The Days of Political and other kinds of Blogging Might be Over Soon: The EU's Article 13 is coming...

Pretty soon, the EU will once again force their overprotective internet rules onto everyone in the US. 

They want to end the internets free exchange of ideas.

Watch out for Article 11 and 13 (especially 13).

Nope, I'm not a big fan of EU meddling; they stopped Microsoft from including their Media Player. Then ... investigated the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows operating systems, saying 'Microsoft's tying of IE to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.'" Wow, were they wrong or what?

Along with repealing Net Neutrality, the EU came up with the final few nails in the coffin: 

The Last Days of the Internet: Like the whining recording companies who had a fit over stolen music via P2P networks (their fault, they didn't like online digital music), we now have news media and others companies whining about a few of their paragraphs, sentences/links, being "stolen" by the likes of...Democurmudgeon, Google, and right-wing news shapeshifters.

Don't let anybody try to soft-peddle this. To comply, companies will play it overly safe banning everything, like they did recently after passing sex trafficking laws that ended many adult dating sites and apps. Here's a soon to be considered "stolen" excerpt and link:  

New digital copyright laws pushed forward by the European Parliament this week would make platforms like Google, Facebook and YouTube share more of their profits with creators, news organizations, musicians and artists. The laws would make them take more aggressive steps to filter copyrighted material. But critics, including YouTubers, say the law is so broad that it could lead to widespread censorship and even kill off internet memes. Article 13 requires certain platforms like YouTube and Facebook stop users sharing unlicensed copyrighted material.

Article 13, they say, is even worse. The legislation requires that platforms proactively work with rightsholders to stop users uploading copyrighted content. The only way to do so would be to scan all data being uploaded to sites like YouTube and Facebook ... and could be used as a mechanism for widespread censorship. This is why figures like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee came out so strongly against the directive.

See if you spot anything here that won't be used as a sledgehammer to censor:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and 56 other rights organisations sent an open letter to European lawmakers in October outlining their concerns about Article 13. "Article 13 appears to provoke such legal uncertainty that online services will have no other option than to monitor, filter and block EU citizens' communications if they are to have any chance of staying in business," it read.

Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Placido Domingo and David Guetta ... were among 1,300 musicians who urged politicians to enact the law ... Critics said the laws would stifle creativity - with Creative Commons chief Ryan Merkley observing that The Beatles would have been prevented from performing cover versions under the proposed rules.

For you and me, it could have resulted in text, music and videos posted to blogs, social networks and comment sections being yanked from the net at point of upload - somewhat like YouTube's controversial Content ID system on steroids.

Two Points: Many of my video clips have copyrighted material and Youtube simply allows rights holders to profit from advertising on those videos.

My second point is this; without exact quotes and pictures from articles and research, what I write will become nothing more than an untrustworthy opinion piece of writing offering nothing as proof.