---
layout: post
title: "You can't break what's already broken"
date: 2019-01-14 23:30:00
categories: misc
---

Just like your average net denizen, i don't posses precognition powers, so i
can't say whether the dreaded thirteenth article will have overall positive or
negative effect. What i can say, however, is that the amount of criticism it
provoked is disproportional.

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I'm not a lawyer and mostly haven't read the official document, so i can't tell
you whether the critics are right about its (un)intended consequences. However,
that's beside the point; for the sake of argument, lets assume article 13 is
about as evil as it's painted. Media hosting companies either go out of business
or employ automatic filters which remove tons of "legal" content. Sounds bad,
doesn't it?

Well, it sure is bad for you if you're running business of spying on your users,
or are getting payed by such business, or are one of those users who don't care
about their privacy and are happily watching tons of ads that are shoved at
them.

But lets dig deeper. What exactly *is* the "legal content" that is going to get
banned? Depends on your imagination, of course, but the most endangered are
works (ab)using the so-called "fair use" and similar "rights" to use
"copyrighted works" without permission in certain ways. Complex and arbitrarily
chosen ways, actually.

- Parodies and reviews with heavy video/audio quoting are perhaps the most
obvious in this grey zone.

- Unironic remixes, fan fiction and fan art are not directly affected, because
without permission they are most likely already infringing copyright. While it's
possible they will be taken down more aggressively, that's mostly irrelevant. If
you are against such takedowns, you are already against existing laws.

- Situation with musical covers will probably depend on whether big copyright
holders are getting enough revenue from them.

So essentially the change boils down to this: people who are using copyrighted
work in order to profit from its popularity will have less legal opportunities
to do so. Comedic remixers will no longer receive a free pass and will be put
into the same position as other remixers. Critics will have to go back to
"text-only" criticism, effectively losing a large portion of their ability to
increase (decrease) profit from the works they like (don't like).

If that sounds like the end of the world to you, you're probably not alone. But
as you might've already guessed, i see this potential change as merely making
oppressive copyright a bit more logical.

That's not necessarily a good thing, but neither it's inherently bad.

Now, there is of course another potential issue. Namely, possibility of totally
random takedowns. This would be a very serious matter, if not for a simple fact
that random takedowns are inherent to easily censorable centralized commercial
services. Sure, it's conceivable to write legislation to forbid hosting
companies from removing content from their servers without government
permission, but that sounds like it might have its own downsides.

If you're serious about being against censorship and "unfair copyright"
(whatever that means to you), you should use less censorable, decentralized
platforms. Of course, there's a simple reason why so many affected people prefer
to keep nagging: there's no easy way to make money when you can't feed your
users with ads. But i guess that's a price you should be prepared to pay, if
what matters to you is indeed freedom of expression.
