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The European Parliament’s JURI committee passed on Wednesday a deeply flawed proposed amendment to the copyright directive that could break the Internet for almost everyone. It is just the latest in a stream of misguided legislation responding to the lobbying of special interests trying to triage the effects of the Internet on their expectations of wealth and control. There is still time to contact MEPs to avoid its damage – see https://saveyourinternet.eu/

While the putative targets of much of this bad legislation are US new-wave corporations — especially Google and Facebook — the actual victims are repeatedly the Europeans who are our best hope of countering this US corporate power; citizen-innovators. Far from gutting Google’s guns and foiling Facebook’s finagling, the new rules — notably GDPR and now the new copyright rules — give them and their peers unintended power over European innovators.

A root cause of many of the problems with British and European legislation regarding the Internet is a failure to recognise that, in the meshed society it creates, the citizen can play roles previously reserved for the corporation. I can create published works, I can directly fund new ventures, I can build global-scale applications and so on.

Believing these and other capabilities to only be within the scope of corporations, legislation frequently fails to observe the impact of regulations on individuals. Penalties are disproportionate, recourse is onerous or absent, restrictions are asymetric. Consequently, only well-resourced corporations can hope to fully comply — an exclusionary gift to the large and established players and a further smack in the face of European innovators.

To make significant progress with any “Digital Charter” of the kind the UK government purports to love, we first need to recognise that the Internet has created a meshed society of opportunity for all and not just a new market for the winners of the previous age to re-sell their old goods and methods. Until the legislators consult open source developers, self-published writers and musicians and other small-but-scaleable innovators, new rules targetting the Internet will only result in reinforced oligarchies.

Filed under: Copyright, Zeitgeist | Tagged: Copyright, European Parliament, SaveYourInternet |