Websites and businesses across Europe went dark yesterday in protest of disgraceful changes to copyright law being introduced by the European Union.
Ahead of a final vote on the legislation next Tuesday, March 26th, a number of European Wikipedia sites are going dark for the day, blocking all access and directing users to contact their local EU representative to protest the laws. Other major
sites, such as Twitch and PornHub, are showing protest banners on their homepages and social media. Meanwhile, any users uploading content to Reddit will be shown this notice: Critics of the Copyright Directive say it could lead to messages like
this.
The law in question is the EU Copyright Directive, a long-awaited update to copyright law. Two provisions have been singled out by critics as dangerous to European people's freedom and livehoods.
These are Article 11, which lets publishers charge platforms if they link to their stories (the link tax'), and Article 13, which makes platforms legally responsible for users uploading copyrighted material (the so-called 'upload filter').
Article 13 is particularly dangerous, say critics. It will make all platforms hosting user-generated content legally responsible for users uploading copyrighted content. The only way to stop these uploads, say critics, will be to scan content
before its uploaded, leading to the creation of filters that will err on the side of censorship and will be abused by copyright trolls.
Wikipedia said the rules would be a "net loss for free knowledge." Volunteer editors for the German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak Wikipedias have all blacked out their sites for the day.
As well as the website blackouts , more than five million internet users have signed a petition protesting Article 13 . Marches and demonstrations are also planned in European cities across the weekend and on Monday and Tuesday before the final
vote.
The official version of the #copyright trilogue agreement is online now, translations will follow shortly. Don't get a heart attack when you see #Article13 has been renumbered #Article17, both the old and the new numbers will show up on MEPs'
voting lists.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2018-0245-AM-271-271_EN.pdf
Our efforts to defeat #Article13 just got a huge boost! Polish @Platforma_org will vote AGAINST the #copyright directive unless #Article13 is deleted! They're the second largest single political party in EPP after @CDU. Thanks @MichalBoni
https://twitter.com/MichalBoni/status/1109057398566764544 #SaveYourInternet
At a press conference in Berlin, @AxelVossMdEP confirmed rumours that some press publishers have threatened parliamentarians with bad election coverage if they vote against the #copyright reform. Voss does not consider this problematic.
#Article11 #Article13 #SaveYourInternet
Pornhub posted a banner at the top of the European version of its site on Thursday, as seen in the image at the top of this page. The discussion forum Reddit204the self-described front page of the internet204and the sprawling online encyclopedia
Wikipedia also protested the planned new law, according to a Business Insider report .
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns repeated attacks by the Chinese embassy against Swedish journalists and insists that diplomatic missions have no say in the editorial content of media in their host country.
Chinese ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, has embarked on a truth crusade against the country's media since taking office in August 2017. The ambassador seems to have trouble understanding that in Sweden, a country ranked second in the RSF's
2018 World Press Freedom Index, journalists are not subject to censorship.
On the embassy's website, the ambassador recently posted a long, unsigned attack against SVT Nyheter, a major Swedish news outlet. The diplomat castigates the site for giving a platform to David Liao, Representative to the Taipei Mission in
Sweden, on February 27. Liao published an opinion piece calling support for Taiwanese democracy against Chinese threat. According to Gui Congyou, the article challenges the one China principle and amounts to serious political provocation. Beijing
is very aggressive in claiming sovereignty over the island of Taiwan, despite it having an independent government since 1949.
The attack on SVT Nyheter is indeed not an isolated incident. Since July of 2018, the Chinese Embassy in Stockholm has attacked multiple Swedish news sources. The ambassador was particularly harsh towards Swedish journalist Jojje Olsson, author
of a book on the Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, who was kidnapped in Thailand in 2015 and is still detained in China with no scheduled sentencing. Last December, he also attacked Swedish journalist and commentator Kurdo Baksi, accusing him of
instigating hatred against China.
The new EU Copyright Directive will be up for its final vote in the week of Mar 25, and like any piece of major EU policy, it has been under discussion for many years and had all its areas of controversy resolved a year ago -- but then German
MEP Axel Voss took over as the "rapporteur" (steward) of the Directive and reintroduced the long-abandoned idea of forcing all online services to use filters to block users from posting anything that anyone, anywhere claimed was their
copyrighted work.
There are so many obvious deficiencies with adding filters to every message-board, online community, and big platform that the idea became political death, as small- and medium-sized companies pointed out that you can't fix the EU's internet by
imposing costs that only US Big Tech firms could afford to pay, thus wiping out all European competition.
So Voss switched tactics, and purged all mention of filters from the Directive, and began to argue that he didn't care how online services guaranteed that their users didn't infringe anyone's copyrights, even copyrights in works that had only
been created a few moments before and that no one had ever seen before, ever. Voss said that it didn't matter how billions of user posts were checked, just so long as it all got filtered.
(It's like saying, "I expect you to deliver a large, four-legged African land-mammal with a trunk, tusk and a tail, but it doesn't have to be an elephant -- any animal that fits those criteria will do).
Now, in a refreshingly frank interview, Voss has come clean: the only way to comply with Article 13 will be for every company to install filters.
When asked whether filters will be sufficient to keep Youtube users from infringing copyright, Voss said, "If the platform's intention is to give people access to copyrighted works, then we have to think about whether that kind of business
should exist." That is, if Article 13 makes it impossible to have an online platform where the public is allowed to make work available without first having to submit it to legal review, maybe there should just no longer be anywhere for the
public to make works available.
Here's what Europeans can do about this:
*
Pledge 2019 : make your MEP promise to vote against Article 13. The vote comes just before elections, so MEPs are extremely interested in the issues on voters' minds.
*
Save Your Internet : contact your MEP and ask them to protect the internet from this terrible idea.
* Turn out and protest
on March 23 , two days ahead of the vote. Protests are planned in cities and towns in every EU member-state.
Members of the European Parliament are considering a proposition for the censorship of terrorist internet content issued by the European Commission last September.
The IMCO Committee ("Internal Market and Consumers protection") has just published its initial opinions on the proposition.
The idea is that the government of any European Member State will be able to order any website to remove content considered "terrorist". No independent judicial authorisation will be needed to do so, letting governments abuse the wide
definition of "terrorism". The only thing IMCO accepted to add is for government's orders to be subject to "judicial review", which can mean anything.
In France, the government's orders to remove "terrorist content" are already subject to "judicial review", where an independent body is notified of all removal orders and may ask judges to asses them. This has not been of much
help: only once has this censorship been submitted to a judge's review. It was found to be unlawful, but more than one year and half after it was ordered. During this time, the French government was able to abusively censor content, in this case,
far-left publications by two French Indymedia outlets.
Far from simplifying, this Regulation will add confusion as authorities from one member state will be able to order removal in other one, without necessarily understanding context.
Unrealistic removal delays
Regarding the one hour delay within which the police can order a hosting service provider to block any content reported as "terrorist", there was no real progress either. It has been replaced by a deadline of at least eight hours, with
a small exception for "microentreprises" that have not been previously subject to a removal order (in this case, the "deadline shall be no sooner than the end of the next working day").
This narrow exception will not allow the vast majority of Internet actors to comply with such a strict deadline. Even if the IMCO Committee has removed any mention of proactive measures that can be imposed on Internet actors, and has stated that
"automated content filters" shall not be used by hosting service providers, this very tight deadline, and the threat of heavy fines will only incite them to adopt the moderation tools developed by the Web's juggernauts (Facebook and
Google) and use the broadest possible definition of terrorism to avoid the risk of penalties. The impossible obligation to provide a point of contact reachable 24/7 has not been modified either. The IMCO opinion has even worsened the financial
penalties that can be imposed: it is now "at least" 1% and up to 4% of the hosting service provider's turnover.
Next steps
The next step will be on 11 March, when the CULT Committee (Culture and Education) will adopt its opinion.
The last real opportunity to obtain the rejection of this dangerous text will be on 21 March 2019, in the LIBE Committee (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs). European citizens must contact their MEPs to demand this rejection. We have
provided a
dedicated page on our website with an analysis of this Regulation and a tool to directly contact the MEPs in charge.
Starting today, and for the weeks to come, call your MEPS and demand they reject this text.
German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this
month, and its
Article 13 requires that online communities, platforms, and services prevent their users from committing copyright infringement, rather than ensuring that infringing materials are speedily removed.
In a new
official statement on the Directive (
English translation ), Kelber warns that Article 13 will inevitably lead to the use of automated filters, because there is no imaginable way for the organisations that run online services to examine everything their users post and determine
whether each message, photo, video, or audio clip is a copyright violation.
Kelber goes on to warn that this will exacerbate the already dire problem of market concentration in the tech sector, and expose Europeans to particular risk of online surveillance and manipulation.
That's because under Article 13, Europe's online companies will be
required to block all infringement , even if they are very small and specialised (the Directive gives an online community three years' grace period before it acquires this obligation, less time if the service grosses over ?5m/year). These
small- and medium-sized European services (SMEs) will not be able to afford to license the catalogues of the big movie, music, and book publishers, so they'll have to rely on filters to block the unlicensed material.
But if a company is too small to afford licenses, it's also too small to build filters. Google's Content ID for YouTube cost a reported ?100 million to build and run, and it only does a fraction of the blocking required under Article 13. That
means that they'll have to buy filter services from someone else. The most likely filter vendors are the US Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook, who will have to build and run filters anyway, and could recoup their costs by renting access
to these filters to smaller competitors.
As Kelber explains, this means that Europeans who use European services in the EU will nevertheless likely have every public communication they make channeled into offshore tech companies' servers for analysis. These European services will then
have to channel much of their revenues to the big US tech companies or specialist filter vendors.
So Article 13 guarantees America's giant companies a permanent share of all small EU companies' revenues and access to an incredibly valuable data-stream generated by all European discourse, conversation, and expression. These companies
have a long track record of capitalising on users' personal data to their advantage, and between that advantage and the revenues they siphon off of their small European competitors, they are likely to gain permanent dominance over Europe's
Internet.
Kelber says that this is the inevitable consequence of filters, and has challenged the EU to explain how Article 13's requirements could be satisfied without filters. He's called for "a thoughtful overhaul" of the bill based on
"data privacy considerations," describing the market concentration as a "clear and present danger."
We agree, and so do millions of Europeans. In fact,
the petition against Article 13 has attracted more signatures than any other petition in European history and is on track to be the most popular petition in the history of the human race within a matter of days.
With less than a month to go before the final vote in the European Parliament on the new Copyright Directive, Kelber's remarks couldn't be more urgent. Subjecting Europeans' communications to mass commercial surveillance and arbitrary censorship
is bad for human rights and free expression, but as Kelber so ably argues, it's also a disaster for competition.
In the evening of February 13, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council concluded the trilogue negotiations with a final text for the new EU Copyright Directive.
For two years we've debated different drafts and versions of the controversial Articles 11 and 13. Now, there is no more ambiguity: This law will fundamentally change the internet as we know it -- if it is adopted in the upcoming final vote. But we can still prevent that!
Please click the links to take a look at the final wording of
Article 11 and
Article 13 . Here's my summary:
Commercial sites and apps where users can post material must make "best efforts" to preemptively buy licences for anything that users may possibly upload -- that is: all copyrighted content in the world. An impossible feat.
In addition, all but very few sites (those both tiny and very new) will need to do everything in their power to prevent anything from ever going online that may be an unauthorised copy of a work that a rightsholder has registered with the
platform. They will have no choice but to deploy upload filters , which are by their nature both expensive and
error-prone .
Should a court ever find their licensing or filtering efforts not fierce enough, sites are directly liable for infringements as if they had committed them themselves. This massive threat will lead platforms to over-comply with these
rules to stay on the safe side, further worsening the impact on our freedom of speech.
Reproducing more than "single words or very short extracts" of news stories will require a licence. That will likely cover many of the snippets commonly shown alongside links today in order to give you an idea of what they lead
to. We will have to wait and see how courts interpret what "very short" means in practice -- until then, hyperlinking (with snippets) will be mired in legal uncertainty.
No exceptions are made even for services run by individuals, small companies or non-profits, which probably includes any monetised blogs or websites.
Other provisions
The project to allow Europeans to conduct Text and Data Mining , crucial for modern research and the development of artificial intelligence, has been obstructed with too many caveats and requirements. Rightholders can opt out of having
their works datamined by anyone except research organisations.
Authors' rights: The Parliament's proposal that authors should have a right to proportionate remuneration has been severely watered down: Total buy-out contracts will continue to be the norm.
Minor improvements for access to cultural heritage : Libraries will be able to publish out-of-commerce works online and museums will no longer be able to claim copyright on photographs of centuries-old paintings.
How we got here Former digital Commissioner Oettinger proposed the law
The history of this law is a shameful one.
From the very beginning , the purpose of Articles 11 and 13 was never to solve clearly-defined issues in copyright law with well-assessed measures, but to serve powerful special interests , with hardly any concern for the collateral
damage caused.
In his conservative EPP group, the driving force behind this law, dissenters were marginalised . The work of their initially-appointed representative
was thrown out after the conclusions she reached were too sensible. Mr Voss then voted so blindly in favour of any and all restrictive measures that he was
caught by surprise by some of the nonsense he had gotten approved. His party, the German CDU/CSU, nonchalantly violated the coalition agreement they had signed (which rejected upload filters), paying no mind to their own
minister for digital issues .
It took efforts equally herculean and sisyphean
across party lines to prevent the text from turning out even worse than it now is.
In the end, a closed-door horse trade between France and Germany was enough to outweigh the objections... so far.
What's important to note, though: It's not "the EU" in general that is to blame -- but those who put special interests above fundamental rights who currently hold considerable power. You can change that at the polls! The anti-EU
far right is trying to seize this opportunity to promote their narrow-minded nationalist agenda -- when in fact without the persistent support of the far-right ENF Group (dominated by the Rassemblement/Front National ) the law
could have been stopped in the crucial Legal Affairs Committee and in general would not be as extreme as it is today.
We can still stop this law
Our best chance to stop the EU copyright law: The upcoming Parliament vote.
The Parliament and Council negotiators who agreed on the final text now return to their institutions seeking approval of the result. If it passes both votes unchanged, it becomes EU law , which member states are forced to implement into
national law.
In both bodies, there is resistance.
The Parliament's process starts with the approval by the Legal Affairs Committee -- which is likely to be given on Monday, February 18.
Next, at a date to be announced, the EU member state governments will vote in the Council. The law can be stopped here either by 13 member state governments or by any number of governments who together represent 35% of the EU population (
calculator ). Last time, 8 countries representing 27% of the population were opposed. Either a large country like Germany or several small ones would need to change their minds: This is the less likely way to stop it.
Our best bet: The final vote in the plenary of the European Parliament , when all 751 MEPs, directly elected to represent the people, have a vote. This will take place either between March 25 and 28, on April 4 or between April 15
and 18. We've already
demonstrated last July that a majority against a bad copyright proposal is achievable .
The plenary can vote to kill the bill -- or to make changes , like removing Articles 11 and 13. In the latter case, it's up to the Council to decide whether to accept these changes (the Directive then becomes law without these articles) or
to shelve the project until after the EU elections in May, which will reshuffle all the cards.
This is where you come in
The final Parliament vote will happen mere weeks before the EU elections . Most MEPs -- and certainly all parties -- are going to be seeking reelection. Articles 11 and 13 will be defeated if enough voters make these issues relevant to the
campaigns. (
Here's how to vote in the EU elections -- change the language to one of your country's official ones for specific information)
It is up to you to make clear to your representatives: Their vote on whether to break the internet with Articles 11 and 13 will make or break your vote in the EU elections. Be insistent -- but please always stay polite.
Article 13 is the
on-again /
off-again controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service
provider to know that a copyright infringement had taken place.
This will require unimaginable sums of money to even attempt, and the attempt will fail. The outcome of Article 13 will be a radical contraction of alternatives to the U.S. Big Tech platforms and the giant media conglomerates. That means
that media companies will be able to pay creators less for their work, because creators will have no alternative to the multinational entertainment giants.
Throwing Creators Under the Bus
The media companies lured creators' groups into supporting Article 13 by arguing that media companies and the creators they distribute have the same interests. But in the endgame of Article 13, the media companies
threw their creator colleagues under the bus , calling for the deletion of clauses that protect artists' rights to fair compensation from media companies, prompting
entirely justifiable howls of outrage from those betrayed artists' rights groups.
But the reality is that Article 13 was always going to be bad for creators. At best, all Article 13 could hope for was to move a few euros from Big Tech's balance-sheet to Big Content's balance-sheet (and that would likely be a temporary
situation). Because Article 13 would reduce the options for creators by crushing independent media and tech companies, any windfalls that media companies made would go to their executives and shareholders, not to the artists who would have no
alternative but to suck it up and take what they're offered.
After all: when was the last time a media company celebrated a particularly profitable year by increasing their royalty rates?
It Was Always Going to Be Filters
The initial versions of Article 13 required companies to build copyright filters, modeled after YouTube's "Content ID" system: YouTube invites a select group of trusted rightsholders to upload samples of works they claim as their
copyright, and then blocks (or diverts revenue from) any user's video that seems to match these copyright claims.
There are many problems with this system. On the one hand,
giant media companies complain that they are far too easy for dedicated infringers to defeat; and on the other hand, Content ID ensnares all kinds of legitimate forms of expression, including
silence ,
birdsong , and
music uploaded by the actual artist for distribution on YouTube . Sometimes, this is because a rightsholder has falsely claimed copyrights that don't belong to them; sometimes, it's because Content ID generated a "false positive"
(that is, made a mistake); and sometimes it's because software just can't tell the difference between an infringing use of a copyrighted work and a use that falls under "fair dealing," like criticism, commentary, parody, etc. No one has
trained an algorithm to recognise parody, and no one is likely to do so any time soon (it would be great if we could train humans to reliably recognise parody!).
Copyright filters are a terrible idea. Google has spent a reported $100 million (and counting) to build a very limited copyright filter that only looks at videos and only blocks submissions from a select group of pre-vetted rightsholders. Article
13 covers all possible copyrighted works: text, audio, video, still photographs, software, translations. And some versions of Article 13 have required platforms to block infringing publications of every copyrighted work, even those
that no one has told them about: somehow, your community message-board for dog-fanciers is going to have to block its users from plagiarising 50-year-old newspaper articles, posts from other message-boards, photos downloaded from social
media, etc. Even the milder "compromise" versions of Article 13 required online services to block publication of anything they'd been informed about, with dire penalties for failing to honour a claim, and no penalties for bogus claims.
But even as filters block things that aren't copyright infringement, they still allow dedicated infringers to operate with few hindrances. That's because filters use relatively simple, static techniques to inspect user uploads, and
infringers can probe the filters' blind-spots for free, trying different techniques until they hit on ways to get around them. For example, some image filters can be bypassed by
flipping the picture from left to right , or rendering it in black-and-white instead of color. Filters are "black boxes" that can be repeatedly tested by dedicated infringers to see what gets through.
For non-infringers -- the dolphins caught in copyright's tuna-nets -- there is no underground of tipsters who will share defeat-techniques to help get your content unstuck. If you're an AIDS researcher whose videos
have been falsely claimed by AIDS deniers in order to censor them, or police brutality activists whose bodycam videos have been blocked by police departments looking to evade criticism, you are already operating at the limit of your
abilities, just pursuing your own cause. You can try to become a filter-busting expert in addition to your research, activism, or communications, but there are only so many hours in a day, and the overlap between people with something to say and
people who can figure out how to evade overzealous (or corrupted) copyright filters just isn't very large.
All of this put filters into such bad odor that mention of them was purged from Article 13, but
despite obfuscation , it was clear that Article 13's purpose was to mandate filters: there's just no way to imagine that every tweet, Facebook update, message-board comment, social media photo, and other piece of user-generated content could
be evaluated for copyright compliance without an automated system. And once you make online forums liable for their users' infringement, they have to find some way to evaluate everything their users post.
Just Because Artists Support Media Companies, It Doesn't Mean Media Companies Support Artists
Spending hundreds of millions of euros to build filters that don't stop infringers but do improperly censor legitimate materials (whether due to malice, incompetence, or sloppiness) will not put any money in artists' pockets.
Which is not to say that these won't tilt the balance towards media companies (at least for a while). Because filters will always fail at least some of the time, and because Article 13 doesn't exempt companies from liability when this happens,
Big Tech will have to come to some kind of accommodation with the biggest media companies -- Get Out Of Jail cards, along with back-channels that media companies can use to get their own material unstuck when it is mistakenly blocked by a filter.
(It's amazing how often one part of a large media conglomerate will take down its own content, uploaded by another part of the same sprawling giant.)
But it's pretty naive to imagine that transferring money from Big Tech to Big Content will enrich artists. Indeed, since there's no way that smaller European tech companies can afford to comply with Article 13, artists will have no alternative
but to sign up with the major media companies, even if they don't like the deal they're offered.
Smaller companies play an important role today in the EU tech ecosystem. There are national alternatives to Instagram, Google, and Facebook that outperform U.S. Big Tech in their countries of origin. These will not survive contact with Article
13. Article 13's tiny exemptions for smaller tech companies were always mere ornaments, and the latest version of Article 13
renders them useless .
Smaller media companies -- often run by independent artists to market their own creations, or those of a few friends -- will likewise find themselves without a seat at the table with Big Tech, whose focus will be entirely on keeping the media
giants from using Article 13's provisions to put them out of business altogether.
Meanwhile, "filters for everything" will be a bonanza for fraudsters and crooks who prey on artists. Article 13 will force these systems to err on the side of over-blocking potential copyright violations, and that's
a godsend for blackmailers , who can use bogus copyright claims to shut down artists' feeds, and demand money to rescind the claims. In theory, artists victimised in this way can try to get the platforms to recognise the scam, but without
the shelter of a big media company with its back-channels into the big tech companies, these artists will have to get in line behind millions of other people who have been unjustly filtered to plead their case.
If You Think Big Tech Is Bad Now...
In the short term, Article 13 tilts the field toward media companies, but that advantage will quickly evaporate.
Without the need to buy or crush upstart competitors in Europe, the American tech giants will only grow bigger and harder to tame. Even the aggressive antitrust work of the European Commission will do little to encourage competition if competing
against Big Tech requires hundreds of millions for copyright compliance as part of doing business -- costs that Big Tech never had to bear while it was growing, and that would have crushed the tech companies before they could grow.
Ten years after Article 13 passes, Big Tech will be bigger than ever and more crucial to the operation of media companies. The Big Tech companies will not treat this power as a public trust to be equitably managed for all: they will treat it as a
commercial advantage to be exploited in every imaginable way. When the day comes that FIFA or Universal or Sky needs Google or Facebook or Apple much more than the tech companies need the media companies, the tech companies will squeeze,
and squeeze, and squeeze.
This will, of course, harm the media companies' bottom line. But you know who else it will hurt? Artists.
Because media giants, like other companies who have a buyer's market for their raw materials -- that is, art and other creative works -- do not share their windfalls with their suppliers, but they absolutely expect their suppliers to share their
pain.
When media companies starve, they take artists with them. When artists have no other option, the media companies squeeze them even harder .
What Is To Be Done?
Neither media giants nor tech giants have artists' interests at heart.
Both kinds of company are full of people who care about artists, but institutionally, they act for their shareholders, and every cent they give to an artist is a cent they can't return to those investors.
One important check on this dynamic is competition. Antitrust regulators have many tools at their disposal, and those tools have been largely idle for more than a generation. Companies have been allowed to grow by merger, or by acquiring nascent
competitors, leaving artists with fewer media companies and fewer tech companies, which means more chokepoints where they are shaken down for their share of the money from their work.
Another important mechanism could be genuine copyright reform, such as re-organizing the existing regulatory framework for copyright, or encouraging new revenue-sharing schemes such as voluntary blanket licenses, which could allow artists to opt
into a pool of copyrights in exchange for royalties.
Any such scheme must be designed to fight historic forms of corruption, such as collecting societies that unfairly share out license payments, or media companies that claim these. That's the sort of future-proof reform that the Copyright
Directive could have explored, before it got hijacked by vested interests.
In the absence of these policies, we may end up enriching the media companies, but not the artists whose works they sell. In an unfair marketplace, simply handing more copyrights to artists is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch-money: the
bullies will just take the extra money, too, and your kid will still go hungry.
Artists Should Be On the Side of Free Expression
It's easy to focus on media and art when thinking about Article 13, but that's not where its primary effect will be felt.
The platforms that Article 13 targets aren't primarily entertainment systems: they are used for everything, from romance to family life, employment to entertainment, health to leisure, politics and civics, and more besides.
Copyright filters will impact all of these activities, because they will all face the same problems of false-positives, censorship, fraud and more.
The arts has always championed free expression for all , not just for artists. Big Tech and Big Media already exert enormous control over our public and civic lives. Dialing that control up is bad for all of us, not just those of us
in the arts.
Artists and audiences share an interest in promoting the fortunes of artists: people don't buy books or music or movies because they want to support media companies, they do it to support creators. As always, the right side for artists to be on
is the side of the public: the side of free expression, without corporate gatekeepers of any kind.
Berlin, I Love You is a 2019 Germany romance by Dianna Agron, Peter Chelsom...
Starring Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren and Luke Wilson.
Latest installment of the Cities of Love series (Paris, je t'aime / New York, I Love You / Rio, Eu Te Amo), this collective feature-film is made of ten stories of romance set in the German capital.
A contribution by the Chinese artist, film-maker and activist Ai Weiwei to a film called Berlin, I Love You , was cut by the producers on concern it could create difficulties for them with the Chinese authorities.
The film is part of a series known as Cities of Love created by Emmanuel Benbihy. The Berlin movie features 11 directors and stars Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren. Ai directed his contribution, which focussed on his relationship
with his son while in detention in China in 2015. It was included in the marketing teaser but did not make it into the finished film.
It was infuriating to find our involvement had been erased, Ai said in a statement on Deutsche Welle television. The reason we were given for the episode's removal was that my political status had made it difficult for the production team to
secure further funding.
Ai said another reason was that the organisers of the Berlin Film Festival told the producers of Berlin, I Love You that the artist's contribution would make it impossible to screen the film at this year's edition of the festival, which ended on
17 February.
AI said the fact that the next film in the Cities of Love series centres on Shanghai also played a role in the producers' decision to scrap his contribution to Berlin, I Love You. He added:
The situation has got worse. China has become much more powerful and globally plays a major role in politics and economics. At the same time, China starts promoting its soft power. The effect is clearly being felt in the entertainment industry,
he adds.
Thankfully, Europeans aren't taking this lying down. With the final vote expected to come during the March 25-28 session, mere weeks before European elections, European activists are pouring the pressure onto their Members of the European
Parliament (MEPs), letting them know that their vote on this dreadful mess will be on everyone's mind during the election campaigns.
The epicenter of the uprising is Germany, which is only fitting, given that German MEP Axel Voss is almost singlehandedly responsible for poisoning the Directive with rules that will lead to mass surveillance and mass censorship, not to mention
undermining much of Europe's tech sector.
The German Consumer Association were swift to condemn the Directive,
stating : "The reform of copyright law in this form does not benefit anyone, let alone consumers. MEPs are now obliged to do so. Since the outcome of the trilogue falls short of the EU Parliament's positions at key points, they should
refuse to give their consent."
A
viral video of Axel Voss being confronted by activists has been picked up by politicians campaigning against Voss's Christian Democratic Party in the upcoming elections, spreading to Germany's top TV personalities, like Jan Böhmermann.
In the meantime,
the petition to save Europe from the Directive --already the largest in EU history--keeps racking up more signatures, and is on track to be the largest petition in the history of the world.
Websites and businesses across Europe went dark yesterday in protest of disgraceful changes to copyright law being introduced by the European Union.
Update: Anti censorship hub
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns repeated attacks by the Chinese embassy against Swedish journalists and insists that diplomatic missions have no say in the editorial content of media in their host country.
German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this
month, and its 
In the evening of February 13, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council concluded the trilogue negotiations with a final text for the new EU Copyright Directive.
