Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Please weight your words. Europe didn&#x27;t lose its Internet today.<p>As to the content of this article:<p>&gt; Article 13: the Copyright Filters. All but the smallest platforms will have to defensively adopt copyright filters that examine everything you post and censor anything judged to be a copyright infringement.<p>It&#x27;s worth to mention what is <i>smallest</i>.<p>Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003&#x2F;361&#x2F;EC Article 2.2 states:<p><i>Within  the  SME  category,  a  small  enterprise  is  defined  as  an  enterprise  which  employs  fewer  than  50  persons  and
whose annual turnover  and&#x2F;or annual balance  sheet  total does not exceed  EUR   10 million.</i> [4]<p>They will not <i>censor</i> anything that is not copyrighted material and you have right to dispute that censoring (it&#x27;s also in article 13) in case you have copyright to material posted&#x2F;it&#x27;s not copyrighted material. In which case they can&#x27;t stop you posting that based on this law.<p>Any action taken by platforms to check that uploads do not breach copyright rules must be designed in such a way as to avoid catching non-infringing works. As stated in<p>Article 13.2a: <i>Member States shall provide that where right holders do not wish to conclude licensing agreements, online content sharing service providers and right holders shall cooperate in good faith in order to ensure that unauthorised protected works or other subject matter are not available on their services. Cooperation between online content service providers and right holders shall not lead to preventing the availability of non-infringing works or other protected subject matter, including those covered by an exception or limitation to copyright.</i> [1]<p>These platforms will moreover be required to establish rapid redress systems (operated by the platform’s staff, not algorithms) through which complaints can be lodged when an upload is wrongly taken down.<p>As stated in article 13.2b: <i>Members States shall ensure that online content sharing service providers referred to in paragraph 1 put in place effective and expeditious complaints and redress mechanisms that are available to users in case the cooperation referred to in paragraph 2a leads to unjustified removals of their content. Any complaint filed under such mechanisms shall be processed without undue delay and be subject to human review. Right holders shall reasonably justify their decisions to avoid arbitrary dismissal of complaints. Moreover, in accordance with Directive 95&#x2F;46&#x2F;EC, Directive 2002&#x2F;58&#x2F;EC and the General Data Protection Regulation, the cooperation shall not lead to any identification of individual users nor the processing of their personal data. Member States shall also ensure that users have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes as well as to a court or another relevant judicial authority to assert the use of an exception or limitation to copyright rules</i> [1]<p>&gt; Article 11: Linking to the news using more than one word from the article is prohibited unless you&#x27;re using a service that bought a license from the news site you want to link to.<p>This is wrong unless you make money of what you do, which point 1a clearly states:<p>Article 11.1a: <i>The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall not prevent legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users.</i> [1]<p>Additionally if you make money of it you can link to the article and include individual words:<p>Article 11.2a: <i>The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall not extend to mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words.</i>  [1]<p>&gt; Article 12a: No posting your own photos or videos of sports matches. Only the &quot;organisers&quot; of sports matches will have the right to publicly post any kind of record of the match. No posting your selfies, or short videos of exciting plays. You are the audience, your job is to sit where you&#x27;re told, passively watch the game and go home.<p>You know that exactly the same law applies to artists on concerts? You can legally record that and make selfies for your personal use but you can&#x27;t share recordings publicly without consent? Most artists&#x2F;copyright holders ignore that, this is why you see recordings on social media, youtube etc. But if they wanted to they could sue you.<p>But sports at the moment is different. Some EU countries introduce protection of sports events on national level but not all.<p>Look at ECJ (European Court of Justice) decision in <i>Premier League v QC Leisure</i> [2] in which court stated that  sports events as such (notably football games) do not qualify as protected subject matter under EU copyright law. The Court explained that in order to be classified as a “work of authorship” the subject-matter concerned would have to be original in the sense of the author’s own intellectual creation. However, sporting events cannot be regarded as intellectual creations within the meaning of the EU Information Society Directive. This applies in particular to football matches, which are subject to rules of the game which leave no room for creative expressive freedom. The Court went even further and stated that sports events are not protected by European Union law on any other basis in the field of intellectual property, excluding therefore neighbouring or related rights to copyright (including database suigeneris rights) as well. [3]<p>Terms and conditions of access attached to sport event tickets have nowadays developed into quite lengthy lists of contractual obligations, which can vary depending on the type of event and on its commercial relevance. By way of illustration, together with the prohibition to carry into the stadium items considered dangerous or otherwise inappropriate, the use of recording and broadcasting equipment, the unauthorized transmission and&#x2F;or recording
through mobile phones or other recording devices, and sometimes even flash photography are explicitly forbidden. These rules are purely contractual. Therefore, in the case in which a spectator has, without authorization, succeeded in recording the match on a personal device such as a smartphone and has uploaded the video on an online platform, a third party acting in good faith (such as the online platform) will not be bound by that contractual agreement. It follows that the platform operator, as well as any other third party,
cannot be forced merely on this contractual basis to take down the content from the platform. Whereas it has been argued that amateur recordings do not really pose serious commercial threats to sports organisers (and in any case they still represent a breach of contract), the gap in the “house right” based legal protection of sports organisers is in the absence of third-party effects. [3]<p>This is the reason why article 12.a was introduced, not someone personal selfies. Context is really important when commenting on law.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.europarl.europa.eu&#x2F;sides&#x2F;getDoc.do?pubRef=-&#x2F;&#x2F;EP&#x2F;&#x2F;NONSGML+TA+P8-TA-2018-0337+0+DOC+PDF+V0&#x2F;&#x2F;EN" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.europarl.europa.eu&#x2F;sides&#x2F;getDoc.do?pubRef=-&#x2F;&#x2F;EP&#x2F;&#x2F;...</a><p>[2] 403&#x2F;08 and 429&#x2F;08 Football Association Premier League Ltd and others v QC Leisure and others and Karen Murphy v
Media Protection Services Ltd (2011) ECR-I-9083.<p>[3] Margoni, T. (2016) The protection of sports events in the EU: Property,intellectual property, unfair competition and special forms of protection.<p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;LexUriServ&#x2F;LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:124:0036:0041:EN:PDF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;LexUriServ&#x2F;LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...</a>