Os políticos, burocratas e tecnocratas nunca conseguem estar parados. Têm sempre que procurar produzir legislação, impostos, burocracia e outras coisas completamente inúteis (um bom exemplo recente é o GDPR)… …isto porque um punhado de iluminados do alto da sua cadeiro do poder se sente no dever de comandar e regular a vida de milhões de indivíduos.

A proposta da nova directiva dos direitos de autor irá ser votada no parlamento europeu em Abril e se a for votada favoravelmente, a Internet – sobretudo a blogosfera e o youtube – tal como a conhecemos deixará de existir. Deixo aqui uma versão resumida dos malfadados Artigos 11 e 13 retirada daqui:

Article 13: Upload filters

Parliament negotiator Axel Voss accepted the deal between France and Germany I laid out in a recent blog post:

• Commercial sites and apps where users can post material must make “best efforts” to preemptively buy licences for anything that users may possibly upload – that is: all copyrighted content in the world. An impossible feat.
• In addition, all but very few sites (those both tiny and very new) will need to do everything in their power to prevent anything from ever going online that may be an unauthorised copy of a work that a rightsholder has registered with the platform. They will have no choice but to deploy upload filters, which are by their nature both expensive and error-prone.
• Should a court ever find their licensing or filtering efforts not fierce enough, sites are directly liable for infringements as if they had committed them themselves. This massive threat will lead platforms to over-comply with these rules to stay on the safe side, further worsening the impact on our freedom of speech.

Article 11: The “link tax”

The final version of this extra copyright for news sites closely resembles the version that already failed in Germany – only this time not limited to search engines and news aggregators, meaning it will do damage to a lot more websites.

• Reproducing more than “single words or very short extracts” of news stories will require a licence. That will likely cover many of the snippets commonly shown alongside links today in order to give you an idea of what they lead to. We will have to wait and see how courts interpret what “very short” means in practice – until then, hyperlinking (with snippets) will be mired in legal uncertainty.
• No exceptions are made even for services run by individuals, small companies or non-profits, which probably includes any monetised blogs or websites.