A new EU copyright bill forces filtering across the internet

On June 20th, a committee of the European Parliament will vote on whether to proceed on a copyright proposal that some say will destroy the internet as we know it. That may sound fairly hyperbolic, but over 70 experts — including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — have criticized the proposal, saying it will turn the internet into “a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.” The controversial provision in question is Article 13, which requires internet platforms to filter uploads for copyright infringement. If it seems as though Article 13 has sprung up out of nowhere, blindsiding people, it’s because it quite literally has. “It wasn’t going to be in the final draft but it was reintroduced on GDPR day [May 25th, the day GDPR went into effect],” says Cory Doctorow, who is organizing against the proposal with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow — whose copyleft views are well known — calls the rest of the EU proposal “a pretty unobjectionable, technical set of revisions to a pretty important statute that has gone long in the tooth.”