Walled Culture by Glyn Moody

Author:Glyn Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BTF Press
Published: 2022-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Catherine Stihler,485 CEO of Creative Commons,486 was an MEP representing Scotland at the time. She remembers how intense lobbying activity was around the proposed copyright law: ‘I have never seen anything quite like this. Either you were with them or you were the complete enemy, there was just no in-between.’487

When the so-called ‘trilogue’488 discussions started between the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission to harmonise the draft versions of the text they took place behind closed doors,489 as usual. In January 2019, arguments were still raging among the European Union’s national governments about whether the proposed text concerning upload filters protected users’ rights sufficiently.490 In early February, the German government reversed its position, which had been to block progress unless smaller companies were shielded. Later, it emerged that the German volte-face was part of some political horse-trading to obtain France’s approval of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia491 (cancelled in 2022 because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). As part of the deal, Germany agreed that smaller companies would only be exempt from the requirement to establish filters for their first three years of trading.492 It was as if the European Union wanted to punish its startups for surviving to the next stage of their evolution. Germany’s agreement to abandon small companies allowed the trilogue negotiations to proceed.

Yet the climbdown by German negotiators did not go unnoticed. Millions of people signed an online petition493 against Article 17 and its upload filters. Thousands of people took to the streets494 in Cologne, Berlin495 and beyond.496 In Cologne, people carried placards reading ‘Ich bin kein Bot’ (I am not a bot) in a reference to German MEP Sven Schulze’s497 claim that the thousands of emails he received from people voicing their opinions against the upload filters were part of a ‘fake’ campaign498 conducted by bots. He arrived at this erroneous conclusion because many of the emails came from the gmail.com domain—a demonstration of his poor understanding of how Gmail works and how widely used it is. The Internet community staged other protest measures included blacking out the German, Danish, Czech and Slovak versions of Wikipedia, and holding an Internet blackout day.499

Meanwhile, the European Commission became more strident. The trilogue negotiations were completed on 13 February 2019. The day after, the European Commission published a post on its official Medium account that called those who were against the idea of upload filters a ‘mob’.500 The article was removed shortly afterwards and replaced by the note: ‘We acknowledge that its language and title were not appropriate and we apologise for the fact that it has been seen as offending.’501 At the same time, the European Parliament’s Twitter account was also disseminating propaganda, including the misleading claim on a video that ‘platforms will not be required to put filters in place’.502

Then just before the final plenary vote in the European Parliament was to be held, Germany’s commissioner for data protection, Ulrich Kelber, raised an issue regarding privacy and upload filters. Given

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