Lobbyists for “creators” threw their lot in with the giant entertainment
companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU
Copyright Directive by a hair’s-breadth this morning, in an act of
colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by
the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.
Here’s what the EU voted in favour of this morning:
* Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to
stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run
by the big platforms. They’ll compare your posts to databases of
“copyrighted works” that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim
copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything
that appears to match the “copyright database” is blocked on sight, and
you have to beg the platform’s human moderators to review your case to
get your work reinstated.
* Link taxes: You can’t link to a news story if your link text includes more than a single word
from the article’s headline. The platform you’re using has to buy a
license from the news site, and news sites can refuse licenses, giving
them the right to choose who can criticise and debate the news.
* Sports monopolies: You can’t post any photos or videos from sports
events – not a selfie, not a short snippet of a great goal. Only the
“organisers” of events have that right. Upload filters will block any
attempt to violate the rule.
Here’s what they voted against:
* “Right of panorama”: the right to post photos of public places despite
the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements,
public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the
facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).
* User generated content exemption: the right to use small excerpt from
works to make memes and other
critical/transformative/parodical/satirical works.
Having passed the EU Parliament, this will now be revised in secret,
closed-door meetings with national governments (“the trilogues”) and
then voted again next spring, and then go to the national governments
for implementation in law before 2021. These all represent chances to
revise the law, but they will be much harder than this fight
was. We can also expect lawsuits in the European high courts over these
rules: spying on everyone just isn’t legal under European law, even if
you’re doing it to “defend copyright.”
In the meantime, what a disaster for creators. Not only will be we liable to having our independently produced materials arbitrarily censored by overactive filters,
but we won’t be able to get them unstuck without the help of big
entertainment companies. These companies will not be gentle in wielding
their new coercive power over us (entertainment revenues are up, but the share going to creators is down:
if you think this is unrelated to the fact that there are only four or
five major companies in each entertainment sector, you understand nothing about economics).
But of course, only an infinitesimal fraction of the material on the
platforms is entertainment related. Your birthday wishes and funeral
announcements, little league pictures and political arguments, wedding
videos and online educational materials are also going to be
filtered by these black-box algorithms, and you’re going to have to get
in line with all the other suckers for attention from a human moderator
at one of the platforms to plead your case.
The entertainment industry figures who said that universal surveillance
and algorithmic censorship were necessary for the continuation of
copyright have done more to discredit copyright than all the pirate
sites on the internet combined. People like their TV, but they use their
internet for so much more.
It’s like the right-wing politicians who spent 40 years describing
roads, firefighting, health care, education and Social Security as
“socialism,” and thereby created a generation of people who don’t
understand why they wouldn’t be socialists, then. The copyright
extremists have told us that internet freedom is the same thing as
piracy. A generation of proud, self-identified pirates can’t be far
behind. When you make copyright infringement into a political act, a
blow for freedom, you sign your own artistic death-warrant.
This idiocy was only possible because:
* No one involved understands the internet: they assume that because
their Facebook photos auto-tag with their friends’ names, that someone
can filter all the photos ever taken and determine which ones violate
copyright;
* They tied mass surveillance to transferring a few mil from Big Tech to
the newspaper shareholders, guaranteeing wall-to-wall positive coverage
(I’m especially ashamed that journalists supported this lunacy – we
know you love free expression, folks, we just wish you’d share);
What comes next? Well, the best hope is probably a combination of a
court challenge, along with making this an election issue for the 2019
EU elections. No MEP is going to campaign for re-election by saying “I
did this amazing copyright thing!” From experience, I can tell you that no one cares what their lawmakers are doing with copyright.
On the other hand, there are tens of millions of voters who will vote
against a candidate who “broke the internet.” Not breaking the internet
is very important to voters, and the wider populace has proven
itself to be very good at absorbing abstract technical concepts when
they’re tied to broken internets (87% of Americans have a) heard of Net
Neutrality and; b) support it).
I was once involved in a big policy fight where one of the stakes was
the possibility that broadcast TV watchers would have to buy a small
device to continue watching TV. Politicians were terrified of
this proposition: they knew that the same old people who vote like crazy
also watch a lot of TV and wouldn’t look favourably on anyone who
messed with it.
We’re approaching that point with the internet. The danger of internet
regulation is that every problem involves the internet and every poorly
thought-through “solution” ripples out through the internet, creating
mass collateral damage; the power of internet regulation is that every
day, more people are invested in not breaking the internet, for their
own concrete, personal, vital reasons.
This isn’t a fight we’ll ever win. The internet is the nervous system of
this century, tying together everything we do. It’s an irresistible
target for bullies, censors and well-intentioned fools. Even if the EU
had voted the other way this morning, we’d still be fighting tomorrow,
because there will never be a moment at which some half-bright, fully
dangerous policy entrepreneur isn’t proposing some absurd way of solving
their parochial problem with a solution that will adversely affect
billions of internet users around the world.
This is a fight we commit ourselves to. Today, we suffered a terrible,
crushing blow. Our next move is to explain to the people who suffer as a
result of the entertainment industry’s depraved indifference to the
consequences of their stupid ideas how they got into this situation, and
get them into the streets, into the polling booths, and into the fight.
What comes next? Well, the best hope is probably a combination of a
court challenge, along with making this an election issue for the 2019
EU elections. No MEP is going to campaign for re-election by saying “I
did this amazing copyright thing!” From experience, I can tell you that
no one cares what their lawmakers are doing with copyright.
It would be a brilliant idea if the export function did allow us to download files by type and by a range of dates, allowing large blogs to do it piecemeal. I can’t understand why mine is taking so long, either. It’s either a glitch or exporting to a file I’ll never be able to open.
Can you tell me if your posts looked correct, was the export a tidy one?
Thank you for all the information it is much appreciated.
A brief check-in to note – we are on MONTH THREE of the blog export process and Tumblr’s only response to me – was to inform me how to export my blog. Again.
Has anyone else tried this function? I’ve heard two days is all it is supposed to take, tops.
@staff?
I can’t even stop the process and start over because anytime I log in, no matter the browser, it still in the exporting process.
Good night.
ETA: One user just let me know they got the blog export process finished, saved the Zip file, but when they tried to open it (yes, with the proper app), it was empty.
Would love to hear more for anyone attempting this process.
“Don’t like, don’t read” is so exhausting because it acts like fandom can only be harmful if people go out of their way to read triggering fanfic. As if it’s all isolated and underground and easy to avoid. Like. I’ve never read a Reylo fic, but if I search for Finn stuff, there it is. If I scroll the TFA tag, it’s there. Fans write “Finn meta” that tears him down to elevate Reylo (shit, journalists do it too). Finnrey shippers and Finn fans are demonized for noticing any of it.
We can avoid it, sure – if we leave fandom. We’re fans, we’re not going anywhere.
Some good points here. The meta bit is pretty distasteful, and just in general I think people shouldn’t tag character hate, or tag a character just because they show up in a fic if they’re not going to be a focus of it.
That said… being upset because you see a ship you don’t like when scrolling through a tag for the whole fandom is maybe a wee bit excessive. ‘cause honestly, if you find it harmful just to know there are people who write your NoTP, then maybe you SHOULD leave that fandom.
You have a right not to have to read content you find upsetting. You do NOT have a right to demand it be so “isolated and underground” that you don’t even have to know it exists.
You have it a wee bit backward. I demanded no such thing. Do I think reylo belongs in the main tags? No, I don’t. It has nothing to do with The Last Jedi, it’s a white fantasy wankfest that buries posts that are about the movie and erases the inclusiveness of the actual trilogy. There’s nothing I can do about that, the Star Wars fandom has always been racist as hell.
But don’t tell me “don’t like don’t read” when it’s everywhere, making just about every tag a shitshow. I DO have the right to say I don’t like it when I can’t avoid it. Don’t like criticism, don’t shove it in my face.
Do you use Xkit or Tumblr Savior?
Those are browser extensions that work with tumblr (i.e. make it goddamn functional for a change) on multiple browser platforms.
You can use the Blacklist feature in Xkit or Tumblr Savior (and for AO3 this works too, with the AO3 Savior extension) to completely block a chosen tag or keyword.
It might show you something was blocked from your dashboard or whatnot depending on the extension but it won’t show you the actual posts with that tag (some people have also managed to set it up – I think in Tumblr Savior specifically? not sure, I stick with Xkit and haven’t fiddled much with this but I think it has a whitelist option too- so that it would whitelist something so that for example a fandom tag would only show up with say, your preferred ships and not any other content, something the Teen Wolf fandom has made heavy use of in rebellion against canon’s apparent queerbaiting turnaround – I say apparent because I’m not in that fandom, but that’s what I’ve seen some people in it say they did).
If you use an extension like this to block the reylo tag/keyword then you should almost never have to sit through those posts on the Force Awakens or Star Wars tags again, if they’ve been tagged with the ship or otherwise include the ship name in their text they should get blocked. 🙂
At worst, you’ll spot a few “blocked based on this keyboard” notifications but they’ll be like a single text line with no post and no content attached other than mentioning what keyboard it was being blocked for.
Options like this are exactly why a lot of people are okay with saying “don’t like, don’t read” because we CAN filter better now – but if you didn’t know these were common options (because why would you? it’s not like they’re official through tumblr, which hates that third parties attempt to make this hellsite functional apparently) then I can understand your frustration. So I hope this reply helps you out with your annoying reylo issue! 🙂 I don’t tend to browse the main tag for TFA or Star Wars, but I really don’t like that ship either (just?? why??) and so I could see how if you’re looking for neutral content and can’t block it, that could be really frustrating
Unfortunately there is no fix for character hate tagged with just the character name though : that’s a matter of individuals tagging accurately, and that’s in turn a matter of internal fandom tagging practices/culture. I’m sad to hear Finn hate is being tagged with neutral tags, that sucks. 😦 If you spot some common lines that get repeated though you might be able to cut down on it with keyword blocking? Again, not a perfect fix, but >_>
Wow, patronizing. Of course I know about and use xkit on the web. Dropped Tumblr Savior years ago. I know how Tumblr works. I’m on mobile 90% of the time, and yes, I know about Washboard, too. All but one of the examples in the op? Xkit doesn’t fix it.
Personally, because of the nature of my blog, I don’t blacklist or block, ever. It’s important for me to see the reality of the fandom. That’s my choice, yeah. It doesn’t make flooding tags with irrelevant ship content reasonable or above criticism. It’s not that I can’t handle all they reylo, it’s that it pisses me off when fanon ships like reylo sideline Black characters. I’ve used blacklisting, and believe me, seeing dozens of “this post has been hidden” posts isn’t any better.
And why is it so damn hard for this particular fandom to be respectful? Kyluxers, regardless of how I feel about the ship, somehow manage not to infest every corner of fandom, on and off Tumblr. I don’t see them harassing SW directors and actors on social media. It can’t be that damn hard.
This isn’t just like, I don’t want to look at Adam Driver’s face. It’s about maneuvering through a fandom for a trilogy that offers inclusion that aggressively prioritizes whiteness.It’s about antiblackness. A band-aid doesn’t help.
I’m someone who does black list things I hate, and I STILL see them! Part of my problems with my current fandom is that there is literally no way to avoid the problematic stuff without leaving it entirely.
And that’s before getting into all the insidious ways in which hate continues to permeate even after you black list the obvious stuff. i.e. My fandom is tremendously racist towards the main character – which would be fine (or, well, tolerable) if people tagged it. But they don’t, because the fanon has spread so far that people think it’s canon, and thus no one thinks to tag it.
Not to mention microagressions. No one is going to tag their fic or write in a warning that “I took the main character’s good traits and gave them to the white leads while giving him all their bad traits” – but that’s exactly what happens.
One of the biggest problems with things like racism, sexism, etc., is that they most often AREN’T intentional – which means people aren’t going to tag for them. The racism will run so deep that people don’t even see it. The hate will run so deep that people don’t even see it. If you don’t see it, you can’t tag for it, so how are you supposed to block it?
“Blocking” problematic content on Tumblr, AO3, or anywhere else, relies on the person generating that content, AND on *everyone* else reblogging that content, to accurately tag it with what you have blocked.
How likely do you think that is to actually happen when people don’t even think they’re doing anything problematic in the first place?
Exactly. People will trigger warning all kinds of things, but not racism, not unless it’s like a screencap of an “alt right” Twitter rant. Tagging their own potentially triggering posts for racism? Doesn’t happen. People can use fandom to cope, unless it’s coping with racism, then it doesn’t really count. What is upsetting to Black fans is just fandom fun. They wouldn’t even think to tag it as racist.
In any event, I’m not going to expend time and energy on helping to create a space that fosters the comfort of fans who make fandom a hurtful place for fans of color who don’t toe the line. They want me to do the work so fandom can be a nice, happy place where racism can flourish while xkit makes me (partially) oblivious of how shitty it really is? Lol no.
We’re at Month Two of the Blog Backup.
Seriously, @staff, this function doesn’t exist. Why do you offer it?
And no response from my queries is a little telling.
The Doctor Is Out 