Thread by @Senficon

My speech to @Europarl_EN about tomorrow's copyright/#SaveYourInternet vote (Thread):
Dear colleagues— Copyright law is complex. When it comes to tomorrow's vote, you're getting a lot of mixed messages. Here's why:

The problems that @AxelVossMdEP and @EU_Commission want to solve are serious. But they are NOT caused by copyright law. Copyright law can't bring back lost newspaper subscriptions or lost ad revenues.

If that's the problem we want to solve, we need an Online Advertising Regulation – that's how tech companies actually make their money, how they put the independent press under pressure.

The truth is: News articles are already protected by copyright. If platforms use them without paying, they are already breaking the law. Adding an extra layer of protection won't change that.

Our alternative proposal (see juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyri…) will allow publishers to enforce that law without limiting the freedom to link. The #linktax, on the other hand, has been tried and failed before. Simply wishing it will work this time around is not a solution.

It's time that we turn the discussion from what we would really like the proposals to do, to what they will actually do:

If we make platforms directly liable for all their users' copyright infringement, they won't get a license from every single rightholder in the world. Even if they could find all of them, if only one refused to offer a license, a platform will have to deploy #uploadfilters.

@AxelVossMdEP and @JeanMarieCAVADA either deny that, or try to assure us that these filters will only block legal content. But simply wishing that automatic filters can do that is not going to make it true.

Until algorithms are smart enough to have a sense of humour, they won't know parody from copyright infringement – #uploadfilters will simply block everything.

If we want YouTube or Facebook to pay creators, let's write that into the law, like many alternative amendments from the left side of the house do. #Uploadfilters will just give them an excuse NOT to pay. Instead they will sell their filters to small European platforms.

#Uploadfilters are a danger that even the United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of expression @davidakaye calls by its name: Censorship. ohchr.org/Documents/Issu…

The proposals may be well intended, but they suffer from a “reality gap”. We have to stick with what copyright law can do to support creators – without trying to bend it to solve other problems, and without threatening fundamental rights.

This is what my amendments do. They're not what Big Tech wants, and certainly not the @Piratenpartei position. They're originally by @EP_SingleMarket and the previous @EPPGroup rapporteur, and supported by Europe's leading independent copyright academics: create.ac.uk/blog/2018/09/1…

What Europeans expect from us is clear: No #UploadFilters. #SaveTheLink with no restrictions. If we fail to deliver that, we risk losing all the positive elements of the Copyright Directive that would really bring a benefit to creators.