I’m speaking to you from the birthplace of democracy about one of the most pressing problems of our time: a key battleground for the defense of our current democracies. A week in the past, the European Parliament voted for new rules that endanger people’s online freedom: the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.
This new “directive,” as this type of EU law is called, falls short of the vital modernization that our old intellectual property rights require. The aim of every significant copyright legislation needs to be to strike a fair balance between the rights of creators, publishers, or producers and the rights of users. We have witnessed a noticeable boom in human creativity taking root through the liberty and suggestion supplied through the inter-connectivity of the net: many more people are capable of submitting books, creating a song, and discovering their innovative instincts than ever before.
The new copyright regulation makes every online platform older than 3 years immediately accountable for each copyright infringement that a user commits. The analogy for the offline global would be making a toll road agency immediately responsible for every dashing motive force. The best manner for an online platform to cope with this risk of legal responsibility is to filter out every text, every photograph, and each video before it’s even uploaded. This adds that clear out is an era that we to this point only recognized from authoritarian regimes like China. It is a pretty wake-up call that many European politicians are trying to make such ad filters obligatory to prevent “infringements of copyright.” On behalf of the big hobbies found in our continent, they are imposing upon citizens a form of censorship that doesn’t belong in our democracies.
Many have warned us about this. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, David Kaye, warned the European Parliament about “the danger of error and censorship” with this regulation. He was joined utilizing the founding father of the sector-wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, and one of the inventors of the internet, Vint Cerf. However, every technologist sees the risks of this thought, but our flesh pressers refuse to permit our pastimes to get within the manner of the pursuits of their wealthy and powerful pals.
There remains one very last risk to prevent the adoption of this dangerous censorship tool in Europe, and this is why I am now speaking to you. On April 15, the Council of the European Union has to comply with this copyright directive. Germany is the swing vote that can single-handedly save this law from being adopted. Therefore, I am calling on you, Ms. Angela Merkel, to concentrate on the humans and ask your agriculture minister (how weird is the EU that one of these technical count numbers comes right down to the vote of an agriculture minister?) to protect our essential right to freedom of speech.
The unleashing of online creativity can be tough freedom for us, politically-active people, to deal with, as Mr. Böhmermann taught me together with his middle-finger trickery lower back in 2015, but it’s miles a critical one. Thanks for that lesson, Jan.
