Europe just voted to wreck the internet, spying on everything and censoring vast swathes of our communications
If you thought the EU was this amazing place that would bring all countries together to prevent another world war, and would help us all live in harmony – these new laws that they just passed should make you realize that what the EU is, is a single place for corporations to go to, to lobby and get laws passed all over Europe that ONLY benefit corporations and screw the rest of us over.
These laws will destroy the very nature of the Internet:
Here’s what the EU voted in favour of this morning:
* Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run by the big platforms. They’ll compare your posts to databases of “copyrighted works” that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything that appears to match the “copyright database” is blocked on sight, and you have to beg the platform’s human moderators to review your case to get your work reinstated.
* Link taxes: You can’t link to a news story if your link text includes more than a single word from the article’s headline. The platform you’re using has to buy a license from the news site, and news sites can refuse licenses, giving them the right to choose who can criticise and debate the news.
* Sports monopolies: You can’t post any photos or videos from sports events — not a selfie, not a short snippet of a great goal. Only the “organisers” of events have that right. Upload filters will block any attempt to violate the rule.
Here’s what they voted against:
* “Right of panorama”: the right to post photos of public places despite the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements, public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).
* User generated content exemption: the right to use small excerpt from works to make memes and other critical/transformative/parodical/satirical works.
