LetsFixCopyright

Thanks for the question, and the pro-active attitude! Reality is that as normal people we have very little opportunity to bit our two cents in, besides voting & responding to consultations (which are almost all finished for this specific legislation). What you can do is support your local civil rights organisations in their fights, signing petitions when they share them, and being active on social media where a lot of politicians take note.

There are some good tips in the guide Edri wrote here called "the activist guide to the Brussels Maze"

Sites like Reddit, when this type of legislation becomes reality, have several choices to abide by new laws. One option would be to restrict certain links for the entirety of the world (to take the worst case as the whole), another option would be to pull out of Europe entirely (to GeoBlock the site from EU IP Adresses) another would be to ignore it and let "them" sue.

Neither of which sound very appealing to me.

Thank you for the question. This debate is around the question "is linking an act of using copyrighted materials or not?". We believe not, but recently the Court of Justice of EU tends to have different opinion. And if it is yes, it means you need an approval for linking to copyrighted content. With ancillary (publishers) rights introduced, companies will be able to restrict which content can be shared and which cannot. Remember we're discussing "news" in a very broad sense of the word. This is a threat to right to information. The discussion is not only about Google, giving this right would mean they can use it on everyone, not just big multinational organisations.

What I'm advocating for is not necessarily a 'leaner copyright' - the rights of creators as they are today, and are harmonised across the EU, would not change. I advocate for more balance in copyright - exclusive rights for creators need to be balanced with exceptions and limitations to copyright to things that we find important as a society such as access to heritage and education.

Getting your work used without permission for purposes you don't like sucks, and there should be a line, and that is what we have in EU copyright. You have to ask for permission before using a copyright protected work - unless you can apply an exception to this rule - like citing a work for example. On how to enforce these rules, both not using without permission AND making sure you can use works under exceptions is a very difficult question, being solved under a different law that we are discussing here today.

For example with ancillary copyright (the "link tax"), big companies (both publishers and news aggregators) will afford getting into licensing agreement, while small one will not be able to carry additional costs - in results they will have to shut down (this was a case when they tried this type of law in Spain)