Internet Blackouts and Electronic Book Burnings

The European Union has officially passed Article 11 and Article 13 of their Copyright Directive. Together, they effectively mean that in order to host stuff within the European Union — or to be “visible” in the European Union if you host elsewhere — you must obtain (and possibly pay for) a license to all copyright material that “might” be uploaded to your website by visitor to your site, and be in a constant state of monitoring all content on your site — whether it’s being uploaded by you or one of your many visitors — to see if it’s something you have a copyright license for, and to remove it if you don’t.

This is bad for many reasons, but mainly because anyone that is not an Internet Giant (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) likely won’t be able to afford to buy or develop a system for monitoring their sites, nor enough servers that such a system won’t DoS (Denial of Service) itself into not being able to serve their sites to their visitors. For anyone that can’t afford this, they also won’t be able to afford the sheer number of copyright licenses they need to protect themselves. Thus, they won’t be able to host anything on any server within the European Union for fear of being shut down, and they’ll have to deal with the fact that their site may, at some point, be blocked from being viewable within any member state of the European Union. For people who reside within the European Union who choose to host their content outside the European Union to circumvent the law, they won’t be able to administer their own web sites or moderate their contents without resorting to I2P, Tor, a VPN, or something similar, if their site gets blocked within the European Union due to these unreasonable laws. Let us hope that things I2P, Tor, and VPNs are not made illegal within the European Union.

Now that Article 11 and Article 13 have been passed, the European Union is now trying to extend it’s powers to block content that might be deemed terroristic in nature, and France has already tried to exercise this power by asking The Internet Archive to remove at least 550 items from their site, including Alice in Wonderland, content from the Smithsonian, the Bible, and the Ungrateful Dead. These are things that clearly aren’t terrorism (well, maybe that last one can be considered metaphorical terrorism if you truly care about your hearing), yet France wants it taken offline for being works of terrorism, and the power to request this will be extended to the entire European Union of the European Parliament approves their new law.

To The Members of the European Union

You are free to send me requests to remove content under these laws all you like. However, I would like to point out that I am in the United States and hosting my blog via WordPress. Without being told otherwise by WordPress, I have to assume my blog also resides within the United States. Therefor, I shall assume that I am free to post content under the Fair Use and Copyright laws of the United States. If I am wrong (and I would appreciate confirmation from someone working at WordPress if that is the case), I will disable my blog until I can ensure that I am fully hosted on a platform that allows me to post under the Fair Use and Copyright laws of the United States. But as long as I can be reasonably confident that I am hosted within the United States, I will refuse to comply with any and all requests from member states of the European Union (or from any representative body of the European Union itself) unless it can be proven to me that I am in violation of United States Fair Use and/or Copyright laws or that the content being called into question is somehow truly harmful to the safety of others (which, let’s face it, is extremely unlikely).

My Pledge to My Readers

  • All content I post to my blog that is owned by me is explicitly licensed under the Creative Commons license linked to at the bottom of my blog. As long as you remain within the bounds of said license, I won’t attempt to suppress your use of my content, even if I don’t agree with how you use my content (note: I’m not promising I won’t complain loudly! 🙂 ).
  • If I want to post content that I don’t own, I will do so if and only if my use is in full compliance with Fair Use and Copyright laws of the United States, and I will clearly mark what content this applies to so that you are aware of what is not covered by the Creative Commons license I am using.
  • If I attempt to Fair Use content you own and you believe that my Fair Use claim is not valid, you are free to contact me to discuss it. If your concerns are valid (and if you can provide proof that you are, indeed, the copyright owner), I will promptly remove your content from my blog.
  • I will not, under any circumstance, attempt to block the use of Tor, I2P, VPNs, or any other censorship-resistant tool or network. If I get enough complaints that WordPress is blocking these, I will seek out a platform that allows them. I want to make my blog available to everyone that wants to read it, and that means making sure it is accessible via networks like Tor and I2P that can be used to fight censorship.

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