This 1 April, we mourn the death of parody

This year, in Brussels, we cannot partake in parody. Parody has died, at the hands of a political reality that is too absurd to be mocked.

Today, we are faced with:

• Parliamentarians who vote for and against upload filtering in consecutive committee meetings;

• Commission officials and lobbyists who explain that an obligation to implement generalised and filtering of all uploads to the Internet is not a “general monitoring obligation”, if you’re searching for millions of “specific” files;

• The European Commission pushing “ancillary copyright” legislation as a tool to protect European publishers, after it failed miserably already in Germany and Spain, to the detriment of (especially smaller) publishers.

• The law on linking will be further complicated by the draft EU Copyright Directive, in order to “harmonise” and “clarify” EU law. The current situation, based on existing “harmonisation” is the following:

Source: this masterful effort in explaining the inexplicable was prepared by Professor Eleanora Rosati and published on the IP Kat blog.

Paradoxically, EU copyright law still doesn’t have an exception that allows parody.