Europe might soon be deprived of the very essential mode of entertainment, Memes. Under the recent digital copyright laws having controversial rules- article 11 and article 13-European union is putting ahead the proposal to ban online memes, now been successfully passed through an EU committee.
The copyright directive was voted in favor of on June 20 by the EU’s JURY, seemingly the first valid reason to support Brexit. Meaning it’ll be put forward to the European Parliament, with the idea of it being passed into a law.
New restrictions will be implemented on user-generated content and remixes under these regulations, Article 13 of the directive pushing the online platform providers to “take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rights holders for the use of their work.”
The renowned memes that are inspired by the copyrighted images, like the evergreen “One does not simply…” belonging to the Lord of the Rings, may be removed from the internet under “Robo-copyright regime”.
The ones against Article 13 claim that it will destroy the internet as we know it, and lead to the senseless censors and deletion of the content online with no comprehension of the context.
This means that a single version scanned by Facebook or Twitter, of a song, video or image could be used to block anything mildly similar to that media. Hence the parodies that are often our sole source of entertainment during our busy day will also be removed.
Kim Killock, Executive Director told BBC “Unfortunately, while machines can spot duplicate uploads of Beyonce songs, they can’t spot parodies, understand memes that use copyright images or make any kind of cultural judgment about what creative people are doing. We see this all too often on YouTube already.”
They Save Your Internet campaign, aimed at taking down this threat on memes, and Article 13 that also threatens live streaming gamers, blogs, discussion forums etc. seems to be a ray of hope amidst this digital chaos.
