How the copyright directive changed my view of the EU
Confessions of a hurt — but not defeated — Europeanist
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The views and opinions expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official position of any group, organization or institution I belong to.
This is not a technical essay on copyright, internet or the EU. It’s a personal piece that I wrote to share with you my feelings, thoughts and doubts about something I really care about.
About 10 years ago, in early 2009, I was installing a GNU/Linux distribution (Ubuntu) on my computer for the first time. Back then I was 18 years old, but using Linux I quickly realized the value of open source and freedom in computing. Soon, I started advocating for digital rights: privacy, freedom of expression, open knowledge. Fast-forward 10 years, I’m now doing a PhD in Computational Privacy at Imperial College London.
In the meantime, I’ve always been a convinced Europeanist. For a few months now, an EU flag has been hanging on the wall in my room in London. Simply put, to me being a Europeanist means believing that only a united Europe can face the challenges of a globalized world, ensuring good living standards and freedom for European citizens. However, most Europeanists are not completely happy with the way the EU currently works. They know that the EU is not perfect and needs to change in some areas.
That said, for the sake of intellectual honesty I have to admit that most Europeanist criticisms of EU institutions, representatives, and political agenda are typically not very forceful. Their objections to the status quo are often quite shy and submissive, as if they were afraid of challenging the EU’s aura of inscrutable benevolence — that rooted idea that EU institutions know what’s better for the people, and therefore their decisions can’t really be questioned. On the contrary, criticism from the Eurosceptic front is quickly dismissed as exaggerated, subversive and often based on fake news or even conspiracy theories. In a nutshell: unfounded.
As much as I’ve always tried to be objective, I’ve admittedly been guilty of this attitude, and will probably continue to be. But the recent final approval of the EU copyright directive hit me straight at the heart, and forced me to reconsider some of my convictions about the EU. In the context of digital rights, the copyright directive is probably the most dangerous set of regulations that the Western world has ever produced. However, this post is not about the copyright directive. This post is about why I’m no longer convinced that EU’s institutions know what they’re doing: for me, this changes everything.
The copyright directive received final approval by the European Parliament on March 26th and by the Council of the European Union on April 15th. The directive is now official and member states have 2 years to implement it into their national laws.
The directive is a clutter of a few confused but somewhat good norms, together with some measures that threaten to seriously harm online creativity, freedom of expression, and privacy for many years to come. Overall, it is an awful directive that firmly goes in the wrong direction. It is also a missed chance for the EU to become a world leader in digital rights, a process that seemed to have finally begun with the approval of the GDPR. You can find many good articles that explain the directive and its issues in detail, so I won’t cover that here. In this post I rather want to discuss what the copyright directive revealed to me about the EU, its functioning and its current representatives.
1. Credibility
In July 2017, the German MEP Julia Reda (Pirate Party) found out that more than 3 years earlier, in 2014, the European Commission had commissioned a report to the consultancy firm Ecorys for 360'000 Euro to study the effect of piracy on the market. The main goal of the report was to answer this question:
Does copyright infringement negatively affect legal sales?
The final report was delivered to the Juncker Commission in May 2015. But the Commission kept it secret for 2 years, until it had no alternative but to release it publicly, following a freedom of information request issued by Julia Reda.
Why was the Commission so fond on hiding such an expensive report (paid by European taxpayers)? The answer probably lies in the conclusion reached in the report:
With the exception of recently released blockbusters, “the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements”.
No news: these findings are in line with those of several other studies and experts’ opinions on the topic.
This is important as the the underlying assumption of the copyright directive is that piracy negatively impacts sales, and hence, creators. This assumption is not true. The Commission knew it, but it deliberately tried to keep these findings from Members of Parliament and citizens. This is outrageous. It looks like the kind of fake news you read on the pro-Russia website Sputnik News. But it’s all true. In a moment when people’s trust towards EU institutions is reaching worryingly low levels, revelations like this can seriously undermine their credibility even in the eyes of a convinced Europeanist like me.
Any discussion about the copyright directive must start from the results of this report and from the shameful, pathetic attempt of the Commission to bury it.
2. Evidence-based policy
The hidden report affair is not only a matter of credibility. It also reveals that EU’s policy is not as evidence-based as EU institutions would have us think. This is especially true for the Commission, which often presents its proposals as scientific, objective, and based on analyses by top-notch experts.
“Nearly universal criticism of the proposal, with particularly critical interventions from academics based not only in Spain, France, Finland and the UK, but also the country where the right originated, Germany.”
This was not the case for the copyright directive, as the Commission dismissed the statistical evidence to stubbornly pursue an ideological war in the name of copyright. The Commission would not even listen to another independent academic study commissioned by the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, which found “nearly universal criticism” by European academics against the introduction of extra copyright for news sites.
What if the Commission is equally biased and untrustworthy in economic policy? Shall we suppose the existence of any other reports that have been so far kept secret?
3. The experts
Members of populist and Eurosceptic parties are often portrayed as ignorant and incompetent. I certainly agree. But are members of PPE and S&D really expert?
One of the main objections against the copyright directive is that it will inevitably require almost every website to install filters that would preemptively scan every file uploaded by users to ascertain it does not infringe copyright. Upload filters would lead to a dystopian scenario, a great start for a Black Mirror episode. Thanks to a lot of pressure by activists, any explicit reference to filters has been removed from the final text of the directive, and replaced by requiring some vague “best efforts” from platforms. Unfortunately, supporters of the directive have so far failed to explain how these “best efforts” can be put in place without filters. Right after the final approval, this confusion became evident in the ridiculously contradictory statements of the Commission and the German government.
Many experts (mainly academics) emphasized that current upload filters (such as YouTube’s Content ID) are severely limited. State-of-the-art artificial intelligence algorithms cannot recognize satire, parody, reviews, etc. This is why filters often block such content, with a subtle but dangerous harm to creativity and freedom of expression that is hard to appeal against.
In response to these concerns, the MEP Axel Voss declared in an interview that algorithms are actually totally capable of identifying parody such as memes. The proof is that:
«a Google image search for “memes” displays a bunch of memes, so they can be recognized».
Now, anyone with a vague idea of how Google Search works will easily understand why Voss’s claim is complete bullshit and proves his embarrassingly low level of digital education. It would be a funny story, if Axel Voss wasn’t the EU’s copyright rapporteur (a sort of legislative custodian) for the European Parliament. The fact that a rapporteur can be so ignorant about the very subject of the law-making process he’s supposed to coordinate is frankly disturbing and alarming. I can’t help but wonder how many other Axel Vosses have so far obtained important political victories at the European Parliament, influencing the life of 500 million citizens.
4. The Establishment® and The People®
The debate on the copyright directive has been influenced by strong lobbying efforts. This is nothing new: German media have been trying to obtain copyright on news since the invention of the telegram in 1850. After 170 years, they finally won: pressure by major German and French publishers played an extremely important role in the approval of the directive.
Lobbies are respectable and legitimate actors in a liberal democracy. Even Google and Facebook, on the other hand, lobbied intensively against the directive. But the copyright debate has never been just a clash of two lobbies with conflicting interests. Heavy criticism against the copyright directive was raised by Tim Berners-Lee (the creator of the web) together with 70 internet and computing experts, 50 NGOs defending human rights, more than 200 academics from 25 research centers, associations of small and medium-sized enterprises, startup associations and even the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But, most importantly, 5 million EU citizens signed a petition against the directive (the most popular petition in the history of change.org), and 200 thousand people participated in demonstrations across Europe.
This was unquestionably a massive popular mobilization and an incredible example of democratic engagement. European institutions did not care at all, and overbearingly secured new rights for major publishers with no regard whatsoever for the collateral consequences on the lives of European citizens. The requests by the civil society were not only ignored: they were also belittled with the accusation of being manipulated by web giants. Such slandering and coward accusatory remarks will certainly leave an indelible mark in the hearts of millions of young Europeans.
I felt particularly sad to see that such an obscurantist and denigrating attitude had also infected environments that I usually consider close to my political sensitivity. For example, this article by POLITICO describes winners and losers of Europe’s copyright reform, but the journalist completely “forgets” to talk about internet users. POLITICO’s Chief Europe correspondent called “jihadists” the activists for human rights protesting against the directive. The copyright debate on most of the media has been shamefully biased, but I used to think of POLITICO and its journalists as an objective and reliable source. Now I can’t help but question everything I’ve learned in all the Playbooks I’ve read and the EU Confidential podcasts I’ve listened to. (To be fair, I have to say that POLITICO’s coverage about the directive was still much better than most catch-all news websites I came across. However, the general level was so awful that it doesn’t really make for an interesting comparison.)
Something similar happened with an Italian podcast produced by some very young journalists, one of which I know personally and esteem professionally. In one minute they dismiss the protests against the directive as a big “misunderstanding”. An unacceptable lack of respect, especially given the size of the movement and the prestige of many of the spokespeople.
And more: the official press release by the European Parliament, which could have been written by North Korea’s propaganda body; a Young European Federalists page on Facebook that shares an incredibly biased article championing the directive (and removes it as soon as followers express their disappointment), proving that Europeanists are not immune from fanboyism; Margrethe Vestager’s support for the directive, feeding the allegations of her prejudiced bias against Big Tech — something that I’ve always denied in light of my trust for her competence.
All in all, the debate was poisoned by the famous “establishment”, and the poison reached “friendly” environments that were completely unable to resist it.
Therefore now I wonder: how many other debates were and are similarly “poisoned”? How much of that poison contaminated myself and my beliefs?
5. The influence of France and Germany
The directive has mostly been the result of negotiations between France and Germany that would make for a good House of Cards episode. In the meantime, the feeling of European unity has been undergoing a deep crisis. Populists across all Europe are accusing France and Germany of leveraging EU’s power to weaken member States’ sovereignty for their own economic and geopolitical interests.
I’m starting to think that there might be some truth to these allegations. France and Germany are important and advanced democracies that I truly admire and respect. But while I’m happy with France and Germany leading the way to European integration and prosperity, I certainly can’t accept them bullying other countries on highly ideological, non evidence-based, and freedom-threatening reforms. Was this copyright directive really worth feeding the far-right narrative, dividing the EU Council, fighting activists, experts, and even the UN? Is this what the influence of France and Germany should be used for?
6. A sad truth: Eurosceptics are not always the “bad guys”
The member states that voted against the directive in the EU Council were: Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden. Because vote weights in the EU Council depend also on a country’s size, the only countries that could really make a difference were Italy and Poland. Now, clearly no government can be simply labelled as “good” or “bad”: politics is much more complex than that. But, as a Europeanist, it didn’t feel good to find myself hoping that human rights could be saved in extremis by two far-right governments. Such an experience leaves a deep mark.
And now?
Of course this is not the first time I’ve got disappointed by the EU, and certainly it won’t be the last. But I think that on the copyright directive, the EU did its worst. It did so bad that I had to reconsider my whole idea of the EU at its core. At the end of the day this is likely a good thing: my previous view of the EU was probably a bit too idealistic and naive.
Am I still Europeanist? Absolutely. The idea that national states alone can better protect the (digital) rights of their citizens just makes no sense. A “Europe of Nations” with free trade but no common politics is nothing but a ghost from the past. The far-right and Eurosceptic final opposition to the copyright directive was just an easy tactical move to blame the EU for something they were equally to blame for (as it’s often the case when national governments blame the EU). Also in this respect, they have nothing to propose: they just act as free-rider opponents of the current establishment without bothering to come up with viable and ethically sustainable alternatives.
But what should we do when experts are called “jihadists” by the very people who taught us to trust the (EU) experts? What should we do when the European Commission blatantly acts as a biased, irrational, presumptuous player that puts big economic interests before human rights, just like populists do?
Unfortunately I have no real answer to these questions. But I think that at the European elections this week, it’s time to send a strong message. PPE and S&D have some very competent people among their ranks, and I truly believe that many of their representatives do what they think is better for Europe. But we need more radical change. We need young Europeanist parties that have the courage to propose an ambitious reform of the EU to make it more democratic, accountable and transparent. Although I don’t criticize the work of the outgoing Commission and Parliament in its entirety, we clearly need less arrogant representatives that can empathize with the people’s demands and listen to experts’ advice without preconceptions. We need parties that people can trust to build genuine European integration, firmly based on the principles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, where solid European democracies can lead the way but must refrain from imposing their own interests and coordinate the policies they advocate for in closed-door meetings with lobbies.
I believe Volt is such a party. It is a new, radical pan-European party that runs in each country with the same political program, proposing a stronger, greener, fairer and more participative European Union. Digital rights are in the programme as well. If you don’t know Volt, check it out. Unfortunately I won’t be able to vote for it, as Volt coherently decided to run as an independent party: in Italy this would have required them to get 150'000 signatures and they didn’t make it. Luckily there are other valid alternatives. I won’t list them here, but you could start looking at how different parties and MEPs supported the copyright directive here. For a general idea, here are the votes by each group at the European Parliament.
Finally, if you care about digital rights or you want to know more, you can follow and support organizations such as EFF, EDRi and the Wikimedia Foundation. You can start with a like on their social media.
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