We complain a lot about China. The EU? They moved themselves closer to China rather than even further away from it with their recent move.
The EU is banning internet freedom as it is.
This meme? Soon it will be illegal to post it on the likes of Facebook. People are asking did EU ban memes. The short answer is yes, except the issue is much bigger than memes. It will affect many more people than just meme creators.
And it won’t just make a lot of content illegal, it will create a significant censorship platform.
The European Parliament has voted in favor of copyright holders rather than users.
What does that mean? It means that if you want to post a meme from something that happened in a TV show, it won’t just be illegal, it will be impossible as these platforms will have to create software that filters content and automatically removes it before even being uploaded.
And that’s a move on the level of China. The EU is banning internet freedom as it is with this move.
Anything that you don’t own rights to making about 99% of our phones will be impossible to share.
That funny meme you want to post on your Instagram story? Not possible. That comparison picture of your friend and an actor? Not possible. Anything that you do not own, it will be impossible to access.
Of course, copyrights should be a thing and they should be respected. But certain content, it just shouldn’t be copyrighted. The likes of memes often benefit movies and shows by starting a conversation about them. It benefits both sites. Removing that freedom will not help anybody.
A normal user won’t pay money to re-post a picture he doesn’t own.
EU’s move is going to decrease the quality of internet.
“Creators and news publishers must adapt to the world of the internet as it works today,” Axel Voss, a member of the European Parliament stated.
Except, it’s the EU that needs to adapt. The internet today has accepted memes and re-sharing of content. It’s the norm.
Platforms would be required to build their own systems to filter for content. This could potentially start another privacy issue as a machine would have to go through your content. The likes of Facebook will be able to build such a system. It will be a problem for the smaller emerging platforms. It will almost without a doubt kill them.
It will also impact the usage time on the platforms that manage to cope. Fan pages? Gone. Streaming of gaming? Gone. Reaction videos? Gone. Tutorials? Potentially gone. Music remixes? Gone. Parodies? Gone.
You can contact your MEP and complain about this. Check out Saveyourinterent.eu to find out how you can do it. One email won’t make a difference. But one email sent by every person will!
At PrivateVPN we believe in privacy and freedom to do whatever one desires. And that’s what we aim to provide with our service. We keep no logs. We don’t even ask for your name when registering. We allow payment with Bitcoin. We believe in providing people with privacy all over the world and that’s what we do.
The EU is banning internet freedom as it is. Something we never thought would happen in Europe.
A possible fix to the situation if this does happen might potentially be a VPN. We hope that you only have to use our service for staying secure in a cafe or when you want to watch American Netflix in a different country, but it looks like you might, unfortunately, need to use our service to view memes.
This is hypothetical but provided these filtering systems don’t work everywhere, if you connect to a different country with a VPN, you might be able to post them.
The EU is banning internet freedom as it is but whatever they do, we will keep it.
Written by Michael Smolski.