Social Media Without Memes: Today in Tech News

Article 13 aka “the meme ban”

Social media without memes?! That’s like a donut without frosting!

Have you heard of it yet?

Many of us in the tech world are buzzing on the EU’s proposal to address copyright issues across social media platforms. More people are being made aware after YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki has spoken out, warning the passing of these proposals into law “could drastically change the internet that you see today.”

What is it?

Article 13 (aka the meme ban) states “online content sharing service providers and right holders shall cooperate in good faith in order to ensure that unauthorized protected works or other subject matter are not available on other services.” (wired)

What does that mean

In a nutshell, any site that offers platforms to share user-generated content (think most social media sites: i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) will be responsible for taking down content that infringes on copyright.

Article 13 has been dubbed the meme ban because memes would be thrown into this gray area- memes are often based on copyrighted images- however, the legislation states that ‘parodies’ would be exempt from the law- claiming memes would remain the same.

The discussion around this is how would the technologies be able to decipher what is infringement and what is a parody?

Do you know? I don’t.

Protecting copyrighted creations all sounds well and good- until you look at logistically how that is going to happen. I think we all know that most of these sites already have technologies or efforts put in place currently, that involve delays in posting or the sites taking down certain copyrighted material. Where the concern comes into play is the effort to eliminate it entirely and holding the hosts responsible is going to be a pricey endeavor. These companies would have to employ entire work forces to sift through everything posted – OR would have to develop technologies to find copyrighted material posted by someone without proper permissions.

I think we can all draw the conclusion, social media sites would be much quieter and much more expensive to utilize if they were to remain anything like they are today.

Will this affect the USA?

In our opinion… yes and no…

If these articles pass into law, members of the European Union have two years to pass laws in line with the regulations. So we’ve got a good amount of time before we see it play out in Europe alone – most outlets say it should have zero affect on the US and our use of the sites and ability to share copyrighted media (we keep our memes- YAYYYY) – BUT our friends across the pond, in certain areas of the EU, may be completely blocked from the content we are posting.

Instead of sites complying with the extraordinary standards of these strict anti-copyright bots, they may just prevent people in the areas under these laws from participating or viewing sites with this content.

So this could potentially affect our social and business networking with these areas…

To Sum Up

While we should be able to keep our social media sites just the way they are, we may no longer be able to share with our EU counterparts.

We strive to keep ourselves in the tech loop and want to be sure that our customers and followers are as well! One of our favorite ways to communicate is to share popular memes and we enjoy to making our own content to share with our clients and their customers.

How about you? Join the conversation, and let us know what you have heard and what you think about the ‘meme ban’ in the EU.

Sources and more information from this blog can be found on these sites:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-article-13-article-11-european-directive-on-copyright-explained-meme-ban

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/youtube-susan-wojcicki-creators-protest-eu-article-13-copyright-law.html