 Okay, now let's begin. Sorry for the short delay. I would like to say a few words about our next speaker. This is the talk which should begin at 12.20. It will last about one hour, 20. And it's more like a workshop and not a presentation. And the title is Let's Stop EU Copyright Expansion. The speaker, Christopher Clay, welcome Christopher, is a founding member of the MetaLab, the Vienna Hackersies, and also was part of the Austrian Pirate Party. And right now he's communicating with the Julia... What's the name? Julia Rader in the European Parliament. And the talk will be about plans of the EU Commission to install an extra copyright for Newside and an obligation for internet platforms to survey all user uploads. Sounds for me quite malicious. What we can do about it and why we should do something about it, this you will learn from Christopher Clay. Give him a warm applause. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, so like it has been said, this is supposed to be a workshop. So I am here to get your feedback and to get you to take some action. So again, I would like to ask if you want to move forward a little bit, that would be super useful because once I've given an introduction about the topic, I'm going to jump down here and talk to you. And so it would be easier if you can talk back. So it's been almost 15 years since the European Union reformed its copyright framework in 2000... Well, over 15 years. In 2001, the Infosock Directive, which outlines European copyright, was passed and that was a time before Wikipedia was famous, before Facebook existed, before YouTube existed, before we all had machines in our pockets with which we can remix content, create content, publish it globally. And so these rules are woefully out of date. They are mostly meant to target... So many rules that used to target companies, interacting with copyright, now target everyone, because we all in our everyday life share things and create things. Here. Excellent. So finally, after a decade, the EU said, okay, we have to look at copyright again. Another problem is that it's extremely fragmented. There are 28 different copyright laws. For example, which exceptions to copyright apply is different from country to country because they are not mandatory, they are optional. Each country can choose which ones to implement and which ones not. So what we would have needed would have been an update of copyright to the digital age, an expansion and harmonization of users' rights in copyright. But we got none of this because Digital Commissioner Oettinger was responsible for creating this reform. And what he came up with are several proposals that mostly aim to protect the business models of large European industries from change through the Internet. So for the publishing industry, which feels threatened by Facebook and Google, the proposal is to introduce an extra copyright specifically for news websites, for the publishers of news websites. So right now the journalists already have copyright for the articles they write, but the publishers don't have their own layer of rights and they say that platforms like Facebook and Google are totally abusing that by using snippets of news content. Like in Google News, when you see a headline and the first sentence of an article or a thumbnail image or like on Facebook when someone shares a news article, these same things show up, a thumbnail, a headline, a snippet. They say this is an abuse of their rights to reproduce in your Facebook stream the headline of a news article. And they want this extra copyright so they can go to Facebook and Google and say pay us a couple million a year and then we won't sue you for spreading our headlines and snippets. So again, this doesn't apply to full articles or anything like that. It's about these tiny little bits of content which they want an extra copyright to protect. It's supposed to last for 20 years. It's supposed to apply retroactively and there's no limit to Facebook or Google so it would also affect bloggers who quote or who reproduce parts of news articles. And it has no minimum length, like even three words could be a violation that's the proposal for publishers. For the music industry, there's a different proposal because they also feel threatened by YouTube. They think YouTube doesn't pay them enough money. They have come up with this lobbying term called the value gap. If they list the amount of money they get per play of a song on Spotify and the amount of money they get per play of a video on YouTube, they get less on YouTube because it's obviously a totally different business model. It's based on ad revenue sharing and on Spotify it's based on subscription fees and the result is that the YouTube income is less and they say the difference between this is the value gap which is being stolen from them by YouTube. So what they want to do is to get a stronger negotiating position against YouTube and the law that Mr. Ertinger came up for that purpose is to force all internet platforms that host a large amount of user uploaded content to filter every, to surveil and scan every upload for potential copyright infringement so they can prevent copyrighted things from even going online. If that sounds familiar to you, that's kind of like YouTube's content ID system already works. They already scan every video you upload and try to find copyrighted content in there. But at that point, YouTube is doing this voluntarily. So they want this law to, so that YouTube is in a worse position because now they would be forced by law to do the thing they already do. Of course, again, this would not just affect YouTube, this would affect any platform that hosts a large amount of user uploaded content. For example, small blogging communities or even platforms like Wikipedia. There is no exception for platforms that only host Creative Commons content or that are community-run or anything like that. As soon as you have a large amount of user uploaded data, you will have to introduce filters. This would also affect online platforms that deal with content types that aren't usually a problem for copyright infringement and where technology doesn't even yet exist to scan uploaded content. For example, we have a case of a small company in Europe who is running a music notation sheet sharing site. They would also have to scan every uploaded notation sheet, whatever it's called exactly, for copyrighted melodies and that technology doesn't even exist. SoundCloud tells us they spend 3-4 million euros per year on such technology. YouTube has spent around 30 million. So every European platform would have to implement such very costly technology. And then, of course, what will it lead to? It will lead to legitimate uploads being taken down because an algorithm can never differentiate between a valid use of copyrighted content that is covered by copyright exceptions, for example, quotation or parody. It cannot differentiate between, you know, a parody video that includes a snippet of a song and a copyright infringement. That is something an algorithm cannot make the decision on. So the platforms, of course, fearing being sued by the music industry will just take everything down and then you will have to fight to get your video back online if it was legitimate. Yeah, the other things I will... I guess, well, I'll mention them shortly. So one other big contentious issue is for the first time, Europe is going to get an exception, so an allowance for text and data mining. So for automatically reading and analyzing a lot of copyrighted content. That's right now, it's unclear whether that's legal or not. They will introduce an exception. That means it will be legal, but only for research institutions in the public interest. So not for hackers and hobbyists and startups and academia and any... Well, academia research institutions, maybe, but not for journalists, not for anyone else who wants to data mine. So this exception that they're planning to introduce, which is good, is going to be extremely limited in scope, which is bad. And then they are debating in the European Parliament right now whether they should add to this reform package an exception for remixing and user-generated content. That would be amazing and really what we need, but it's not looking very good that this will actually happen. So let me talk a bit about the process. So the European Commission has last year made these proposals. Again, like I said, mainly handouts to industry to protect obsolete business models. Now the European Parliament and the European Council can voice their opinions on this and suggest changes, and they have to approve this law before it goes into effect. The European Parliament are the directly elected representatives of the people of Europe and the European Council that is the member state governments of Europe. So they both have to find an opinion. And this process is ongoing in the European Parliament and it takes about a year. We're getting close to the end of it. Several different committees have already voted and it's gone very badly. The committee that is responsible for science policy in the European Parliament has said this idea of an extra copyright for news sites is great and we should expand it to scientific articles. Scientific articles should also, you shouldn't be able to quote the scientific publishers, should have this extra copyright so that not just the author of the article, but the publisher of the journal can also prevent you from quoting from that scientific article. That's what the scientific industry and research committee of the European Parliament has said in its vote. The Culture Committee similarly said good ideas. The Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee was a little bit better, but also they couldn't find a majority on the topic of an extra copyright for news sites. So they have no opinion on this. They couldn't decide whether to reject it or whether to call for expanding it. Nothing got a majority so they have no opinion so they support what's already on the table. This is pretty tragic. We were expecting this to go differently. The main committee is the Legal Affairs Committee. That's the most important one that's still missing. They will vote in October, this October. Probably, it might be moved back, but probably October. And they're... Yeah. We can't expect it to solve these problems. Like Article 11, the extra copyright for news sites and Article 13, these censorship machines, online upload filters, they need to be removed. They will harm the European internet. They will harm freedom of expression. They will harm internet startups in Europe. And they won't even work. They won't even create the purpose they were intended for, like giving money to these industries because of course Google and Facebook, the big platforms are going to find ways around it. They're going to change the way they display news when you share it and so on. They're just not going to pay up. So it's going to be a lose-lose situation because there's no majority for that in the European Parliament in this committee that's going to vote in October. There might be an opportunity to make these proposals weaker, but that's not good enough. We need to actually remove them. So to give you an idea, this Legal Affairs Committee, that's about 40 members of the European Parliament from all these different groups. The majority is right of centre. So the progressive groups are social democrats, part of them at least, the greens, the left. They are short of a majority. For a majority you need either some conservatives or you need the Eurosceptics and the Nazis. That's the situation in the Parliament. So who's fighting here? So on the side of a progressive copyright there are several organisations that deal with digital rights like EDRI, European Digital Rights, or C4C, that's a big alliance that includes Creative Commons, for example. It's a copyright for creativity. There are NGOs that fight for open access that are on our side. There's Mozilla, EFF, libraries and archives are also on our side. They don't want to make copyright more complicated like these proposals would do. And also the scientific community, the independent scientific community. So there's overwhelming consensus that these proposals would be harmful. I will just quote from some independent academic feedback. So there's independent scientific consensus that this extra copyright for news sites cannot be allowed to stand. It said an open letter from Europe's leading research centres for intellectual property law. An open letter by 37 IP professors said it's unnecessary, undesirable, would introduce an unacceptable level of uncertainty and would be unlikely to achieve anything. It's an interference with freedom of speech. It may set back the function of the press as a public watchdog. It's contrary to the objective of creating a single European digital market. There's a negative impact on small publishers. Risks having repercussions for the acceptability and legitimacy of the copyright system as a whole. It will not foster quality journalism. It adversely affects authors. It directly affects the communication of the European population. It will not create additional revenues. It will privilege large providers such as Google. Small European entities will be prevented from entering the market. The final result may be further market concentration, less information diversity. However, in my life and in my work at the European Parliament, I heard independent academics this clearly and unanimously rejecting illegal proposals. They usually don't speak in such language. It's usually very complex, hedging their bets. But there's just overwhelming majority. This is not a pirate party position. There's overwhelming opinion and consensus that these would be horrible proposals for the internet in Europe. But nobody cares in the European Parliament. Policymakers do not care if they've even read this. They read it and shrug it off because, on the other hand, are the industry lobbyists who say they need this. Journalism is going to die if they don't get this right. Musicians are going to die. We're all going to die. The kids of creators will not have food on their table. We need this. We need this. And that is so much louder than all the academics combined. It's just the same with the censorship machine's proposal. Yeah. It's been found by studies to be incompatible with existing EU law, which prohibits countries from introducing general monitoring on internet platforms. It's incompatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It's ambiguously worded and inconsistent. Yeah. Privatized censorship says, there are negative impacts on the internet, violates fundamental rights, and so on. So there's really no debate whether these proposals are good or bad, except in the committee that will vote on whether to impose them on us for the next decade or so in Europe. There are some campaigns trying to fight against them. Oh, this isn't German, no? Mozilla has launched a campaign called Change Copyright, which is pretty cool. They promoted it on Firefox fairly strongly, but they're also not really getting through in the parliament. They're doing like tweet your MEP campaigns, but it's not really having an impact that we've noticed so far. More specifically, there's the Save the Link campaign. That's a Canadian NGO who are fighting against this extra copyright for news sites. They also are doing open letters, write your MEP campaigns, information pages. The link is under attack. So they're fighting here against this one proposal. There's Save the Meme.net. That's an attempt by, I think, Bits of Freedom. That's a Dutch NGO to fight against this upload filtering proposal by framing it as your memes are in danger. Save the Meme. And this has a call your MEP function in here. These are the legal affairs committee MEPs. Yeah, Bits of Freedom. So there are sites where you can get involved, but there really hasn't been much attention paid to this issue by the activist community, by the press, by the media. I mean, the press is a tricky one because, of course, the publishers are economically interested in these proposals, and so Commissioner Ertinger even specifically said at one event, like a big German press meetup, he told the publishers to talk to their journalists to convince them not to write bad articles on these proposals. So he said, you need to get out there. If you want to protect your business model, tell your journalists why this is an amazing idea and why they shouldn't write against it. Luckily, Mr. Ertinger is no longer the digital commissioner of Europe, but, of course, his proposals are already on the table and his successor, a Bulgarian is continuing. I mean, he can't change direction this quickly. In the parliament, another anecdote maybe that frustrates me to no end right now is that the person who was responsible for shepherding this legal proposal through the European parliament was a Maltese Maltese MEP called Therese Comodini I don't have it on here who actually listened to all the stakeholders. She met with over 100 organizations and so on and she came to very sensible proposals despite being a conservative MEP. She really listened and she said, okay, we need to make these proposals less harmful and she proposed doing that but then suddenly there were elections in Malta and she decided she would like to become justice minister of the next Maltese government so she decided to run for local parliament her party didn't end up winning so they're not in government and she can't be justice minister but she had won the seat in the local parliament but she looked that she compared her work in the European parliament shaping copyright for all of Europe that she's been spending a year on and being in the opposition of the parliament of Malta I'm sure it's a great country but tiny and she decided to stay in the European parliament and we were very relieved, okay, she would continue her work there then there was a big media shitstorm in Malta apparently, they said oh, she's just after the higher salary that you get in the European parliament and then there were a lot of evil comments on her Facebook page and so she had a change of heart and decided to go with what the voters of Malta want and leave the European parliament and drop all her work that had taken her so much time to prepare and that she had come to sensible conclusions on and it was taken over by a German conservative Axel Foss from CDU and the first thing he said was oh, this controversial report that she has written, we have to drop this and he whipped the entire conservative party in Europe in line to support all these proposals without changes so the work of a year was lost because of the Maltese local elections so we're in a bad position, the conservatives are strictly pro these proposals the social democrats are mostly on the right side, a bit split social democrats from France and Belgium are very pro-copyright and they're also pro these proposals the greens are against it the left is in theory against it but doesn't really care enough to show up to the votes and that is generally the position the Eurosceptic populists the EFDD which is mostly the Italian Movimenta Cinque Stelle this protest party run by this comedian they are also on our side they're against these proposals they also don't really have the resources to devote to this fight so that's where we're at we have until October to convince a majority of these 40 MEPs in the Justice Committee to vote against these harmful proposals how can we do that until October that's what I want to discuss with you in the workshop part of this there are these campaigns already there's another one called the copy fighters that is going online soon the youth of Europe responding to these proposals but as you've seen there's four or five different ones it's not a very unified message it's not an acta yet it's not like we need to stop these proposals from harming the internet and my proposal for framing these issues would be so they are attacks on the link the extra copyright for news sites and on the upload the censorship machines filtering proposal and links and uploads are the way we interact on the internet are the way that average people contribute to the internet so that they're not just passive consumers that's the way we share and that we participate online and if we are making these processes harder like they're trying to turn the internet into cable TV sort of where all we do is consume Netflix like good little consumers and we're participating and getting our own voice heard is going to be harder that's the message I propose that we campaign on like the way we participate in the web is under attack unless we stop this what do we need to do we need to call our MEPs we need to call local people need to call their countries MEPs in the legal affairs committee and explain to them this is important to me I'm watching please vote in favor of a freer internet against these restrictions of a free internet we need influential organizations to approach them for example libraries, academics startups have been very useful here investors in startups they have arguments to convince conservative MEPs they can say this will harm the development of the economy in Europe which is something that they will be more open to hearing than digital rights arguments so yeah in each of these countries in each of the 28 countries or not all of them have MEPs on this committee but most of them we need to approach our representatives we need to get some media attention we need to get popular youtubers involved in this so that's two things I'm trying to do in the European parliament over the next few months is getting famous youtubers to care about this because they do care because they already have bad experiences with this content ID system on YouTube so it's easy to explain to them okay this would make this worse we are talking with like a British rapper who has like over million subscribers who wants to do a video on this and this we need to do in all 28 countries so if you can help with that start thinking about whether you have any connections to someone who has an audience on YouTube or could put some effort into contacting them the other thing I'm trying to do is the start-up angle I'm going to European internet investors and telling them they need to tell European governments that this will harm the investment landscape and the future of growth and jobs and the digital economy in Europe because I think that's a very potent argument for conservatives and liberals oh I totally forgot the liberals earlier when I was talking about the parties the liberals are always very split on these issues the best you can find in the European Parliament half of them are pretty bad yep so that is I'm looking over my notes I think that's generally what I wanted to tell you about the background let's do a Q&A on the content and then I would like to get your ideas of how we can contribute to stopping this there's a microphone in the middle quick question this equates to changing degree programs throughout the world because every type of academic research we do is based off of linking with other people's documentation, links and information if we take this one step further how could that even be constitutionally valid because that would mean that this law would change every single degree program throughout Europe and probably throughout the world of academic research okay so so what the proposal says is let's see if I have the original text here and just before you go on I know you say there's some loophole for academic institutions that's not good enough I'm a security researcher like a lot of people out here and we actually reference other people's work to prove a point to not spread fake news and that kind of BS and if we don't have that possibility how can we even do research? one important thing I should mention is this extra copyright will not change how copyright exceptions work in Europe so these still apply and there are copyright exceptions for quoting in the context of academic research for example that are generally implemented in all of Europe there are exceptions for parody things but there are not that's why I mentioned these snippets on social networks and so on these do not currently fall under any copyright exception so for example in Germany the exception to quote content only applies if you're doing so in an academic context like you just said only applies if you're critically engaging with a work in a larger work so posting a snippet of a news article to your facebook page will fall under these criteria and that's why that would be affected but the academic use probably would not like I said the one committee in the European Parliament proposed expanding it specifically to scientific articles which would be horrible but the likelihood of that actually getting through in the other committee in the European Parliament in the plenary of the European Parliament and then in the negotiations with council and the commission you are very slim it's probably going to stay with the original proposal by the commission which I think would generally not change things for academic work because it is under exceptions already but it would change things for well it would create legal uncertainty certainly so for you know if a researcher is blogging about their work and quoting things they could potentially be sued for that it's again then courts would need to decide whether this applies to the situation or not we could expect long legal battles you are absolutely right there are constitutional challenges that could be made to all of this like I said it's incompatible with existing charter fundamental rights and so on these battles will happen but we also know that they will take like five years a time frame in which this law will be enacted and it will be unclear what it applies to and we will have to wait for the court to decide what it actually is for example the censorship machine's proposal contains these words large amounts of uploaded content what is a large amount a court will have to decide based on cases so it's very hard to predict exactly what it's going to effect I would guess that academics will not be very much impacted by that except by this text and data mining issue which you also referenced I think is a high uncertainty the probability that that will or will not happen is right now low the second thing is that still doesn't address security research security research is not currently defined as academic research now if we're trying to find out if a specific nation state is attacking elections in September in Germany or in a different country and we want to prove that based on evidence without quoting fake news which is a third component I mean how the hell can you even do that it doesn't seem consistent to me it doesn't seem logical to me the last thing is it also decreases security because if we can't do our job if we can't quote other researchers that are not classified as academic but commercial companies or research institutes which aren't academic either how is that supposed to work I mean the cdu is one of the biggest parties that says in Germany they want security yet this type of proposal will decrease security it will give people that spread fake news more of a platform that goes unchecked and it stifles the democratic process of discussing things in open discourse with different people it doesn't make sense I absolutely agree and I'm glad you're getting angry about it because we should all be you should see the campaign site by the publishers I'm going to try to pull it up arguing for this extra copyright for news sites and against quoting from articles because they frame it as journalism in Europe needs this to survive and if they don't get this extra right that will prevent you from quoting them in your blog that's bullshit they will like fake news will take over the web because the good quality journalism will have no more funding and that's the arguments they are making and they're absolutely transparently bullshit and it's incredible how they how they can exaggerate their argument much but they are getting through more than our sensible counter arguments right now that's what we are here to hopefully start changing what are the next steps the next steps are convincing these MEPs on the legal affairs committee by October mid October that they need to vote against these proposals that is the very specific next step so creating noise in the media creating noise in communities calling for people to call their MEPs to tweet their MEPs to meet their MEPs in person and to share these concerns with them right so the good thing is that they are not proposing to extend the copyright time for me mouse and stuff like that but another thing is also does it mention anything about revocation of breaking the copyright law should be in each country so for instance in Denmark we have currently a proposal on the way against extended content so if the team that you have some extended content on your website will administratively shut it down and de-list the domain at the decay registry and then tell you and often it will just be hacked word presides the people wouldn't want to take it down but they will first know once their domain is taken down administratively so I don't think this will interfere with the local Danish legal process that you just described they want in Denmark to have they are very kind of using DNS blogging against copyright violations the law that's being discussed on the European level says nothing about DNS blogging or ISPs or anything like that so it's not it won't well it will make things worse because it will give publishers and so on more reason to demand these horrible tools be used for their new rights we would be nice to have in there that it shouldn't use those kind of centering absolutely but unfortunately so the chance of making this proposal better is slim so good new ideas are probably not going to get in there it's right now really that come down to fighting the worst proposals I'm struggling with my internet but somewhere in here this is what I'm doing empower democracy with free independent journalism empower now save your press democracy is in danger European newspapers are in trouble without a free press how will we get the information we need of course that's correct we're all worried about the future of the media the cornerstone the media is great speaking truth to power I agree we embrace innovation not sure about that one but this is the campaign to create this extra copyright for news sites by the European news media association or whatever here you go publishers council newspaper publishers associations magazine media associations and news media Europe the biggest proponent of this proposal is Axel Springer in Germany but also Buda the publisher for example Bilt the largest yellow press newspaper in Germany but they have all of them on board there are some rebels there is what is the El País big Spanish newspaper who has come out against this and then there are some associations of minor publishers who say this would actually harm them but in general the big press publishers are claiming like we need this to protect democracy I wonder what this empower now what does it do contact us why is it suddenly needed now so what they also argue is they're not asking for an extra right they're asking for a right that others already have for example music publishers have this kind of extra layer of rights there's the artist who has the right to the song they wrote but when they record it when they master it and so on the publisher has an extra layer of rights that makes sense because the abstract idea of a song is obviously very very different from the specific recording of a recording session of a song and obviously a lot of work has been put in by the publisher to create this other work what they want is similarly so the journalist has the copyright of the article they wrote the publisher is supposed to have a copyright of the article they wrote as it appears on a website which is not substantially different from the work of the journalist and there is no reason for this extra layer of rights but they are saying we just want what music publishers have always had that's their defense against why they need this extra thing let's see why is it suddenly needed now in the non-digital past the publishers right was not considered necessary their arguments are very bad will it impact citizens and then they say no we of course don't want to harm anyone from sharing and linking to our articles but that's just not true the law does not limit it to Facebook and Google I do believe that the publishers themselves don't have the intention of going after each one of us if we quote them on our blog posts that is not their intent they want the millions from Facebook and Google but the law they are asking for to do to enable them to do so would affect us all for this campaign I just had it open it's save your press and hashtag publishers right hashtag save your press the accounts are for example magazine media at magazine media or at news media Europe but hashtag save your press just search for that and you will find their propaganda someone else had a question but sat down again sorry firstly I think you you condensed the argument down very well and you picked out four key points that you are criticising the second part is the law already exists to sue people for copyright infringement so what this law seems to be doing is giving let's say a pop artist the right to say my music was used on YouTube and now I need to get some money for that and it also stops news aggregation like on Google and the BBC also do news aggregation they have a photocopy of all the front pages of every newspaper in the morning and you can actually read the whole front page because the resolution is that good again the law is already there to protect the newspapers so what they have to do is sue the person who has published their stuff and then let's say I uploaded something I've infringed somebody's copyright then it's up to the person who got sued to then go and sue me I uploaded it let's say on to YouTube so you have to sue YouTube and then sue the person who uploaded it and that's the correct way to do it and the only reason they don't allow that is because you need the address of the person who uploaded it and so your argument is very watertight and you've presented it really well and that's it thank you I'll say some things on yes so it already exists so if someone's you know the whole article from a newspaper on a blog post or something like that of course the publisher can already sue them they need to have their documents in order that they have transferred the copyright from the author of the original piece to them and then they can go to court what actually the sensible proposal by this Maltese person who listened to all the voices was on this issue was let's change this from an extra right for publishers an assumption that works in court that the publisher represents the interests of the actual copyright holder the journalist because that would be that would be useful then they could sue people easier for actual abuse because they wouldn't have to complicatedly prove in court that they represent the journalist who published at their medium it would be just a general assumption that unless there's a sign against it that they are the correct to have a legal standing to actually sue but of course this compromise proposal is now dead and they claim that that's somehow not enough I want to say one more thing and the law is already in place for the censorship machines because right now of course a right holder can request that YouTube can demand that YouTube take down content if it is their copyrighted content what they are proposing is to automate that process to try and stop it from even getting online so that's the difference they are asking for now they already have the right to take it down if they find it they want to prevent it from ever being online and that's why they want to surveil all of us to make sure we don't upload something copyrighted this extra copy are from news sites I should mention it already exists in Germany and in Spain they have already tried implementing that it's called the Leistungsschutzrecht in Germany and Canon Aide I think in Spain so when they implemented in Germany but in Germany it was limited only to news aggregators it was squarely aimed at Google what Google did as a result was to not show snippets of content anymore from the publishers who wanted money for doing so what happened well the traffic to these publishers plummeted they got less readers and so they decided to give Google a free license to use their snippets so that Google would restore their full functionality and send them the readers they wanted so they ended up giving the company they were targeting they were hoping for money from it ended up they are in a stronger position so they gave them a free license but of course they didn't give anyone else a free license so there were several news aggregator startups in Germany or like privately run platforms and so on they had that right now so it ended up making Google stronger in Germany and it killed everyone else because no one else can negotiate afford to negotiate with all these media companies to get a free license so then Spain decided let's also implement this amazing idea but let's learn from the German example and let's make it legally impossible to not to give out a free license and so Google News in Spain and said okay we cannot run Google News anymore under these circumstances and shut it down again the traffic to the news sites plummeted and the publishers went to the Spanish politicians and said you have to do something, you have to demand that Google keep running this service and also pay us money for the privilege of doing so for sending us readers and the politicians said well we can't really do that we can't force a company to run a service they don't want to provide so in neither of these cases did any extra money, did any journalist get any extra sent, was any journalism saved or anything like that and the reaction of Commissioner Ertinger was well it hasn't been tried on a large enough level yet if all of Europe has this law then all the big US companies will say okay we're just going to pay up so there's nothing structurally wrong with these proposals that they failed so horribly is not a sign to discourage us from doing it we need to do more of it might it not be possible to use this case with Google to gain a certain kind of leverage for the smaller companies to demand by the courts of law to get equal rights because now Google is favored in over the smaller companies while the Commission is against would you call us sorry lost my words cartel forming would prohibit that yes so there are competition concerns if they give Google a free license but nobody else so that's the situation in Germany Germany actually might abolish this law altogether because there were some procedural mistakes that they made they should have gotten EU permission to do so but they didn't so this German law might soon be obsolete the proposal for doing this on the European level we do not expect that Google will get a free license from the news well it might happen it might not happen but I can't really like you're right that if it comes to that point at the European level that they give Google a free license and nobody else we might have grounds or the small publishers might have grounds to sue them on anti competitive reasons but again like that will take years where we'll have just uncertainty about what we can link to on the internet so I agree with you but it's it's not an argument that wins us the fight now it might in a few years in the spirit of workshops I'm going to try something here in the form of maybe a question maybe something to think about when I look at and you've described a bit we've even looked at the websites of those who are campaigning to push this through and you've discussed a bit which I think is extremely important the individuals within the European parliament whether whatever party they're from that they actually listen and those that don't but it makes me wonder as far as you understand how is this movement if I can call it a movement between the mozillas or the bits of freedoms or the those on the side of not going in this direction right an alternative direction how are they seen by those who seem to well never vote with them because I'm kind of curious about that image and why is it we can't get some of them to listen I understand that a large section will never listen but you mentioned the sort of in-betweens the they don't show up but they might be on our side or they're sometimes on our side we're not sure I'm wondering how to reach them and how they see the movement right now that's an excellent question I'm not sure what this microphone is picking up but oh it's a different tent I guess okay I wish I had a good answer to that so I think in general I mean the general impression by politicians by older politicians in the European parliament and everywhere is copyright is good it protects our creators US companies are bad generally like big US internet giants are bad we don't have any of them in Europe so they're like this foreign threat so and they are I mean of course there's a lot to criticize about Facebook and Google and so they are they have a very like even we are actively avoiding appearing to be in any way close or interested in the business of Google and Facebook and all these giants because we're always accused of just being in their pocket like the whole internet freedom community like internet digital rights community is obviously like just in Google's and Facebook's pocket and they just want to enrich them at the expense of our poor European cultural industries and the individual artists and creators there is there is a tiny bit of truth to the fact that many of these organizations receive some funding from Google Google is one of the few companies that actually invests money in like keeping the internet open even though they do like contradictory things partly on their business policies but it's not an influence that it's not the reason why these organizations fight for these things but it is true that many of these organizations if you trace their funding back from how involved in a tiny bit in many of them and that's actually maybe even harmful I don't know because it opens them up to this criticism that they're just you know fronts for Google or something ridiculous like that so I would actually prefer if Google does not have their fingers in this at all and I'm very annoyed that in the media it's always like they quote the press publishers saying we need this and then they quote like Google or Facebook saying this is bad but they never quote the digital rights activists they never quote the independent academics so it's always framed as this fight between two corporate interests and then the MEPs decide to be on the side of the European culture industries rather than the US giants and these lobbies the digital rights, the startups, the libraries they're just not strong enough they just don't have the resources to talk to each MEP five times to convince them there is such an uneven fight there so we need desperately more people on this side to you know fly to Brussels and request meetings with their local MEPs and explain to them look this is really important this is what it will, the effect it will have because the general like if we don't do that they will just assume more copyright is better so let's just go with more copyright as for like why the left doesn't care I mean I think it's a resource problem again the left is a fairly small group they have two representatives in this legal affairs committee out of these 40 and these have to cover all the legal affairs issues in all of Europe and they're busy with other things so they don't really have like there's not one person who can dedicate all this effort to this issue I mean most of these MEPs of course aren't topical experts on this each group nominates one person to be their spokesperson but my MEP who I work for Yulia Rida is actually the only one who is an expert on these issues in the parliament and can hold sustain a conversation on the policy details of it everyone else is talking in slogans they picked up from somebody and our side is not the one providing the slogans right now firstly thank you for educating us all on this so you were saying about the situation in Germany and Spain they applied this and then decided to reverse it based on losing hits losing traffic if this was applied throughout the whole of the EU and Google just as an example turned around and said right we're not paying, we're not doing business at all who do you think would lose out more Google or the news throughout Europe so my estimate is that the relationship is symbiotic I think it's right that publishers are concerned about the shift of power towards these platforms like which news we consume is now more controlled by Google and Facebook than by the news publishers mostly if we stop having a subscription to a paper if we stop going to the news sites every day this power is shifting especially with this like instant articles and all these features where they're trying to get the whole thing into Facebook these are real concerns but the fact that people are sharing articles I think does not mean that this does not harm the publishers it benefits them and of course it benefits Facebook also if people are debating around news articles and it's actually true not everyone who engages with something on Facebook has actually read the article we all know that right the comment section like half of these people have not clicked have not given any revenue to the publisher that's like people passing by a news agent on the street not everyone who reads the headline will buy the product that doesn't mean that this should be changed by law that's what they're proposing kind of if you even read the headline at a subway stop at the news agent or something you would already need to pay a license to receive this content so I think the relationship is symbiotic I think both would lose out like if Facebook stops allowing us to share European news articles or makes them uglier doesn't provide the nice thumbnail and so on well I mean users will like Facebook will find something else to fill this space they will post more cat videos or whatever users will have less access to information to news and publishers will have less readers so both of them I think actually the balance of power is probably more towards the platforms users will lose out more we think that it's partly part of their strategic thinking of these huge publishing houses like Axel Springer that if they generally harm like news being shared on social media people will start going to people will start typing in their addresses again because they are in their common knowledge like if you don't see news on Facebook anymore they think people will go to them again for the news this is of course their ideal outcome but then the independent ones lose because platforms like Facebook and aggregators of course provide a level playing field for independent news to also be seen like the big publishers and of course the big publishers don't like that sure Hi Christopher, I'm Chris I'm doing a live radio show here from Shah every night at 10.30 we infringe on copyright in all means we can because this is Shah but we do care about valuable content so I would like to invite you as a guest on our table to continue this discussion online sure talk to me afterwards about time and so on but I'd be happy to but again I don't know how much time we have left I think a little so I'm going to come down here and I'm going to ask you to shout out any ideas you have of what you personally could do like can you think of in your country organizations that you can engage on this topic user groups press contacts YouTubers like how can we make a big think about that how can we turn it into a new actor who has ideas so digital rights organization yes free software association that's a good example of I would just for example putting the idea on the developer community of doing something like a browser that would work as a proxy which you would for example see news that you would like and then you flag it and it would automatically create independent like for example whereas that software like the blockchain and the torrent there's a where you can spread all the blog posts between the users that remember another name but the idea is to create a like the google news website like a censorship persistent aggregator yes but it would aggregate select through everybody's views and for that you know it would be there would be no target for the spring ever there like to to sue because it would be distributed I like it yes solve the problem with technology that's good I think we should wait for that until like we have lost the fight on the legislative side I think it's more important to try to prevent the rules but of course we will find as a community workarounds if they are implemented one last point one thing that I find extremely insulting by the parliament I've been trying and calling and writing is that they take a different view between citizens and institutions they value you feel that they value more institutional interests than the citizen which is the key constitutional creator of the the whole society and that is one conservative European feature that insults me much for example when museums now they have special copyrights for their the works that they have in their collections and they should be on public domain for that's insulting and this idea of having for example academia has an institution separate from the the scientific research that an individual can do one thing that people should have but people are very conservative and think in institutional terms more naturally I absolutely agree thanks for the input I mean like if a representative of the music industry goes to an MEP and requests a meeting they will first say I represent 300,000 artists all across Europe I represent the cultural industry of Europe and then give their arguments that are mostly in favor of the industry and not actually these individual artists but they have this claim to represent everyone and if individual citizens come they can't claim to speak for everyone in the same way I think one of the things we need to do is organize more into such membership organizations so for example I think the YouTube creators of Europe should have some kind of association that can say I represent 3 million teenagers on YouTube creating fun stuff and we're also valid creators of the opinion and the collecting societies do and the industry does but of course that's just not happening they're not organizing so far they're not aware of this but if someone has ideas on how to stimulate that that would be immensely important that we have organizations they're not going to have the same resources but they can at least claim we represent someone who is not being heard in that process right now sorry did you want to go afterwards well in the next time in Germany we have elections yes and the pre-election times are the only time the meetings of all parties whatever because well they have a little bit an ear but mostly in the press there are articles about these meetings and if we are strong enough to get these things in the press it will be wider spread I absolutely agree can you give the microphone to the gentleman so I think it's tricky again because for example the Guardian we wanted to we thought we could offer some commentary there about this issue but the publishing house even though it's one of Europe's coolest is in favor of this right so there is some conflict of interest but at least we should be reaching all the independent or the small or the online press on this and I agree we should make more effort there the German elections are actually right now harmful to us and not beneficial because the German social democrats don't know anything about this issue until the election is over because they are afraid of angering the tabloid media in Germany and then they won't be able to fight for the chancellorship anymore so they are not going to come out against these proposals because they are scared of the press and do you remember the press publisher saying like for free and open and pluralist press we need these laws actually right now we are seeing the opinion in favor of these laws because politicians are afraid to anger the tabloids by arguing against them so the German elections are actually a bad thing for us right now I hope they will be over and then the social democrats will be free to oppose these plans because the German social democrats are fairly influential there are several a lot of them the local press yes the small ones yes we need them all the small press the local press they are not so limited and they well they have many readers much more than the big press help us and speak to your local regional press and ask if you can write you know a letter or a guest article or talk to their journalists tech journalists maybe or something about that it's a good proposal we should all do it you mentioned before about the musicians I don't think Prince is on YouTube he protected his stuff very well the other thing is successful lobbying in the UK it's all done through posts and that's the most powerful thing we have that's an excellent thing to say so for my experience working in the European Parliament so the number one way citizens contact us is via email the number one way there is via some kind of form emailing system where like a hundred thousand copies of the same email against I don't know t-tip come in of course as soon as they start clogging the mailbox someone creates a filter they're all sent to some folder and never seen again if there's a large number it will like the MEP will be aware that there's a large campaign happening I know that in the past year we had campaigns for the rights of rabbits I'm not sure exactly what it was about against like bullfighting and like I'm aware of these things but they don't have very much of an impact what does have an impact is phone calls so MEPs there's not a lot of attention paid at the European level to politics in Europe everyone's paying attention at the national level instead and the phone hardly ever rings and if it does it's someone else from the parliament so the phone will be picked up you will reach an assistant and if you share your concerns with them they will listen and if the phone rings a lot they will notice and they will tell their MEP so calling your MEP is important you should though make sure to call an MEP who is working on this issue so can you find this on our site let me just think I will add to our website which is you can find in the menu an item about EU copyright reform which is what I've been projecting I will add a list of the responsible spokespeople at the different parties so you know who to focus on calling that's the tier one is the one MEP per group you should call tier two is all the members of the legal affairs committee because these are the ones who are going to vote in October so that's about 40 people so for most countries you will have your countries representative in that committee so calling these will be extremely impactful all the other MEPs are busy with other stuff they won't be in this issue it could also be useful to tell them hey I really care about this copyright thing please investigate the legal affairs committee we can have an actual impact on do you want to say it in the microphone yes so on the save the meme.net website if you scroll down like I showed before there is this tool to call your MEP and they already only show you legal affairs committee MEPs I think so use this tool to call MEPs and then you will be sure to reach someone who will listen to you and like I said it is effective ideas ideas over here what can you do you need a mailing list and you need to write down people's names and you have to kick their arses to get them to do stuff absolutely so I could pass a paper around well I don't have paper actually so what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to take out your smartphone which you have with you I know don't make excuses where is it actually though yes so if you go to yuliarida.eu yuliarida.eu on the contact page there is a form to sign up for her newsletter so and there is a comment form where you can type like copyright or something like that if you sign up here I will do my best to keep you informed but I'm really hoping that you understand the urgency of this matter it is a winnable fight I think it's not all lost the majority is not three quarters against us it's more like 60 against us to 40% in our favor it won't win itself but if we all put some energy into this and raise our voices then it is winnable so sign up to the newsletter or just you know tell your local hacker space hold a session about this topic there is information on our website I'm happy to provide anything else I'm happy to do a talk via Skype or whatever via a free alternative to Skype even better or whatever is convenient to you so let me know any other ideas? I don't like this microphone this is more long term which is not going to fix this issue so you can walk out if you want but there is something interesting I think I live in this country and over the years you meet people at this event you meet people but out in life and I've met a lot of people in my age group who are within some of these companies since a couple are based one is based here maybe some of you know in Germany what I find interesting is there is a younger generation there not that young middle age they don't have power maybe I hate this microphone these individuals can be reasoned with are open as we are perhaps and I think that the more we engage with them they work for the side that right now is definitely not with us if I say us but in the future could be if that engagement happens now again it's not going to solve the immediate threat but it is going to be a more long term game changer basically there are real humans working for these companies the problem is that it's too difficult to engage and get them to listen and many of them I don't know I agree we need to reach the young generation at these companies and I'm sure in general I will send people to the mic in the middle in the future I'm sure in general like the younger people in these corporations agree with us and they don't think that their business model can be solved by inventing new taxes on the web but yeah like you said they don't currently have the power I wanted to mention one more idea so in the SOPA people fights these fights in the US against these bills that were similar like ACTA in Europe they did these online campaigns where big websites had these blackouts it would be cool to do some kind of little javascript campaign that any site that wants to implement on their page that will, I don't know, each time you click a link have a little annoying popup or something saying like the freedom of links is in danger like something like that a campaign that websites can implement and if we manage to raise the concern and level of noise to a level where big sites are also getting concerned then they could easily just implement that campaign piece of javascript and spread the word like that I think that would be useful if any javascript coder here feels up to creating something like a link blackout a day campaign or something like that that might have an impact I know I won't have time to to code it unfortunately really like the good side of this fight doesn't have enough resources alright I will give you one more chance to contribute your world-changing idea to stop copyright expansion in Europe this is it, we all want to hear it okay well, think about it maybe you can come up with something I'm happy to yes, shut down the internet yes, go ahead suppose if these people who have their news articles put on other people's sides just put a notice saying do not put my article on your website and then perhaps if they put a tag around it which said this part you can put on your website if they want to if they want their story aggregated they can just put a tag around it saying please aggregate this and pay me every time so you can suck my data but pay me at the same time does that fix their problem are you saying like create a flatter like or no just a voluntary code instead of this I think it's cool but I think in the point where we are at this process we have a vote to sway in October so this we would have had to do two years ago I think alright then thank you very much my name is Christopher Clay I'm C3O on Twitter get in touch with you with any of these ideas or projects or if you want to help with anything thank you so much for listening and I hope we manage to stop these horrible plans together