Topic: Article 13 - Copyright Directive

This is something that has only just been brought to my attention today and has gone heavily the under the radar.

In the EU later this month the European parliament will vote on "Article 13", otherwise known as the Copyright Directive.

This act is the most horrendous thing to happen to the internet.

Here's a rundown:

All online content, anything at all, will be taxed.

So if you link a new story as a source, boom, "link tax".

If you share, upload, download, or link any information or works, be it YouTube videos, live streams, blog posts, articles, that have any possible links to copyright material, you, or the platform you are doing so on, must have written permission from copyright holders otherwise anything can be removed or used as liable.

To put this in perspective, to anyone in the EU, if you were here on this forum, discussing a Switch game, and link an article to do with that discussion, you don't have legal permission to do.

How do they enforce this? Easy. They go for the platform holders. Any platform like Reddit, Twitch, YouTube, GitHub, hosting any user created works that are potential copyright, will be liable.

Just uploaded a YouTube video discussing a new game? Well bad news, YouTube is now legally liable for that, suddenly your work is gone. Made a meme? Too bad. Linked that site in a forum? Gone.

Platforms can use "Mandatory filtering" that basically filters out this content. But it gets worse, even doing THAT isn't enough under new drafts.

Mr Voss’ latest draft expands the scope of the censorship machines proposal to all web platforms (a) whose purpose is to “give access to copyrighted content uploaded by users” and which (b) “optimise” that content. What counts as optimising? Among a long list of actions, we find that “displaying” the uploads already makes platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement they may include (Recital 37a).

For a platform holder under this bill to prevent itself being legally liable in the EU, it would need to get licenses from every rightsholder on Earth before allowing any user generated content, just in case.

And yes, this DOES breach "general monitoring", where they would be scanning for hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works in user content, but they want to push past that.

For more info, check out this video. It gives a very good rundown of the situation.

This is, ultimately, a death sentence for even this place. We couldn't even link to other sites.

We need to really get the word out about this. This is insane and we needs to do want we need to kill this before it goes into effect.

@Smash_kirby Less than 3 weeks and no one knows its coming

I dont want to live on this planet anymore