The German-language version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is supposed to go offline tomorrow for a full day in protest against the planned EU copyright reform. „For the very first time the German-speaking community of authors will perform a complete shutdown,“ it said in a blog entry of Wikimedia.
Several other language versions might follow this example or display banners on the main page. Reason for the protest is the planned copyright reform, to be voted on Tuesday in the EU Parliament.
Fear of Article 13
The Wikipedia authors fear considerable restrictions from the planned reform. They refer particularly to the highly controversial article 13. „Even the smallest Internet platforms would prevent copyright infringement of their users preventively, which in practice would be implemented only by means of error- and abuse-prone upload filter,“ it says in a text tomorrow to be published on the Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia itself is exempt from Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive. However, according to the community’s fear, „Free Knowledge will suffer even if Wikipedia remains an oasis in the filtered desert of the Internet.“ The German-language Wikipedia currently contains nearly 2.3 million articles and is accessed about 30 million times a day ,
