Hi all.
First off, this post is directed to forum members who are EU citizens. It's nice if other people follow developments, but there isn't much you can do to help. To everyone in the EU who wants to help keep forum communities like this up and running: Please get read up on the issue of the EU copyright reform, in particular Article 13, and consider participating in the protests on March 23 (i.e. this Saturday) to try and sway the minds of enough MEPs. DO NOT participate in harassment or threats.
I considered participating in the
blackout on Thursday to raise awareness, but given the nature of our forums I think a post in here will be enough.
So what is this all about, what does it mean for forums in general, and how does it apply to this forum in particular? Well, an EU copyright reform is currently making its way through the EU institutions. It is on the home stretch now, with only the Parliament vote remaining to pass it. In general it's a good idea to unify and modernize copyright rules across the EU, but Article 13 of the reform in particular has received a lot of criticism because it severely increases the burden and the risk of "online content sharing service providers".
The following is just my understanding and may of course be wrong, please do your own research and feel free to correct me below.
Currently in Germany, if you run a platform that distributes user-uploaded content, you are not expected to proactively police that content looking for copyright infringement. If you become aware of infringing content, you have to remove it within 24 hours though. The reform would change that - providers would have to implement filters (the so-called "upload filters") that remove and prevent the future upload of certain works, where the list of works would be provided by the rights holders.
These new rules are intended for platforms like Youtube (and contentious even there, because the same filters could also be used for censorship once in place. Also ContentID never fucks up.), but the wording of the reform might make them also apply to forum communities (even disregarding attachments and embedded images / videos, the text of your posts can be copyrighted material too!) and other services where users can publish their own content. You can see that the impact would be very broad just by learning that there are explicit exemptions for sites like Wikipedia and Github. The reform says that the rules should be applied with an eye to the size of the provider, but that is a very vague reassurance and a lot of uncertainty for someone running a forum in their spare time. And if you don't implement some kind of system to catch copyrighted content from the catalogs you are given, you are made fully liable for any infringement of your users. And don't be fooled by the exemptions for new and small providers in the proposed text. Yes, there are some exemptions for platforms that are younger than 3 years and have less than 10 million euros turnover. However, the exemption only applies if BOTH these conditions hold. So, you make only 1000 Euros per year but you're 4 years old? Too bad, no exemption for you.
Now a somewhat happier part: I am fairly sure this all does not apply to these forums, because they are entirely not-for-profit and don't even contain ads, and the proposed text of Article 2 that I have seen that defines what constitutes an "online content sharing service provider" is fairly clear that it only applies to for-profit providers.
However, even the addition of ads could be enough to get into uncertain territory. I don't think that placing a higher burden on small providers is a good idea, and frankly I am very annoyed with how the opposition to parts of this reform has been dealt with by the politicians, from claiming that the opposition is artificially created by big content providers using bots, to an attempt at moving the date of the final vote so it would happen before the announced protests on March 23. So I'll be joining the protests on Saturday and I hope some of you will, too.
Here are some links for further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Markethttps://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
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Topic: About the EU copyright reform (Read 4794 times)
