EU copyright directive

For those that follow such things, you'll probably be aware of the latest idiocy being proposed by the clueless, meddling bureaucrats at the EU. An accurate assessment of it has been provided by Mike Masnick over at Techdirt:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190213/12071341588/eu-moves-forward-with-agreemen t-to-fundamentally-change-internet-open-to-closed.shtml

Should it come to fruition it will have extremely far-reaching consequences for millions of sites including the LSF.

I've no idea whether it will do any good or not given the EU's propensity to reject compromise but there is a petition about it here:

http://change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-intern et

I signed the petition and "chipped in." Will it matter that I don't live anywhere in the EU?

What impact would the legislation have on sites published in the US? Can LSF be published here (isn't the host server here in Texas or someplace?)

When I can, I will chip in. I'm getting really tired of suits destroying the good things in life due to their greed and paranoia.

Any attempt to regulate the freedom of the internet is a matter for concern and should probably be resisted as a matter of course. However, and I may be missing something, reading Mike Masnick's assessment in the link, it seems to me that the EU is attempting to curb copyright abuses rather than necessarily censor content. Thus, whilst the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Tumblr have much to be concerned about, I do not see how LSF would be too seriously affected. Apart from the odd link in the Forum, LSF publishes original material rather than republishing copyrighted material, and the fact that the LSF is a moderated site would surely satisfy the 'doing everything in your power' requirements. However, the fact that Februs (who I trust implicitly) is concerned is enough to make me concerned. So I for one would therefore welcome any further light that readers can shed on this matter.

(As an aside, I would be more concerned about Article 11. If one cannot republish copyrighted news from legitimate sources, it is only going to contribute to people just making it up - i.e. even more fake news - whilst what is or is not released as legitimate news will be even more tightly controlled by a few conglomerates).

Hopefully, our only real exposure would be in regards to the forum where we'd be personally liable for any material or link that was considered a copyright violation.


The EU may be attempting to curb copyright abuses but the nett effect of their directive as it stands will certainly be to censor content for the reasons described in Masnick's article. The situation here is not dissimilar to the recent GDPR fiasco where the EU simply don't understand what they're doing (apart from meddling and being dictatorial) and aren't amenable to discussion about anything.


The forum is only moderated in the sense of making changes after the event if we find something that is problematic. These days we have less time to keep checking what is being posted. I probably could consider modifying the forum software so that every post has to be approved prior to being displayed but that's not something I'd want to do. Terms like "doing everything in your power" and phrases such as "best endeavours" are often used in contracts and are a nightmare to interpret.

I thought this quote from Wired (my highlighting) pretty much summed up the situation: