Italian Wikipedia was blacked out on Tuesday in protest at a new EU copyright directive that the online encyclopedia says will restrict internet freedom.
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.
Translated letter from Italian Wikipedia Dear reader,
On 5 July 2018, the European Parliament in plenary will decide whether to speed up the approval of the Copyright Directive. This directive, if promulgated, will significantly restrict the freedom of the Internet.
Instead of updating copyright laws in Europe to promote everyone's participation in the information society, it threatens online freedom and creates obstacles to network access by imposing new barriers, filters and restrictions. If the proposal were approved, it may be impossible to share a newspaper article on social networks or find it on a search engine. Wikipedia itself would risk shutting down.
The proposal has already met the firm disapproval of more than 70 computer scientists, including the creator of the Web Tim Berners-Lee (here), 169 academics (here), 145 organisations working in the fields of human rights, freedom of the press, scientific research and Computer industry (here) and the Wikimedia Foundation (here).
For these reasons, the Italian community of Wikipedia has decided to obscure all the pages of the encyclopedia. We want to be able to continue to offer a free, open, collaborative and verifiable content encyclopedia. We therefore call on all Members of the European Parliament to reject the current text of the directive and to reopen the debate by examining the many proposals of the Wikimedia associations, starting with the abolition of articles. 11 and 13, and the extension of the freedom of view to the whole EU and the protection of the public domain. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SaveYourInternet
The Italian Wikipedia community
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Apparently Google is opposing this, which is something to monitor. Generally the UK, or at times Canada or Europe at large, has served as the elites' testing ground for the more long-range related goals for the slightly more independent-thinking Americans on their various "totolitarian tip toe" movements. As usual, I expect the elite-financed "fake left" to stand down on this issue. Rather than relying on the UN, the globalists perhaps believe that it's better to hold their UN construct as a decoy while they start eating away from a more local angle. .
************************* Now we just
have to play the waiting game. The nice fox is now in charge of the
chicken house, and we are the chickens. Literally almost anything can
happen in time as a result of handing it over to the UN. I'm still not
clear as to actually how much power and influence "they" will have. The
UN doesn't recognize any 1st Amendment rights. We've already seen some
very inconsistent censorship, for example on twitter, where someone may be
muted for something small and inconsequential while another person is
simply allowed to call for violence against individuals. Americans are
not aware that the Canadian government has, for twenty years, attempted
to censor websites through threats to American-based internet service
providers. Now that same government, and many much worse, will have a
say on what will happen with free speech. Dozens of very powerful
special interests around the world are just salivating at the
possibilities.
In the same manner that there are "labor unions" which seek to unite and ignite an active consensus among workers; there are "unions of billionaires" who use this same basic formula. I say "billionaires" when in fact, three separate international banking cartels each have a net worth in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Right from the get-go, each country is to have both a central bank.. and a foreign relations group made up of major figures from the main choke points of society: banking, corporations, media, education, advertising, intelligence, military, etc. These two entities are to be linked into the global network in the same manner as perhaps an international labor union might.
Since they're internationalists, these are the people who have made words like "nationalism, protectionism, and isolationism" into dirty words. Once in awhile they wave a flag when they want something done in a certain area, but their focus is international. Their power is so immense that within a few days of Brexit, we now have contrived mainstream new stories about massive "vote regrets" and millennials being angry at baby boomers (UK).. using manipulated "polls" as they so often do. The simple fact is that a monkey wrench was thrown into the machine of the internationalist dream of these financial and corporate overlords. The UK and Germany was the EU. Some years ago when countries were signing up with the European Union, on a couple of occasions the organized facilitators were openly stating that they would just keep putting it to a vote (of politicians) until they got the result that they wanted. Now they want to do the opposite! In their minds.. it's heads they win, tails we lose... every time. These are the people who have for many years, promoted the very worst elements of monopoly Capitalism and social Marxism... as we can so painfully see today. The hard underlying truth is that someone like Obama gets elected, and the very first thing he does is bring in a team of financial advisors from Goldman Sachs.to work like termites behind the scenes for the next eight years. That's the way it works in every country that these transnationalists are allowed to inhabit.
Brexit was one of the most important news events of our lifetime, because these people must operate in a way that loosely follows some type of Democracy. Luckily the populace got a chance to vote, and the scoundrels were thrown out. This should only be the start. There's no way to even begin to describe the damage that these unelected Globalist bureaucrats have done to our world. This whole dynamic reminds me of the movie 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Next' when McMurphy finally realized that after all the complaints.. all they really had to do was walk out the door and it would all be over.. just like any abusive relationship.
However, if there was really any justice, there would be Nuremberg-type trials set up. Bankers who have bled economies dry and funded both sides of wars as has happened so often, and corporations who have organized and armed rebels for coups in third-world countries in order to get at the resources, should be punished. If America is so left-leaning, then why can't we break the unions of these super wealthy transnationals? The British have shown up the Americans and Germans, and punched out their own metaphoric class bully. The bullies can't solve the problem, because they are the problem! .
