The furor over Articles 11 and 13 in the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is appropriate but the logical consequences and knock-on effects are far more chilling than merely banning memes. Typical of large unelected bureaucracies, the foresight exercised by the EU in this instance is either nonexistent or intentionally obfuscated.

To date, the focus on meme-censorship as a consequence of beefing up copyright protections has been almost the sole focus of media coverage. Undoubtedly, memes and even original work would be restricted by the systems being proposed to police the internet. This is because the automated systems that will be tasked with policing content will return false positive matches. How?

Want to post that picture you took of the Eifel Tower? Well, if anyone has ever taken a picture of the Eifel Tower from the same spot you did and registered it, the machine would flag it as infringing copyright. Think of all the postcard publishers and photographers around the world who will register their catalogs with the policing systems. Say goodbye to uploading your holiday pictures.

Want to make a meme using your favorite politician, actor or cartoon? Do you have the copyright on the image you want to use? No? By demanding platforms police content during uploads or face fines, the recognition systems will be tuned to err on the side of caution. Who cares that you slapped some text on a picture you don't own? If you didn't pay the licensing fee to use it, you don't own the picture, just the text.

Article 13 not only forces online platforms to police uploads, it would require them to guarantee their users seek the correct licenses before posting content. How are they going to do that? Likely a window that says "Your image has been determined to be copyrighted by X. Click here to pay the fee and enter the copyright license number before proceeding". Sounds like a lot of fun to post that meme now, doesn't it?

If you want to have a good idea of exactly what this kind of licensing scheme looks like, take a look at the SESAC website where it is made clear that advanced permission is needed to play music in a public venue or face fines upwards of $150,000.00 per song played. "SESAC Internet Performance License fees are determined using either Aggregate Tuning Hours or (Aggregate) Revenue times a multiplier."

The additional costs of policing content during uploads will also make it all the more difficult to launch new online content-sharing platforms. As is, it will likely drive many of the smaller platforms out of business entirely, leaving the internet landscape a digital corporatocracy, policed and censored by the dominate internet ghettos known as Goolag, Fakebook, Twatter and Instaspam.

But these scenarios, as grievous as they are, are likely not the final consequence. Licensing before posting necessitates ascertaining identity. This is a workaround that makes private companies do the government's work of eliminating online privacy for them. Anonymous uploads from VPNs are pointless if your licensing number is attached to your work.

Eliminating the ability to use the internet anonymously is the penultimate step before going for the final death knell of requiring users to get "internet licenses". This would enable the government to remove unruly users access to the internet entirely, or, at the very least, remove their ability to upload content to the internet. This is logical goal of an autocratic state intent on policing public dialogue.

The reason for this is that the internet has empowered the general population to have access to information that the plutocrats and their puppet governments do not want people to have. Currently, the entire world is waking up to just how screwed humanity has been under the leadership of the parasitic psychopathic banksters and the crony henchman they have installed in government for decades, if not centuries.

Article 11, for its part, is the better-known "link tax" which would require online platforms to buy licenses from media companies before linking to their stories. The criticism of SPARC cannot be better formulated: "(Article 11 would) make the last two decades of news less accessible to researchers and the public, leading to a distortion of the public's knowledge and memory of past events." That alone must be enough to convince the world of the true intent to control, not spread, information.

EU Articles 11 and 13 are just another salvo in the war on freedom of speech and freedom of information. Fortunately the old school plutocrats were too short-sighted to understand what the internet would become, and the current generation of plutocrat parasites is playing catch-up. Even if this attack is rebuffed, the war is far from won, the monstrous masters of humanity have deep pockets and even darker hearts.

There's still time to stop #Article11 and #Article13. Here's how.
FOLLOW THIS LINK: Save the Internet

The Legal Affairs Committee of the EU (JURI) voted in favor of the legislation contained in Articles 11 and 13 on June 20th, 2018. The final vote is scheduled "sometime in July 2018" (great transparency by government, eh?) and it is not too late to let your voice be heard by the EU Parliament. To stop the censorship and suppression of the free flow of information on the internet, which will affect the entire world, please visit the website Save the Internet. Do it, do it now!

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