Memes can disappear if the European Parliament adopts the appropriate rules. But it's too early to panic, because the Pirate Party promises to block the initiative.
The EU's main weapon is copyright
The leadership of the European Union decided to improve the rules regarding copyright. They want to introduce new rules called "Article 11" and "Article 13". Users and experts say it will destroy the internet as we know it because it will completely change the way websites operate.
Article 13
Thus, "Article 13" may generally lead to a ban on memes. It obliges web resources to check content and block content that matches the corresponding copyright database. Monitoring should be carried out automatically thanks to special algorithms. This means that memes, which often use images from movies, TV shows and TV shows, will disappear from sites. According to The Independent, the system can actually fail, as happened with YouTube, when the algorithms of the web service blocked unrelated publications.
And small sites that will not be able to introduce such algorithms for crawling content will not be able to continue to exist at all. This already happened when the EU enacted a new GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation.
“By requiring Internet platforms to automatically filter all content that users download, Article 13 is taking an unprecedented step towards transforming the Internet from an open platform for exchange and innovation to an automatic monitoring and control tool for users,” the open letter said. released last week. It was signed by more than 70 experts, including the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, and Vinton Cerf, one of the developers of the TCP / IP protocol, who is often called the "father of the Internet."
The authors of the letter agree that copyright is an important piece of legislation to protect creators. But the automatic system that the EU is proposing is the wrong move to control this.
“Copyright law has exceptions for specific uses of certain materials, such as parodies. But these protective schemes are different in every EU country. Automatic blocking systems are unlikely to be able to distinguish between parodies, and therefore it will block many memes. It will just be safer for the system,”explains Julia Reda, German MEP, member of the German Pirate Party and President of the Young Pirates of Europe.
Article 11
This regulation introduces the so-called "link tax" for Internet companies. That is, companies must obtain permission from publishers to use portions of their work. Google or Twitter usually displays a small chunk of an article before someone clicks on it in its entirety. According to "Article 11", these (and other) companies will be forced to obtain consent from the author to use this fragment and will most likely pay.
“The new rules will impede the free flow of information, which is vital to democracy,” the open letter said.
And although the new rules were approved by the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, they will not come into force until they are voted by the EP. The pirate party will block the norm.
