Spanish-language cartoon Tiranía (Tyranny). Superstition sits on the throne, advised by a priest and a devil by Claudio Linati, 1826. Wikicommons. Public domain.
Xnet (https://xnet-x.net/en/),
an activist group working for civil rights in the Internet, is the founder
member in Spain of the #SaveYourInternet coalition, which has among its
participants groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), European
Digital Rights (EDRi) and others. We have come together to organise a campaign
to inform the public about the hidden dangers of the new European Copyright
Directive.
With the approval in the
European Parliament of the final text of the Copyright Directive, which will be
definitely put to the vote in a very few months’, the European Union has lost a
historic opportunity to produce copyright legislation adapted for the Internet
in the twenty-first century. What the European Parliament will finally vote on
is a technophobic text, tailor-made for the interests of the copyright
monopolies which, moreover, doesn’t guarantee the right of authors to have a
reasonable standard of living as a result of their work.
If the law is eventually
passed, it will be used for wholesale curtailment of freedoms and more
censorship, in keeping with the bizarre idea that anything that doesn’t produce
hard cash for the major players – which doesn’t mean authors! – has to
be prohibited and eliminated. The
amount of money the real authors receive in the end is zero or almost zero.
This is a tragedy for
workers in the domain of culture who (with a few, brave, and praiseworthy
exceptions) have once again been frivolously incapable of informing themselves
about the real state of affairs. They have passively swallowed the version fed
to them by their masters and, avidly playing the victim, have become the chief
mouthpiece of freedom-killing propaganda without the slightest understanding
that this is not going to enhance their rights but will do away with the rights
of everyone.
Alarm bells started
ringing almost two years ago when we discovered that, rather than being a
proposal for an obsolete copyright law, the directive is being used as a Trojan
horse to introduce surveillance, automatic data processing, government by
opaque algorithms, and censorship without court orders, etc.
This threat to such
basic rights as freedom of expression and access to culture and information
lurks in ruses which are mainly hidden in two articles of the Directive:
Article 11: no link without a licence
Article 11, otherwise
known as the “Linktax” article, has created a new economic “right” for magnates
of the written press. This ‘right’, moreover, implies indefinitely restricting
the possibility of citing the press online.
If this seems absurd,
arbitrary and counterproductive, we invite you to read the proposal itself.
This is an ambiguous text, described by the jurist Andrej Savin as “One of the worst texts I have ever seen in
my 23-year-long career as a law scholar.” Given its muzzy formulation, the
safest response for any platform will be not to link to any media publication
without explicit permission. “One of the worst texts I have ever seen in my
23-year-long career as a law scholar.”
This perverse measure
will be the equivalent, on a European scale, to the “Google tax”, which is
already in force in Spain and Germany. Even its promoters were soon to regret
it, when Google shut down Google News in Spain after it was approved. The Google
tax is paradoxical and those responsible for initiating it know very well it
won’t work in Europe. For example, Xnet revealed that the big German publishing
company Alex Springer was paying itself – having linked up to pay itself – in
an outlandish pretence that “everything’s fine”.
Where are they trying to
go with this? What sense is there in this move by the press barons to push laws
which prevent you from linking up to their content, disseminating it, and
commenting on them? Is this just a mix of ignorance and greed, or something
like shooting yourself in the foot?
There is certainly
something of this involved, but we believe that this is a mix of ignorance and
greed which, in the end, means cutting off your nose to spite your face (when
you’re trying to damage someone else’s face). With laws like this, the press
barons can engage in legal harassment to the point of closing down social
aggregators and communities like Meneame or Reddit, eliminating any new
competitor, consolidating their monopoly, and thus becoming the lone voice on
the Internet, the only ones who speak. In short, they are aspiring to become a
new kind of television.
Article 13: no uploading content without a licence
Platforms – from
medium-sized providers of services storing subject material through to the
giants of the Internet – will be considered responsible for any copyright
infringement committed by their users, and they are bulldozed into taking
preventive measures. In other words, this isn’t a matter of eliminating content
but directly preventing people from uploading it.
Of course, nobody is
forcing them to do anything. They are simply being made responsible for
material uploaded by their users. It’s like a car salesman being held
responsible for crimes committed by people who buy his cars. This can only end
up with algorithmic upload filters being applied to absolutely everything or,
in other words, prior, automatic, and massive Internet censorship. This can only end up with algorithmic upload filters
being applied to absolutely everything or, in other words, prior, automatic,
and massive Internet censorship.
Recently, YouTube
prevented the pianist James Rhodes from uploading one of his own videos in
which he is playing Bach. This kind of “error”, which always favours
privatisation of the public domain, is the everyday reality for all authors who
use YouTube.
And this isn’t just
about the “errors” that lead to the privatisation of the public domain. It is
about the difficulty or impossibility of uploading on the Internet any kind of
derivative work: parodies, memes, remixes, fandom, satires, and so on or, in
other words, the very essence of culture, political freedom and freedom of
expression.
Repeating the medieval experience
of the invention of the printing press
This whole setup, which
looks like a science-fiction dystopia, an impossible attempt to lock the doors
when the horse has bolted, or an exaggeratedly grim prophecy being spread by
concerned activists, is already being implemented today on big platforms.
At present, there are
two options:
The Spotify model
In this case, the
platform would acquire all national and international licences and then make
all contents available unidirectionally in such a way that users can’t upload
content. Even so, in the case of Spotify, one of the few giants with the
resources to do this today, paying the copyright monopolies has raised its
overheads so much that, despite its commercial success, its medium-term
sustainability isn’t guaranteed. If this is the situation of Spotify, it’s not
difficult to imagine what will happen to medium-sized Internet companies.
This model has another
defect which is obvious to most artists. The amount of money the real authors
receive in the end is zero or almost zero.
The Facebook/Google
model
These new Internet
monopolies refuse to share the cake with the old copyright monopolies and
therefore opt for large-scale, automatic filtering of all content. They will
find it easier to adapt to Article 13 since now they will only need to apply
the filtering mechanisms before uploading takes place.
This technology, besides
being opaque and exclusive, is very expensive. Since it will be obligatory, it
will also mean that these giants are very unlikely to have competitors that
have any chance of prospering.
Google has spent
approximately 100 million dollars to create the
technology that has so far enabled it to respond to copyright claims coming in
from only 1% of its users.
The effect which these
arbitrary regulations will have on free Internet conversation, on diffusion of
culture and information, and access to them will be devastating.
Whose rights are at stake?
Authors’ rights (Droits
des auteurs→ copyright) are important. But what are these rights? And which
authors have them?
Any democratic proposal
seeking widespread consensus and aspiring to guarantee the decent employment of
authors without jeopardising the basic rights of citizens would need, finally,
to take a bold stand against the copyright monopolies and management entities
which are suspected of abuse when not directly investigated, tried, and
condemned, as we succeeding in doing with SGAE (the Spanish Society of Authors
and Publishers).
It should also take as
given the fact that the concept of the author or medium has changed in the last
twenty years. Since the earliest days of Web 2.0, the content generated by
users has evolved from being an interesting social experiment to the digital
reality in which we are immersed day in day out.
In a society like that
of Spain, for example, content generated by entities which were once “big”
media now account for less than 5% of Internet traffic. The EU must respect
citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal
content generated by the elite. The EU must respect
citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal
content generated by the elite.
No single company,
medium, or author has written Wikipedia, or turned the Web into the repository
of gazillions of videos, or generated hundreds of millions of tweets per day.
We – the people – did this. The Internet doesn’t belong to them.
The threats skulking
behind the Copyright Directive are part of an attempt to stuff the genie back
into the bottle and embark on an inquisition that would allow the oligarchs to
take control of the Internet. Our politicians and big company bosses are
envious of the Chinese model.
Open architecture
The initial idea of the
fathers and mothers of the World Wide Web and the Internet, as we know it, this
idea of an open architecture for sharing links without restriction, was crucial
to its success. And it would be radically undermined if the directive is
approved.
Now the EU wants to
create an Internet with a licence. And since we are a civilised society, they
can’t call it censorship so they say “copyright”.
In the final vote, all
the power and wealth will be on one side. We, the people, who are on the other
side – in favour of freedom of expression, an open Internet, and copyright
laws adapted to the twenty-first century, which will enable authors to make a
decent living and not have to scrabble for crumbs dropped from the table of the
Internet moguls – will be vilified, slandered as thieves, hackers and
pirates, and absurd allegations will be made against us.
This situation has happened
before. And what it most clearly evokes is the relationship between the
invention of the printing press and the censorship of the Holy Inquisition.
Inscribed in pen and ink. "Spanish Inquisition" by Thomas Rowlandson (1756 – 1827). Wikicommons/ Google Cultural Institute. Some rights reserved.
What is the responsibility of artists and (left) political parties?
The vote has not yet
been cast. We have a few months to get everyone to understand the magnitude of
the danger. We can win this battle. We have already won in extremis in other situations like the fight for net neutrality
and ACTA, and we can do it again.
What would help:
- – Artists
who will step forward and say, “NOT in my name”.
- – A
clear, effective, and non-opportunist stance from the left in favour of an open
Internet and freedom of expression.
The
left instead tends all too often to cultivate a technophobic position which
contributes towards censoring narratives. The case of Spain is paradigmatic.
The PP (right-wing party) and PSOE (“socialist” party) voted and will vote in
block for whatever the Copyright Monopolies and the SGAE tells them to vote
for, which is to say what most favours control and censorship.
But
the example of the left-wing electoral alliance Unidos Podemos is also instructive.
They joined the SaveYourInternet campaign at the last moment in order to coopt these
citizen-activists. The next day, one Anova and two Izquierda Unida members of
parliament abstained from voting and nobody in either party as much as batted
an eyelid. It would seem that none of our politicians take these basic rights very
seriously.
We citizens who are
active in battling for civil rights on the Internet will meet our obligation
and fight the good fight. We’ll stop this attack on the Internet and democracy
sooner or later, with or without the help of the “artists” or the
“parliamentary left”, but not without bitterly calling attention to the dangerous
future that is looming for freedom of expression and information, and our other
freedoms in the new context of the digital age in which, again and again, the
tool is being destroyed and the messenger killed in order to preserve a status
quo that must not continue.
Heretics brought before the tribunal of the Inquisition, Seville by F.Moyse, 1870. Wikicommons. Public domain.
This text was first released in no.70,
Revista Mongolia
