This week is a very special week for the internet and sees the passing of the deeply contentious Article 13 requiring EU countries to implement controls on referencing creator content.
It is important to stress that Brighton Roleplayers are a disturbingly friendly bunch of like minded people out for a good gaming time and whilst politics does come up sarcastically in our drunken discussions from time to time we are not in any way exclusionary to individuals of any political persuasion or either side of the Brexit debate provided no one is mobbed, tortured or burnt at any stakes.
More importantly this tome itself is not a platform for any political preaching, bar Clerics and Paladins, so to be as unbiased as possible its important to state that many people see the EU as necessarily clamping down on theft from struggling creators - something that particularly bites the RPG industry as it's a very small market. How is the next D&D or Cthullu ever going to happen if the hard work of authors is simply ripped off.
Equally for those against copyright laws there is the deep concern that many creators - particularly news outlets, critics and free thought sites, will now be crushed as they will not be able to reference any third party content - the only messages that will go out will be those paid for by giant multinationals and pro government agencies - censorship by any other name and one of the pillars of democracy that has now fallen.
Why then is this relevant to a bunch of Roleplayers ? Well I am afraid that the law also covers this blog and whilst we will have to see how the UK will implement controls, the Blog contains references and images to many thousands of sites on many platforms over the last decade. Whilst this will be an impossible situation to re-engineer it also affects my new content as I am now unsure if I can speak of or link to anything relating to anything that someone else has created.
It would be deeply saddening to suggest this is my last post but I will just have to take some time to determine if I am allowed to continue creating as I have done so in the past as I am now frightened to do so.
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Our betters are frightened. They take memetic warfare as a serious threat. They want to shut us up. Whether it’s the constant attacks on Trump and Boksonaro or the undignified begging at the foot of Juncker by May or the wholesale importation of migrant populations all across Europe, the elites will do anything to hold on to power.
ReplyDeleteThese are frightening times.
Please continue to write and link and meme. If a few do it, they will be destroyed. But if ten million do it, we all survive.
If you are no longer going to post to the blog, would you mind renaming it to Brighton Boat-Lovers?
ReplyDeleteI haven't even thought of this affecring what we write about here ._.
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