greywash:

theconqueeror:

labambinafantasma:

If you’re European, in a couple of weeks you will be denied any and all access to fandom contents on Tumblr and everywhere else on the internet. Here’s why.

On June, 20th the JURI of European Parliament approved of the articles 11 and 13 of the new Copyright Law. These articles are also known as the “Link Tax” and the “Censorship Machines” articles.

Articles 13 in particular forces every internet platform to filter all the contents we upload online, ending once and for all the fandom culture. Which means you won’t be able to upload any type of fandom works like fan arts, fan fictions, gif sets from your favourite films and series, edits, because it’s all copyrighted material. And you won’t also be able to share, enjoy or download other’s contents, because the use of links will be completely restricted.

But not everything’s lost yet. There’s another round of voting scheduled for the early days of July.

What you can do now to save our internet, is to share these informations with all of your family members and friends, and to ask to your MEP (the members of the European Parliament from your country) to vote NO at the next round, to vote against articles 11 and 13.

Here you can find more news and all the details to contact your MEP:

https://saveyourinternet.eu

Also, sign and share this petition:

https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet?recruiter=50668942&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial

We have just a couple of weeks to stop this complete madness, don’t let them dictating the way we enjoy our internet.

#SaveYourInternet now!

It’s funny how y’all will reblog any and all US things but when whole Europe might lose access to internet then everything is quiet.

Okay, so I’ve got some THINGS TO SAY, one of which is to roll my eyes massively at the above poster (not the OP):

If it seems as though Article 13 has sprung up out of nowhere,
blindsiding people, it’s because it quite literally has. “It wasn’t
going to be in the final draft but it was reintroduced on GDPR day [May
25th, the day GDPR went into effect],” says Cory Doctorow, who is
organizing against the proposal with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

(bolding mine) This is from an article in the Verge from two days ago, i.e., the day before the JURI vote, and overall, this law has not gotten nearly as much news coverage as it probably should. My primary news source is European (still, for a little while) and I hadn’t even heard of this law until today, i.e. after the JURI vote, so like, before you all: heartless internet people don’t reblog stuff having to do with Europe!! Maybe check how much news coverage it’s actually gotten.

Also, framing this as “when whole Europe might lose access to internet” is hugely misleading: it manages to both understate and overstate the problem. If you want a good source on what this law actually does and why it’s bad, Wired has a good breakdown. TL;DR it’s bad, it’s really really bad, not because it will make the internet go dark in Europe but because it will fundamentally change how the internet works for the entire world.

If you don’t want to click on the link, Article 13 is intended to end a “safe harbor” exemption that’s so far limited the penalties for companies that host user content, when that user content infringes on copyright; and requires all companies to build and check content against a database of copyrighted materials, like YouTube Content ID. It’s being pushed by the music industry (who—really, guys, Napster was a long time ago, you really need to get over it), but because of the way the law is written it would affect all companies that host user content, including (definitely) Tumblr and also potentially the AO3—even though transformative works are (probably) covered under fair use and are (probably) not actually illegal, because this kind of filtering frequently is overaggressive/doesn’t work correctly on either a technical or a legal level.

In other words: if you read the original post and were like: pfffft, fanfic’s not illegal: it doesn’t matter. This absolutely will catch material that’s not actually in violation of copyright, because it already does.

It is possible that companies that allow hosting of user content will just choose to blackout all of Europe, but it’s unlikely—the EU’s too big a market. What’s more unlikely is that tech companies will try to comply—which would be hugely, massively disastrous for the entire internet.

And the link tax (Article 11) is arguably even more dangerous than Article 13, because it will directly commodify links to reputable news sources, which is likely to make linking to unreputable news sources more appealing, just because they’ll probably be cheaper. Think the Guardian, WaPo, the NY Times, CNN, The Economist, the WSJ all falling off Google News results in favor of some asshole blogger, because the blogger doesn’t require a license for links. If you feel like you want to get your news from me, boy, guys, I have bad news for you.

Anyway the real point here is that because the internet is international, this law doesn’t just affect Europe, so don’t write this one off as a “European” issue—just like we’ve all been getting GDPR notices in the last few weeks as a result of an EU privacy law, we can anticipate that if this one passes, it will likewise affect all of us as well.