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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 17 March 2019, Michael Reichert wrote:
> [...]
>
> - 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

I would very much support these.  The idea of concentrating the effort 
on a single day seems a very good one to avoid unnecessarily annoying 
people but concentrate on raising awareness.

> - Turn off all map tile caches in Europe or let request point to
> nowhere (depens what is easier to implement).

Not quite sure about this one.  The idea of propagating the protest to 
users of osm.org tiles seems fine (it is just for a day) but just 
disabling the service without providing information why seems 
suboptimal.  Delivering tiles with a message would seem the better 
solution if feasible (and would promise some nice screenshots of EU 
institutions protesting the directive...)

On a general note - this protest now is focused on article 13 of the 
directive draft.  There is relatively broad opposition against this 
also from journalists, authors and artists so this is not a matter of 
content users vs. content creators.  See

https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/

Parts of the rest of the directive however are seen more positively by 
quite a lot of people - though many articles fall short of what would 
be good.  And because of that there are some who lobby for the whole 
thing because they want these components and they simply don't care 
about article 13 or don't understand what it means.  This is important 
to keep in mind when you read up on the subject.  See also:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/02/07/problems-remain-with-the-eus-copyright-reform/

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/