I hate having to do Announcements that regularly and about Stuff that doesn’t originate from me, but here we go with important Politics again:
Apparently the Conservatives and the Social Democrats want to reschedule the final Vote for the Copyright Directive to be 2 weeks earlier, which in fact also means that all the Protests that were supposed to happen before the Vote, are now absolutely meaningless and silenced.
And you have to actually get Permission to do a Protest ahead of time, so it is near impossible to actually get them re-permitted or even organized, within the ONE WEEK that they would have left, should this reschedule go through!
This is highly Antidemocratic, and must be stopped before it can happen!
I also found out about Article 12, which enables Publishers to steal even more rights from their Artists without any way to avoid it. Nobody has put attention to it so far, because Article 11 and 13 are even worse, but this is equally terrible for Artists in Europe, who just had their rights strengthened by Courts, because of Publishers exploiting them!
And ofcourse popular Newspapers barely ever mention the whole Copyright Directive, or they even spread lies about the Law itself, like Axel Springer does here in Germany.
If Article 11 or 13 somehow make it through, I will be forced to Geo-Block the entirety of Europe from the Forums, and I am German, if I didnt have a VPN in Canada I would Block myself by doing that. Should the Geo-Blocking happen, I will just put a Page explaining how to use a free Proxy or VPN to be able to access Sites while being inside of Europe, including the Forums ofcourse, because if I dont know you’re from Europe then I am not legally forced to block you.
Another short-term Loophole could be that “newer than 3 years”-Exception-Clause, since I dont make money and dont have many Users, I could be Geo-Blocking free for until July 2021. But I dont know how long Patreon will last with this.
I would rather have 2 more weeks of anxious waiting until the Vote at the end of March, than having this whole thing rushed to the point of maybe getting through by next week…