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EU Copyright Directive daydream

While Big Tech and Big IP holders are fighting the EU citizens are caught in the middle and are in danger of becoming the victim of this fight.

Article 13 and upload filters

In March or April the EU Parliament will vote for a new EU Copyright Directive. Recently France and Germany agreed on a proposal text for the Directive that according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF ) is the worst one yet. Earlier I wrote about the EU Copyright Directive and the threat it poses for average users like you and me. The reason is that Article 13 of the Directive will inevitably result in upload filters.

thanks for all this DRM

The EU Copyright Directive is actually a clash between Big Tech and Big IP holders and the EU citizens are caught in the middle. Worse they are manipulated by both sides for there own purposes. It reminds me of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) discussion where IP holders were trying to limit the access of software and multimedia content with technical means. Leaving the user with bad products and restricting their rights such a making a back-up. Instead of prohibiting DRM the legislators, influenced by the IP holders, tried to criminalize the circumvention of DRM, communication about such circumvention, and the creation and distribution of tools used for such circumvention.

history repeats

Now with Article 13 history repeats itself. On one hand there are wealthy technology companies such as Google and Facebook. They take the lion share of all the profits made on the internet. The winner takes all principle on the internet has denied other companies to enter the arena and gain a significant market share. Mean while Big Tech has gained access to user data and profited from this on an unprecedented scale.

On the other hand are the Big IP holders that exercise, in their eyes, unlimited and perpetual rights to all intelectual property and as we have seen with DRM enforce it with all means possible. In the middle is the internet user which in general is not a criminal and is not purposely trying to infringe copyright. Nevertheless this user has to pay in the same way as they did with DRM with access to the internet being subjected to upload filters that can reject any content that the user is trying to share.

let’s fight back

The solution to the DRM problem came from the community providing users with tools such as Handbrake enabling them to make that back-up copy. This time around the solution is likely to come from the community again and the tool is probably already available. For that we have to go back to 2010 and the origins of Diaspora. The initial inspiration for Diaspora came from a speech by Eben Moglen, Freedom in the Cloud, where he proposed a distributed system of pods, called Freedombox. The idea of Eben Moglen was for every user to have a server with his/her data in his/her home. This idea never came to fruition and currently Diaspora is a system of pods serving dozens or hundreds of users per pod. What if we were to go back to this original idea. It’s possible. Freedombox is still here and they’re similar solutions like Freedombone Libreserver and perhaps others that I’m not familiar with.

Freedombox has a planned feature to create a Diaspora pod running on top of Freedombox and Freedombone Libreserver allows the user to install Epicyon, an ActivityPub social network instance. Surely these homepods and instances will be free of all the restrictions mentioned in Article 13 as long as they are not-for profit. Your pod in your home therefore doesn’t need an upload filter and you can share all the information that you like as long as you’re respecting copyrighted material. It will create an iron clad distributed network where you determine what you want to share without passing any third party upload filter. It is also a message to both Big Tech and Big IP holders that no matter what they think of the community will always come back with a solution to be able to share data in a way they want to.

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