Dear supporters,
The EU is looking at the final spurt in German copyright law: the second reading is coming up, the reform has to be wrapped up in June.
We are not going to be beaten down and are planning an art action next! At the end of May, signs are to be flooded.
So we need YOU and your creativity. Open any digital design programme and start painting (pen, paper and then a scan or a proper photo will also do).
Send your poster to us by 24.05 at the latest by e-mail to post@savetheinternet.info (anything that comes later will be printed smaller).
We will announce when exactly the art action will take place, so keep your eyes open on all our channels: Twitter, Instagram, Discord etc.
What's happening in Germany?
The government's draft of Article 17 ("Copyright Service Provider Act") still doesn't mention the upcoming upload filters with a single word. Copyright-protected material will instead be "blocked" unless licences for it are bought from collecting societies. Then users will then be allowed to use the work as long as they do so non-commercially. Small platforms are to be exempt from the law.
Quotations, caricatures, parodies and pastiches are to be allowed. But in Germany only if the platform pays for it.
And then only if "the extent of the use justifies a special purpose". This wording, however, comes from scientific quotation law and is particularly difficult for artistic forms of expression. The German Federal Ministry of Justice was unable to answer which special purpose this should be in the case of memes, fanarts and fanfictions, for example, and pointed out that the courts will have to decide this in the future.
If you only want to use small snippets of copyrighted things, this is supposed to be "presumptively allowed", but only under the following conditions:
- Less than half of the contribution may be works by third parties.
- And third party works may only be used "marginally", which means:
- Up to 15 seconds of video or sound
- Up to 160 characters of text
- Up to 125 kilobytes of image
- Use must be non-commercial only
Even the German Bundesrat warned against the current wording in its recommendations: The draft law would make the application of upload filters unavoidable. It further points out that "in many cases it [is] not technically possible to distinguish legal and illegal content on the internet in an automated way". This creates the danger of overblocking. The Bundesrat also sees the danger of "building up an infrastructure that is difficult to control later on", which could be used and expanded by platform providers for their own purposes.
The election promise in the coalition agreement 2017 was quite clear: no upload filters. But "It's not in the text" does not mean that "it won't happen".
Your team from SaveTheInternet