Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law

Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
es.wikipedia.org

I haven't seen the community discussion that led to this decision, but assuming that it was democratically decided across collaborators from the entire Spanish-speaking world, I think gives the protest a lot more weight than the title may suggest.

Dear reader,

On July 5, 2018, the plenary of the European Parliament will vote on whether to proceed with a proposal for a directive on copyright. If approved, this would significantly damage the open Internet as we know it today.

Instead of updating copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation of all citizens in the information society, the directive would threaten online freedom and impose new filters, barriers and restrictions on access to the Web. If the proposal was approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news article on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated; even Wikipedia would be at risk.

So far, dozens of relevant people in the field of IT have strongly opposed this proposal - among them the creator of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the Internet pioneer, Vinton Cerf - 169 academics, 145 human rights, press freedom, scientific research and technological development organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that promotes this encyclopedia, among other projects for free knowledge.

For these reasons, the Spanish language Wikipedia community has decided to shut down all the pages of the encyclopedia before and during the vote, i.e. until 10 am (UTC) on July 5. We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free publication with verifiable content. We call on all Members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the many proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge, including the deletion of Articles 11 and 13, the extension of freedom of panorama throughout the EU and the preservation of the public domain.

In other countries of the Spanish-speaking world, such as Colombia and Mexico, the Wikipedia community has recently opposed similar proposals. We ask you to keep up to date with their development and support this effort.

For more information on the campaign in the European Parliament and how to act, visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_vote_in_.... You can follow the communication on social networks with the tags #WikipediaSeApaga, #SalvemosInternet and #SaveYourInternet.

The Spanish Wikipedia community