Yesterday it was confirmed that MEPs had voted yes to the new Article 13 and 11 (now called 15 and 17) how controversial it is. This new law will greatly affect Internet freedom, and it is a real shame that they are so unaware of having voted positively for this article. But it is even more sad to see that those who have voted against, most of them, have not voted against because they think like this, but to hunt votes, since this thinking predominates among their supporters and the current political parties act more like companies than like matches.
They tend to list to one side or the other depending on the popularity of what they do and if they are going to get votes or not. Just like a company does with its marketing department. Make a market analysis and according to the money (exchange money for votes and you will have it) that they are going to win, they do one thing or another. But to do this, first you have to create a need in these people, as Steve Jobs well exploited at Apple. And to create the need in the people in relation to politics we have the means of "communication" that divide the population, infoxicate or manipulate in many cases.
Alarms 0:
I personally believe that the campaign against these reforms has been such that many users have believed that this could be even worse than it has been. Therefore, alarms out, The Internet will continue to work as it has been before. And for the user of the services there will be almost no difference. And the creators will simply have to tackle a series of new measures for their content. With this I do not mean that they are happy with the reforms, but that sometimes they tell us that everything is going to be a world catastrophe and it is not like that. Like influenza A, for example, that it was going to be a global pandemic, that millions of people would die, comparing it to the Black Death, etc. Y? What happened? Well that ...
Well, with that said, now we go to the purely practical, that is, how is it going to affect us this new Copyright law to the day to day on the Internet, which in short is to bring the filtering system or such strict rights that YouTube has to the entire Internet:
- All platforms, and that includes sites like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia and other Wiki sites, Github, etc., they have to implement strong and restrictive filters to ensure that the content that is published does not violate copyright and if it does, immediately delete the content. This may seem very light, but the law is so ambiguous that it could be used to remove a lot of content ... For example, Google has positioned itself against it despite how restrictive YouTube is already, which we remember that it forced the removal of a video from a interpretation of a song by Bach when he is an author who died in 1750 and it is assumed that copyright is no longer valid when the author has been deceased for at least 70 years ... Or Google itself gave the video of the song "Despasito" as an example of Fonsi, that they would have to withdraw it from YouTube with this new rule, and like that cansion many others. Why? Well, this is where the ambiguity comes in, and although they have rights to distribute said content through a series of agreements with the authors and so on, some of the rights to that content are unknown and they could not establish them. That is why many of the videos on the current streaming platform could be removed.
- In order for the above to be fulfilled, it means that monitor constantly and massively all content that is published on the Internet.
- The authors now have it much more complicated and it will affect the quality and quantity when publishing on blogs, Youtube, Instagram or other platforms, since they will have to be careful and take care not to share copyrighted content, whether they are works of art, photographic images, music, video, text, etc.
- La freedom of expression, privacy, some business initiatives and the creation of startups they are also threatened by these reforms.
- This will make even more powerful and great to the already great ...
Positive things of the laws, because there are also, although I don't think they make up for the bad ones ...
- All EU member countries will have 2 years to adapt these standards. It will not be a radical transition, but a progressive one.
- Now certain services must be more transparent with the authors and editors or other authors we can get more information that we were not given before.
- The copyright or copyright for those authors who are in favor of this type of intellectual property rights.
- The pressures to withdraw Europe services Google and other giants have caused the laws to yield in some respects, such as:
- In principle, these laws prohibited even share snippets code, video, music, etc. subject to rights. That is, things as innocent as sharing a Meme with the image of a movie would be prohibited. However, in the final law this is not the case, and protected works may be uploaded to the network in order to cite, criticize, review, caricature, parody or imitate. So memes, GIFs, etc., will remain available.
- Share snippets of articles and photos It is also not prohibited with these last minute corrections. Google News will be able to continue sharing news articles and images without problem in Europe. And like them, other platforms.
- Services like Spotify are totally legal and they will be able to continue operating normally, since they pay royalties to the authors.
For all this, thank German Voss, the ideologue of these reforms ... and of course the parties that have voted in favor, which you can see in lists by countries on the net. In Spain, PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, PDECAT, PNV and part of the IU have voted in favor of passing these terrible laws. Podemos, ERC, ICV and EQUO have voted against.