Fair Use and the EU

The EU/EC seems to be an ever expanding set of rules and regulations that at to control people's lives. Fundamentally it represents an entity which denies fundamental American values. The EUs stance as exemplified all too often by the German state, an entity which believes that its policies are all too often to dominate and control.

The most recent example is the intent to control free speech. We in the US have a mandated right to free speech. In the EU it is severely curtailed and controlled.

The EFF just recently notes:

This week, EFF joined Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Mozilla, EDRi, Open Rights Group, and sixty other organizations in signing an open letter [PDF] addressed to Members of the European Parliament expressing our concerns about two key proposals for a new European "Digital Single Market" Directive on copyright. These are the "value gap" proposal to require Internet platforms to put in place automatic filters to prevent copyright-infringing content from being uploaded by users (Article 13) and the equally misguided "link tax" proposal that would give news publishers a right to compensation when snippets of the text of news articles are used to link to the original source (Article 11).

Namely if one is analyzing a work which has been posted and one desires to refer to what was said and then in any way comment, that would be a breach of the proposed law. At best one could refer to the source and then let the reader go and try to find it. Frankly that defeats the ability to have free and open discourse and also makes a mockery of the very essence of the Internet.

The filter proposal also makes the Internet facilitators entities who must on their own filter and control. Pravda did that a while back and you know how that worked.

I suspect it is a mind set. We Americans do not understand Europeans and Europeans do not understand Americans. Both all too often look down on the other and I suspect the gap is widening. One could as if the Paris Accord was reflective of that?