Modified Freedom of Panorama law is also knocked down

Jul 10, 2015 12:18 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday, the European Parliament voted on reforming various aspects of its copyright laws across EU states, and a series of amendments were submitted to debate.

The original draft for the copyright law reform was written by Julia Reda, member of the European Parliament for the German Pirate Party, but was later modified in June, after a series of consultations with various EU political parties.

During these negotiations, five changes were introduced to Mrs. Reda's original draft. In yesterday's vote in the European Parliament, three of those amendments were knocked down.

The accepted amendments refer to a modification in the text of law regarding private copying levies, and the removal of a European Commission direction regarding copyright limitations and exceptions.

The ones that were defeated were the ones more dangerous to EU citizen's liberties, one of them being the Freedom of Panorama, which we explained in a previous article, and is a limitation for taking photos of public spaces.

The second defeated amendment referred to the right of artists and professionals to put their content online for free, which EU regulators wanted to prohibit and force people to require monetary compensation for their work even if they didn't want to.

Something like this would have practically voided any open licenses like Creative Commons, and denied a person's right to do whatever they want with their property.

Threats to Freedom of Panorama, Creative Commons, and Internet links were dismissed

The third amendment that didn't go through was both dangerous and terribly stupid at the same time, and was the intention to set up a tax for linking to news stories online.

With powerful lobbying efforts behind it from news media conglomerates, this amendment would have allowed any news agency to charge other companies or professionals if they linked to their stories.

While nobody can actually break the Internet with one law, this amendment had the potential of actually ruining the quality of content you'd get online. This applies more specifically to search engines like Google or Bing, which would have had to pay for any news link that popped up in their search results.

In a statement for IT PRO, Meghan Sali from OpenMedia's Save The Link campaign said the following, “A ‘Link Tax’ is essentially a cash-grab from giant media conglomerates, desperate to shore up an outdated business model off the backs of Internet users. [...] This is good news for internet users everywhere."