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Article 13 - THE END OF THE MEME?

You are probably wondering 1 of 3 things right now. Firstly, what do you mean this is the end of memes? Secondly, what is article 13? And thirdly, what is a meme? Just in case you are part of the small minority that doesn't know what a meme is,

Originally posted by desingyouruniverse

The Oxford Dictionary has 2 definitions. The one I will be talking about is: “An image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations”. If you want some examples of memes check out this article post by Complex down below:

Link to memes: https://www.complex.com/life/best-memes-2018

 Now over to the main talking point. Article 13 is a proposal put forward in 2016 by the European Commission to change and implement new copyright laws. The reasoning behind this proposal was to update copyright laws to a more appropriate manor to combat the ever-changing environment. This blog post will talk about what is Article 13, its sister Article 11, the organisations and people affected. Also, the way in which it would change the way we use the internet with the EU.

 What are the effects on organisations and creative people?

The overall effects caused by the change to Article 13 and 11 have been described as “taking a step back” as quoted in an article by The Guardian. This article would influence most of the creative economy such as music artists, video creators, reviewers and news sites. One of the proposals is referred to as a “Link Tax” by most news reports and articles. This change would mean that the creator of the content shared on their page would get a percentage of the advertisement revenue. This means the company’s revenue would be eaten into by this new proposal. The other issues that would arise would be that the companies that host the information would be open to lawsuits for copyright infringement. This would mean that sites such as YouTube and Twitch, who’s sites primarily rely on user generated content to generate revenue from adds, would have to drastically change the way they operate.

This is one of the big reasons why there has been such an uproar, since larger companies would have to set up processes to scan all user uploaded content to check for any infringements. This would be costly to this organisation and would drive down traffic to their sites due to the lack of content that would be compliant with the new regulations if they were to be put in place.

 For these platforms to protect themselves people who upload content to the site would have to have agreements with the people who have produced the product to prevent them from being sued. This would be hard to do for large platforms like YouTube and Facebook as they have millions of videos and images posted by users that it would almost be impossible to have an agreement with every content owner.

This has started up large campaigns to prevent these legislation changes such as the one by YouTube called #Saveyourinternet. This campaign highlights the issues of this article and tries to make creators aware of its effects and impacts. They mention a lot of issues that would arise if this act in its current form was passed. In a video titled, “Article 13 – There’s a better way”, Matt from YouTube quotes, “YouTube would be forced to block millions of existing and new videos in the EU”. They continue to mention that the types of videos people could upload would be ‘limited’. Down below are some of the affected videos they name: 

If you would like to watch the full video it is down at the bottom of the blog post.

This is part of Youtube’s campaign to stop Article 13 being put in place. This shows the effects it would have on YouTube as they would be forced to block videos. Could you imagine if this happened to Youtube?

If you want to read more on the issue and to see YouTube’s campaigns here is a link to their site on the issue. Here you will also find videos from creators on the site to see where they stand on the matter.

Link to their campaign: https://www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/

 Above is a demographic from EDiMA on all the sectors and business’s that would be harmed by the proposal of Article 13. You can see that there is a vast amount of companies on here that would affected and ultimately change the way these sites will operate due to the user created content being limited. There

 BBC News quoted that “many believe would be an excessive restriction on free speech”. The reasoning this is said is due to the fact that people would be stopped from making creative and opinionated videos such as movie reviews and parodies. The other impact Article 11 will have is that it is forcing news organisations such as the New York Times and The Guardian to take a percentage out of their ad revenue and give it to the owner of the content.

 To note these organisations aren’t dismissing change to the copyright law. Most people and organisations respect and want to achieve this change. Just with its current form, this would have a huge effect on how people would express themselves.

 Why does the European parliament want change?

The European union wants to “update EU copyright law for the age of Facebook and Google” as quoted by the Guardian. People who support the articles think it’s important to help support and give credit where is due to creatives online. With this overhaul of Article 13 and a similar overhaul to the similar sibling Article 11, the commission aims to make the creators of the work get paid for the work they have put in.

One of the proposals put in place is something referred to as a “link tax”. The idea of this is to take a cut of the revenue generated by the website, video, music or video and give it to the creator of the content through licensing the content for people to use. This includes sites putting snippets or links of their work to drive their own ad revenue up, having to give a proportion of this to the creator. 

One example of this would be that any of the above images that aren’t owned by Lad Bible would generate revenue for the owner of the property. This would mean that sites that use this would have to take more precaution and spend more time to create their own content to use on their sites.

How close is this to happening? Or will it ever happen?

Currently both Article 13 and 11 are still being hotly debated with a possible final vote to take place in March of this year. Compromise have been offered to try and push the bill through with MEP Axel Voss offering to exempt small to medium sized businesses. However, this proposes a new challenge as there would be 2 sets of copyright law. As said in a report by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) this would essential create a “two-tier Internet”. This would cause issues with companies as they may want to stay in medium to small business category so they wouldn’t have to split some of there revenue with the creator if they use their property online.

One of the things that would have to be considered in this is the effect on new online start-ups within the EU if there wasn’t a tired system is that small online businesses within the EU would be at a big disadvantage compared to online business based outside the EU as they will struggle to stand out and differentiate themselves from competitors.

 With the changes in copyright, I believe that everyone wants there to be change and respects the end goal of people getting revenue for when a site or person uses their work online. I just find that in its current state, the change would change the shape of how we use the internet for content in the EU. I feel that more time needs to be taken on changing the current laws for people properly online due to the world being more dependent on a digital life style.

Regarding the “link tax”, I feel that this a great concept as it gives credit to the creator for their work. I just think in practice this would be a very complicated system to put in place due to the sheer amount of content online.

Hopefully this opened you up and showed you a very present issue that could have large effects on how we go about our day to day life in a digital world. I also hope that there will never be a time where creativity is hindered and for there to be an end on Memes.

references  The guardian(June 2018) EU votes for copyright law that would make internet a 'tool for control available at : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/20/eu-votes-for-copyright-law-that-would-make-internet-a-tool-for-control (accessed :22/1/2019)

The Guardian(September 2018) “ In punishing tech giants, the EU has made the internet worse for everyone” 

Does it scare you too? If so, click here to #SaveYourInternet → https://t.co/UzaIKzKpj1 pic.twitter.com/obaNTfKlQD

Available at:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/tech-giants-eu-internet-searches-copyright-law

 (accessed :22/1/2019)

The guardian(Sep018) Battle over EU copyright law heads for showdown https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/09/battle-over-eu-copyright-law-heads-for-showdownl (accessed :22/1/2019)

Oxford Dictionary, meme, available at:  https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meme (accessed :22/1/2019)

Complex (2018) “The best memes of 2018″ Available at : https://www.complex.com/life/best-memes-2018/ (accessed :22/1/2019)

The law dictionary(2018) “What Happens If You Break Copyright Laws?” Available at: https://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-happens-if-you-break-copyright-laws/ (accessed :22/1/2019)

alphr (2017)”Article 13 approved: What are the EU copyright law amendments?” Available at:https://www.alphr.com/politics/1009470/article-13-EU-what-is-it-copyright

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Poster

When thinking of concepts for my info-graphic I decided to follow a social media theme like to my bitsy game and twine story. To build up on the idea I researched the topic to get a better understanding of what sort of information I wanted to include into my info-graphic. Once I found some reputable sources, I started to work on what I wanted to do with my design. I experimented with different shapes, colours, layouts and fonts to see what works well and how well I could present the info. I didn’t have access to photoshop, so I used an online tool called Canva. This is like photoshop but very limited to what I could do with only having access to certain shaped and tools I could use. I feel like these made it harder for me to get the reasonable amount of detail I wanted. However, it made me think differently to how I would usually approach something like this. With the timing of making the info-graphic I felt that I spent more time on trying to get the poster to look right and sourcing images rather than looking for more information that could add to the info-graphics detail.

The feedback I received was that the info-graphic was easy to read to follow and had some important points mentioned in there. However, the lack of statistics did hinder its impact. If I was to do this again I would 100% use Photoshop as is such a powerful editing tool to make my info-graphic look nicer and have a more complex and detailed design. I would put a higher enthesis on including my statistics and graphs to back up the information I have on the graph.

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poster reference

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=t5RpAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=the+history+of+social+media&ots=pm0wSPyrGI&sig=qeEpekmXOgKQqGUCEyImoG8VIHw#v=onepage&q=the%20history%20of%20social%20media&f=false

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-media

https://phrasee.co/the-history-of-social-media-a-timeline/

://interestingengineering.com/a-chronological-history-of-social-media

https://ourworldindata.org/internet

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This is my bitsy game

When trying to think of an idea for my game I looked at other bitsy game examples to see how they played out and what features they used one game to make the game interesting. One game was a survival type game where the character is stranded and must find different materials to survive. When trying to find a concept for my game I looked back at the previous seminars we had to find an idea for the character and purpose of the game. After doing this I decided to go with an internet them with the character being in the computer. I used the items to display facts, answers and questions in the game. I used the rooms as different browsers and screens that you would typically find when using the computer. For example, I would use the home page to display different options such as choosing whether to go through to the mail of internet explorer. Other icons on the screen that didn’t lead to the room displayed facts about the program. This added an educational factor to game as the game is designed to show the dangers whist browsing the web.

When I had finished the game, I gave the game to my brother the game to review. He found that the game was easy to follow because the flashing icons were a good indictor to follow where to go on the page. This was also aided with the detailed instructions in the very first room which described the purpose of different icons. For example, the fact flag which gave out facts on the page. For an area of improvments my brother noted that the game looked a little bland with largely blank tiles and that there could be more levels to elevate the quality of the game.

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appendices 2, gifs

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appendices 1, Dice roll

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This is my twine interactive story that i have made for Digital citizenship.

With the overview of the story  i came up with a couple ideas i could such as A story on processing fake news and the consequences of these sorts or articles, the other idea being the story of a child using his mums bank card and using it on a untrustworthy site. With this idea, it became more developed as i started to get to grips with how twine works. This allowed me to add a dice roller to the story which allowed the program to decide the out come instead of the user (appendices 1). This was handy as it added an element of randomness to the story, so that the outcome would be different if reader went through the story again. 

Through the production process I found that it became a lot easier to put together the story in a diverse and complex manor, with the use of the dice roll command (appendices 1). Also to make the story more interesting i decided to opt for the use of GIFs instead of images (appendices 2)

Feedback on my story was pretty good as people found the story easy to follow and understand the main purpose of the story. The one criticism I had was that the story could have included more detail.