#article13

I am devastated. 

My dear followers from all the other continents of the world, we really fought hard, we demonstrated over weeks, on Saturday was the biggest one yet and the politicians sitting in the Parliament are ignoring our voices, our opinion. They switch up our arguments, they spread false assumptions about our reasons to be against this article and are also implying we’re bots and been bought by american companies like Google and Facebook to stop this madness.

While I hope you all know this is not true, I am absolutely frustrated by this outcome and this way of doing politics. I have always been involved into politics in my country and the EU and I cannot believe that those politicians are this stupid to completely IGNORE the fucking future of their union, of their countries.

I’m not sorry for the rant, but what is happening here is not right. 

https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/eu-copyright-final-text/

I might feel a little like crying...  The US-guys always had the support of us Europeans with ACTA and SOPA and whatnot to fight against it ... where was the help of the US when we Europeans might have needed them to raise our voice against this **** idea of some old white guys who don’t know how the internet works?

So, Article 13 just passed the second stage of voting in the European Parliament. Before everyone freaks out, the law has NOT banned memes, you will still be able to post content from your favourite TV shows/films/bands, it will very likely not affect you at all.

Article 13 is mainly designed to stop people from using copyrighted music on their websites, and from pirating entire episodes of TV shows. That means you can still post Doctor Who gifsets and be just fine, but linking to the entire episode on a dodgy pirate sight might get you in trouble.

It is true that Article 13 introduces the need for large websites to use ‘upload filters’ to screen content, but again, it will not screen out your memes. The only real problem with this is that song parodies are under fire if they’re too close to the original song, which is...not great, but not the devastating internet-ruining law I’ve seen people label it as.

Article 13, in essence, makes it harder for people to pirate content, but it will not actually limit your ability to post edited content about your favourite things, like gifs, video edits, fanart, or fanfiction. At the very worst, sites like Tumblr and Twitter will have to pay a licensing fee to allow their users to post content from copyrighted media, but that’s out of your hands as a user. It will not affect you personally.

So if you’re freaking out right now, my best advice to you is, don’t. You will be fine. If you still want the law to be stopped or changed, the European Parliament uses a ‘trilogue’ system of voting, meaning that there are three rounds of voting on new bills, and Article 13 has only just passed round 2. If you want to stop or change the law, call or email your MEP before the third round of voting.