EU Censorship News

With the passage of last year's Copyright Directive, the EU demanded that member states pass laws that reduce copyright infringement by internet users while also requiring that they safeguard the fundamental rights of users (such as the right to free expression) and also the limitations to copyright . These safeguards must include protections for the new EU-wide exemption for commentary and criticism. Meanwhile states are also required to uphold the GDPR, which safeguards users against mass, indiscriminate surveillance, while somehow monitoring everything every user posts to decide whether it infringes copyright .

Serving these goals means that when EU member states turn the Directive into their national laws (the "transposition" process), their governments will have to decide to give more weight to some parts of the Directive, and that courts would have to figure out whether the resulting laws passed constitutional muster while satisfying the requirement of EU members to follow its rules.

The initial forays into transposition were catastrophic. First came France's disastrous proposal , which "balanced" copyright enforcement with Europeans' fundamental rights to fairness, free expression, and privacy by simply ignoring those public rights.

Now, the Dutch Parliament has landed in the same untenable legislative cul-de-sac as their French counterparts, proposing a Made-in-Holland version of the Copyright Directive that omits:

• Legally sufficient protections for users unjustly censored due to false accusations of copyright infringement;

• Legally sufficient protection for users whose work makes use of the mandatory, statutory exemptions for parody and criticism;

• A ban on "general monitoring"-- that is, continuous, mass surveillance;

• Legally sufficient protection for "legitimate uses" of copyright works.

These are not optional elements of the Copyright Directive. These protections were enshrined in the Directive as part of the bargain meant to balance the fundamental rights of Europeans against the commercial interests of entertainment corporations. The Dutch Parliament's willingness to pay mere lip-service to these human rights-preserving measures as legislative inconveniences is a grim harbinger of other EU nations' pending lawmaking, and an indictment of the Dutch Parliament's commitment to human rights.

EFF was pleased to lead a coalition of libraries, human rights NGOs, and users' rights organizations in an open letter to the EU Commission asking them to monitor national implementations that respect human rights.

In April, we followed this letter with a note to the EC's Copyright Stakeholder Dialogue Team , setting out the impossibility of squaring the Copyright Directive with the GDPR's rules protecting Europeans from "general monitoring," and calling on them to direct member-states to create test suites that can evaluate whether companies' responses to their laws live up to their human rights obligations.

Today, we renew these and other demands, and we ask that Dutch Parliamentarians do their job in transposing the Copyright Directive , with the understanding that the provisions that protect Europeans' rights are not mere ornaments, and any law that fails to uphold those provisions is on a collision course with years of painful, costly litigation.

The Italian Senate is set to take up new legislation to block all online porn sites in the country, requiring internet users to specifically request that the porn blocks be removed The proposed new censorship law was introduced by Senator Simone Pillon, a member of Italy's nationalist Northern League party, led by former Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

The law would require all makers of internet-connected devices, including computers, cell phones, and smart TVs, to install software that would automatically block all porn sites. Users would have to file a specific request to remove the software in order to view porn online, under the proposed law.

It is not yet clear whether this internet censorship measure has a realistic chance of becoming law.

Update: Thwarted

26th June 2020. See article from xbiz.com

The lower house of the Italian parliament has approved an agenda item by the ruling PD's Enza Bruno Bossio to prevent the passage of a controversial amendment that would have required all adult sites to be automatically blocked by device manufacturers, and at the ISP level, with the proposal that subscribers would be required to individually request the block to be lifted.

The amendment had been inserted, as XBIZ reported earlier this week, at the legislative committee stage by Simone Pillon, a representative from the Lega party, and it was due to come to a vote by Monday.

La Repubblica opined that the matter is not yet settled, though Bossio's agenda item is an important roadblock to the Lega's attempt to censor all adult content on the Italian internet.

In 2015, a a human rights organization that monitors web-censorship and pirate site blockades in Russia was itself ordered to be blocked by a local court for offering advice on how to use tools including Tor and VPNs.

The European Court of Human Rights has now ruled that the order to disable access to that advice was illegal and a violation of the freedom to receive and impart information.

ECHR Russsia-based project RosComSvoboda advocates human rights and freedoms on the Internet. Part of that work involves monitoring and publishing data on website blockades and providing assistance to Internet users and site operators who are wrongfully subjected to restrictions.

In 2015, it found itself in a battle of its own when a local court ordered its advice portal to be blocked by local ISPs. RosComSvoboda's crime was to provide information on tools that can circumvent censorship. While it didn't offer any for direct download, the resource offered advice on VPNs , proxies, TOR, The Pirate Bay's Pirate Browser, I2P and Opera's turbo mode.

According to the ruling by the Anapa Town Court, the resource allowed people to access content banned in Russia so it too became prohibited content. Subsequently, telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor contacted RosComSvoboda with an order to remove its anti-censorship tools information page or face being completely blocked.

The site's operator complied and filed an appeal against the decision, arguing that providing information about such tools isn't illegal under Russian law. The Krasnodar Regional Court rejected the appeal without addressing this defense so in 2016, RosComSvoboda's operator, German national Gregory Engels, took his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

This week the ECHR handed down its decision, siding with Engels' assertion that the order for him to remove the content from his site was in breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers, the Article reads.

The ECHR found that the action against Engels breached Article 10. It also declared a breach of Article 13 due to a failure by the Russian court to involve him in the blocking action or consider the merits of his arguments on appeal. The Russian state was ordered to pay 10,000 euros in damages to Engels plus interest.

French internet censorship law suuposedly targeted at hate speech on online platforms has been widely deemed as unconstitutional by France's Constitutional Council, the top authority in charge of ruling whether a new law complies with the constitution. It won't come into effect as expected in the coming weeks.

The original law said that online platforms should remove within 24 hours illicit content that has been flagged. Otherwise, companies will have to pay hefty fines every time they infringe the law. For social media companies, it could have potentially cost them many millions of dollars per year.

And of course illicit content means anything that would be considered threating or insulting, such as death threats, discrimination, Holocaust denial etc.

But the Constitutional Council says that such a technical list makes it difficult to rule what is illicit content and what is not. Due to the short window of time, online platforms can't check with a court whether a tweet, a post, a photo or a blog post is deemed as illicit or not. When you combine that with potential fines, the Constitutional Council fears that online platforms will censor content a bit too quickly.

The government said it would respond to the criticisism and change the law accordingly.

The GDPR is a reprehensible and bureaucratic law that is impossible to fully comply with, and dictates an onerous process of risk assessments that are enforced by inspection and audits. It is not the sort of thing that you would wish on your grandmother. So the law makers built in an important exclusion such that the law does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the exercise of a purely personal or household activity.

But now a Dutch court has weighed in and decided that this important exclusion does not applying to posting family pictures on the likes of Twitter.

The court got involved in a family dispute between a grandmother who wanted to post pictures of her grand children on social against the wishes of the mother.

The court decided that the posting of pictures for public consumption on social media went beyond 'purely personal or household activity'. The details weren't fully worked out, but the court judgement suggested that they may have taken a different view had the pictures been posted to a more restricted audience, say to Facebook friends only. But saying that such nuance doesn't apply to Twitter where posts are by default public.

The outcome of the case was that the grandmother was therefore in the wrong and has been ordered to remove the pictures from her social media accounts.

But the horrible outcome of this court judgement is that anyone posting pictures of private individuals to Twitter must now register as a data controller, so requiring submission to the full bureaucratic nightmare that is the GDPR.

Polish public radio has censored an anti-government song that topped the charts and was then removed from the station's website.

Kazik's Your Pain is Better than Mine is widely seen as criticising the head of Poland's ruling nationalist party.

The station director has claimed the chart was fixed, but MPs from the ruling party as well as the opposition have condemned the song's removal. ?

The song's theme is grieving and the lockdown of the nation's cemeteries during the coronavirus outbreak. Kazik Staszewski's song doesn't mention Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of Law and Justice, by name, but his target is pretty clear.

When cemeteries were closed, Kaczynski still visited the Warsaw grave of his mother and the graves of victims of a Russian air disaster in Smolensk in which his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, was killed. By Friday, Kazik's song had topped Poland's renowned chart on Radio Three, highlighting a sense of one law for ordinary Poles and another for the ruling party's leader.

Shortly after the chart show was broadcast, internet links and news about the veteran singer's hit were disabled on the website of Radio Three, known as Trojka.The chart is voted on by Trojka listeners and station boss Tomasz Kowalczewski insisted it had been manipulated: We already know for sure that this song did not win. It was manually moved to number one. In other words, it was fixed for sure, he claimed.

France has adopted a new censorship law forcing internet companies to take down content that that the government doesn't like at breakneck speed.

After months of debate, the lower house of Parliament adopted the legislation, which will require platforms such as Google, Twitter and Facebook to remove flagged hateful content within 24 hours and flagged terrorist propaganda within one hour. Failure to do so could result in fines of up to 1.25 million euro.

The new rules apply to all websites, whether large or small. But there are concerns that only internet giants such as Facebook and Google actually have the resources to remove content as quickly as required.

Digital rights group La Quadrature du Net said the requirement to take down content that the police considered terrorism in just one hour was impractical.

The worrying outcome maybe that small companies are forced to present their content via larger US companies that can offer the capability that content will be censored automatically on receiving a complaint. This will of course result in the likes of Google taking even more control of the internet.

The law, which echoes similar rules already in place in Germany, piles more pressure on Silicon Valley firms to police millions of daily posts in Europe's two most populous countries.

The censorship law targets search engines as well as social media companies, has been the source of plenty of controversy. Online digital rights groups, tech companies, opposition parties have all criticized the initiative, and the Senate has led an effort to water it down by deleting the systematic deadline for removing content.

Opponents argued in particular that the law would lead to lawful content being taken down and would hand too much power to the companies charged with making decisions on what content is considered obviously unlawful.

The European Commission has also voiced criticism , writing to the French government in November to ask for the legislation to be postponed. The EU executive argued that Paris should wait for its own planned rules on platforms, the Digital Services Act, to pass to set a common EU-wide standard on policing illegal content online.

An EU report about Chinese and Russian disinformation on coronavirus was watered down after pressure from Beijing.

Chinese diplomats exerted pressure on the EU to change the wording of the report. The report -- on narratives and disinformation around the coronavirus pandemic -- was finally published with heavily toned-down language on China.

Most strikingly, references to China running a global disinformation campaign and Chinese criticism of France's reaction to the pandemic were erased.