[Osmf-talk] Turning off services and/or adding banners to protest against the EU Copyright Directive

Michael Reichert osm-ml at michreichert.de
Sun Mar 17 22:58:42 UTC 2019


Hi,

this topic is not new but it requires our attention again – the EU
Directive.

I raised this topic in September 2018 on this mailing list. FOSSGIS,
local OSMF chapter in Germany and operator of www.openstreetmap.de
blacked out every ~ 7th tile delivered by their tile server back then. [1]

However, protest have proven not as successful as necessary at that time
and the European Parliament voted in favour of the draft back then.
Since then, the draft was discussed in non-public "trilogue"
negotiations between representatives of the parliament, the commission
and the council. Regarding upload filters (article 13), they came to
strictest possible compromise. A final voting by the plenary of the
European Parliament is expected to happen on 26 March. On Saturday, 23
March 2019, there will be demonstrations in more than 30 cities in Europe.

I think that we as OpenStreetMap project have to become active.

Why should we become active as OpenStreetMap project? Staying inactive
and hoping that nothing bad happens and we won't be affected is the
wrong option! Given that OSM stays on the safe side of copyright issues
and does not test out the limits of law, it is likely that we will have
to implement some kind of filtering. There are people in our community
who are in favour of filters but they aim to filter out low quality
edits. There is a huge difference between implementing filters to
protect us from vandalism/fake data and filters designed to protect us
from copyright violations. The first kind of filters don't
have to catch everything but the second kind should be as effective as
possibles and will have too many false positives.

We should both try to reach out to our users and to our mappers to make
them join the protest and a demonstration. In order to reach that goal,
every 7th map tile returned by tile.openstreetmap.de on Thursday, 21
March will be replaced by a black tile with a special message. The
German Wikipedia will be turned off on that day as well.

We will use this black tile:
https://michreichert.de/forum-images/forum.openstreetmap.org/62754/greift-freie-inhalte-an.png
Translation:
> The EU Copyright Directive attacks free content on the internet – and
> us as well!
> Please join the demonstrations on 23 March.
> www.openstreetmap.de/uf

The explanatory page at https://www.openstreetmap.de/uf we used the last
time has been update and translated into English:
https://www.openstreetmap.de/uf/en.html
(source code at https://github.com/fossgis/openstreetmap.de/)

I would like to see as much national OSM websites, OSM-based non-profit
projects and www.openstreetmap.org to join to protest.

I proposed a banner image for the upper left corner of the map on
openstreetmap.org in September.
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/1979

The pull request was not merged because it arrived too late and the
maintainers of the Rails Port wanted the board to agree with it.
Therefore, I ask the board to agree on one of the following measures
(they are otherwise unlikely to be applied by those in power):

- Add a banner (like our advertisement for State of the Map) to the
  upper left corner of www.openstreetmap.org
  Pull request at
  https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/2181
- Add a black horizontal bar (about 70 pixel high on desktop, smaller on
  mobile screens) to openstreetmap.org with nearly the same content but
  as translateable text with a clickable link. Similar to
  https://michreichert.de/osm/openstreetmap.de/karte.html
- Turn off all map tile caches in Europe or let request point to nowhere
  (depens what is easier to implement).
- Make some important services behave

FOSSGIS e.V., the German chapter of OSMF is evaluating to turn off even
more services to reach as much mappers and data users as possible.
Geofabrik will turn off download.geofabrik.de partially on 21 March.

One might argue that the OSMF is located in the UK leaving the EU sooner
or later (but likely before the directive has to be implemented in
national law?). However, the board discussed establishing a subsidiary
in Europe as licensor of OSM data for European users if Brexit requires
it [2].

Best regards

Michael


[1] screenshot at
https://www.golem.de/news/uploadfilter-openstreetmap-schwaerzt-karten-aus-protest-1809-136470.html
[2] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board/Minutes/2019-02-20#Brexit

-- 
Per E-Mail kommuniziere ich bevorzugt GPG-verschlüsselt. (Mailinglisten
ausgenommen)
I prefer GPG encryption of emails. (does not apply on mailing lists)









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