When you realize DanAndPhilGames could be shut down because of the upcoming European copyright laws
Oh shit
I feel like no one realises how bad this actually is. To make it clear for y'all if this law passes, it’s going to be 1000x worse than net neutrality. This is a literal internet censorship.
Want to post a cute fanart? BLOCKED. A fanfic? BLOCKED. Do you have a friend in europe and want to send them a meme? BLOCKED. Youtube let’s plays? BLOCKED Dan’s meme videos? BLOCKED.
Nearly not enough people are talking about this so please, even if you’re not european, help us and take part. We did the same when net neutrality was trying to ruin all of our lives. I’ll put some useful links below.
Right so to add to this. My friend has already been affected by this shit today . Her gmail profile pic which was eevee (pokemon) has been removed apparently due to eu copyright laws. It was a fucking profile pic. @eu fuck u
also Philip DeFranco made a p good video about this topic. I’ll link it which according to the new laws will also be illegal.
🇺🇸 Another addition for y'all americans: Just so you know there’s quite a big chance a certain cheeto could get inspired by the shit eu is going to pass rn and then we’re all screwed.
🇬🇧 UK lads: UK is going to be affected by this until the day they officially leave the EU and that is in 2021. Contact your local MPs link is above.
🇪🇺 europeans: Are basically all going to be fucked if we don’t do something! Contact your local MPs link is above.
🌏Rest of the world is hopefully sane but still…. please try to help even if this isn’t going to affect you directly.
Any help is appreciated but please try to spread the message as well as signing the petition. Thank u all
This is a message, not just for the people pf Europe, but everyone! If you want to continue to enjoy content created by fans, to read a fanfic about your favorite fandom or just make a simple drawing and show it to the world, sign now.
[Here] is Julia Reda (Pirate Party and member of the EU Parliament)’s website where you will find
summaries of the articles under debate: Article 11 (link tax), Article 13 (copyrighted material use) - and Article 3 (that may be less important than memes to some but it’s going to impact data mining for research, some articles [here]).
the complete text of the proposal
criticism of the debated articles
a timetable because the law hasn’t passed yet (no one should be having avatar issues due to this law quite yet? I doubt many websites are rushing to meet the demands of a law that may yet change.)
what happened on the 20th of July is that the EU Committee on Legal Affairs basically approved the proposition. There’s a few steps left before the final Parliament vote and any implementing. That fight can still be won. Maybe. Hopefully.
SPEAKING OF TIMETABLE: PARLIAMENT WILL MEET IN A FEW DAYS (4th OR 5th OF JULY) TO DECIDE WHETHER THEY APPROVE OF THE COMMITTEE ON LEGAL AFFAIRS’ DECISION OR RE-OPEN THE WHOLE DEBATE. [SIGN THE PETITION], [CALL YOUR MEPS].
The petition’s website also has a page on [what happens next] and what can be done about it
As of July 4th 2018, the Internet as we know it might be dead for good.
The European Parliament is passing a new Copyright Directive. Article 13 #CensorshipMachine will impose widespread censorship of all the content we share online. Art, fanfiction, parodies, remixes, mashups, memes, etc.. Anything that you do not hold the rights over will be taken down.
Article 13 would force all online platforms to police and prevent the uploading of copyrighted content, or make people seek the correct licenses to post that content. Internet platforms hosting large amounts of user-uploaded content must monitor user behaviour and filter their contributions to identify and prevent copyright infringement.
Such filters will be mandatory for platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit and Instagram, but also much smaller websites.
Last Tuesday (19th June 2018) a group of more than 70 people who have played important roles in building the internet and developing it (Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf,
Jimmy Wales, Mitchell Baker…) into what it is today addressed an open letter to the members of the European Parliament:
“As creators ourselves, we share the concern that there should be a fair distribution of revenues from the online use of copyright works, that benefits creators, publishers, and platforms alike.
But Article 13 is not the right way to achieve this. By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users. […] The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial.”
Back in May, Mark wrote about
a Kickstarter project to fund a mobile app that will help you locate
the hidden entrances to Malibu’s public beaches, which the local rich
and famous people have done everything they can to obscure (including
putting up illegal fake signs that falsely declare passage to be
trespassing).
The Kickstarter was fully funded and the app is out, and the public is
finding its way to Malibu’s public beaches, which is great news –
unless you’re one of those people who’s spent decades treating a public
beach as your own private patch. Local residents are pissed:
this is literally the UK prime minister. why are americans so ignorant? if i have to know about ur fugly tangerine peel president u can know about our long-deceased grape skin PM
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia - including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents - and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.)
During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve.
And the thing about Australia – there isn’t the coverage that America has. Not even in our own country. It’s hard to find out what’s happening – visas for journalists to visit Nauru are prohibitively expensive – and … no one really cares. It’s so entrenched that it’s the status quo, and when I called my MP and senators to go, WTF guys? the response was like, “…oh yeah, thanks for your feelings, cool, bye”.
I honestly tune out a lot of the coverage because, at this point, I don’t know what to do. Both major parties support these policies, so I vote for the Greens. I contacted my representatives. I walked in protest marches. I donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and other charities.
So I guess, if I have advice for Americans, it’s to not let this become the status quo. Because you’ll wake up one day and it will have always been like this.
Holy shit, I knew it was bad here but I didn’t know it was that bad. Why don’t we hear about the depth of these things in Australia, how can they keep us so in the dark?
What you can do to help the Human Rights crisis in Australia:
If you are Australian:
Keep up to date and informed. The only major media outlets that routinely reports on this issue is The Guardian Australia. They are free online but consider donating if you can to keep it free access.
The Saturday Paper is another independent online news source that reports on this.
Follow or sign up to GetUp!. GetUp! is Australia’s largest progressive grassroots activist group and has lots of campaigns and information about this issue and many others, such as climate change, economic justice, and democratic and civil rights. Donate if you can, sign their peritions, follow their campaigns.
CONTACT YOUR MPs AND SENATORS. This is really important, especially if they are supporters of the policy. Keep public pressure on then, make them feel it. Letter templates are good, but personally written letters/emails are better. Call them if you can. And respond to them with your displeasure if they send you a cookie cutter response of their party’s policy on “stopping the boats”.
SHOW UP TO PROTESTS. Another really important one. Even if you just show up and march, your physical presence counts. They’re not as scary as it might seem.
DONATE. I really cannot stress this enough, if you can afford it, donate.
WHO SHOULD I DONATE TO?
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) provides financial and legal support, as well as counseling and community services, to refugees already in Australia.
Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) are a group of state-based advocacy groups that support refugees in Australia and advocate for those trapped in Australia’s offshore detention regime (link is for the Sydney group but contains links to other states).
GetUp! is one of the best to donate to for political action. They have options to donate to the organisation as a whole, or to specific campaigns.
If you are a member of the Australian Labor Party, please do what you can to bring up this issue and pressure the party leadership to change its policy.
If you are NOT Australian
Do what you can to contact your government and representatives to bring up this issue and pressure Australia to change their policy.
SPREAD THIS POST AND OTHERS LIKE IT. Australians do not have the numbers and influence on his site that Americans and British have. Please spread this information and resources so that other Australians might see it and feel like they have some power to change it or even know about it.
If you are a New Zealander: please continue to keep the pressure on your government to call out Australia and offer to take refugees.
a lot of TERFs speak like they’re giving a speech in a movie. One time one of them referred to me & my “brethren”, which they then had to clarify meant trans people and their supporters. I still think about that and laugh sometimes. “you and your brethren” fedgyejgfjhdgsjhksa like what are we, viking warriors?
On June 20, the EU’s legislative committee will vote on the new Copyright directive,
and decide whether it will include the controversial “Article 13”
(automated censorship of anything an algorithm identifies as a copyright
violation) and “Article 11” (no linking to news stories without paid
permission from the site).
These proposals will make starting new internet companies effectively
impossible – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the other US giants
will be able to negotiate favourable rates and build out the
infrastructure to comply with these proposals, but no one else will. The
EU’s regional tech success stories – say Seznam.cz,
a successful Czech search competitor to Google – don’t have
$60-100,000,000 lying around to build out their filters, and lack the
leverage to extract favorable linking licenses from news sites.
If Articles 11 and 13 pass, American companies will be in charge of
Europe’s conversations, deciding which photos and tweets and videos can
be seen by the public, and who may speak.
The MEP Julia Reda has written up the state of play
on the vote, and it’s very bad. Both left- and right-wing parties have
backed this proposal, including (incredibly) the French Front National,
whose Youtube channel was just deleted by a copyright filter of the sort they’re about to vote to universalise.
So far, the focus in the debate has been on the intended consequences of
the proposals: the idea that a certain amount of free expression and
competition must be sacrificed to enable rightsholders to force Google
and Facebook to share their profits.
But the unintended – and utterly foreseeable – consequences are even
more important. Article 11’s link tax allows news sites to decide who
gets to link to them, meaning that they can exclude their critics. With
election cycles dominated by hoaxes and fake news, the right of a news
publisher to decide who gets to criticise it is carte blanche to lie and
spin.
Article 13’s copyright filters are even more vulnerable to attack: the proposals contain no penalties for false claims of copyright ownership, but they do
mandate that the filters must accept copyright claims in bulk, allowing
rightsholders to upload millions of works at once in order to claim
their copyright and prevent anyone from posting them.
That opens the doors to all kinds of attacks. The obvious one is that
trolls might sow mischief by uploading millions of works they don’t hold
the copyright to, in order to prevent others from quoting them: the
works of Shakespeare, say, or everything ever posted to Wikipedia, or my
novels, or your family photos.
More insidious is the possibility of targeted strikes during crisis:
stock-market manipulators could use bots to claim copyright over news
about a company, suppressing its sharing on social media; political
actors could suppress key articles during referendums or elections;
corrupt governments could use arms-length trolls to falsely claim
ownership of footage of human rights abuses.
It’s asymmetric warfare: falsely claiming a copyright will be easy
(because the rightsholders who want this system will not tolerate
jumping through hoops to make their claims) and instant (because
rightsholders won’t tolerate delays when their new releases are being
shared online at their moment of peak popularity). Removing a false
claim of copyright will require that a human at an internet giant looks
at it, sleuths out the truth of the ownership of the work, and adjusts
the database – for millions of works at once. Bots will be able to
pollute the copyright databases much faster than humans could possibly
clear it.
I spoke with Wired UK’s KG Orphanides about this, and their excellent article
on the proposal is the best explanation I’ve seen of the uses of these
copyright filters to create unstoppable disinformation campaigns.
There’s pretty detailed information about the law from the above-mentioned Julia Reda here.
This site gives info on the 10 remaining ‘undecided’ MEPs, and contact information. (Oddly, it seems to be a different list from this other set of undecided MEPs on the committee.) I don’t get the impression any MEPs outside the Legal Affairs committee have any influence at this point in the legal process.
There’s a gadget on this page that will apparently identify your MEP and set up a call between your phone number and them.
I admit I’m not sure what I can say that would make the Conservative MEP ‘representing’ me prioritise things like artistic expression and access over the wealth of giant tech and media companies, but I can try.