Copyright Reforms in Brussels Meets with Protests

Resisters of suggested copyright changes for Europe are taking the resistance efforts to the next level, in order to get the politicians to stand against the proposed idea. The parliament of Europe will be presented with this vote on Copyright Directive on June 20, 2018. Although the reforms are targeted at restoring balance to controls on copyright for the net age, it is being expressed that the reforms will suffocate liberty of expression. The experts from Internet field have expressed their dissent via an open letter and a few have devised applications to assist in attempts to influence the vote.

This pronouncement finds its basis in an initiative from 2014, targeting to make the laws for copyright modern, make them supportive to the online activity of people and ease the process of using protected works for few institutions. From this directive, the Article 13 has been the reason behind maximum opposition, which entails that web-services be put into place to censor the data being put up on Internet by users to confirm that users are not harming any of the works that are copyrighted.

The removal of the article has been requested to the European Union by computer industry leaders like the founder of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee, Internet veteran Vint Cerf, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and many more. They have stated via their letter that if Article 13 is approved in its current form, it may lead to restriction of activity of people online.

In other similar efforts, a website named Save Your Internet was made live by the group named Copyright 4 Creativity (C4C), which is trying to oppose Article 13. This website is intended to make it simpler for the people to connect with Members of the European Parliament via phone, email or by tweeting.