The European Union proposed a copyright regulation that Save Your Internet, a digital rights campaign, said would “destroy the internet as we know it,” and it’s not the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The EU is considering legislation, first proposed in 2016, that would force all content uploaded on the internet to pass through a content filter that would automatically block content potentially violating pre-existing copyrights, giving the European Union a watchful eye over nearly everything on the internet.
Article 13 of the European Union’s Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on copyright in the Digital Market threatens to make it illegal to create memes, parodies and even share links.
Platform providers should “take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers,” the article states.
“Whether a creator or a consumer, everyone who uses the internet will be affected by this law — which is why we all need to speak out against it,” Save Your Internet — which is managed by Copyright 4 Creativity and is made up of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons and the Civil Liberties Union for Europe — states on its website. The law applies to the EU’s population of half a billion, but potentially could affect most of the content on the internet.
Online platforms would be required to implement complex content filtering systems, or “content recognition technologies,” as the article states.