Article 13: Pre-schools to close after EU passes copyright directive

The European Parliament approved the Copyright Directive yesterday which includes the controversial article 13 which means that institutions such as libraries and schools are directly liable for copyright infringements as if they had committed them themselves.

Jane Walker, “The problem is that any child that attends pre-school could accidentally draw an existing copyrighted painting in the world and so we have to either pre-emptively buy licences for all paintings that exist or just prevent them from drawing.”

“Similarly, children might accidentally write a sentence from an authors work, like ‘the cat sat on the mat’ and we’re held liable.  We just don’t have the memories to recognise every combination of words that are copyrighted out there so we’ve had to abandon all creative writing.”

We asked how Article 11 of the Copyright Directive would affect them.

“Ah yes, where reproducing more than ‘single words or very short extracts’ of news stories will require a licence. Well sadly this has put an end to our paper mache and other craft activities involving newspapers.”

The EU hasn’t enacted such a bad law since GDPR prevented God from keeping a record of sins.

Well on the bright side the children are going to be doing a lot more maths in pre-school now.  Oh wait, news just in that some number problems the teacher set were actually included in a copyrighted textbook and the publisher is now suing the school…

 Reporter: John Spencer aka Not the Bible