mostlysignssomeportents:

The EU is mooting a new copyright regime for the largest market in the
world, and the Commissioners who are drafting the new rules are
completely captured by the entertainment industry, to the extent that
they have ignored their own experts and produced a farcical Big Content
wishlist that includes the most extensive internet censorship regime the
world has ever seen, perpetual monopolies for the biggest players, and a
ban on European creators using Creative Commons licenses to share their
works.

Under the new rules, anyone who allows the public to post material will have to maintain vast databases of copyrighted works claimed by rightsholders,
and any public communications that matches anything in these databases
has to be blocked. These databases have been tried on much more modest
scales – Youtube’s Content ID is a prominent example – and they’re a
mess. Because rightsholders are free to upload anything and claim
ownership of it, Content ID is a font of garbagey, sloppy, fraudulent
copyright abuse: five different companies claim to own the rights to white noise; Samsung claims to own any drawing of its phones; Nintendo claims it owns gamers’ animated mashups; Sony claims it owns stock footage it stole from a filmmaker whose work it had censored; the biggest music companies in the world all claim to own the rights to “Silent Night”, a rogues’ gallery of sleazy copyfraudsters claim to own NASA’s spacecraft landing footage – all in all, these systems benefit the large and the unethical at the cost of small and nimble.

That’s just for starters.

Since these filter systems are incredibly expensive to create and
operate, anyone who wants to get into business competing with the
companies that grew large without having to create systems like these
will have to source hundreds of millions in capital before they can even
enter the market. Youtube 2018 can easily afford Content ID; Youtube
2005 would have been bankrupted if they’d had to build it.

And then there’s the matter of banning Creative Commons licenses.

In order to bail out the largest newspapers in the EU, the Commission is
proposing a Link Tax – a fee that search engines and sites like Boing
Boing will have to pay just for the right to link to news stories on the
web. This idea has been tried before in Spain and Germany and the
newspapers who’d called for it quickly admitted it wasn’t working and
stopped using it.

But the new, worse-than-ever Link Tax contains a new wrinkle:
rightsholders will not be able to waive the right to be compensated
under the Link Tax. That means that European creators – who’ve released
hundreds of millions of works under Creative Commons licenses that
allow for free sharing without fee or permission – will no longer be
able to choose the terms of a Creative Commons license; the inalienable,
unwaivable right to collect rent any time someone links to your
creations will invalidate the core clause in these licenses.

Europeans can write to their MEPs and the European Commission using this joint Action Centre; please act before it’s too late.

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/11/evidence-free-zone.html