The months of debate over Article 13 of the new EU Copyright Directive (passed in a tragicomedy of errors when some MEPs got confused and pushed the wrong buttons), the most contentious issue was whether the rule would require online service providers to spend millions on copyright filters, which are known to be error-prone and the source of mountains of algorithmic censorship, as well as being easily abused by would-be censors who can make false copyright claims with impunity and use them to prevent images, videos, sounds and words from ever appearing on the internet.
Since 2014, we've chronicled the reality-challenged internet proposals of the scandal-haunted EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger; now, on the eve of Oettinger's promotion to EU budget chief, MEP Julia Reda lists the 10 normal web activities that Oettinger has sought to ban, from sharing snippets of 20 year old news articles to quoting three-word newspaper headlines to creating and operating a search engine.
The European Commission's "copyright modernisation" plan is an unmitigated disaster, but there's one particularly insane section of it that I want to call your attention to: the "link tax," which entitles publishers to payment when people link to them on the internet.
Meghan writes, "You've probably never been kept awake at night worrying about a European Commission communication. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be. Today the Commission published its roadmap for EU copyright reform, and despite the fanfare around portability of Netflix, it's clear that the bad idea known as 'ancillary copyright' has come back — from the dead! — Read the rest
Digital commissioner Günther Oettinger (CDU – EPP) is joining with European Parliament president Martin Schulz (SPD – S&D) in pressing the European Commission to create a copyright interest in links, meaning that making a link to a Web-page that contains infringing material would expose you to liability for copyright infringement yourself.
Spain's insane new compulsory fee for quoting news stories has shut down Google News there — and will prevent any new news search-engines from emerging to replace it.
