As a company working in open source software development for business and non-profit organizations, we tell the Therp programmers to look into the code of other developers. To add good software you have to know what other existing modules do, and how they do it. More importantly, you learn from weaknesses and good ideas in the existing software which invites you to use your creativity and do it even better. As we look at the software of others, others look at ours. Expanding your mind, by getting to know and building on previous discoveries and creativity, is in our opinion an age-old best practice. Of course if you use something of somebody else, you make sure you attribute the piece to the known creator or rights holder.
Yes, also open source software is
copy-righted.Our sharing and learning idea however seems to collide with the new and especially and On February 13, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council concluded negotiations with a Article
13 states that commercial sites or apps where users can post material
must make “best efforts” to preemptively buy licenses for anything
copyrighted that users may possibly upload. In addition, most sites will
need to do everything in their power to prevent anything from ever
going online that may be an unauthorized copy of a work that a rights
holder has registered. Although Article 13 doesn’t explicitly mandate
automated upload filters, this is the only feasible way to handle the
mass of content going online all the time. They will have to deploy
expensive and error-prone upload filters to prevent a court to judge
them liable for infringements as if they had committed them themselves.Article
11 states that reproducing more than “single words or very short
extracts” of news stories will require a license. No exceptions will be
made even for services run by individuals, small companies or
non-profits.The
official idea behind the directive is to protect content creators and
to secure revenues for artists that would otherwise be lost from the
unauthorized use of their material on the content-sharing platforms like
Youtube and Facebook. In public the big tech companies allegedly oppose
the new intellectual property law.In
reality, the directive will probably only expand the power such
companies already have on the internet. They not only end up selling
their filtering services to smaller platforms, which can’t afford to
develop their own, but also will extend their role as de facto content
police. Controlling and analyzing the Internet data traffic of all
relevant platforms and services. Because their filters can't recognize
it properly, the only chance to escape these filters will be using
satire, jokes and memes.The
other winners will be the big corporations lobbying the directive:
media, music, film, and their lawyers. They can expect a lot of money
from the copyright infringements decided in the courts. And the actual
content creators will be even more in stranglehold of some publisher as
it's the case now already.Will
seemingly opposing mayor companies win big, the legislation will harm
independent and commercial creators, as well as the cultures in which
they operate, says digital rights activist Hannah Machlin, who is
working with Create Refresh,
a group of artists and about 40 organizations, including Creative
Commons and Wikimedia France. Indeed society as a whole will lose.
Creating, innovating, learning, imagining, collaborating, it all starts
with playing, discovering, imitating and sharing. Controlling the flow
of information, music, code, movies, and thought itself, will not solve
the problems of content creators, but rather hinder real progress.We
don't need to consent however. This directive will be finally voted on
by the European Parliament end of March or begin of April. Until then,
but not restricted to that period, you can be creative in your
opposition in whatever way you feel most comfortable with, be it
demonstrations, posts, letters to your MEP, signing a petition, protest
songs, parody or raising awareness in your social circle.
Sources:
EU Copyright Directive Article 11 Article 13.final text.
Wikipedia, Corporate Europe, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Quartz, Save your Internet
New EU Copyright Directive
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Opinion