izzymalec:

i keep seeing these posts about the whole eu parliament voting for article 11 & 13 situation and why we have to sign this petition to stop it but the posts hardly explain anything so i did some research.

the situation is that if the bill is approved by the parliament plenary, websites will have to pay for (or block) content that’s put on them if the content is copyrighted.

the main problem with this is that algorithms will be used to detect copyrighted material, and those aren’t unfailable, critics say that they wouldn’t understand satire and therefore can end up censoring material but more importantly quotes that are taken from somewhere else and links that lead to somewhere else. 

this will mostly affect sites like google news (who wouldn’t be allowed to show headlines or videos from different websites), facebook and youtube (having to check content while it uploads).

not so fun facts about these articles

• idea by günther oettinger, the european commissioner for budget and human resources. (why he believes that this falls into his field of expertise is unclear to me) (listen to him speak english here)
  
• the bill passes when the plenary votes in july and while the plenary usually votes the same way the parliament does, the vote was a very close one, with 13 votes for the bill and 12 against it.
• while the intention is to prevent people from posting copyrighted material and protecting the creators of said material another issue would be that big sites like the ones mentioned above would have no problem to pay for it, smaller sites such as artists etc. wouldn’t be able to afford to check everything, making big businesses profit again.
• notable: similar bills were passed in germany (2013) and spain, both failed, but in different ways.
• in germany the media gave google a free pass while in spain (where the law was stricter) google news is no longer available.
• in conclusion: yes, this bill has huge flaws and could end up in censorship and you can fight against it, but sharing hysteria on tumblr by claiming that you wouldn’t be able to share memes anymore or that it is “the end of fandom culture” or that the entire eu won’t be on the internet anymore is not the right way to go here and frankly, ridiculous.

thanks for coming to my ted talk (sources (in german, sorry) x, x, x)