How the Internet breaks in Europe

"International Experience" will teach a bad bad

The new directive of copyright protection on the Internet, which was adopted on March 26, has already managed to call “tax on links” at first glance is not related to our country. However, Russian lawmakers love to refer to “international experience” and try to draw the worst practices from European law. It is safe to assume that its analogue of the “tax on links” will also appear in us over the next few years. So, what about?

Formally, the reason for the development of a new law indicated the need to correct the situation, “in which several companies earned huge amounts of money and at the same time did not properly pay reward to thousands of journalists and creators, on whose work they depend.” That is, it was, in fact, about the redistribution of cash flows between content creators and large aggregators, for example, such as Google. From now on, with any attempt to “re -use” materials (except for obviously non -profit type of Wikipedia), these aggregators and social networks will be required to pay a reward.

In favor of the authors? Alas, no. The main problem of any legislation on copy is precisely that

Declaring the struggle for the rights of the Creator, in practice it protects exclusively the rights of the owner of the content. And this is not the same thing.

In most media, journalists work either for salaries or on the basis of piecework wages, so formally their reward does not at all depend on the number of links to their materials in aggregators and social networks. Of course, some media encourage their employees with payments of additional KPI bonuses, but they could do this perfectly before - at the expense of the advertising budget.

But the new directive will strike a heavy blow to the small network media. The whole charm of Internet journalism is the possibility of instant verification of any information using links to other people's materials, videos or images. Without them, neither interactivity nor a sense of trust in the published material are impossible. Google and other giants will have the opportunity to pay for links and previews, small media and platforms have no. The production of high -quality and interesting publications will almost become a privilege available to not many large players of the media market. And the right of readers to the diversity of both information itself and to an infinite number of its interpretations, of course, will be infringed.

The second point of the new copy-directive is the so-called "13th amendment." She strikes already on the main competitors of both traditional and network media - by bloggers. In fact, it obliges all public platforms (such as YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook or LiveJournal) to install “robots” to prevent users to load someone else's content.

As similar programs work, we, unfortunately, know very well: if, for example, you will post your own shooting in the city park, then they can remove the sound path or even erase the video, because the music that belongs to a certain copyright holder is coming from the stage. The main “chip” of modern video blogging is to interrupt their own content with memes in the form of excerpts from films, pictures, personnel from rollers of other video bloggers and other little things that create an attractive style of utterance for the audience. And although the authors of the law made an exception for “some materials such as memes and gifs”, such a breadth of the soul of European legislators indicates only that these people do not understand that they undertook to regulate.

An alien picture can be a meme depicting a bear with raised paws (“Pereved”), the work of an unknown GIF animator, to which a sound was added (“Mr. Dudets”), a screenshot from a computer game-in a word, anything. Modern Internet culture is based on compilations that give birth to new meanings, and it is basically impossible to distinguish its works from a “illegally loaded author’s product”. No filter has such selectivity.

Simply put, the owners of the public platforms received on their heads the European version of the "Package of Yarova".

Now they will also have to install expensive software, which will slow down the load speed, without bringing any benefit. And since, as already mentioned, anything can be a meme, then these software filters will have to either be twisted to the maximum level of censorship, or disconnected at all, hoping for a chance. Judging by how YouTube has been behaving recently, it will be the first option.

For Russian legislators, such an “international experience” is a real gift, if only because it can become an ideal tool, including for political censorship.

To ruin small media copyright deductions and deprive the video bloggers of the actual language - what could be better?

We all curse Roskomnadzor, but the problem is that on the other side of the new iron curtain the state and large corporations in the same way in four hands break the usual web. And, apparently, Tim Berners-Lee, who is called the “creator of the Internet”, when he says that it is already useless to repair the “Internet creator” is right. The situation is such that we need not free from the state or copy censorship “Pinch for freedom of speech”, but new information networks, where no one can establish the rules of the game.