Re: European gopherholes, Articles 11 and 13
Greetings,
On Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:04:30 +0200 peter garner <peter@petergarner.net> wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> If you're in Europe I'm sure you've heard of the upcoming "link tax"
> and copyright enforcement
> proposals as detailed in EU Articles 11 and 13.
>
> As a UK-based gopher keeper I'm very worried about these proposals,
> especially as I've set my gopher up
> to download dozens of newsfeeds in RSS format on a daily basis. I've
> tried to ensure that I get as wide a
> variety of news subjects as possible and of course I am now concerned
> that depending on how Article 11
> is interpreted, this will be seen as a revenue-generator for a wide
> variety of publishers (despite the fact
> that these are links, not articles). If it *is* interpreted in this
> way, it'll be a game-changer for me: I'll
> either have to remove a lot of my content or move the gopherhole
> somewhere non-European/off the
> clearweb.
>
> Is anyone else in a similar position?
I haven’t read the complete details yet. I have to admit that I am from
Germany and the Axel Springer company is the main pusher for such a link
tax, where they use their media influence (which is an indirect censor‐
ship) to use the CDU (Merkel party) to get the law as they want it. Here
my interpretation is that Axel Springer is close to its end of profit
and not flexible enough to adapt to the new times. On the other side it
is a shame on how deep the media controls German politics from the top
newspapers to the local ones, where you see exclusively actions of
Merkel party politicans, besides there being four other active parties.
For gopher: Please avoid overreactions, like many people did with the
GDPR. We need to support organisations like EDRi[0] to for example pre‐
vent the new upload filters. We only need to get one committee member to
vote against it and it is gone! Even people from the UK can influence
there! You are a part of Europe!
If the link tax really becomes a reality there needs to be a movement
for people news. GPLv3 for news, everywhere, on a daily basis. People
will need to pay for it and reporters give up all their rights. I am
planning 10 years for this, if the link tax comes into effect, to build
some basic news infrastructure. Maybe in the meanwhile the old tree
newspapers break down because noone is reading them anymore. But this
may destroy the democratic public, as we know it. :(
In GDPR there is a loophole for non‐commercial organisations. I hope
there will be one in the link tax too.
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
[0] https://edri.org/
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