Bad News, Good News, Bad News, Good News · 9:22pm Jun 20th, 2018
So the first bad news is that Articles 11 and 13, as I discussed in a previous blog post here, has passed the vote. It passed 14 to 9, which means that it's not fully supported by ALL members of the EU, but it still passed by a distressingly wide margin.
The good news is that we have until December/January before it possibly goes into effect. Now, I won't say that I was chicken little-ing (as so many people accused me of) just yet. Sadly, there's still no proof that this directive is harmless and, in fact, more and more tech experts are coming out saying that this new law would be a complete disaster. So I'm still convinced that my alarm is entirely warranted.
With that said, I WILL OPENLY ADMIT to being a stupid, ignorant American who doesn't know how the EU's process of instating new laws works. Apparently, the law today only passed something called a "JURI vote." I'm not 100% certain on all the details but from what I can gather, this is simply a committee within the EU, specifically centered around discussing and voting on legal affairs. Now that this committee has voted in favor for it, the law has to pass through parliament at large.
I apologize if I scared anyone into thinking this site (as well as the rest of the internet) was doomed to explode today. That was wrong. However, we cannot simply relax, as it's still at risk of exploding, only it's six months from now instead of today.
Frankly, I find myself more than a little disgruntled at the fact that this was not detailed anywhere when I looked for information. I would have saved myself a lot of anxiety and panic if I'd known there was an extra six months for us to archive our favorite stories/youtube shows/art/webcomics/etc, as well as continue to advocate for internet freedom.
Sadly, the other bad news is that this advocacy may be in vain anyway. The articles I linked above seem to suggest that once a law passes through the committees, it's almost guaranteed to pass and it's very hard to change the parliament's mind on it. The next step for this law is to go through a bunch of weirdly secretive and private closed door negotiations that sound incredibly fishy and undemocratic, before going to a final vote in December or January. As I've stated before, the EU is an unelected and therefore unaccountable body. Frankly, as an American, it baffles me how anyone could ever be okay with such a powerful body existing when it cannot account to its citizens. Now the Europeans must lie in the bed they've made. Suddenly Brexit seems like the best idea in the world, doesn't it?
Thankfully, while the panic around June 20th may have been slightly unwarranted, it has led to some final good news. The panic that today's vote drummed up has woken up a lot more people to the danger that the EU poses to internet freedom. Articles from both left and right wing publications have realized that this is not a partisan issue (as some certain dogmatic ideologues in my previous comments section tried to make it) and that this new law is going to affect everybody equally regardless of political leaning. It doesn't matter if the people reporting on it are a part of the "alt-right" or the "regressive left," because this is a big-deal monster that isn't going away.
If we (and especially the people of Europe) can truly come out en masse and put enough pressure on the EU to convince them that we're sick of unelected bodies fucking everybody over without accountability, (and perhaps convince them that we may just be angry enough to pull a second French Revolution if they really start screwing us), they might back down. It's going to take a lot of pushback at this point though. The odds are, sadly, not in our favor.
There is still hope, but it's going to take people from all over and from every political leaning really coming together and saying "you will not fuck us over like this."
And our slow, painful march towards global societal collapse continues.
And instead of actually doing anything we just sit here allowing this to happen.
Our ancestors must be so proud.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/6/20/17482554/eu-european-union-copyright-filter-article-11-13-passes-juri-vote
For the sake of convenience, I'm posting this here.
EDIT: I didn't even realize that the very article I linked was already attatched to the blog post. My bad.
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Abraham Lincoln's ghost is facepalming....
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China literally censors websites completely and nothing happens. And now that a copyright law has passed the world is going to end and societal collapse is going to happen? The fuck?
The day this site gets nuked, twilight sparkle is gonna be ticked