Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

Update: Polish Wikipedia has also now joined the black out.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

We are community driven and so each community makes their own decision. I think we should get more organized in the future so that we could vote more quickly or earlier! — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018

We had only a very short time from the largely unexpected (by me anyway!) JURI committee vote to have a community discussion. We move slowly sometimes, and woke up too late. https://t.co/fVjIZ4aZPr — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the public in this way. — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.</s>Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.</s>Estonia's Wikipedia authors and editors are protesting against the European Parliament's vote on the next steps towards a changed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market scheduled for tomorrow Thursday. They have shut down the encyclopaedia, and are warning of serious consequences for the freedom of the Internet should the measure be approved.

The virtual protest of Estonia's Wikipedia authors and editors started in the early morning of 4 July, and will last until the result of the vote is announced tomorrow July 5.

"The planned changes would serve most of all the interests of large corporations, and would leave the promise unfulfilled to harmonise intellectual property legislation with the principles of the distribution of information in the digital age," they wrote.

The EU's planned amendments to the new directive, initially welcomed on all sides, have been subject to plenty of amendments in committee that will vastly increase the pressure on all those organisations and websites that depend on the free sharing of certain information, Wikipedia among them.

For instance, linking directly to media sources such as newspaper articles and the like would in many cases become impossible. Google and other search engine providers would in future have to disregard websites and also Wikipedia articles that illegally source such content.

"Instead of a strong defence of the freedom of panorama and public property, we are getting a censorship machine and linking fees. We are expressing our protest in solidarity with the Wikipedia movement, all the issues of Wikipedia that are participating in this blockade, and with all Internet users around the world," chairwoman of Wikipedia Estonia, Eva Lepik wrote.

The blockade, now in effect across various countries, started in Italy on 3 July. Spain, Latvia and Estonia followed early on July 4.

Along with hundreds of organisations, opinion leaders, journalists, and politicians, Wikipedia Estonia as well as Internet Society Estonia are protesting against the measure. Tomorrow 5 July, the European Parliament will vote on the next steps towards the directive, which are to start negotiations with member states about the eventual scope and wording of the changes.</s>Seekers of knowledge in Spain, Italy and Poland will have to make do without Wikipedia for a day or two, as the version of the free online encyclopedia in these countries have temporarily shut off access in protest over a controversial copyright law, reports TechCrunch.

The law, which goes to vote on July 5 at 10 a.m. UTC (3 a.m. PT), sports two elements that critics have taken issue with. The first is Article 13, which makes platforms liable for infringements by users, as well as Article 11, which has been dubbed a "link tax" by critics, as it creates a neighbouring right for snippets of journalistic content.

Users in affected countries will see a banner urging them to call their MEP to voice their opposition, as well as a button to visit the saveyourinternet.eu website, according to TechCrunch.

The Wikipedia sites will be unavailable until after the parliament vote.</s>Wikipedia went down in at least three countries Wednesday in a protest at an upcoming European Parliament vote on a highly disputed law that could make online platforms legally liable for copyrighted material put on the web by users.

In Spain, Italy and Poland, an explanatory protest statement about the upcoming vote came up when the online encyclopedia was consulted.

“The directive would threaten online freedom and would impose new filters, barriers and restrictions to access the web,” Wikipedia Spain said in its statement.

“If the proposal was approved in its actual version, actions like sharing news on social networks or accessing news via a search engine would be more complicated on the Internet.”

It added that Wikipedia would be “at risk” and asked users to phone their MEPs.

The overhaul of European copyright law is divided into several sections, one of which is the reform criticised by Wikipedia and others who have warned it will lead to blanket censorship by tech giants.

Another reform would force online platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content, which news agencies including AFP have hailed as a “major step”.

The European Commission has replied saying that “Wikipedia and other online encyclopaedias would not fall within the scope of the Commission’s Copyright proposal.”

But Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales and Greens MEP Julia Reda, a leading campaigner on the issue, insist that it will.

Thursday’s parliament vote is not final, but only sets out the negotiating position of MEPs.

There then follow negotiations with member states for a final position, during which the full extent of the law and whether it does apply to Wikipedia will be worked out.

Austria, which has just assumed the EU’s six-month rotating presidency, has said this will be difficult, so there will have to be some sort of compromise.
The Polish, Spanish, Estonian and Latvian Wikipedias shut down in protest of the European Union's proposed copyright reform, blocking access for all users. This follows identical actions taken by Italian Wikipedia the previous day.