The digital encyclopedia Wikimedia, a non-profit social organization, declared a temporary closure on July 4 in protest at the vote on the reform of the copyright protection law.
Finally, the European Parliament rejected its approval after the vote on July 5, 2018. Now, the measure will have to be debated.
In a statement, the association details its position and its considerations regarding copyright reform in Europe, highlighting some basic Internet services that, they say, are in serious danger if they are approved, such as neutrality, freedom of expression , and diversity.
To begin with, they consider that the new proposal not only contains little progress in terms of copyright management, but also includes two articles that boycott both the internet itself and the Wikimedia projects: articles 11 and 13 . But what exactly do these articles say? Let’s see.
Article 11: “protect press publications in relation to digital uses”
Article 11 is intended to “protect press publications with regard to digital uses”. In other words, in order to link or refer to an article on a non-profit platform (such as Wikipedia), it would be necessary to ask permission from each and every one of the editors in each particular case. A rule that would make it difficult for thousands of volunteers who write Wikipedia in Spanish to write more than 200 new articles a day, and make the more than 650,000 editions in the encyclopedia that are produced each month.
Therefore, Article 11 would seriously hamper the possibility of creating hyperlinks and sharing content , which is, they say, “one of the pillars of the Internet”, affecting the right to freedom of expression and freedom of appointment.
Article 13: “the obligation to check in databases of works protected by copyright”
For its part, article 13 implies that sites that allow users to publish text, sounds, codes, static or moving images or other works protected by copyright for public consumption must filter all the presentations of their users to compare them with a database of protected works.
Additionally, sites will have to pay to license these submissions to the database, and to identify matches.
But the big loophole in Article 13 is that Article 13, while penalizing any site that doesn’t block copyright infringement, will not penalize people who falsely claim copyright in someone else’s work.
Therefore, it will be much easier to make these false claims than to find out which of the hundreds of millions of copyright claims are real and which are hoaxes or hoaxes or attempts at censorship.
