3 Negative Ways That The EU Copyright Revamp Could Impact You
Recently renewed EU copyright laws could harm your privacy and ability to express yourself on different subjects.
Renewed EU copyright laws have recently been introduced. Crucially, Article 11 and Article 13 of the new laws, which explain the changes, are particularly worrying.
Here are three significant ways these changes could impact you.
1. Your privacy
The laws that are going to be put into action require websites to monitor what users are uploading closely. In other words, surveillance. The side effects of websites using surveillance technology on its users mean every action will be traced. This could result in major leaks on websites, revealing all the actions of different users. That could be every message you’ve sent, every sentence you’ve searched, every website you’ve been on. And some people have closets full of skeletons they’d rather not open.
2. Your ability to express yourself, plus potential malfunctions
The surveillance is likely to be performed by a type of “censorship machine” (as described by Buffered VPN) which means any content uploaded by one user may not be uploaded by another, or your account could get flagged. What’s worse is that these machines could incorrectly detect posts as copyrighted content and flag it as such. Additionally, it won’t be able to detect things such as parodies or memes.
3. Legal trouble
If you enjoy uploading edited images you have created, and continue to do so after the reformed laws, you could earn yourself a spot in court. Say the base image was sent to you by a friend who gave no source. You couldn’t have known the image was uploaded by someone who doesn’t give anybody rights to re-upload edited versions of their content. A lot of time and research will be forced to find out this information, and without it could you could have to pay a hefty fine.