It’s official — at least almost. Last Wednesday the EU Council of Ministers agreed on a much-criticized reform of the EU copyright law. If the EU Parliament approves the draft next week, the directive will become legally binding.
As a consequence the use of the Internet in Europe might change dramatically. Mainly because the new rules have a drastic impact on the free exchange of information. These rules will change the way content creators, content publishers and search engines will cooperate.
Where exactly are the problems?
Brussels has long been arguing that EU copyright law should continue to be adapted to the online single market. According to Axel Voss, rapporteur to the EU parliament on the copyright reform, the draft is well intended. Online media platforms and first publishers of content shall received their fair share of earnings in regards of the economic and legal risks that are associated with their contributions. Also the EU wants to prevent business models solely based on copying. And it seems somehow Brussels believes that with the revised copyright directive it might break the dominance of major US-based IT-corporations like Google or Facebook or at least make them pay.
But critics claim the new version has gone too far. In particular Articles 11 and 13 of the new guidelines are in the focus of a harsh critic. Article 11 introduces an ancillary copyright for publishers across the EU. As a consequence search engines like Google will have to pay if they are displaying content from other media platforms in services like Google News.
Article 13, on the other hand, holds the online platforms responsible for possible copyright infringements of their users. Example given YouTube will be punshied if one its users is uploading content that includes copyright infringements.
Consequences for the Internet community
You might think that these are steps towards a more fair pay for content producers, but the consequences are indeed far reaching. There were already similar attemps in the past but at national levels. Belgium and Spain for example tried to make search engines pay for implementing content published by third parties into their news feeds. They failed miserably. In Spain, Google stopped its news service completely. Mainly the small, regional and independent media plattforms suffered due to their loss of reach. A scenario that is conceivable at EU levels as well.
At the end it seems more likely that Google will find an agreement with the publishers so they renounce their copyrights instead of Google is paying for using any content. That’s by the way exactly what happened in Belgium. So in the best case, the whole reform is producing much ado about nothing here and if things turn nasty small publishers, media houses and content creators will loose a lot of their reach and thus lots of theirs revenues. As a final result the media landscape will be even more dominated by the big players and therefore even more monotonous.
The consequences deriving from Article 13 might turn out to be seriously dangerous. The new draft of the directive changes the current state of liabilities. From then on plattforms like YouTube, Facebook and Co. are directly responsible for the copy right infringements of their users. This means they will install so called “upload filters”. Of course they are not obligated to do so. But it is more or less the only way to garantuee the greatest possible reduction of potential copyright infringements. With that the freedom of the internet itself is in danger.
Not only will the filters be set to be more strict than necessary, they can also be used for other purposes once installed. Who guarantees that in the future the filter will not only be used in terms of copyright, but also in terms of opinions, beliefs or the like? Ultimately, this puts the freedom of press and speech into question.
In addition, such filters are always error prone. Quite a few user complain on a regular basis that YouTube, Facebook & Co. block their contents respecitively posts unjustified. Getting these unlocked is a lengthy process with an uncertain outcome. Are such filters really able to classify satirical and artistic contributions correctly? This can quickly become an existential question. Science is also affected. Citation is a core element of scientific work. Can the currently available filters distinguish between a correct quote and a plagiarism and a copyright infringement? If not, all scientific online libraries may be up for discussion and maybe even the online catalogs of analogue libraries.
No profit for content creators
Of course Brussels is appeasing. The whole reform is only addressing commercial usage and that private users do not need to be worried at all. Small and mid-sized enterprises enjoy special protection. Of course some critics overshoot as well, but it is obvious that setting the appropriate limits will be quite a challenge. Imagine a freelancer who, for example, uses Facebook not only privately but also for publishing his content — will Facebook’s AI decide whether he is logged in for private or for business purposes? In general, the boundaries between private and professional can be quite blurry when it comes to social media. Does every Facebook or LinkedIn user need to have two profiles in the future — one for private and one for professional usage? Questions that will ultimately be clarified by court. But this means a considerable amount of time and money. Something freelancers and smaller media platforms normally do not have.
In addition, the rights of authors and producers are curtailed, even if the EU claims the opposite. For Article 11 is intended to provide the publishers of content with more income, whereas the actual creators of this content are not. Article 12, which is hardly discussed in the public discussion, is for example garanting sport event organizers copy rights over their events. Sounds fair? It basically also means that a photographer taking pictures on such an event has no right on the pictures he took. And this article also legailzes a practice that is regarded as unlawful in Germany: Collecting socities are allowed to share profits between content creators and publishers whereas the German Federal Court banned this practice.
It’s the technology stupid!
The problem itself is ancient. People were already arguing about copyright back in the 18th century. Protecting content creators as well as publishers and ensuring they receive their well deserved earnings is a fair and legitimate concern. However, we believe that the solution to this problem can’t be found in the legal but in the technical area. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the general public might be more familiar with it as “blockchain”, is the first technology that allows to track and remunerate copyrights in transparent and secure way.
crumbl offers a contemporary, elegant and user-friendly solution for the entire problem. Thanks to DLT, it is always easy and transparent for everyone involved to understand who is the respective owner of an article or audio respectively video contribution. In addition compensation is automized in regards of previously agreed rules. Thus, both the content creators and the content publishers are on the safe side. A fair dealing is guaranteed. Of course, this also applies to third parties such as search engines or social media platforms.
Learn more about crumbl here or test us out in the closed beta phase and convince yourself.
All you have to do is send Felix a one-liner at felix@crumbl.org expressing your interest.
