototyping a new type of neighbourhood/district-level community network that includes physical spaces and regular face-to-face meetings for governance, training and engaging people, cultural activities, etc ,
• demystification of technology and emancipation of citizens in building and operating their own technology infrastructures,
• using locally-run services (e.g. secure messaging, file share, video streaming, internet radio)
• organising ExarcheiaNet projects in a P2P way by facilitation rather than hierarchy and project management, building in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing peer to peer, and allowing networks to grow and connect to each other in an organic bottom-up method rather than ‘funded’ and top down.

Greece is home to a number of community network projects, each following their own governance model, such as Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN), Sarantaporo.gr, and Wireless Thessaloniki. Community network projects bring with them lower data costs, often faster internet speeds than telecom-provided internet, and benefits of privately owned infrastructure such as privacy and locally run services.

From June 12-16, you can join Exarcheia Net for a series of workshops,  where Exarcheia residents will join in on a public introductory workshop and guests from Freifunk (Germany), Altermundi (Argentina), Guifi.net (Catalonia), Ninux (Italy) and OpenFreenet (India) will lead an open debate on building self-organized community networks at the neighborhood level.

Exarcheia Net is looking for more people interested in working  “hands-on” in community networking and setting up p2p infrastructure. To connect with Exarcheia Net, check out the Wiki or join a weekly meeting by contacting James Lewis: lewis.james at gmail dot com.  

Lead image “Le libraire d’Exarchia – Athènes, Grèce” by ActuaLitté, Flickr

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tl;dr: Projects building open communications networks using custom router software are playing an important role in providing refugees with Internet access. Last year, largely unbeknownst to the public, a new EU directive was passed on the regulation of radio equipment. This directive may limit the software that can be run on WiFi routers to those certified by the manufacturer. This could keep initiatives from being able to provide such open networks in the future. Now is the time to get active in your member state to protect open WiFi networks!

In cities throughout Europe, people are seeking refuge from war, discrimination, hunger and persecution. Initiatives from civil society have been building up free Internet connections surrounding camp sites and housing projects.

Freifunk in Magdeburg Olvenstedt (Photo: Keywan Tonekaboni, CC-BY-NC/4.0)

Many had to flee from their countries in months-long trips. Free WiFi connections allow them to participate in society, in culture and everyday life, which has become unthinkable to most of us without access to the Internet. It also allows them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.

In Germany, Freifunk and other initiatives have been building up free and open – that is: collectively built-up, not-for-profit – wireless networks for more than a decade. Similar initiatives exist throughout Europe, such as Guifi.net in Spain or Funkfeuer in Austria. In the current situation, Freifunk and others have committed themselves to an additional, humanitarian goal.

They provide Internet access to refugees by way of installing customized software onto devices such as routers and WiFi access points. They are replacing the software (so-called firmware) originally installed on the devices by their manufacturers. Using their own software, they can build up free and open networks more easily and automatically.

Radio equipment rules with unwanted consequences?

There are common rules for devices that communicate using radio waves in the European Union. They have been put into place to avoid devices interfering unwantedly with other devices, as well as to keep certain frequencies clear for communication of airplanes, emergency services and so on.

WiFi access points and routers are subject to these regulations. The overhaul of the old directive (Directive 2014/53/EU on “the making available … of radio equipment”) early in 2014, at the end of the last parliament’s legislative term, introduced a new requirement for hardware manufacturers to demonstrate that software running on devices comply with rules regarding the use of certain radio channels, for example. This not only applies to firmware shipped by device manufacturers but also to any kind of software installable on the devices.

In Article 3.3 (i) of the directive, it says devices need to be built in a way to “ensure that software can only be loaded into the radio equipment where the compliance of the combination of the radio equipment and software has been demonstrated”. This could be interpreted as a requirement for manufacturers to only allow certified software to run on their devices. Projects like Freifunk and others as well as commercial third-party producers would suffer as a result, lacking proper certification.

The original Commission draft of the directive (PDF), however, includes a recital (19) that explicitly mentions: “Verification … should not be abused in order to prevent [the devices’] use with software provided by independent parties”.

It is now a matter of the member states’ transposition of the directive into national law whether the recital’s intention is kept.

Will manufacturers have to verify third party software?

It is curious that according to recital (29), “conformity assessment should … remain solely the obligation of the manufacturer”. Depending on the implementation of the directive into national law, manufacturers would subsequently have to verify third party producers’ software. It is hitherto unknown if manufacturers are sympathetic to the idea of having to spend money and expertise on this process.

Governments need to make sure open WiFi projects can continue

Volunteer projects throughout Europe that are building WiFi networks for refugees, similar to Freifunk in Germany, have made headlines and earned sympathy this summer. Lawmakers in Europe need to make sure these projects can continue their work.

EU member states have until 13 June 2016 to complete their national implementations of Directive 2014/53/EU. A freedom of information request brought forward by Michel Vorsprach in Germany has already produced an answer from the ministry for economic affairs. According to their reply, the German draft law is in its final stages and implementation will happen in due time. Governments throughout Europe need to implement the radio equipment directive in a way that does not hinder the free and open internet movement.

Manufacturers must not be lured into implementing even more restrictive measures than they are already using to prevent installation of third-party firmwares. It is a basic necessity for volunteers to be able to install customized firmware onto routers. Only if they can overcome the boundaries of what hardware manufacturers had originally planned for their devices to do, can free and open Internet projects continue to flourish.

Act Now!

If you are working with an initiative that provides free and open networks that are based on OpenSource firmwares like OpenWRT or DDWRT, or if you are willing to help them continue to do so, you have to act now:

• Ask your national government how it is planning on implementing Directive 2014/53/EU in its national law and if your WiFi routers can subsequently still be equipped with customized software.
• Ask your routers’ manufacturers how they plan on handling the requirements that arise from Article 3.3 of Directive 2014/53/EU.
• Ask politicians with special expertise in all political parties about how they envision an implementation that encourages Freifunk-like projects.
• Write to funkregulierung@juliareda.eu with any answers you have received.
• Translate this call to action to your native language so we can mobilise activists in all member states. We’re happy to publish translations here that are sent to us via funkregulierung@juliareda.eu.
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Photo by slworking2

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