EFF: EU Internet Censorship Will Censor the Whole World’s Internet
EU Internet Censorship Will Censor the Whole World’s Internet As the EU advances the new Copyright Directive towards becoming law in its 28 member-states, it’s important to realise that the EU’s plan will end up censoring the Internet for everyone , not just Europeans. A quick refresher: Under Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive, anyone who operates a (sufficiently large) platform where people can post works that might be copyrighted (like text, pictures, videos, code, games, audio etc) will have to crowdsource a database of “copyrighted works” that users aren’t allowed to post, and block anything that seems to match one of the database entries. These blacklist databases will be open to all comers (after all, anyone can create a copyrighted work): that means that billions of people around the world will be able to submit anything to the blacklists, without having to prove that they hold the copyright to their submissions (or, for that matter, that their submissions are co...