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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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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