Leaked document: EU Presidency calls for massive internet filtering

Non-EU readers should bear in mind that the presidency of the EU is much <i>much</i> weaker than that of, say, the US. It&#x27;s rotated around the countries on a schedule, and has mainly agenda-setting authority.<p>That is, countries who hold the presidency will use it to try to get movement on some issues that they care about, but it doesn&#x27;t have anywhere close to enough power to get something passed which the other member states do not agree with. Real power sits with the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament in various proportions.

China’s example is massive.<p>China’s success has proven that countries <i>can</i> succeed without adopting western liberal freedoms. In fact, success adopting only a small subset of economic and personal freedoms, and none of the political freedoms. The economy is good, the state is stable..<p>Proof of concept for non-liberal systems.<p>This means freedoms need to be argued for on their own merits. Free speech for its own sake. No censorship for its own sake. etc.<p>Much harder. Much more prone to compromise and erosion.

&gt; the Presidency has worked hard in order to make the proposal for the new copyright Directive even more harmful than the Commission’s original proposal,<p>I read that as &quot;corporations can enforce copyright... I can&#x27;t&quot;<p>See Youtube drama of a news organization using someone&#x27;s video without attribution or payment... and then filing automated copyright claims against the original, because parts of the &quot;copyrighted news broadcast&quot; appear verbatim in the video.

I sincerely hope that we will succeed in keeping the internet as democratic as possible and not let it be destroyed by corporate interests in the name &#x27;terrorism prevention&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;d like to give a shout-out to epicenter.works, an Austrian NGO, which I&#x27;ve been following the last 1.5 years or so. I think it&#x27;s hard to get the public engaged in these topics, but they seem to be really determined.<p>Here&#x27;s a google translate link to one of their latest articles &#x2F; achievements (preventing a &#x27;surveillance package&#x27; in Austrian law):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;translate?hl=en&amp;sl=de&amp;tl=en&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fepicenter.works%2Fcontent%2Fueberwachungspaket-gescheitert-wir-rufen-zum-schulterschluss-fuer-sicherheit-statt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;translate?hl=en&amp;sl=de&amp;tl=en&amp;u=h...</a>

&gt; upload filter<p>Your upload is my download. A user <i>uploads</i> an HTTP request to a server, and the server <i>uploads</i> an HTTP response to the user. Of course that sounds unnatural compared to the user downloading the HTTP response. But the difference between upload&#x2F;download is purely semantic and only distinguishes the <i>intent</i> of the user. Regardless of terms used, data flows in one direction, then back in another. The only distinguishing factor is its direction and whether or not both sides can establish the initial connection. So in that sense, a server uploads data to the user, who implicitly permitted the sever to do so when establishing the connection.<p>This misappropriation of technical language to advance a policy goal is revealing in that it shows the concept is fundamentally unlegislatable and therefore unenforceable, or worse, arbitrarily enforceable.<p>This is just part of an ongoing legislative pattern of the past 5-10 years. My reading of its trajectory is that regulatory regimes will eventually require licenses to run any service behind public IP addresses, to register domain names, and to advertise BGP routes or run public DNS resolvers. When coupled with centralization of inbound routing infrastructure (transatlantic fiber) and&#x2F;or increased regulation of IP transit companies, this licensing legislature will work effectively.

Is anyone surprised at this? The internet is a single point which governs the majority of information and communication for the people now. Someone who is in power can potentially eliminate threats and increase their own power&#x2F;wealth. I would be more surprised to find the opposite -- that the powerful had privately written a memo telling others that privacy matters more than their own power&#x2F;wealth&#x2F;safety.<p>Its like all the &quot;shocking&quot; revelations on the corruption of elections using voting machines -- hardly surprising given that the manipulation guarantees &quot;legitimate&quot; power from the people, the cost is fairly low relative to payoff, and the effect is largely untraceable.

Personally, I think the cookie law could be expanded a bit further. Currently, I&#x27;m not always appropriately notified that the website I&#x27;m visiting uses cookies. How about we institute a law that requires browsers to implement a feature that detects when a cookie is stored, locks the browser and proceeds to play an unbridged rendition of the <i>Ode to Freedom</i> (yes, that&#x27;s really what it&#x27;s called) while displaying a full page warning that you have to manually accept. Later, we could expand the mechanism to cover websites that use CSS stylesheets.

So at a quick glance at the leaked document, it seems to contain provisions for requiring certain services to let copyright holders have unlicensed content pulled and to provide ways to stop such content being posted in the first place. Excluded from this group would be e.g. ISPs, storage providers and service providers whose primary function is not to distribute content to the public.<p>The article seems very alarmist and light on detail. This draft may well be pretty bad, but I&#x27;d recommend reading it to form your opinion.

So I admit that I&#x27;ve only skimmed the PDF on statewatch.org that the site points to, but I didn&#x27;t see the &quot;massive filtering&quot; bit. This reads like the DMCA seems to be practiced; can someone point out to me the specific page number of the PDF, or better the text within the document, which refers to the content filtering?<p>I&#x27;m not saying the DMCA is a good thing or a bad thing; I&#x27;m just trying to get calibrated to what is being proposed in the directive. Thanks for the help!

and they still call me paranoid ...

&gt; follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship<p>This phrase makes the article seem overly dramatic. The proposed directive is all about copyright and not about censorship in the common sense. So, if I own the copyright (e.g. I wrote a blog post critizing the European Commission), this directive doesn&#x27;t apply to me.

The web page is receiving the &quot;hug of death&quot; right now, and is having difficulty loading.<p>Pasting the content here in case it goes down (I did not include the in-paragraph hyperlinks though).<p>However, here is the leaked document they reference in the first sentence: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statewatch.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;aug&#x2F;eu-council-copyright-directive-estonian-compromises-11783-17.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statewatch.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;aug&#x2F;eu-council-copyright...</a><p>======================================<p>A Council of the European Union document leaked by Statewatch on 30 August reveals that during the summer months, that Estonia (current EU Presidency) has been pushing the other Member States to strengthen indiscriminate internet surveillance, and to follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship. Standing firmly behind its belief that filtering the uploads is the way to go, the Presidency has worked hard in order to make the proposal for the new copyright Directive even more harmful than the Commission’s original proposal, and pushing it further into the realms of illegality.<p>According to the leaked document, the text suggests two options for each of the two most controversial proposals: the so-called “link tax” or ancillary copyright and the upload filter. Regarding the upload filter, the text offers two alternatives:<p>* Option A maintains the Commission’s original proposal of having in place an upload filter which will be under the control of platforms and other companies that are hosting online content. Although it removes mentions to “content recognition technologies”, in reality, there is no way to “prevent the availability” (another expression which remains in the text) of certain content without scanning all the content first.<p>* Option B is, at best, a more extreme version of Option A. In fact, it seems so extreme that it almost makes the first option look like a reasonable compromise. This may, of course, be the “diplomatic” strategy. In this extreme option, the text attacks again the liability regime of the e-commerce Directive – which, bizarrely, would not be repealed, leaving us with two contradictory pieces of EU law but adds a “clarification” of what constitutes a “communication to the public”. This clarification establishes that platforms (and its users) would be liable for the copyright infringing content uploaded by its users.<p>The proposals in this leak highlight a very dangerous roadmap for the EU Member States, if they were to follow the Presidency’s lead. The consequences of these flawed proposals can only be prevented if civil society and EU citizens firmly raise their voices against having a censorship machine in the EU. We will be turning on our call tool at savethememe.net before each of the key votes in the European Parliament. Make use of the tool, and call your representatives to stop the #censorshipmachine!<p>No, you can’t enjoy the music you paid for, says EU Parliament Committee (05.07.2017) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;no-you-cant-enjoy-the-music-you-paid-for-says-eu-parliament&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;no-you-cant-enjoy-the-music-you-paid-for-sa...</a><p>Proposed Copyright Directive – Commissioner confirms it is illegal (28.06.2017) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;proposed-copyright-directive-commissioner-confirms-it-is-illegal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;proposed-copyright-directive-commissioner-c...</a><p>EU Copyright Directive – privatised censorship and filtering of free speech (10.11.2016) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;eu-copyright-directive-privatised-censorship-and-filtering-of-free-speech&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;eu-copyright-directive-privatised-censorshi...</a><p>Copyright reform: Document pool <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;copyright-reform-document-pool&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edri.org&#x2F;copyright-reform-document-pool&#x2F;</a><p>(Contribution by Diego Naranjo, EDRi)<p>======================================

Site can&#x27;t be reached at the moment. Anybody care to provide a TL;DR?