Save the Link – P2P Foundation https://blog.p2pfoundation.net Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Fri, 13 Apr 2018 10:01:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 62076519 SAVE, CODE, SHARE! Current EU Copyright Review threatens Free and Open Source Software. Take action now! https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/save-code-share-current-eu-copyright-review-threatens-free-and-open-source-software-take-action-now/2018/04/13 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/save-code-share-current-eu-copyright-review-threatens-free-and-open-source-software-take-action-now/2018/04/13#respond Fri, 13 Apr 2018 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=70502 Current EU Copyright Review threatens Free and Open Source Software. Take action now to preserve the ability to collaboratively build software online! The P2P Foundation supports the SAVE, CODE, SHARE campaign to defend our Internet sovereignty and digital collaborative spaces. Click here to sign as an individual or organization. The letter below, along with the signatures signatures, will be... Continue reading

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Current EU Copyright Review threatens Free and Open Source Software. Take action now to preserve the ability to collaboratively build software online!

The P2P Foundation supports the SAVE, CODE, SHARE campaign to defend our Internet sovereignty and digital collaborative spaces. Click here to sign as an individual or organization. The letter below, along with the signatures signatures, will be delivered
the Members of the European Parliament and the EU Council. The following is taken from SaveCodeShare.eu:

Open Letter to Secure Free and Open Source Software Ecosystem in the EU Copyright Review

Your mobile device, your car, your wifi router at home, your television, the airplanes in which you travel all contain Free and Open Source Software. This widespread reuse is possible because Free and Open Source Software can be shared openly, studied and customised to meet any need.

The EU is getting ready to vote a “Copyright Reform” package which fundamentally undermines the foundations upon which Free and Open Source Software is built. The proposed Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive targets every online service that allows its users to upload and share content with each other, including code hosting platforms.

Under this proposal code hosting platforms will be compelled to prevent any possible copyright infringement by developing fundamentally flawed filtering technologies. These filtering algorithms will ultimately decide what material software developers should be allowed to share.

As a result of this ongoing copyright review, every user of a code sharing platform, be they an individual, a business or a public administration, is to be treated as a potential copyright infringer: their content, including entire code repositories, will be monitored and blocked from being shared online at any time. This restricts the freedom of developers to use specific software components and tools that in return leads to less competition and less innovation. Ultimately this can result in software that is less reliable and a less resilient software infrastructure for everybody.

We, individuals, developers, organisations and companies that develop or rely on the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem call upon European decision makers to protect open, collaborative software ecosystems. We call upon European policy makers to fundamentally rethink or delete Article 13 of the EU Copyright Reform in order to avoid the threat it poses for Free and Open Source Software.

Save Europe’s digital future, by making sure that there is a re-think or deletion of Article 13 in the EU Copyright Reform.

Please Save Code Share!

Take Action Now

About the initiative

#SaveCodeShare is an initiative launched by the FSFE and OpenForum Europe in September 2017. It aims to bring awareness about the unintended impact of Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive on software sharing platforms. Through the research presented in our White Paper, the initiative shows that better awareness is needed to understand where and how innovation takes place in the current market. This is a first step in order to create a proper regulatory framework. And this is what this initiative aims to achieve.

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Censorship machines are coming: It’s time for the free software community to discover its political clout https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/censorship-machines-are-coming-its-time-for-the-free-software-community-to-discover-its-political-clout/2018/04/10 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/censorship-machines-are-coming-its-time-for-the-free-software-community-to-discover-its-political-clout/2018/04/10#respond Tue, 10 Apr 2018 13:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=70419 Continuing our coverage of the European Parliament’s heinous proposition for filtering uploaded content, Julia Reda writes about the disturbing consequences it could have for FLOSS projects. 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... Continue reading

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Continuing our coverage of the European Parliament’s heinous proposition for filtering uploaded content, Julia Reda writes about the disturbing consequences it could have for FLOSS projects.

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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The dangerous trend for automating censorship, and circumventing laws https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-dangerous-trend-for-automating-censorship-and-circumventing-laws/2018/02/28 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-dangerous-trend-for-automating-censorship-and-circumventing-laws/2018/02/28#respond Wed, 28 Feb 2018 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=69991 Deals between companies and governments working together to automate acceptable content online are too common. Whilst content filtering is being proposed in EU copyright law, in other situations it’s all wrapped up in a closed door agreement.  Ruth Coustick-Deal, writing for OpenMedia.org lays out the “shadow regulation” complementing the dubious legal propositions which are being drafted... Continue reading

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Deals between companies and governments working together to automate acceptable content online are too common. Whilst content filtering is being proposed in EU copyright law, in other situations it’s all wrapped up in a closed door agreement. 

Ruth Coustick-Deal, writing for OpenMedia.org lays out the “shadow regulation” complementing the dubious legal propositions which are being drafted to curtail sharing.

Ruth Coustick-Deal: As the excitement over using automation and algorithms in tech to “disrupt” daily life grows, so too does governments’ desire to use it to solve social problems. They hope “automation” will disrupt piracy, online harassment, and even terrorism.

This is particularly true in the case of deploying automated bots for content moderation on the web. These autonomous programs are designed to detect certain categories of posts, and then take-down or block them without any human intervention.

In the last few weeks:

1)The UK Government have announced they have developed an algorithmic tool to remove ISIS presence from the web.
2) Copyright industries have called for similar programs to be installed that can remove un-approved creative content in the United States.
3) The European Commission has suggested that filters can be used to “proactively detect, identify, and remove” anything illegal – from comments sections on news sites to Facebook posts.
4) The Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, currently being debated by MEPs, is proposing using technical filters to block copyrighted content from being posted.

There’s a recklessness to all of these proposals – because so much of them involve sidestepping legal processes.

EFF coined the term “shadow regulation” for rules that are made outside of the legislative process, and that’s what is happening here. A cosy relationship between business and governments has developed that the public are being left outside of when it comes to limiting online speech.

Let’s take a look at Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s anti-terrorist propaganda tool. She claims it can identify “94% of IS propaganda with 99.995% accuracy.” Backed up by this amazingly bold claim, the UK Government want to make the tool available to be installed on countless platforms across the web (including major platforms like Vimeo and YouTube) which would be able to detect, and then remove such content. However, it’s likely to be in some form of unofficial “agreement”, rather than legislation that is scrutinised by parliament.

Similarly, in the European Commission’s communication on automating blocking illegal content, our friends at EDRi point out, “the draft reminds readers – twice – that the providers have “contractual freedom”, meaning that… safeguards will be purely optional.”

If these programs are installed without the necessary public debate, a legal framework, or political consensus – then who will they be accountable to? Who is going to be held responsible for censorship of the wrong content? Will it be the algorithm makers? Or the platforms that utilise them? How will people object to the changes?

Even when these ideas have been introduced through legal mechanisms they still give considerable powers to the platforms themselves. For example, the proposed copyright law we have been campaigning on through Save the Link prevents content from being posted that was simply identified by the media industry – not what is illegal.

The European Commission has suggested using police to tell the companies when a post, image, or video is illegal. There is no consideration of using courts – who elsewhere are the ones who make calls about justice. Instead we are installing systems that bypass the rule of law, with only vague gestures towards due process.

Governments are essentially ignoring their human rights obligations by putting private companies in charge. Whether via vague laws or back-room agreements, automated filtering is putting huge amounts of power in the hands of a few companies, who are getting to decide what restrictions are appropriate.

The truth is, the biggest platforms on the web already have unprecedented control over what gets published online. These platforms have become public spaces, where we go to communicate with one another. With these algorithms however, there is an insidious element of control that the owners of the platforms have over us. We should be trying to reduce the global power of these companies, rather than hand over the latest tools for automated censorship to use freely.

It’s not just the handing over of power that is problematic. Once something has been identified by police or by the online platform as “illegal,” governments argue that it should never be seen again.  What if that “illegal” content is being shown for criticism or news-worthy commentary? Should a witness to terrorism be censored for showing the situation to the world? Filters make mistakes. They cannot become our gods.

Content moderation is one of the trickiest subjects being debated by digital rights experts and academics at the moment. There have been many articles written, many conferences on the subject, and dozens of papers that have tried to consider how we can deal with the volumes of content on the web – and the horrific examples that surfact.

It is without a doubt that however content moderation happens online, there must be transparency. It must be specified in law what exactly gets blocked. And the right to free expression must be considered.

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Article 13 will set back creativity. We let the artists speak for themselves. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/article-13-will-set-back-creativity-we-let-the-artists-speak-for-themselves/2018/02/26 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/article-13-will-set-back-creativity-we-let-the-artists-speak-for-themselves/2018/02/26#respond Mon, 26 Feb 2018 09:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=69971 Content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will seriously harm creativity in Europe. That’s why artists are joining together to speak out against it. Continuing our coverage of the European Parliament’s heinous proposition for filtering uploaded content, Ruth Coustick-Deal consults with the artistic community. Republished from OpenMedia.org. Ruth Coustick-Deal: Last... Continue reading

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Content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will seriously harm creativity in Europe. That’s why artists are joining together to speak out against it.

Continuing our coverage of the European Parliament’s heinous proposition for filtering uploaded content, Ruth Coustick-Deal consults with the artistic community. Republished from OpenMedia.org.

Ruth Coustick-Deal: Last week we asked our community to let us know how people in their profession will be harmed by content filtering (Article 13) and the link tax (Article 11).[1]We’ve heard from more than 1000 people already, and more responses are still coming in every day.

Now it’s time to take the message to the person at the front of this decision. Axel Voss MEP is both in charge of the key committee and a leader in his party.

Axel Voss MEP today published his “compromise” (in name only) today. Essentially he kept Oettinger’s original flawed proposal. Despite public voices. Despite tens of thousands of people speaking up against. Despite robust academic critique. We are still faced with unaccountable censorship machines.

Axel Voss MEP needs to directly hear why the public are so opposed to automated censorship machines. He has the most influence on this law. He has all this power, and is still clinging on to broken, unpopular proposals.[2]

If MEPs like Voss want to the web to work for artists, they need to start listening to the individuals, not just the big industry groups.

They try to tell us that automated content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will help creativity flourish. We know that it won’t. Consider Adam Neely.[3] A YouTube-based jazz teacher couldn’t play short snippets of music to analyse them. Because the music was owned by Universal Music Group; they got it blocked and taken down. We will see more and more of this kind of censorship, which will take place across Europe, if these filters are legally demanded.

That’s why we are working with the Create/Refresh coalition.[4] They are a network of artists from across Europe who are opposed to Article 13. These creators produced a video which illustrates all of their talents, and their unity against these rules. Watch the video to find out more.

We need Axel Voss to see this! Let’s make sure he can’t ignore it, and knows that the very people he claims to be speaking for, oppose him.

This is just a small sample of art made possible because we don’t have these excessive restrictions that do nothing for creators.

Please give them a voice. Share the video with Axel Voss on Facebook and Twitter demanding he rejects content blocking and the link tax.

We know that tweeting at MEPs can be hugely effective if we raise a chorus too loud to ignore – MEPs pay attention to what people are saying on social media. Lets show Axel Voss that artists are not asking for his “protection”, what they want is freedom to create.

Footnotes

[1] Help our censorship impact research AND speak to your MEPs. Source: OpenMedia
[2] Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament’s copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate. Source: Julia Reda
[3] When I want to teach but can’t, thanks to Universal Music Group. Source: Adam Neely
[4] Create Refresh Coalition website.

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Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament’s copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/green-light-for-upload-filters-eu-parliaments-copyright-rapporteur-has-learned-nothing-from-year-long-debate/2018/02/24 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/green-light-for-upload-filters-eu-parliaments-copyright-rapporteur-has-learned-nothing-from-year-long-debate/2018/02/24#respond Sat, 24 Feb 2018 11:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=69963 Julia Reda gives an update – and not a good one – on the forthcoming European Comission “censorship machine” proposal. The following is republished from Reda’s website. 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... Continue reading

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Julia Reda gives an update – and not a good one – on the forthcoming European Comission “censorship machine” proposal. The following is republished from Reda’s website.

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

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Breaking the web and killing innovation: Now even lobbyists admit that’s the plan behind the extra EU copyright for news https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/breaking-the-web-and-killing-innovation-now-even-lobbyists-admit-thats-the-plan-behind-the-extra-eu-copyright-for-news/2018/02/01 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/breaking-the-web-and-killing-innovation-now-even-lobbyists-admit-thats-the-plan-behind-the-extra-eu-copyright-for-news/2018/02/01#respond Thu, 01 Feb 2018 09:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=69567 Julia Reda, writing in her own blog, warns of the dangers of the new EU copyright law. Please share this video and text widely. 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... Continue reading

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Julia Reda, writing in her own blog, warns of the dangers of the new EU copyright law. Please share this video and text widely.

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.

The post Breaking the web and killing innovation: Now even lobbyists admit that’s the plan behind the extra EU copyright for news appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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