INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Wikipedia Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online
encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament
tomorrow.
The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two
most controversial elements: Article 13,which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them
towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which
targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax&, as
critics dub it.
Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open
Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship
machines&, warning it will &weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based&.
Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP&
links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website,saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send
an email to protest against the measure
The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the
Center for Democracy Technology.
In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: &If the
proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search
engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.&
The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will
remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o&clock (UTC) on July 5.
&We want to continue offering an
open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content
We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the
numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the
extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,& it adds.
The Italian language version of
Wikipedia went dark yesterday.
While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out
encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.
We are community driven and so each
community makes their own decision
I think we should get more organized in the future so that we could vote more quickly or earlier!
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3,
2018
We had only a very short time from the largely unexpected (by me anyway!) JURI committee vote to have a community discussion
We move slowly sometimes, and woke up too late
https://t.co/fVjIZ4aZPr
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018
As you&d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal
critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission Twitter feed yesterday when they tried
to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be &considered& to be giving
access to &large amounts of unauthorised protected content& by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law
because it covered by Creative Commons licenses
(An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)
And the commissioners drafting this portion of the
directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry irein recent years,
over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.
But critics arguethis is a wrongheaded,
sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to
information online.
Wales shot back at the EC tweet — saying it &deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly
and misleading the public in this way&.
Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the
public in this way.
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018
A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the
argument, he added: &The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big
enough that they try to throw us a bone
Justice matters.&
The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we&ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this
latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.
3 political groups plus an additional 84 Parliamentarians have requested the vote to have a full
plenary debate the possibility to make amendments to the #copyright text
The vote will be tomorrow at noon
https://t.co/ukJFierEfU #SaveYourInternet pic.twitter.com/NayTGf8Grx
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) July 4, 2018
