#article 11

Okay. We are in an incredibly precarious position with the EU Article 13 and Article 11 vote. The EU has revised the wording back to the worst possible form. This means that all kinds of things could be negatively impacted by such a change.

Here is a list of all the things we could stand to lose:

YouTube content from European creators

European fanworks

European users on almost every single platform

The shutdown of news from all the major news sources save for TV which is horribly biased. (At least in the US it is)

This entire thing is a nightmare waiting to ensnare the globe. Remember that this is the entirety of Europe, not just one small place. This could be the global change in a few years time if something isn't done now. Looking at these articles, it is plain to see that the EU Parliament does not care for it's people or the freedoms we have had since the inception of the internet.

Should this come to pass, none of these sites will implement filters. It is too costly to go through every single thing that is uploaded with bots to see if it is copyright infringement. This means that the EU is going to be shut out of nearly every single social media and major internet platform that you can think of. Don't get me wrong, people deserve pay for what work they do but killing everything online for an entire section of the world is not the way to go about it.

Do we want a future where all of the world governments get to decide what we view online? If this comes to pass, only negative things will come from it. Take heed people. Stand up for your freedom before it becomes commonplace not to have any at all.

The EU is trying very hard to kill the internet by passing Article 11 and Article 13 today. I know a lot of you are angry and disappointed. I’m angry and disappointed.

Now it’s time to regroup, because the result wasn’t a surprise. Not really. We have lost these battles before and we will keep on losing them. I’m not saying this to be a negative bore, but to remind you that we have lost shit we thought would ruin the internet before, and you know what, we’ve always managed to adapt.

Lawmaking is always slower than the internet. Lawmaking is always slower than the creativeness of humans. They will not stop us. I promise, they will not stop us. We have lost before and we’re still here.

Take a deep breath. Keep being angry, but take a deep breath. The internet will not give up.

Now to the actual boring part. There are elections in May and I would like every EU citizen who lives in a country where you’re actively voting for your MEP to make sure this vote has consequences for the ones who voted for it. Let’s face it “Contact your MEP” doesn’t really mean that much if no one is held responsible for their actions, and honestly, hardly no MEP is.

I know the EU is not a democracy, it’s a union consisting of democracies. How the number of MEPs are split between the member states is beyond me and each country decides themselves how they decide which people to send to their appointed chairs -- some have specific elections, some divide it according to their last general election, some have their parliament decide etc.

But, if you’re a EU citizen, who lives in a country (like Sweden) where there are separate elections to appoint your MEP… do your research, show up and vote, and make sure there are consequences to not listening.

Okay? Okay.

In closing, let me say again, the internet has survived before, the internet will survive this too.

The European Parliament is meeting this week, and the committee that will decide the future of the controversial new Copyright Directive will meet next, and depending on what they do, it might be the end of the road for the internet as we know it.

The new Copyright Directive contains two deal-breaking clauses: the first, Article 11, gives news sites the power to charge (or refused to offer) a license fee for anyone who wants to link to their stories and include more than a single word from the story to accompany the link. Open access news sites can't opt out of this regime, putting the whole idea of public-interest, open-access news in jeopardy.

The second clause, Article 13, requires platforms to check all their users' posts against a crowdsourced database that is meant to list all the copyrighted works that may not be distributed online. Anyone can put anything in the database without penalty for falsely claiming copyright, and the filters will overblock millions of users' posts either by falsely identifying them as a match, or because software can't tell fair use from copyright infringement.

Worst of all, both of these measures will cost hundreds of millions of euros to comply with, and that will put every European alternative to American Big Tech out of business (some versions propose exempting companies with less than 10m euros/year in revenue, but that only means that earning your 10,000,001st euro will trigger hundreds of millions of euros in compliance costs).

The next step in this process is called the "trilogue," when the representatives of European member-states negotiate with the EU. If countries representing 36% of Europeans refuse to endorse Articles 11 and 13, the negotiations cannot proceed (this is called a "blocking minority").

That's where you come in: many European governments oppose this already, and with just a few more key players, we can rescue the internet -- not just the EU internet, but the internet we all use, because these policies will be impossible to enforce just in the EU -- from these brutal proposals.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has prepared letters targeting the negotiators from four key countries: Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Luxembourg, and we need citizens and residents of each of these countries to get in touch with their nation's negotiators right away.

Time is of the essence. More than four million Europeans have signed a petition opposing these proposals and MEPs are up for re-election in May. Between the popular dissent, the vulnerability of MEPs in upcoming elections, and the local nature of this round of negotiations, there's never been a time when everyday Europeans could have more of a say in the EU's deliberations.

Tell your Polish, German, Luxembourgian and Swedish friends!

The Internet is Facing a Catastrophe For Free Expression and Competition: Sweden, Germany, Poland and Luxembourg Could Tip The Balance