France and Germany just cut a deal to save the EU's #CopyrightDirective -- and made it much, much worse (PLEASE SHARE THIS POST!)

The EU's on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who understand that the CEOs of multinational entertainment companies won't stand for any compromise, or even the appearance of compromise, and so the process fell apart.

That is until Chancellor Merkel and President Macron sat down to broker a deal, in which Merkel caved on every single measure that even looked like it might protect small businesses, co-operatives, nonprofits, and individuals, ending up with a deal that guarantees that every existing small platform will be destroyed and no new ones can be started, leaving Europe in the hands of US Big Tech -- forever.

Under the new deal, any platform where the public can communicate will have to buy copyright filters to intercept all public communications and compare them to a database of so-called "copyrighted works" (which anyone, anywhere, can add anything to), and then block anything that appears to be a match.

Not only will these cost hundreds of millions of euros to develop and maintain, they will also block mountains of legitimate speech -- speech that uses copyrighted works but falls under fair dealing, speech that is incorrectly identified as containing copyrighted works, speech that is deliberately suppressed by trolls, censors and frauds who deliberately claim ownership over works in the public domain, or works that other people hold the copyright to. Read the rest