The European Union passed Article 13 and Article 11, which would effectively cripple the internet for everyone, even for people who don’t live in any European Union member State. However, all member States are expected to pass into legislation the mandates of Article 13 and Article 11, which would severely cripple the freedom of expression on the internet.
If you’re not readily familiar with Article 13, there’s a pretty short and layman-laden explanation put together from ZONEofTECH that concisely explains what it does and how it would affect content on the internet.
As mentioned in the video, you would either have to make sure you don’t use any copyrighted material in your content, or if you do then hosting platforms like YouTube might just block all of your content in member States of the European Union. As he mentions in the video, it would greatly affect a lot of content creators based in or around Europe who has a mostly European audience.
Even websites would be negatively impacted by this, since they’re not exempt from what Article 13 employs across the internet.
So what about Article 11? Well, YouTuber Ian Corzine explains the link tax within the span of just five and a half minutes.
Both Article 11 and Article 13 would severely hamper the internet in serious ways once member States start legislating them into law, forcing social media services, aggregators, search engines, and content hosts to abide by those rules once they’re put into law. As noted by Private Internet Access, even with hundreds of thousands of people protesting on the streets and millions of people petitioning against these measures, the EU still passed the vote on the Article 11 and Article 13 bills.
Unlike the U.N’s draft proposal to go after anime and lolis, this isn’t a proposal for law, this is law.
Worse yet is that as pointed out by Twitter user Dr Grandday, some of the members of parliament who voted for the bills were confused about what they were voting for, and so instead of voting for amendment they voted to pass them.
This is the state of the EU Parliament. According to the speaker himself, some MEPs were confused about what they were even voting for (please excuse the Maltese translations, the EU website is so bad that the English translations were in French for some reason) pic.twitter.com/R8ReFXa3xV
— Dr Grandayy (@grandayy) March 26, 2019
It’s already been confirmed that two MEPs misclicked and meant to vote to amend Article 13. This combined with all the confusion in the room just makes me sad. pic.twitter.com/m8uhXV6XV3
— Dr Grandayy (@grandayy) March 26, 2019
However, there are people fighting back against this by aiming to de-platform politicians by not voting for them again, and ending their term once elections come around.
Count Dankula linked to a list of the politicians who voted for the Article 11 and Article 13 bills.
Here is the list.https://t.co/a616JLk2zd
— Count Dankula🏴 (@CountDankulaTV) March 26, 2019
The list was compiled by MEP for Piratenpartei, Julia Reda. You can access the list from the JuliaReda .eu website.
If the politicians want to pass the laws to hamper and inhibit free speech and freedom of expression, then voters can simply vote them out of office. You can view the full list of those who approved Article 13 in the list below.
(Thanks for the news tip Diogenes and Animatic)
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