Wikipedia goes offline in serveral countríe to protest the upcoming copyright law in the EU
Wikipedia has decided to temporarily drop the Spanish and Italian versions of the copyright protection bill to protest against the upcoming vote in the EU.
Wikipedia is almost entirely published and shared by community users, so if there aren’t millions of community users, there is no Wikipedia at all.
Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the public in this way.
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 3, 2018
However, the European Union’s decision to update the copyright protection bill has added extremely demanding requirements. If the copyright protection bill is passed, it will be more difficult for Wikipedia to operate.
For Wikipedia, if the above regulations passed Wikipedia is inoperable in Europe, whether it is copyright issues or labour costs.
After all, Wikipedia does not have a lot of staff, and most of the content is submitted and edited by community users.
The more significant problem is that Wikipedia’s annual operations as a non-profit, non-profit website rely on user donations from around the world to maintain no advertising fees.
If you need to support copyright fees for news publications, Wikipedia has no money, so Wikipedia can’t reach this requirement anyway.
Legislators in the European Union have also considered the situation of Wikipedia, so after being criticised, legislators tried to exempt the encyclopedia website.
The requirement for this exemption involves the issue of such copyright must be non-commercial, and it seems that this condition is very beneficial for Wikipedia.
However, the Electronic Sentinel Foundation pointed out that Wikipedia’s copyright agreement is open sharing, that is, commercial websites can also directly reference Wikipedia resources.
This has resulted in changes to Wikipedia’s copyright agreement, as well as a large number of commercial websites that reference Wikipedia content worldwide.
Source: Times of India
