Have sex

your whole life story thus far kinda reminds me of 177013 (not that you know what that is)

Quote from: Ásgeirr on March 28, 2019, 09:00:06 PM

You make it sound like its just a copyright law extension with means of stopping platforms benefiting from others works. But then why is everyone up in arms about it? If its too long and nuanced you dont have to go into it.

Basically, people are up in arms about this for two main reasons. One, there's definitely legitimate concerns and genuine criticism of the Directive, but two, it's been convoluted and exaggerated by an absolute shit ton of misinformation and bullshit being spread around. This copyright reform has been years in the making. Public consultation and shareholder talks started years before the first proposal was introduced back in 2016. These early versions of the law were a lot more extreme than the final one and resulted in a lot of opposition from experts (including myself - my own institution is on the open letter by academic institutions that voiced concerns) as well as from other activists. Unfortunately, online activists don't always care about nuance and facts. You don't get the average person riled up with a fair and balanced analysis of copyright law. Much more effective is presenting worst case scenarios as fact and making exaggerated speculative claims.

This then gets pushed by sites like Youtube who don't want to share their revenue with creators or risk liability and is picked up by influencers, vloggers, creators and such who couldn't even tell you what copyright is and haven't read a single word of the actual law, but are eager to jump on the bandwagon and convince even less informed people than themselves that the EU is going to ban memes, that everyone will have to pay a tax when they share links, that mandatory upload filters will have to approve everything you post on the internet, that small internet companies are all going to perish because they can't afford to pay millions for licenses and AI filters, that content creators and small artists are going to be blocked from uploading videos and songs, that it's the end of free speech online, and all sorts of bullshit like that. It doesn't matter that the proposed law has been changed several times to be less strict, dispell several concerns and include a bunch of new safeguards for users and platforms - once you've convinced the average internet user that the ominous sounding "article 13" means the end of memes and the free internet, there's next to nothing that'll change that first impression.

As I said, I definitely don't support every part of the Directive myself and think that there are valid concerns of abuse and the law being too vague on some points, but much of the outrage really boils down to most people just being uninformed and basing their views on what some memes, social media posts or youtube videos had to say about the whole thing. I'm convinced that many of the people who oppose the entire thing would have a very different opinion if someone were to walk them through the law and explain it in a more neutral and fair way than "EU MEME BAN".