You fucking luddites.
Last week the EU parliament voted through the controversial ”Copyright Directive”, along with the even worse articles 11 and 13. The mentioned articles included in the new bill state that every time copyright material is linked on the internet, the copyright holder is to receive a licensing fee, not to mention that platforms are supposed to moderate their users to make sure that no such material is being uploaded by private citizens.
And this is supposed to save the dying newspaper industry. By turning the Internet into Paper 2.0.
I’ve ranted on this insanity before. I’ve said that this will be impossible to enforce. I’ve noted that the people supporting this are isolationist nationalists and lobbyists for the now ironic defenders of freedom of expression. But yet the world turns. Yet past glories try to drag development and advancement back into dark ages past.
The despicable defenders of the Copyright Directive claim that the new bill is in defence of content creators. To strip ownership of the internet and all its works from the mighty US tech giants. Which is fair, in a way. The Internet wasn’t all that free before last week either. Facebook and Google do pretty much what they want with it, and Google has shown itself to be little else than a privatization of the US State Department. And Facebook uses its unprecedented ”big data” to put despots in power over old democracies.
The Internet might not have been as free as we were led to believe. But you sure as shit won’t set it free with more iron fisted control.
So, what’s going to happen? Well, the legalities are sure to wound up in procedural red tape for years. Google and Facebook are sure to fight this with every measure they’ve got. Then extortionist law firms are sure to want to bite down into this new opportunity much like they’ve done with the file-sharing legislation of previous misguided attempts at ”protecting” content from being consumed. And the nationalists, the ones that want to withdraw from the EU, the same people that voted in favour of this bill, will use this draconian tyranny to turn even more voters in their favour. Which is, and I want to make this absolutely clear; a bad thing.
The battle technically isn’t over yet. The bill is still to be voted through a final time (because who doesn’t love superfluous voting?) in January of 2019. But considering how decisive the voting went, and the amount of political clout that has been wielded in overwriting scientific and electorate voices in the matter, odds are it’s going to pass without a hitch.
Getting paid for your work on the internet would be nice. I’m a content creator. I’d love to get something-something for it. But this isn’t the way. I’m sure Google’d rather delete me from the search results rather than pay me any licensing fees. This Copyright Directive isn’t an answer to anything. It’s just another god damned divisive question from god damned quacks in their god damned ivory towers that want to turn back the god damned clock. And it’s god damn it going to fail.
/Sebastian Lindberg 18/9-2018
WastedWords 