[Osmf-talk] Taking a stand against EU directive "Copyright in the Digital Single Market" (upload filters etc.)

[Rihards]

On 2018.09.07. 00:12, Kathleen Lu wrote:
> Hi all,
> For all EU citizens on the list, the call for action from orgs working
> hard on this is to *please make phone calls to your MEPs this week.*
> https://saveyourinternet.eu/ will help you make calls, or you can look
> up their phone numbers here: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/map.html
> Orgs objecting to this are getting pushback from lawmakers dismissing
> emails and tweets as "bots", so phone calls from constituents are the
> best method. The "exceptions" that are currently written do not reflect

I can confirm this after getting through to one MEP office on the phone.
They get so much email against this directive they just delete it all.

> reality, and as Michael mentioned, are in many circumstances limited to
> specific activities by nonprofits, and there is no exception for mapping
> or data platforms.
> In solidarity,
> Kathleen
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 6, 2018 at 1:49 PM Michael Reichert <osm-ml at michreichert.de
> <mailto:osm-ml at michreichert.de>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     on 12 September, the plenary of the European Parliament will vote on the
>     new EU directive "Copyright in the Digital Single Market". The directive
>     will introduce upload filters requiring internet platforms to scan
>     contributions of their users for potential copyright violations
>     automatically. The original proposal has passed the Committee on Legal
>     Affairs on 20 June and failed in the plenary vote a few days later. If
>     the plenary accepts the slightly modified proposal on 12 September, the
>     trialogue negotiations between the European Parliament, the European
>     Commission and the Council of the European Union will start. See also
>     https://saveyourinternet.eu/ for more information in your language.
> 
>     The press reported that there is some kind of exception for Wikipedia,
>     open source software development platforms and online marketplaces.
>     However, OpenStreetMap data is not only used by the non-profit
>     OpenStreetMap Foundation but also by various other data consumers, most
>     of them for-profit businesses.
> 
>     FOSSGIS e.V., the OSMF local chapter in Germany, takes a stand
>     against it by responding to every tenth tile requests to
>     tile.openstreetmap.de <http://tile.openstreetmap.de> with a special
>     black error tile.
> 
>     https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Savetheinternet.svg
> 
>     See it in action on any page using our tile server, e.g.
>     https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html
> 
>     The tiles are distributed randomly over the map.
> 
> 
>     *Why does this affect the OSMF?*
>     The UK will leave the European Union but it is likely that many EU rules
>     will nonetheless apply in the UK as well, depending on how the
>     negotiations continue.
> 
> 
>     *What should the OSMF do?*
>     I myself think that the OSMF should show at least a banner on
>     openstreetmap.org <http://openstreetmap.org> instead of the usual
>     conference banners – ideally
>     ignoring cookie settings and showing it to every visitor for about three
>     days.
> 
> 
>     *What more could the OSMF do?*
>     The OSMF could go even further and answer one of ten requests to its
>     European (or all) tile caches with a black or grey error tile showing a
>     short URL of a page containing more information about the bad side of
>     upload filters.
> 
> 
>     *What could other local chapters and operators of free to use tile
>     servers in Europe do?*
>     They could join the initiative of FOSSGIS and also show error tiles.
> 
>     Our error tile can be found at:
>     https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Savetheinternet.png
>     https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Savetheinternet.svg
> 
>     Our special page about the black tiles is
>     https://www.openstreetmap.de/uf/ (only in German but an automatic
>     translation will help to understand the structure)
> 
> 
>     *The downside*
>     I don't want to keep the downside secret as it has already been
>     discussed on the German OSM forum. Showing black tiles on third-party
>     websites can be perceived by their operators as an intervention into
>     their website. They will not like it when the always neutral, reliable
>     and free of charge tile provider inserts political statements into their
>     site. However, they should keep in mind that they use a free service and
>     that we have to defend our project and our idea of a free and open
>     collaborative map to be able to provide this service in future. Given
>     that there are multiple tile providers and the tile server of FOSSGIS
>     e.V. uses an open source map style, the board of FOSSGIS e.V. decided to
>     show the black tiles even if it could drive away some users.
> 
>     On the other hand, any banner can be hidden by adblockers, a problem we
>     already face with our promotional banners for conferences and donation
>     drives on openstreetmap.org <http://openstreetmap.org>. If a tile
>     server responds with an
>     "advertisement", the ad blocker has no chance to replace it with a real
>     map. It can only hide it and leave a grey/rose gap.
> 
> 
>     *The technical part*
>     The German tile server uses Apache and mod_tile without an additional
>     cache server like Squid or Varnish to deliver its tiles. It is possible
>     to answer randomly every n-th request with this black tile. This means,
>     reloading the a page might result in different tiles being replaced by
>     the error tile.
> 
>     If you use mod_tile, add following to your VirtualHost configuration
>     before any mod_tile related statements:
> 
> 
>         RewriteEngine on
>         RewriteMap filtered "rnd:/etc/apache2/filtered.txt"
>         RewriteCond "${filtered:0}" "1"
>         RewriteRule "^/(.*)(\d).png" "/saveyourinternet.png" [PT]
> 
>     /etc/apache2/filtered.txt has following content:
> 
>     0 0|0|0|0|0|0|0|1
> 
>     The space as second character is correct. The number of zeros determines
>     the probability to receive a normal tile.
> 
>     saveyourinternet.png has to be located in the DocumentRoot of the
>     virtual host.
> 
>     Best regards
> 
>     Michael (Nakaner)
>     FOSSGIS e.V. – OpenStreetMap Deutschland-- 
 Rihards