If anyone is still buying the “Article 13 is a good thing!”, know that Wikipedia is worried about it. If that doesn’t ring any bells, I don’t know what will.
Here is a link: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/2018_European_Parliament_vote
And also, Ao3 has pulled the alarms on it: https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/10706
Save Your Internet. Tumblr was all up and about on Net Neutrality - help the European Union do the same.
Wikipedia Italy has been offline since yesterday ( 3rd of July) to protest the directive and raise awareness to the issue.
These are the links in English if anyone wants to check them out:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicato_3_luglio_2018/en
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_vote_in_2018
Ok. I am American and have been working a borderline illegal number of hours for the last four months and haven’t been paying attention. So I did some reading just now.
Article 11 sucks because it’s vaguely phrased and they want people to pay licensing fees for links. Which is garbage.
Article 13 sucks because it was established by the same thought process that governs music. Which. Incidentally, all the work they did to keep music from being shared at all got circumvented when artists started posting links to the official YouTube videos. So. I think the same would eventually happen to this law where it would be made obsolete by people finding loopholes. However. The EU shouldn’t have to wait for that.
Both of these are definitely bullshit.
They are being voted on tomorrow. And yes. Raise hell about it.
But don’t be scared yet. If it passes the EU first vote it then has to be passed by the individual governments and then goes back to the EU for another vote.
Is it bad? Yes.
Should it be stopped? Yes.
Do we have time to muster our forces? Yes.