As many of you might be aware of, the european union recently passed the disputed “directive on copyright in Digital Single Marked”
This means that all 27 countries in the EU got two years to adopt this directive into state and means that the way europeans will use their internet will change, potentially with significant impact.
Once adopted in EU member state law, content provider on the Internet like YouTube, Vimeo, Reddit, - you name it – who wish to offer service in the european union have to be compliant also with this new rules.
Article 17’s ( former Article 13 ) Uploadfilter
The renamed article 13 obliges any content provider to prevent the upload of copyrighted material with technical measures, so called uploadfilters. Until now, common practice has been that copyright owner could report violations to content providers, urging them taking action to remove said content from their servers. But now with those new laws, providers have to ensure that none of these material will be uploaded in the first place.
YouTube has such a system for years now, and it’s flawed. This raises the question on how effective such technologies can be in general. But more important for this article is, since we now we are in this fine mess, how steem will react.
Needless to say that steem is designed to NOT HAVE anything like a censor machine to filter out pre-uploaded content, but what will be the consequences? Will Steemit Inc be liable for any legal issues raised by the european union? At least they are the major stakeholder in steem and developed this platform as we know it to the most part. Will they take actions to be complaint with EU laws and thus betray the ideals of decentralized blockchain technology? Will they exclude the european union from their service?
Or don’t they feel any responsibility at all regarding this topic. But IF they take this responsibility, they either have to make sure to prevent copyrighted content being uploaded onto this platform lol or they have to do it like YouTube likely will handel it and buy ‘bulk licences’ from the respective license owners and pass it onto their users making them able to use said content.
What are your thoughts on this topic??
So what do you think? Will this have an impact on this ecosystem or will there be workarounds like the usage of VPN and/or other solutions?
Why not take part in this poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/17786178
And also I am interested in your comments!
As always, have a great day and thank you for your time :)
