Is this the End of the Open Internet?

by Jacob Barca

Do the EU's new articles spell the end for popular memes?

The open internet is over: from net neutrality in America all the way to the new copyright directive laws in the EU.

Recently the EU passed articles 11,12 and 13, within which are the new copyright directive laws. Firstly, article 11 states that press publications “may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers”. In everyday language article 11 intends to get news aggregator websites, like Google News and Apple News, to pay the publisher even if it is just a snippet of their article that they are using.

The problem with this article is that it does not specify how big the shared article would have to be before the publisher is paid. However, the directive goes on to say that if there is a hyperlink that is accompanied by just a few words the website will not have to pay. but yet again this is very vague and it is very rare that there would be only a few words to accompany the hyperlink, meaning companies would regularly be falling foul of this rule.

Secondly, article 12a is a rather small article but contains obscene rules, focusing on the posting of sports videos and ensuring that anyone who is not the official organiser of that match will not be able to post videos or photos of that match. It is possible that it could even stop the people who went to the matches from posting anything. This would stop several sports videos going viral. However, like the other two articles it all depends on the way the directive is interpreted by member states when they make it law.

Finally, we arrive at the worst of the three: article 13. This could potentially result in the banning of everyone's favourite memes. Of course, one advantage of this is that Universal would rain hell down on your Mum's favourite Minion memes on Facebook. This is because Article 13 would force all online platforms like Facebook and Instagram to filter or remove copyrighted material from their websites. If they do not do so they will be liable to copyright infringements. One penalty of copyright infringement is a fine from around £200 to £150,000. For companies like Facebook and Instagram, it could be slightly more but still it would not damage them at all, although, if there was a second offence, it would be a lot more severe. One worry is that it could significantly damage smaller sites that are trying to develop, putting the owners of these sites in a very poor financial position. To avoid these penalties, large sites would create algorithms programmed to remove copyrighted material. This would create several problems as it would not be able to differentiate between parodies and copyrighted material (under article 13, parodies would still be allowed).

Millions of companies and people are against the creation of these articles, including sites like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia (although Wikipedia is not included in these articles).

Some believe that Article 13 is necessary because the company that owns the material is "not getting paid for it". However, the very opposite is at work here; each meme increases publicity for that company and its material. An example of this is the Emoji Movie, which rivals The Room as one of the worst movies ever created, achieving an 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and featuring Sir Patrick Stewart sinking to the role of the Poop Emoji. This mistake of a movie had a much more successful box office than predicted, grossing $217.8 million, with a profit of $167.8 million. This was largely due to the memes surrounding it.

Occasionally memes are associated with a very dark sense of humour and some people believe that they do little good for the world. However, this is simply not the case. Stefan Karl Stefansson was best known for playing Robbie Rotten in the Icelandic program Lazy Town. In 2016 he was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer; after this news was discovered by the internet community, a Go Fund Me page was created to help pay for Stefan’s treatment. To raise awareness for this page, Lazy Town was memed - mainly the song known as 'We Are Number One' that Stefan sang himself. The Go Fund Me page raised a total of $169,670.00

If this EU law had been in place at the time, most likely the Go Fund Me page would not have raised nearly as much money, as it would not have been able to use the memes to raise the awareness. During this period, Stefan showed his support for this by posting pictures on Instagram thanking the community for creating the memes which resulted in such large support. Sadly, although Stefan was thought to be out of danger, his cancer recurred in late 2017 and he passed away this August.