How can we fix the European copyright marketplace?
With all that is going on in the world right now, you can be forgiven for having missed some big news coming out of the EU over recent weeks. Whilst it isn’t usually our place to comment on political matters, as the matter at hand here is EU copyright law and as an EU registered company, we want to address if this affects Photochain in any way.
In bureaucratic speak, what has been proposed are changes to EU copyright law. Collectively, these changes are known as the “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market”, where the single market encompasses the 28 EU member states plus a few other European countries. As taken from the EU website, “The EU needs modern copyright rules fit for the digital age.”
In the view of lawmakers, there are three main benefits of having an updated set of copyright rules, as seen in the image here.
Whilst there is plenty to be said about each of these points, it is the 2nd point, “A fairer online environment for creators and the press” that we want to look at in more detail.
Firstly, what does this sentence actually mean? To understand we must take a look at the current state of copyright, especially in the context of digital photography.
Since the dawn of the internet, photographers and picture agencies have been digitizing visual content, licensing said content for a multitude of commercial uses: newspapers, magazines, websites, advertisers etc. But since the invention of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, these platforms have essentially become online content sharing services. To protect themselves from hosting unlicensed content, they allow users to post such content whilst they hide behind safe harbour provisions. This ensures they avoid liability for hosting unlicensed copyrighted content, shifting the responsibility onto the user who posts the content.
In effect, with social media (and other digital content) platforms not adhering themselves to any copyright rules that would befall them in usual circumstance, there has been a proliferation of unlicensed content on the web. For almost all of this unlicensed content, copyright holders are not fairly compensated for their work.
In the picture industry, it has been claimed by CEPIC (Centre of the Picture Industry) that 85% of images shared online by image search systems are illegal copies. According to CEPIC’s members, once an image is uploaded legally onto a website, if such image was unlawfully shared thousands of times this leads to an economic harm of a couple of thousand euros per image. This illegal “supply” of images has been a major factor in the decreasing value of images and subsequent consequences on the entire picture industry.
If the Directive is approved by the EU, it aims to provide a fairer online copyright marketplace by:
- Improving online transparency of content, allowing creators themselves to determine on which conditions their works can be used;
- Giving more authority to rights holders to negotiate licensing agreements and be remunerated fairly for their content when shared by others;
- Sharing revenues generated by use of content with content creators;
- Levelling the playing field in the EU’s Digital Single Market, encouraging the creation of more high quality content.
The proposed Directives do not target individual users and their ability to upload content online. The target is large platforms that allow copyrighted content to be shared unrestricted, at a cost to content creators. These platforms will be required to put in place “effective and proportionate measures…in collaboration with the right-holders” for how content is shared and available on their platforms.
At the present time, the Directives are under review, in particular towards how to maintain such an ‘upload filter’ on content sharing platforms. Once all proposals have been debated, the Directive is set to be voted on by Members of EU Parliament on 12th September 2018.
Approved or not, for Photochain’s photography trading platform, there is no direct impact. As an image marketplace, copyright and licensing are at the core of what we do. Our own blockchain based model enables any contributor to have full control over licensing and trading of their digital images.
Our Trading Smart Contract ensures proof of transaction, hence proof of license ownership, is available on the public blockchain. As a result, all industry participants who trade images via Photochain can know who has licensing rights for each image.
Photochain is an advocate for more integrity in digital copyright for content creators and has further partnerships with companies such as Copytrack to fight image theft.
Whilst we do not wish to make any political statements — and we are neither for or against the Directive — we will continue to champion creator’s rights and fair recognition of their work at every opportunity.
