@Kaarme
I'm not the greatest expert on how the EU works, so I assumed the snippets I'd seen from it wouldn't be the final form of the law (it does still have to pass the council, and then be implemented by member states), because it sounds as vague as a corporate mission statement.
After some research into their lawmaking process, I fully agree with you. How in the living fuck is a document that, if submitted in an eighth-grade English class, would come back marked with "incredible vocabulary, but I can't tell what you're saying - and, Timmy, you're way over the pagecount" this close to becoming law of those lands?
I've
been involved in the process that refines legislation like wuxia cultivators refine pills. (My job was mostly around keeping track of all the revisions/amendments to bills, analyses of their potential effects, etc. in a US state. I shuffled a LOT of paper, but I got to read it all, and even found some errors myself.) Coming from that context, the idea of putting anything this vague into law would be absolutely destroyed by any decent legislature. No wonder Britain is trying to bail out, if this is the sort of shit that passes through the legislative organs of the EU. (Not that Britain doesn't have its own internet regulation/freedom issues.)
Vague laws are always the worst (aside from tyrannical ones)
Are you talking about Draconic laws (massive punishment for even minor crimes) instead of tyrannical ones? Because Despotic/Tyrannical laws are often deliberately vague, so it's up to the discretion of the courts and enforcers who gets punished and who doesn't.
if the "for commercial purposes" is true, then it's not nearly as bad as it could be.
Not really, because any site sustained by ad revenue (as most scanlators are), unless it's specifically a CSO or other type of EU-recognized nonprofit, seems like it would be liable to be counted as for-profit. I mean, yes, none of this is as bad as it could be: the EU's not erecting their own version of The Great Firewall Of China yet, but it's still pretty fuckin' bad, and implementing it's going to be a huge mess for everyone.
And I can't help but see it as one more step forward by an ice giant enshrouded in a blizzard of the
Chilling Effect.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist here, but what current government
wouldn't want to legally crush twitter out of their country after watching the 2010 Arab Spring? The 2011 London Riots (where BBC newscasters explicitly blamed twitter for the way the rioters could organize)? The 2013 Ukraine protests (which used twitter as well)? Most major protests and mass anti-government activities in the past ~9 years have used twitter and other similar platforms to organize, spread news from the scene different than the state/official network take, and gather international support.
...And platforms like twitter get spitroasted by Articles 11 and 13 like an idol in a doujin?
Hmm...
It seems suspicious even without my tinfoil hat on.
And if we REALLY want to put on our tinfoil hats, consider the possibilities for under-the-table leverage Article 13's broad rules gives. The EU trading suppression of certain topics or news on search engine and social media for a bit of leeway in the EU's handling of their Article 11/13 cases. That's the real conspiracy theory.
And, as you pointed out, the law is vague enough for that.
