Against Article 13

On the 12th of September, 2018, Article 13 of the European Copyright Directive will be voted on the European Union's Parliament.

Article 13 mandates that companies prevent users from uploading copyrighted content on their services. Since putting humans to supervise the huge amounts of pictures, sound, videos and text that gets uploaded everywhere is impossible, such supervision would be done mostly by automated computer programs. This law has massive harmful ramifications worldwide, similar to the old SOPA law.

There are better alternatives to this law, such as (this), so there's no reason at all for this law to pass.

And here's why it shouldn't:

1: Destruction of Innovation:

Original creators will get censored by the massive amounts of false-positives. This prevents their propagation and also harms completely legal fan works under fair-use.

About the false-positives: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180708/01252940196/numerical-exploration-how-eus-article-13-will-lead-to-massive-censorship.shtml

2: Oppression and Abuse of Power:

Most if not all internet traffic will be monitored, putting a de-facto end to all privacy, destroying activism and preventing the world from becoming a better place. You can never report issues anonimously.

The filters also can definitely be tampered with, with or without new legislation or the population's knowledge, to exclude any content that is inconvenient to corrupt authorities. It can also prevent the propagation of ideas that harm the status quo, thus creating an overly obedient population that accepts oppression and misery.

Putting it all together, any causes of suffering like world hunger, mass unemployment, disease and crime can be easily be swept under the rug, unseen and unsolved.

Remember that this law exists solely because of the corporate lobbying that corrupts and destroys democracy. This is just the beginning.

About the EU lobbying: https://corporateeurope.org/lobbyplanet

3: Smashing of the Lower Classes:

Such a system would be difficult and expensive to set up, harming small internet business as a whole and giving an undue advantage to bigger corporations. This is greatly augmented for creatives due to the false-positives.

Small business is the true soul of the economy, it is where economic competition comes from. An economy where big corporations rule the market without the competition of the small ones leads to poor products, poor wages, unemployment and hunger.

About the importance of small business: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-are-small-businesses-so-important-for-the-economy_us_58f61f9ae4b048372700db75

Not in Europe? It Still Affects You:

While many businesses will initially block Europe to avoid the filter, they will eventually try to permeate the european market. Since adapting your current product is easier than creating another one, many companies will censor their own content to make it pass the filter.

That means you, outside of Europe, will receive content filtered by Europe's authoritarianism.

What You Can Do:

Raise noise. The more people know about this, the more the members of the Parliament will be afraid of not being reelected later.

Spread this text everywhere, here's the link: https://telegra.ph/Against-Article-13-09-12 Send people to https://saveyourinternet.eu or https://www.cnet.com/news/article-13-europes-hotly-debated-eu-copyright-law-explained/

Spread the info to any group involved in politics, any celebrity on twitter, anything. Translate this text to one of the many non-english languages of Europe, or ask someone else to do it.