 Okay everybody, thanks for coming. I know it's late. I know beer is on your mind I want you to listen up and try and avoid falling asleep at your desks pupils Because this is actually quite important. The current EU copyright reform is shaping up to be a bit of a disaster And you need to know about it and do something about it. Giannis Hello My name is Giannis Constantinidis. I've been part of the Mozilla family for like four and a half years so far Okay, fair enough And more recently I have become a Mozilla tech speaker Which means that I travel I often travel worldwide to speak at conferences about friend open source software technologies and open standards and Here is my friend and colleague serve Hi Use yourself. Well, I'm trying to get the slides to work. So perhaps now is not the moment Okay Hi, I'm Jerv. I've been with Mozilla for about 17 18 years I'm currently working in public policy. So that means persuading governments not to make stupid laws about the internet So what we're talking about is what I do I also run moss if you're here this morning, you'd have heard about that And I try and stop dodgy certificate authorities from undermining the security of the web I probably cannot fix the slides. So it's your call. I guess Well, I'm not that much of a trackpad user. I'm more like a touchpad user So if I'm really hard to control thing that's using the trackpad Apologies for the delay Okay, okay, off we go So this is a quick overview of what we will be discussing about today We will start with a quick introduction to the you copyright reform Then we will try to explain how this can potentially affect the flow ecosystem and not only the flow system But also the internet generally Then we will also try to explain why all of this is happening and before going to Q&A We will also explain what Mozilla is currently doing about this and how you can also participate and demand better Reform from your MEPs So what is really going on last September the European Commission issued published a Proposal for a directive on copyright in the digital single market you can search for it online using your favorite search engine just search for Proposal for a directive on copyright in the digital single market Long story short this proposal for a directive contains lots of articles that can potentially be very harmful Not only for the free and open source software ecosystem, but also for the internet in general In particular there is article 11 also known as ancillary copyright Which pretty much says that anyone using snippets of journalistic online content must first obtain a license and This is targeting primarily search engines such as Google for example You might have heard of Google news what they do is they use snippets From a blinking back to the original source So what the European Union is currently suggesting is that in order to use snippets which in practice It's just a small piece of text Linking to the original source of a offer journalistic article They are saying that you must obtain permission and by obtaining permission most of the times you will end up paying fees To the respective copyright holders This this cannot be same we have been calling this the link tax because this is what it really is and Even worse this right would be in effect for 20 years after the original articles first publication So it's not something that lasts for seven days for seven weeks or seven months. It lasts for 20 years almost an eternity In addition there is article 13 also known as robo copyright which pretty much says in the nutshell it says that Platforms internet platforms hosting user-generated content must constantly Monitor user behavior to identify and prevent copyright infringement This is a huge violation to user privacy. Can you imagine that? Constantly be monitored by algorithms in platforms Jeff will also talk in a few minutes about this in more detail But even if we consider that Monitoring users is a good thing. Which of course is not even if we do consider it's a good thing Still it's such a large technological feat to be implemented by those platforms They would need to design algorithms for monitoring users They will need to find the resources to allocate it to allocate them for monitoring their users It's not something everybody can do Lots of companies can afford to do that. They have the manpower. They have the resources to do such kind of monitoring But not everyone can do that So small and medium-sized enterprises are doomed and of course with article 13 there comes a large set of problems these platforms could potentially be shelter liable for The content that their users upload Everything will need to be licensed so that it can be categorized accordingly and There would be filters so that everything and anything will be monitored Last but not least there won't be any safeguards The European Union will not be able to tell whether companies are overstepping and also the users they won't have any any way of petitioning of Trying to appeal in case their content take their content gets taken down without any reason And it's not just about Europe This thing this directive this proposal for a directive might be seen as best practice Although if you ask me it's far away from being a best practice This cannot be saying It might although be seen by other governments as best practice and try to be replicated and In reality, it's the same rights holders and creative companies That are trying to push for the same kind of legislation in other countries such as the United States So back to you so How did it come to be that article 13 that is supposed to be stopping people from uploading? Yeah, I've turned it off on purpose. How did it come to be? The article 13 which is designed to stop people uploading commercial music and movies to YouTube Ended up being a problem for free software The answer is that the EU doesn't really know what a platform is There's a very loose definition of platform in the legislation and it says the legislation is targeted at quote information society service providers That store and provide access to large amounts of works or other subject matter uploaded by their users so it's supposed to be about commercial audio and video copyright infringement and But it can negatively affect GitLab stack overflow venus of Anna github source fortune software heritage, right? They are information society service providers That store and provide access to large amounts of works other subject matter uploaded by their users Fix those companies pretty well doesn't it? So what do you have to do? If you're covered Maybe it's not so bad. Well, first of all, you're obliged to conclude Licensing agreements with rights holders. So this means you need to have a department that whenever someone who owns some Proprietary software comes to you you have to make an agreement with them that you will monitor your users for uploads of their proprietary software We have open source licenses, right? So there won't be a problem with general open source uploads because everybody who uploads to github gives a license because it's open source right more than that later But the second thing you have to do is you have to prevent the availability on the service of works or other subject Identified by rights holders through the cooperation with service providers. So in other words When the proprietary software company gives you their source code You have to scan every bit of source code uploaded to check whether it's the same And if it's the same in some way, you have to bar access to it So each site we need a submissions process for commercial source code and then have to Scan all commercial source code against it. The thing is though Free software public software does not have a copyright infringement problem of that type When was the last time you read an article about the scandal of someone uploading a pirate copy of the Microsoft Word source code to github? Or for that matter a binary of Microsoft Word to github What is the equivalence of musical movie piracy? Well, it's that but it makes no sense in a software context So it's not like YouTube these flights Public software is necessarily public So copyright problems are obvious Their licenses are attached unlike random bits of video but Even if We did say it could be done the necessary monitoring would be too intrusive You would need to be doing permanent continuous Licence compliance assessment and you'd have a massive false positive problem because unlike music and movies Some source code is the same as other source code for legitimate reasons How many ways are there of writing quicksort? How often do you copy and paste it from stack overflow? Right and that would trigger false alarms and cause your software to be put in the limbo until you could prove that that particular algorithm Was in fact yours to use and Copyright compliance the source code is not an automatable thing anyway There is an entire industry of billions of dollars of companies who go to proprietary companies and help them make sure Their open source using product is in copyright compliance They do use automated tools for it But it's a manual process and they're saying that now We have to basically do copyright compliance as in a licensing compatibility between two libraries you've used in your project Would count as a violation of the rights of one of the copyright holders? and therefore possibly fall under this So we now have to figure out how to do something that a very large industry hasn't figured out how to do and Make sure that anyone hosting their own copy of git is running that software The whole thing is a disaster zone So lack of clarity Will make it mean to have massive side effects which are unintentional unwanted and that's even before the effect It's supposed to have which also So that is why article 13 is a complete nightmare for free software And why even if you don't really care about people pirating music and movies on YouTube and you think well They do that. I don't do that whatever No problem You need to be opposed to this copyright change and do something about it. Thank you Okay, all set. So why is this all happening? well, if you ask me it's more than it's more like a Political problem than rather than an intellectual one because you know politicians they often run for elections And in order to run for elections, they do need money lots of money to fund their campaigns On the other hand creative companies rights holders have lots of money lots of power lots of influence So you can probably imagine what is really going on here. I don't really need to say anything more furthermore politicians sometimes are Technologically illiterate and therefore are conflating. They are not able to distinguish Creative industries from creators. This is not necessarily the same thing and Lately the European Union seems to be so much obsessed with getting Google with trying to punish Google to find Google to make them pay the truth is that large colossal companies such as Google they have lots of power lots of influence lots of money and Whatever you might try to do to them. They will just Smile at you and keep keep on going They can afford to pay any fines. They will find ways to get away with it So in the end, it's the small and medium-sized enterprises that are going to pay the price Not Google not the colossal large companies and Last but not least there is the myth of the value cap as told by the creative industry by the music industry in particular Long story short, they are saying that with the internet Everybody's able to upload content digitally and by spreading copyrighted content without paying for the fees They are creating a huge value gap That that is the the creative industry is not getting their money back So what is Mozilla doing about all of this? We have heard a lot of campaigns Successful campaigns such as paper storm you can still go to paper storm dot eat to find out more about this particular campaign in a nutshell it was a campaign where people could sign a petition and Once they signed a petition we would drop digital leaflets digital non-tangible leaflets over buildings such as the FCC building or over important monuments such as the Eiffel Tower and In total we did drop more than 65 million digital non-tangible, of course leaflets and Once we reached our milestones We would do it directly to keep people such as MEP members of the European Parliament and Apart from paper storm there are other campaigns There is for example the change copyright campaign which you can visit right now right this minute or right after the session at Change copyright.org you can sign the petition and We can also connect your call to the European Parliament to speak with your representative to speak with a member of the European Parliament and We also provide you with a text that you can read to your representative and therefore demand better reform Apart from a change copyright.org campaign there are other ways Which with which you can help for example, you can always keep up Keep up to date with all the latest updates We have around our initiatives around our campaigns And if you would like to lend us a helping hand helping hand you are more than welcome to do so Come speak to us right after the session come find us in our booth in the K building and Well, let's fight together and let's demand better reform by our governments by our representatives in the European Parliament Thank you, and we do have five minutes for any questions. You might have Okay So she's asking Okay, see That's fine Yeah, I will repeat the question so she's asking if this is a proposal and If the proposal has already been voted if something has been decided so the proposal came out last September and The next voting is set to take place in March Nothing has been decided yet. It is merely for a proposal But like we said earlier it contains several articles that can be very harmful not only for individual citizens But also for small and medium-sized enterprises Thank you Just please another question Yes, please So the question is what other concrete actions can we take apart from calling the MEPs? well, it's a political issue like I said earlier, so Personally, if you ask me, I don't know of any other ways which we can, you know Take immediate action and try to demand better reform. It's a political issue. It's a complex issue large organizations such as Mozilla Companies large companies are lobbying directly with members of the European Parliament and Well, I personally hope that pro progress is going to be made and that we don't have to face such challenges In the near future. Would you like to add something? Yes If you sign up at change copyright org will let you know when there is something that you can do other than calling your MEP Thank you Do we have another minute for one last question? Okay? It doesn't apply to I don't think it applies to links No, it's not a it's not one of those things where even if you link to something you have to check it's valid It's only content that you yourself host The question was does it apply only toasted content or does it also apply to content you link to? Thank you. I think we're done. Thank you very much for being here. Come find us right after the session