Reddit has posted a punchy, impassioned warning about the likelihood that it will no longer be able to function if the EU’s plan to mandate copyright filters and limit linking to news without permission goes through.
In its note, Reddit links the fight over the new Copyright Directive to other policy fights it has joined in, like the fights for Net Neutrality and against SOPA.
Visitors to Reddit in the EU are being shown a warning box explaining the issue and asking them to contact their MEPs.
It’s fantastic to see Reddit in the fight, especially after Youtube’s CEO proposed that this could all be fixed if everyone had to use ContentID, or something like it.
Defending equal access to the free and open internet is core to Reddit’s ideals, and something that redditors have told us time and again they hold dear too, from the SOPA/PIPA battle to the fight for Net Neutrality. This is why even though we are an American company with a user base primarily in the United States, we’ve nevertheless spent a lot of time this year warning about how an overbroad EU Copyright Directive could restrict Europeans’ equal access to the open Internet—and to Reddit.Despite these warnings, it seems that EU lawmakers still don’t fully appreciate the law’s potential impact, especially on small and medium-sized companies like Reddit. So we’re stepping things up to draw attention to the problem. Users in the EU will notice that when they access Reddit via desktop, they are greeted by a modal informing them about the Copyright Directive and referring them to detailed resources on proposed fixes.
The EU Copyright Directive [Upvoted/Reddit]