The Copyright Story

The ARD news folks (public German TV, Channel One) brought up a update piece today over the EU, and this pending draft law.

There's to be a vote within the legal committee of the EU over a change in copyright.  It's an odd perception that they are moving toward.

There would be two central features to this draft law.  First, there would be one single EU-wide copyright law.  It wouldn't matter how you perceived things in Italy or Spain, or even Germany....the EU law would overwrite that understanding.  Second, there would be a upload filter that would exist for just about every single digital platform in the EU....meaning people standing there to review content and decide if you violated the EU standard.  This would mean cooking recipes, blogs, travel journals, car facts, and so on.  In particular, it would mean YouTube videos would be reviewed for copyright infringement and tossed if they failed. 

Yes, in a matter of hours, you could see half of all videos and blogs deleted after being freshly planted on the internet. 

The general perception by the internet community?  ARD says to some degree....the community would be small and there would be a fairly limited scope. In other words.....the whole of the internet would be downsized. 

You might be sitting around the balcony one afternoon with your guitar, and record yourself playing a Beatles tune with a jazzy-sound, and as you tried to plant the four-minute song on YouTube....you got some note that this tune is copyrighted, and so your song was denied on YouTube. 

Blocking off the freedom of expression?  Well....yes. 

Blocking off potential political discontent and the chance of a public anger over government activity?  That's very possible.

Some Germans believe that the CDU and SPD are behind the EU movement on this draft.  There's no facts to substantiate this however.  The EU apparently decided on its own to create this massive copyright law....at least that's what they say.

I sat and pondered over this for the last couple of days.  There are three observations I can make:

First, as quickly as this might pass and be implemented....it's very likely to draw an intense amount of public attention and be remarkably part of the spring 2019 election talk ahead of the EU representative election. It's quite possible that you could see fifty-percent of the EU wide vote go to marginal parties who want to confront the law, and toss it out.  You would think that the EU would be mindful of the timing but it doesn't appear to be on their logic-list. 

Second, if you went and mandated copyright analysts for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube....it would require just in Germany alone....several thousand people, and you'd give each of them authority to censor normal citizens but without mechanisms to hinder the censors.  For both the CDU and SPD, they could sit and blame the EU for this mess, but the public wouldn't care.  The public would go and make a blunt message against both parties for being part of the 'mess'.

Third, the political system throughout the EU was built over the decades with the news mechanism available via newsprint, radio, and TV.  Over the past decade....the internet crept into the middle.  Social media became a political player.  A single social media site could easily feed two-million people a day in Germany, and possibly even twenty-million people throughout the EU.  If the political folks and agenda 'masters' can't control that single social media site.....then it'd have to be shut down.

So I come to my final conclusion.  All of this law making and censorship....would lead to non-EU web sites becoming highly popular and the EU having to darken the web to those sites because it's not authorized.  In blunt terms....absolute and total censorship would occur within ten years.  As much as the EU talks about democracy.....they would in the end become the greatest enemy of freedom.  My best guess is that it'll pass.