New EU Laws Will Fuck Us All

I haven’t been paying attention to this much.  But it appears I should have.

The EU tomorrow will vote to change laws relating to the internet.  The new laws would tighten copyright control in an attempt to stamp out memes (of course, the biggest problem in Europe right now).  Put simply, ‘fair use’ would be in the toilet and it would be a golden era for copyright trolls.

In the past you could avoid getting an (unfair) copyright hit by taking a screenshot frame out of a trailer from a YouTube video.  But the commissars in the EU are going after that too.  That, soon, will probably be ‘illegal’.

People are saying the EU may ‘destroy the internet’ with this proposal.  I thought that was hyperbole, now it’s becoming potentially a serious problem.

Worse, the EU now wants to charge websites who link to other websites.  So, in linking to this article which explains the new proposals, I would have to pay money to the site in question.  Given that this site is largely an aggregation platform which links daily to entertainment news from other sites, and I am base in the EU, it would very much destroy it and become a liability for me.

If the worst came to the worst and the site isn’t taken offline, I think this would be reduced to a text-based blog, with no links.

I’m actually not aware of the intricacies of it at this point, I have to do more research.