On June 20, the European Parliament will set in motion a process that could force online platforms like Facebook, Reddit and even 4chan(and it's lesser copycat) to censor their users' content before it ever gets online.
A proposed new European copyright law wants large websites to use "content recognition technologies" to scan for copyrighted videos, music, photos, text and code in a move that that could impact everyone from the open source software community to remixers, livestreamers and teenage meme creators.
In an open letter to the President of the European Parliament, some of the world's most prominent technologists warn that Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive "takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users."
It's a direct threat to the established legal notion that individual users, rather than platforms, are responsible for the content they put online.
Area of effect
Although it's primarily intended to prevent the online streaming of pirated music and video, the scope of Article 13 covers all and any copyrightable material, including images, audio, video, compiled software, code and the written word.
Internet memes— which most commonly take the form of viral images, endlessly copied, repeated and riffed on— could fall into a number of those categories, creating an improbable scenario in which one of the internet's most distinctive and commonplace forms of communication is banned.
The definitions used in Article 13 are broad by design, says writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow: "This system treats restrictions on free expression as the unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage of protecting copyright. Automated systems just can't distinguish between commentary, criticism, and parody and mere copying, nor could the platforms employ a workforce big enough to adjudicate each case to see if a match to a copyrighted work falls within one of copyright's limitations and exceptions."
Meme makers don't have the kind of organised front of code-sharing platforms or the Wikimedia Foundation, but there've been a few, albeit rather muted efforts to raise a fuss among meme-making groups on Reddit, Facebook and 4chan, with leftist meme creators in particular expressing concerns that the new law "will result in blanket meme bans because they can't keep up with actually checking against parody laws".
A redditor from r/dankmemes has passionately proclaimed that "you can take our internet and our rights, but you can never take our memes." And it gets weirder the further right you go, as conspiracy theories proliferate. One denizen of 4chan's Zig Forums went so far as to suggest that attempts to muster support against
icle 13's content platform filtering are "a pro-Article 13 psyop meant to make the opposition look uncool", while other comment threads on 4chan and Breitbart focussed on the always fertile alt-right tactics of blaming the Jews, female MEPs, and hedge fund magnate George Soros.
