https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/the_european_union_would_love_to_control_your_internet_use.html
Imagine an internet in which users can’t freely blog, parody, share material, or remix content – an online experience in which linking, code-sharing, and the unfettered use of art and images would be nearly impossible due to legal limitations. Unfortunately, this scenario – a restrictive internet culture – may soon be a reality in the European Union with the recent passage of the European Unions Copyright Directive. This new E.U. decree, which includes provisions for filtering and surveillance, could have a chilling effect on internet creativity and innovation, potentially increase censorship, and impose new market barriers for businesses worldwide.
The new regulations were originally proposed two years ago as part of the E.U.’s Digital Single Market policy that applies to 28 E.U. member-states and the four non-E.U. states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. Essentially, it could have a global impact on non-E.U. countries across the world similar to the effect of the E.U.’s 2016 E.U.-wide data protection rules created under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR took effect in May this year and standardized data protection laws and set guidelines on controlling personally identifiable data. The Copyright Directive imposes requirements that will change the way netizens interface with online content by imposing mandatory upload filtering, a link tax, and certain prohibitions on user-generated content in public spaces. It requires online platforms to implement privacy-killing filtering systems that will ban content usage under the justification of copyright protections. Platforms will be held liable for copyright infringement and fines that could threaten their economic viability. To add to the confusion, the directive is just that, a suggestion, so each E.U. and non-E.U. party must create its own interpretation of the laws. The result could be that all 28 E.U. member-states have their own separate definition of what part of a link can be used and copyrighted.
As part of the proposed Copyright Directive, bots, applications that run automated tasks, will act as censors and arbitrarily decide what content can be accessed and shared or even deleted without the consent of the intended user. No technology will exist to distinguish between the outright copying of material and various forms of commentary. Under the E.U. directive, revenue streams could be claimed by publishers for small amounts of information, even tables, headlines, or images. Uploading of research articles from online repositories will be forbidden, and non-profit education services and universities will have to obtain copyright licenses and install filters. All data, research papers, and articles will exist behind a virtual paywall. Articles for submission will need to be scanned for potential copyright violations. Exemptions are proposed for research carried out “in the public interest,” but how that will be defined and who will be making those decisions are uncertain. Exemptions could easily be decided along political lines, amounting to a form of point-of-view censorship.