The Italian language Wikipedia website has 'gone dark' in a protest against proposed EU copyright laws, with all pages temporarily blocked.

MEPs will this week vote on a new copyright directive, which was previously approved by a committee.

EU politicians say the proposed measures are aimed at achieving goals such as "fair pay for artists and journalists" and "protecting freedom of expression and innovation".

However, activists and web freedom organisations have voiced strong opposition to the proposals.

Two articles in particular - 11 and 13 - have caused significant controversy.

Campaigners claim the rules would effectively ban memes from the web.

The European Digital Rights (EDRi) association claims the directive contains measures "to monitor and filter virtually all uploads to the internet".

Amid mounting opposition to the proposals, the Italian Wikipedia community has decided to 'obscure all encyclopedia pages' to highlight its concerns around the proposed copyright rules.

They write: "The directive instead of updating the copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation of all the citizens to the society of information, threatens online freedom and creates obstacles to accessing the Web, imposing new barriers, filters and restrictions.

"If the proposal would be approved in its current form, it could be impossible to share a news article on social networks, or find it through a search engine; Wikipedia itself would be at risk."

It adds: "We want to continue to offer a free, open, collaborative encyclopedia with verifiable content. We call on all Members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text [and] reopen the discussion."

If the vote on the directive passes this week, the controversial law will be negotiated with the European Council ahead of a potential final vote later this year. </s> Wikipedia in Italy and Spain blocked all articles in protest of the recent EU vote to implement certain changes to copyright laws within the bloc.

Last month’s vote on a controversial set of proposals to change copyright law in the EU left many stunned following a victory for those who want the alterations to be made.

Yesterday (3 July), both the Spanish-language and Italian Wikipedia sites blocked readers from viewing entries in protest over the danger the new laws would present to Wikipedia and other websites.

The European Committee on Legal Affairs voted in favour of adopting the EU Copyright Directive – the first update to European copyright legislation since 2001. The EU parliamentary vote is due to take place on 5 July.

Issues within the bill centred around Articles 11 and 13, and included the requirement for websites to implement a content filtering system to prevent the use of copyrighted works on the platform, and a so-called ‘link tax’.

Wikipedia could be at risk

The editors of Italian Wikipedia warned that the site would be in danger.

The statement read: “On July 5, 2018, the Plenary of the European Parliament will vote whether to proceed with a copyright directive proposal, which, if approved, will significantly harm the openness of the internet.

“The directive, instead of updating the copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation of all the citizens to the society of information, threatens online freedom and creates obstacles to accessing the web, imposing new barriers, filters and restrictions.

“If the proposal would be approved in its current form, it could be impossible to share a news article on social networks, or find it through a search engine; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

English-language readers of Wikipedia were not cut off from reading articles; instead, a large banner advert with calls to action is visible at the top of the homepage.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responded to a tweet from the European Commission:

When asked why all the Wikipedia sites did not go dark, Wales explained that the communities in each territory make such decisions separately.

Legislators at the EU tried to create an exception in Article 13 for platforms such as Wikipedia, but the vague wording of the exception and the article in general saw the EFF outline the difficulties Wikipedia would still encounter under the projected rules. “And, since every member state will get to make its own rules for quotation and linking, Wikipedia posts will have to satisfy a patchwork of contradictory rules, some of which are already so severe that they’d ban any items in a ‘Further Reading’ list unless the article directly referenced or criticised them.

Activist Corey Doctorow wrote: “Articles 13 and 11 are poorly thought through, poorly drafted, unworkable and dangerous. The collateral damage they will impose on every realm of public life can’t be overstated.”

Communications director at NordVPN, Ruby Gonzalez, said: “AI filters that all websites will have to implement are very bad at detecting the nuanced difference between plagiarism and the concept of fair use, satire or derivative works.

“If this directive passes, we may lose the ability to share an article on Facebook or find it via Google. In fact, Wikipedia might have to close down.”

Proponents of the changes, including German MEP Axel Voss, explained that the alterations in Article 13 could correct “an extreme imbalance” in the copyright system. The aim with Article 11 is to drive traffic to the homepage of news sites, but critics say the wording is also too vague. </s> Attempting to access any page on the Italian-language Wikipedia directed users to a statement on the EU's Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, a package of proposed reforms that would extend the rights of publishers to claim copyright fees on even short extracts of material reproduced online – for instance, snippets of news articles that appear under search results.

It would also oblige online platforms to scan all content that users try to upload – to YouTube, for example – and automatically block anything that risks infringing copyright.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has joined freedom-of-internet activists in opposing the directive, which is to be put to a vote in the EU Parliament this week.

"If the proposal were approved, it could become impossible to share a newspaper article on social networks or find it via a search engine," Wikipedia Italy's statement said.

"Wikipedia itself could be forced to shut down."





The Italian Wikipedia community has decided to black out its content in protest, the statement said. The blackout applies to all Wikipedia pages in Italian, whether accessed from Italy or abroad.

It's not clear when the protest, which began on Tuesday morning, will end. MEPs are expected to vote on the proposed directive on Thursday, July 5th.

The Wikimedia Foundation is urging EU residents to contact their representative before then and ask them to vote against the reforms, as several MEPs have already pledged to do.

In the meantime, Wikipedia users in Italy can continue to access the encyclopedia in any language other than Italian, though they'll see a banner alerting them to this week's vote on the directive at the top of every page. One reader also told The Local that Italian-language content remains visible via the Wikipedia app.

READ ALSO: Facebook loses copyright appeal against Milan startup



Photo: Loic Venance/AFP </s> Rome, July 3 - The shutdown of the Italian version of Wikipedia in protest at the new European Union copyright directive will probably run until Thursday, a spokesperson for the group that runs the online encyclopedia said Tuesday. "My impression is that the protest will last until Thursday. Any longer would make no sense," Maurizio Codogno, the spokesperson of Wikimedia Italia, told ANSA. Wikipedia Italia has said the directive, which, among other things, proposes giving publishers the ability to request payment for the use of short bits of text, threatens the freedom of the Internet and could force it to close. Labour and Industry Minister and Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S), has said he is against the directive. "We welcomed the support of the government," said Codogno. "We hope that the M5S MEPs are in line with Di Maio (when the directive is voted on in the European Parliament on July 5)". The European Parliament said in a statement that Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias were "automatically excluded from the requirements imposed by the new EU copyright rules". Codogno replied that Wikipedia "did not take action just to save itself but also to defend the free Web" and "preserve the Web as an space that is open to less visible realities". European Newspapers Publishers Association ENPA is in favour of the directive, saying the massive reuse of journalistic material is threatening the free press and the future of journalism. "(Wikipedia's position) goes well beyond copyright and reflects a deeper debate that does not just cover press freedom, but the functioning of our democracies too," said ENPA President Carlo Perrone. "This is not just threatened by the economic sustainability of the press, but also by unacceptable, misleading campaigns by platforms to influence MEPs". </s> Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign. </s> The Italian version of Wikipedia will be shut down for two days, a spokesman confirmed on Tuesday. The move came as a protest of a planned new European Union copyright directive that would implement new rules about licenses for content and, according to critics, places a heavy burden on IT companies to police what users upload.

"Freedom of internet at risk," reads the message now posted on the site.

Deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), Luigi Di Maio, said he wholeheartedly supported the protest.

"We welcomed the support of the government," Maurizio Codogno, a spokesman for Wikipedia Italia, was quoted by Italian news agency ANSA as saying.

"We hope that the M5S members of the European Parliament are in line with Di Maio (when the directive is voted on in the European Parliament on July 5)."

Although the EU parliament has said that Wikipedia was excluded from the law as an encyclopedia, the company said its protest was in solidarity with others who would be affected.

Wikipedia "did not take action just to save itself but also to defend the free Web" and to "preserve the Web as a space that is open to less visible realities," Codogno said.

The online information hub was joined by 70 computer scientists, including creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, 169 academics and 145 human rights, press freedom, and scientific research organizations in a letter of condemnation of the proposed law.

Carlo Perrone, who heads the European Newspapers Publishers Association (ENPA), accused Wikipedia of tunnel vision, ignoring the negative effects of stealing content on journalistic integrity.

"(Wikipedia's position) goes well beyond copyright and reflects a deeper debate that does not just cover press freedom, but the functioning of our democracies too," Perrone said.

"This is not just threatened by the economic sustainability of the press, but also by unacceptable, misleading campaigns by platforms to influence the European Parliament."

According to Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, a spokesmen for the European Commissions office for the digital single market said that the law was necessary to combat the "large amounts of copyrighted content that have been uploaded by users who do not own the rights."

Both Wikipedia Italia and IT experts have argued that the law not only poses a threat to creative freedom, but that it also has not been debated long enough for the less tech-savvy parliamentarians to understand what they're voting on.

Wikipedia will be dark in Italy until Thursday, the day the proposed bill is set to be voted on in Brussels. </s> Seekers of knowledge in Spain, Italy and Poland will have to make do without Wikipedia for a day or two, as the version of the free online encyclopedia in these countries have temporarily shut off access in protest over a controversial copyright law, reports TechCrunch.

The law, which goes to vote on July 5 at 10 a.m. UTC (3 a.m. PT), sports two elements that critics have taken issue with. The first is Article 13, which makes platforms liable for infringements by users, as well as Article 11, which has been dubbed a "link tax" by critics, as it creates a neighbouring right for snippets of journalistic content.

Users in affected countries will see a banner urging them to call their MEP to voice their opposition, as well as a button to visit the saveyourinternet.eu website, according to TechCrunch.

The Wikipedia sites will be unavailable until after the parliament vote. </s> Italian Wikipedia Blacks Out in Protest of EU’s New Copyright Directive, NordVPN comments on EU’s Copyright Directive

EU lawmakers are planning to pass an obscure Copyright Directive that might have a massive impact on how Europeans use the internet. There are many objections against the directive, including Italian Wikipedia’s that blacked out on Tuesday in protest. The online encyclopedia says the Copyright Directive will severely restrict internet freedom.

The Copyright Directive claims to protect intellectual property and includes regulating the illegal streaming and downloading of pirated movies and music.

“The general intention of the directive is well meaning. However, the vague wording of the law means that it may be applied to an extremely broad range of cases,” said Ruby Gonzales, Communications Director at NordVPN. “For instance, the Copyright Directive may extend the rights of publishers to charge for the snippets of news articles that appear under search results. It is also going to force websites to scan all content being uploaded – to YouTube and elsewhere – and automatically block anything that might infringe copyright.”

AI filters that all websites will have to implement are very bad at detecting the nuanced difference between plagiarism and the concept of fair use, satire, or derivative works.

"If this Directive passes, we may lose the ability to share an article on Facebook or find it via Google. In fact, Wikipedia might have to close down,” said Ruby Gonzalez. NordVPN encourages internet users to visit savetheinternet.info to sign their petition and see what the next step could be in defeating this proposal. </s> Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

Update: Polish Wikipedia has also now joined the black out.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

We are community driven and so each community makes their own decision. I think we should get more organized in the future so that we could vote more quickly or earlier! — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018

We had only a very short time from the largely unexpected (by me anyway!) JURI committee vote to have a community discussion. We move slowly sometimes, and woke up too late. https://t.co/fVjIZ4aZPr — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the public in this way. — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.
The Italian Wikipedia blocks all articles in protest of the European Union's copyright law.