Tamas Kadlecsik CEO of RisingStack.

Listen up EU citizens!

Copyright laws are ambivalent, often abused constructs (just think about copyright-trolling) that have crippled creativity and the general progress of humanity in the past ~150 years.

You should know that the European Parliament is getting ready to vote a "Copyright Reform" package which fundamentally undermines the foundations upon which Free, Open-Source-Software is built.

It’s time that we take action in the form of signing an open-letter & alerting our own EP representatives!

The harmful legislation in short:

All materials that are uploaded to media sharing sites (including code) will have to go through “censorship machines”. If these filters detect any copyright infringement, the upload has to be denied. These filters are usually flawed, generating lots of false positives, not to mention that upload filtering is a form of surveillance and restricts the right to free speech.

All in all, this would make the use of code sharing platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket so cumbersome that quite possibly most users would need to stop coordinating and hosting their codebase at these sites.

If the legislation gets passed, developers might have to manage their own code sharing platform, while always being on guard so no-one can use any copyrighted, or not properly licensed material while working on the software.

This could potentially mean the end of Free, Open-Source-Software in Europe.

You can read more about how this legislation would affect code sharing on GitHub. Moreover, it also harms the scientific community.

What can you do?

Sign the open letter of the Free Software Foundation Europe!

Get in touch with your EP representative, and try to explain them how badly this legislation can effect the Economy and freedom of the EU and your country alike. You can use a tool to call your EP representative such as Mozilla’s ChangeCopyright.org.

Let's save free speech, save privacy, save Code Share!

Cheers,

Tamas - CEO of RisingStack