User talk:Smallbones/SP NnN
This is just a working page to get a rough draft for a Signpost News&Notes page Deutche Welle
for March 30, 2019
Blackout II
Lede 1 assuming EU copyright directive passes[edit]
The Danish, German, Czech, and Slovak Wikipedias blacked out for 24 hours on March 21 to protest before the final vote on the EU Copyright Directive. Asturian, Catalan, Galician, and Italian Wikipedias followed with their own blackouts on March 25. Unlike the anti-SOPA blackout of 2012, the protest didn't lead to the desired result. The Directive passed on March 26 by a vote of 348 in favor to 274 opposed.
Popular protests went well beyond Wiki-blackouts. A [Can this be whitelisted? ahttps://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet change.org petition] collected over 5 million signatures. According to Deutsche Welle, 40 street protests were organized in Germany with 40,000 protesters in Munich and 30,000 in Berlin. Other protests were held in Austria, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The cause of this furor, the European Union Copyright Directive, contains two articles that are predicted to change the internet as we know it. Article 15 (formerly article 11) has been labeled the "link tax". Websites that aggregate news by using links to other sites will be required to pay those sites for the privilege of linking to them. Article 17 (formerly article 13) will make websites responsible for copyright violations that result from user uploads, and pay fines unless they employ adequate means to filter out the offending uploads. Opponents argue that this article will force websites to use heavy-handed filtering technology that will drastically limit the availability and free use of photos, text, and even memes online. See the analysis of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) on the Directive's effects here
The Directive will be implemented by legislation in each of the 28 countries in the European Union. The process is expected to take about two years, and the WMF hopes to influence the overall effects of the Direction during this period.
How the blackouts were implemented[edit]
Coordinated political protests using Wikipedia, such as the blackouts, are always controversial. The recent blackouts were supported by the WMF and were consistent with the WMF's goals and analysis, but individual Wikipedias and their editors decided on whether and how to protest or blackout their sites.
Christian140 protested the German Wikipedia's blackout, writing "Only 139 users voted for this shutdown of 2.28 million articles and rushed this in one week.... I have ... contributed more than 500 articles and now they are abused for the political agenda of a small group." Three RFCs were conducted March 1-8. In the largest 146 (68%) out of 215 editors voted for a protest; 139 (82%) of 167 voted for a blackout instead of a banner.
For the Czech and Slovak Wikipedias the decisions were made by small, but even more determined groups. Czech editors voted 44 (85%) to 8 in favor of a blackout in a week long RFC. Slovak editors voted 18-0 in favor at the same time, according to editors Venca and Luky001. Most of the countries' press covered the blackout story. In the Czech Republic it started even before the RFC was completed. There were about 2.25 million visitors to the Czech site on the day of the blackout, equivalent to about one-fifth of the Czech Republic's 10.6 million population. There were about 500,000 visitors to the Slovak site, equivalent to almost one-tenth of the Slovak Republic's population. The majority of the Czech Members of Parliament (MEPs) voted against the Directive or abstained, but the majority of the Slovak MEP supported the Directive.
Notes from Czech Republic (from Venca24)[edit]
The discussion about protest against EU‘s Directive on Copyright in Digital Single Market started on March 10 in Czech Wikipedia‘s main discussion page. The idea got support among the first discussion participants, so the voting about form of the protest started on March 12. On March 11 the chapter Wikimedia Czech Republic published translation of the statement of Wikimedia Foundation. The voting lasted for 7 days and ended up with the result of combined protest with blackout and banner campaign with 44 votes. Against any form of protest voted 8 users. 61 users in sum has voted. Simultaneously with the voting on Czech Wikipedia started discussion on Slovak Wikipedia. The voting started one day after being it just voting about blackout as a form of protest. The voting ended up at the same moment as on Czech Wikipedia with all 18 votes supporting the protest. All major Czech media started to inform about the protest already on March 18, one day before the end of the voting. It was for the first time the media in the Czech Republic mentioned also the protest of German-language Wikipedia which they hadn't informed about before. The most popular tabloid newspaper Blesk and it's sister economical journal E15 deleted already published articles about Czech Wikipedia's protest on their websites in less then two days. On the protest day March 21 they (together with another media of the same publisher) published commentary according to which the reason for Wikipedia to protest is the fact that Google is one of the big donors to Wikimedia Foundation. The shutdown on both Wikipedias started couple of minutes after midnight on March 21. All major news portals in the Czech Republic informed about the protest. Some of them even pointed out that the Wikipedia mobile app is still working. In Slovakia the news coverage was of lesser extent. Vojtěch Dostál, chairman of Wikimedia Czech Republic, was the main person to communicate with the media. He was a guest of an interview in the morning information block of public Czech Television and he was also interviewed by another well-known internet news project DVTV. The most visible opponent and well-known Wikipedia contributor, professor of Charles University in Prague, Jan Sokol, was interviewed by public Czech Radio. He stated he had found the arguments for the protest too vague. According to him, the Internet is in danger, but not because of the Directive. On March 21 Czech Wikipedia was visited by 2,25 milion users via web and 38 355 users via mobile application.
Slovak Wikipedia was visited by about half milion users and by 3 487 via mobile application. In both cases mobile application usage arose as some media and Twitter users informed that it is still working. The Wikimedia Foundation's statement in Wikimedia Czech Republic's blog had been visited by some hundreds of visitors before the entire website colapsed. It was moved to Meta where it gained another 31 613 visitors. The intent of the proposed directive was to modernize European copyright law. Taking 6? years to work its way through the legislative process. Opponents focused on two of the Directive's articles.
Article 11 would have required a "link tax", payments by websites which linked to news sites or other copyrighted material. Article 13 would have required websites to check user uploads for possible copyright violations or face fines. In effect it was expected to require expensive and clumsy upload filters. Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias would have been exempt from this provision, but the Wikimedia Foundation (link) issued a statement saying that the provision would have a chilling effect on information sharing and thus hurt Wikipedia.
The Directive passed in the European Parliament without any changes on March 26. Most of the Czech MEPs voted to proceed the amendments and against the Directive in its current form or abstained. However among all the parliament members they were in minority. Major part of the Slovak MEPs voted in favor of the Directive and against the amendments, but significant amount of them also voted for the amendments and against the Directive in its current form. One Slovak MEP abstained. In reaction to the vote Czech MEP and Vice President of European Parliament Pavel Telička (ALDE) wrote on Twitter: "Unfortunately the proposal has passed together with problematic articles 15 and 17 [note: renumbered articles 11 and 13]. I think the next step will be the Court of Justice of the European Union." Another Czech MEP Michaela Šojdrová (EPP) was of different opinion: "It's not possible to overlook the unjustice against the authors, whose rights haven't been protected so far."
notes from Slovakia (from Luky001)[edit]
Hi, I am sending you the article about the blackout on Slovak Wikipedia for The Signpost
Historically first blackout on Slovak Wikipedia due to new EU copyright directive (headline)
When we look back to the history of different language versions of Wikipedia, we can see that they've already had some blackouts in the past. For the Slovak Wikipedia, this was the premiere.
On the 26th of March, there is a vote in the European Parliament about the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The directive itself wouldn't be that controversial if it wouldn't contain Articles 11 and 13. Article 11 gives copyright over headlines and snippets to publishers which would result in paying taxes to these publishers for news aggregation websites like Google News. Article 13 is the most discussed because it requires to check all the content uploaded to online content sharing services and decide if it violates copyright or not. Since automatic filters are quite expensive, this will create a burden for small platforms. Furthermore, filters are never 100 per cent precise and they can mark non-copyrighted content as the one violating it.
On Slovak Wikipedia, we are against the current wording of these two articles and so we joined the initiative of German, Czech and Danish Wikipedia and we went "black" on 23rd March.
The original idea came from the Czech users, who wrote to our Village pump on 12th March. We decided to give it a try and in the voting process, which lasted until 19th March, 18 users voted for and there was nobody against the proposed blackout. So as a community, we prepared our screen for the blackout because we thought it is going to be carried out locally as during blackouts in summer 2018 (e.g. on Italian Wikipedia), but later we learnt that this solution is technically vulnerable and it caused several problems after the blackout. Because of that, we joined the collaborative work on Meta and we managed to implement our own design to a technically better solution.
Meanwhile, the civic association supporting wiki projects in Slovakia, Wikimedia Slovenská republika (internationally known as Wikimedians of Slovakia), prepared a press release and published it on its website. The press release was then sent out to Slovak media outlets and in days around the blackout, we were mentioned in more than 18 articles on different sites – from the major Slovak media outlets (Denník N, SME, Trend, etc.) through websites for young people (Živé.sk, Interez.sk, etc.) to the international press (The Slovak Spectator, Czech Radio)
On 20th March around midnight, we waited. For me, it was like waiting for a New Year and all the fireworks. The clock turned into 00.00 and the blackout was on. Everything worked as it was prepared.
On the 21st March, although enjoying the wiki vacation, we worked as well. Wikimedia SK prepared letters for Slovak MEPs which were sent the next day and we didn't forget to use modern tools as well – we communicated through Facebook of Slovak Wikipedia and Wikimedia SK before, during and after the blackout. We got a response from some Slovak Members of the European Parliament, in which they stated that they are going to vote against the proposed directive.
In the end, the action was, at least from our side, successful. We received responses from MEPs, we were mentioned in many news articles and people are at least aware of Article 11 and 13. We still have the banner calling for an action running on Slovak Wikipedia and it is going to be there until the vote.
We are glad that we supported the initiative to keep the freedom on the Internet and we hope that our action helped.
Reactions from politicians[edit]
8 out of 13 Slovak MEPs voted for the directive, 5 against. Here are some statements from them (translated from Slovak from this news article):
- Eduard Kukan (independent) – voted for, "I believe that the EU needs new, modern rules for copyright protection in the digital world. People who do creative and original work must be fairly rewarded for their job. Otherwise, we will endanger not just the quality of media but creative industry or art as well." He added that the EU needs to have good legislation which will sensitively take freedom of speech in consideration in the digital environment.
- Monika Flašíková-Beňová (Direction – Social Democracy) – voted against, she said she didn't vote for because Articles 11 and 13 are still included and she stated that in her opinion it is a significant intervention of citizens' right to have free access to information.
- Ivan Štefanec (European People's Party) – voted for, he appreciated the directive because it has the goal to adjust European legislation to changed conditions on the market and to protect creators of the content from theft, illegal enrichment and misuse of others' work. He said "Development of new forms of communication allowed easier and less controlled distribution of the author's content. However, without legislation to protect the rights of authors, we will see a decline in the quality of work or its limitation to paid services. In addition, we are witnessing that works are being misused by various dubious or disinformation sites to enrich or spread lies." According to him, the reform of the 2001 directive has ensured that internet giants with billions of revenue will need to look more carefully at what content is being shared and if it is not violating copyright. He stressed that non-profit and educational projects such as Wikipedia as well as small and medium−-sized enterprises are excluded from the scope of this legislation. "I believe that today's vote will make the Internet a safer, fairer and freer place to exchange information."