The European Parliament has voted in favor of the Copyright Directive, a controversial piece of legislation intended to update online copyright laws for the internet age.
The directive was originally rejected by MEPs in July following criticism of two key provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed the “link tax” and “upload filter” by critics. However, in parliament this morning, an updated version of the directive was approved, along with amended versions of Articles 11 and 13. The final vote was 438 in favor and 226 against.
The fallout from this decision will be far-reaching, and take a long time to settle. The directive itself still faces a final vote in January 2019 (although experts say it’s unlikely it will be rejected). After that it will need to be implemented by individual EU member states, who could very well vary significantly in how they choose to interpret the directive’s text.
The most important parts of this are Articles 11 and 13. Article 11 is intended to give publishers and papers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories, allowing them to demand paid licenses. Article 13 requires certain platforms like YouTube and Facebook stop users sharing unlicensed copyrighted material.
Critics of the Copyright Directive say these provisions are disastrous. In the case of Article 11, they note that attempts to “tax” platforms like Google News for sharing articles have repeatedly failed, and that the system would be ripe to abuse by copyright trolls.
Article 13, they say, is even worse. The legislation requires that platforms proactively work with rightsholders to stop users uploading copyrighted content. The only way to do so would be to scan all data being uploaded to sites like YouTube and Facebook. This would create an incredible burden for small platforms, and could be used as a mechanism for widespread censorship. This is why figures like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee came out so strongly against the directive.
However, those backing these provisions say the arguments above are the result of scaremongering by big US tech companies, eager to keep control of the web’s biggest platforms. They point to existing laws and amendments to the directive as proof it won’t be abused in this way. These include exemptions for sites like GitHub and Wikipedia from Article 13, and exceptions to the “link tax” that allow for the sharing of mere hyperlinks and “individual words” describing articles without constraint.
In remarks following the vote in Parliament this morning, MEP Axel Voss, who has led the charge on Articles 11 and 13, thanked his fellow politicians “for the job we have done together.” “This is a good sign for the creative industries in Europe,” said Voss. Opposing MEPs like Julia Reda of the Pirate Party described the outcome as “catastrophic.”
Despite these disagreements, what’s clear is that if the Copyright Directive receives final approval by the European Parliament in January, it will have a huge, disruptive impact on the internet, both in the European Union and around the world. Exactly how the legislation will be interpreted will be up to individual nations, but the shift in the balance of power is clear: the web’s biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet.
Comments
Take care what you wish for – you may get it…
By Aurizon on 09.12.18 7:42am
No one wished for this besides maybe a handful of boardroom execs and politicians.
By Series on 09.12.18 3:01pm
I don’t know, I kind of like the sound of this: "the web’s biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet."
By tanil on 09.12.18 5:11pm
A couple of European Execs and Politicians. No one else.
By descendency on 09.12.18 5:13pm
In favor of other huge companies – content holders.
By shunted22 on 09.12.18 5:30pm
In favor of EU companies, yes. That seems perfectly logical for the EU. And really, it goes beyond commercial reasons. We have seen how Russia exploited Facebook and Youtube to influence U.S. politics. The EU has an obligation to its citizens to prevent that happening within its own borders. Maybe if FB and Google had done a better job at preventing that kind of abuse, things would be different. But as it is, they deserve to be sanctioned out of business within the EU until it is proven that they have fixed their problems.
By tanil on 09.12.18 5:40pm
That’s not what’s going to happen because of this legislation, this simply means that Google and their like will either provide less useful information to avoid this legislation or go through an intermediary to achieve the same end result but make more hoops for us to jump through.
Logically it doesn’t really make sense either, the sources are making the content freely available and passing it onto the search engines to index as they want it to be as visible as possible but now they get to demand a fee for that (or more likely some EU body gets to demand the money)?
I have zero interest in what happens to Google but everyone else has to live with it too, it’s the same idiotic lack of technical understanding which forces us to accept using cookies on every single website for no gain whatsoever. I’m willing to bet the end result is we’ll all have less useful search results, politicians may love bureaucracy but it’s stunning they’re somehow making the web a worse place in this day and age.
By Series on 09.12.18 10:31pm
People have made their content on the internet freely available to be seen. No has ever made content freely available to be stolen by content leeches like Pinterest, image search engines or news aggregators.
People used to allow search engines to link to their images and other types of content years ago because they expected everyone to use them in good faith. They didn’t. So now the EU is correcting that problem. What is your issue with that?
By NYC Babe on 09.12.18 11:13pm
So go after people copying said content, linking to it is not the same.
That’d be why they plaster those images in water marks because they expect people to use it in good faith? The EU isn’t correcting the problem, they’re simply imposing a tax on companies who aren’t responsible for the action you’re complaining about. It’s those using the content who are breaking fair use terms and not a search engine for letting you find what you wanted.
If it wasn’t clear in my first post, my problem with this legislation is the end result makes the Internet worse for the rest of us to actually use.
By Series on 09.13.18 9:27am
"In other words, each country will be able to interpret the directive as they see fit."
The real winners here are lawyers and big companies like facebook and youtube. Can a startup implement this kind of filtering? I dont think so. Also, this kind of database of copyrighted works .. they can charge an unlimited amount for it. Also maybe people can have copyrighted sentences likely to be said by someone espousing a certain viewpoint which cause the filter to trigger. Someone can copyright random computer generated melodies so they can claim infringement against new music. Also, this can block derivative works that are legal.
By nullcodes on 09.12.18 8:16am
Yep, more regulation always helps the big companies protect themselves from startups.
By Anyname-123 on 09.12.18 8:50am
Small businesses are explicitly exempt from article 13.
By Gatanui on 09.12.18 9:13am
Not really. It is too vague and unclear what is and isn’t exempt.
By nullcodes on 09.12.18 11:32am
Have you checked out the amendments that were passed?
By Gatanui on 09.12.18 12:08pm
If you have read it, and know this for a fact, this is where you provide a link or quote that backs up what you are saying.
By W1ngdom on 09.12.18 12:29pm
Until they begin to grow a little and hire their employee #51 and then they are no longer exempt and cannot operate anymore because the licensing makes their business model inviable? So we’re now putting a cap on business growth?
By Elkhantar on 09.12.18 1:35pm
Time to move the better part of the Internet to the TOR network…
By Tim 21 on 09.12.18 8:24am
if there was ever a reason to wish for the EU to disintegrate…
By llort on 09.12.18 8:35am
Well if passed the Copyright Directive will be a disaster.
The link tax will not work, it has been tried twice before and failed twice before. I would imagine google will add to each hyperlink to an EU site in a google search something along lines of "we are unable to provide any information about this link due to EU law and therefore it may not be relevant to your search". That will really encourage people to click through to EU media sites.
As for the upload filtering – we know based on Youtube how badly that works. It is very noticeable that there are no penalties for fraudulently or negligent copyright claims
By justin150 on 09.12.18 9:01am
About time: the free lunch has to (begin to) stop.
An example that impacted me personally: for years, YouTube streamed copyrighted content for free to users, making billions, giving back nothing to legitimate authors. This is theft. When my record company finally had the chance to apply for monetization, the platform already streamed my songs more than one hundred million times, and they paid absolutely nothing for that. What they do pay for now is absymal compared to streaming services like Spotify snd especially Apple Music.
This does not happen with video content, as for trchnological reasons the studios had more time than record companies to prevent this and protect their investment.
Of course there are ways to stream or download any content for free anyways, but it’s an increasingly small hole in an increasingly solid wall.
All in all, I understand the possible pitfalls of this kind of regulation, but I’m happy it passed.
By DJ CERLA on 09.12.18 9:16am
The same goes for news and other articles. The government is finally treating sites like facebook and google like the distributors they are and putting power in the hands of companies that publish these articles.
By Fkeefe4th on 09.12.18 9:20am
Links are, and always have been, how the web works. HTML – this H means Hypertext. HTTPS, the first HT means Hyper Text. The web is working how it is supposed to work. How it was designed to work. Sharing links. Publishers benefit financially by everyone sharing links.
By Just_Some_Nobody on 09.12.18 10:28am
That had nothing to do with google and facebook, who control what links people have the option to click on.
By Fkeefe4th on 09.12.18 11:28am
For the web to be useful, you need to have something that organise it, in the distant past people use to do this manually creating great lists of links to other sites, passable for when the web was just a few thousand pages.
The Web doesn’t function with out a index and that all Google and Facebook and countless others have done. Only difference between Google and Facebook, is Facebook crowd source theirs from it users an Google uses automated means to build theirs.
These companies have never charge websites to be on that index.
Of cause this doesn’t take in to account human jealousy, bit like communism and socialism doesn’t, news papers and the music industry and others are simply jealous that these companies that organise and make the web functional and usable for both consumers and creators are worth many many times the amount the creators are worth.
But without the indexers, the creators content would never be consumed by the consumers, it a symbiotic relationship.
By redeo on 09.12.18 11:50am
And the EU doesn’t’ care about these indexers in the US, they care about the EU new papers and media companies that exist in the EU. The regulations are to protect their rights in the EU.
Sovereign governments are going to always protect their own citizens and businesses over Tech companies from other nations. The tech fanboys are just grumpy because the regulation these companies have been dreading has arrived.
By Fkeefe4th on 09.12.18 2:06pm