Tuesday morning at 10am ET the House Communications and Technology subcommittee will meet and vote on the Save the Internet Act – the best bill we have to restore net neutrality. As soon as the hearing begins you’ll be able to watch the livestream here:
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Unfortunately telecom lobbyists are working overtime to convince committee lawmakers to add dangerous amendments that could completely gut the bill and leave gaping loopholes for Internet providers to block, throttle, and charge users new fees for access.
To pass a clean bill with no bad amendments we need everyone to call their members of Congress and make sure they know the whole Internet is watching.
If we get the bill out of committee without any bad amendments, then we have a solid shot of winning the next big vote on the House floor in the week of April 8. But if the bill gets gutted, we’re back to square one.
Call your lawmakers ASAP and demand they vote for a clean bill to restore net neutrality. Read the rest
Last spring, a coalition of young European political activists adopted this motion opposing the upload filters and link taxes in the new Copyright Directive, which the EU Parliament is about to vote on.
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Update: The EPP has backed off of this demand and denied having made it, but Pirate MEP Julia Reda has documentary evidence that the EPP tried to sneak in this vote and only reversed the plan after a massive public outcry. Keep up the good work and get ready to hit the streets on March 23!
On March 23, Europeans will take to the streets to demand that Members of the European Parliament vote against Article 13, the part of the upcoming Copyright Directive that will replace the internet with a "filternet" where you aren't allowed to write, post, or say anything that might be a match for a copyrighted work, and where small, EU-based tech platforms will be snuffed out, leaving nothing but US Big Tech sitting in judgment of the continent's discourse.
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The EU's on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who understand that the CEOs of multinational entertainment companies won't stand for any compromise, or even the appearance of compromise, and so the process fell apart.
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YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's annual letter to creators takes a strong position on Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive, which forces companies offering public communications platforms to maintain crowdsourced databases of copyrighted works that users are blocked from uploading.
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The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).
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Next Wednesday, the EU will vote on a potentially internet-destroying regulation that will ban linking to the news unless you're using a service that has paid for a "linking license" from the news site you're linking to; and that will force all user-submitted content (text, audio, video, code, stills) through copyright filters that will censor anything that matches a database of works that anyone can put anything in, whether or not it is in copyright.
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In just five days, a key EU vote could visit untold harm on the whole world's internet by subjecting all public communications to algorithmic censorship: the proposed Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive will force sites to build vast databases of known copyrighted works, and then block any user submissions (text, audio, video, code, stills) that seems to match a copyrighted work, and anyone can add anything to the blacklist of unpublishable works, without any proof of copyright and without any regard to fair dealing and other vital protections for free expression.
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