EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

Julia Reda (from European Parliament) writes at EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line page that

EU governments agree on copyright reform, that needs EU parliament approval, to let news sites charge aggregators for snippets, force upload filters on websites. This sound to me like a pretty bad idea based on what I have read – and I recommend you to read also to make your own mind on this.

People across the world are learning what they need to do to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and many are finding themselves wishing they had involved themselves in the debate when the law was decided more than two years ago. It seem that wide public debate was happening too late.

GDPR details have caused a lots of work and are in many details annoying (remember all kinds of “agree” pages and e-mails popping everywhere), but in general the aim for demanding companies to keep better record data of people is a good thing. So it seems that GDPR is generally good, but somewhat annoying.

In stark contrast to the GDPR, experts near-unanimously agree that the copyright reform law, as it stands now, is really bad. Their latest proposal would still force internet platforms to implement censorship machines – and makes a total mess out of the planned extra copyright for news sites by allowing each member state to implement it differently.

On the topic of copyright, you NOW have the chance to have an influence – a chance that will be long lost in two years, when we’ll all be “suddenly” faced with the challenge of having to implement upload filters and the “link tax” – or running into new limits on what we can do using the web services we rely on. If you are opposed to these ideas, please raise your voice now.