“In the near future, it will become possible to book a commercial space flight — a sub-orbital trip to any destination you like. Think of how complex the laws will have to be when space flight goes from something done only by a few, to anyone, and eventually everyone. Now imagine if we decided to govern that industry by taking the Highway Traffic Act and adding the words “in space”. This is a lot like how we’ve updated copyright law for the web. Mostly, we just took the old law, and added the words “digital” and “online”. And that's worked out just about as well as you’d expect it to." (Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons)

The current EU copyright reform proposal puts pressure on platforms (which is badly defined, so includes sites like Gitlab, Github and SourceForge) to monitor and filter all content for copyright infringement (article 13), proposes a new 20-year license for news snippets (article 11), and limits who can access datasets -- including open data. Any of these would be terrible outcomes. Let's demand better copyright reform.

In this session, representatives from Mozilla's Policy team will tackle the following questions:

• What's happening with the EU Copyright Reform?
• How will Articles 11 + 13 affect the Internet experience in Europe?
• How will the proposed reform affect the FLOSS ecosystem in Europe? The rest of the world?
• Why is this happening?
• What is Mozilla doing about it, and what can we do about it?

Why should you care? Because we believe in "default open"; because we want to grow the open source community, and because the internet continues to be in danger of being ruled by politics.

(Disclaimer: we won't be discussing the right of governments or the EU Parliament to propose or enforce internet regulation. We're working within the existing system, not against it at the moment.)

Please note that this talk was originally scheduled to be given by Melissa Romaine who is no longer able to attend. It will now be given by Giannis Konstantinidis and Gervase Markham.