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The European Parliament will vote Wednesday on a series of copyright reform proposals that could have significant consequences for Internet culture. Two special provisions attracted the wrath of digital rights groups.
The first reform, known as Article 11, aims to give more weight to news publishers in negotiations with internet platforms such as Google and Facebook. Proponents of this change argue that large technology companies have undermined the business model of traditional news publishers and therefore want to force online platforms to pay license fees to news publishers when they aggregate their content. .
The second controversial reform, known as Article 13, aims to remedy a long-standing complaint by major content companies: the current regime of copyright notification and withdrawal makes it too difficult for rights holders piracy online. Advocates want to change liability rules to force technology companies to take a more active role in monitoring their content, which could force more online providers to adopt filtering systems such as ID YouTube content.
Critics see these two changes as attacks against the fundamentals that make the Internet work. They dubbed Article 11 a "tax on links" that could bring publishers into trouble simply by linking them to an article whose title is the text of the link. And they point out that systems such as the Content ID have a history of exaggerated retaliation that threatens the rights of fair use and freedom of expression.
What is tricky in this debate is that the complicated regulatory process of the European Union makes it difficult to predict how these proposals will materialize. The European Parliament will vote tomorrow on a long list of alternative amendments to copyright reform. Anything that will ultimately be approved at European level will then be sent to dozens of individual member governments who will have to translate their abstract language into concrete legislation.
What is clear, however, is that both proposals would create chaos in the Internet economy. Although the legislation is clearly focused on Google, the most important impact could be on smaller sites that must suddenly negotiate new licenses and set up new filtering systems.
Content ID for everyone
A first draft Article 13 required technology platforms to cooperate with rights holders to use "content recognition technologies" or other mechanisms to prevent users from downloading content. illicit content.
Proponents of this proposal argue that the existing "notice and takedown" regime does not work for content creators. Often, creators issue a withdrawal notice against a counterfeit copy of their work only to discover that another copy was uploaded a few hours or days later. Publishers want to shift the responsibility for controlling illegal content further to the technology companies themselves, requiring them to respond to bulk opt-out requests and implement technologies to recognize repeated downloads and ban them altogether.
This is the same basic approach adopted by YouTube ten years ago with its content identification system. The content ID analyzes each uploaded video and compares it to a database of copyrighted works previously provided by the rights holders. If matched, YouTube allows rights holders to choose between blocking the video or showing ads on the video and retaining all or part of the revenue.
But critics point out that this system is far from perfect. Last week we published an article from a German music teacher who ran into content ID after downloading public domain classical music recordings written by musicians who have been dead since then. long as Beethoven, Bartók, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. In the past, companies used Content ID to claim ownership of public domain images published by NASA.
To address this concern, a major amendment by Axel Voss, a German MEP aligned with rightholders, states that "co-operation between online content service providers and rights holders should not prevent availability of works "But the amendment does not offer real details about How to achieve this – leave it to individual countries or individual companies to understand it.
Another potential problem: Google has spent more than $ 60 million to create the content identification system. This represents a relatively small expense for a YouTube-wide platform, but a smaller site trying to compete with YouTube could obviously need a lot of money. Critics therefore argue that the practical impact of granting a Content ID-type system on the European Internet would be to anchor the current large technology platforms and exclude new competitors.
European press publishers want Google to pay
The other controversial article in the proposal is Article 11, referred to as a "tax on links" by critics. News editors have long complained that sites like Google News have created large audiences simply by providing links to articles written by other people, without sharing profits with publishers. Article 11 aims to change this by giving news publishers more control over how technology platforms extract and link to their articles.
However, what the law would actually ban is really unclear. To quell the fears that Article 11 imposes a "tax on links" online, Voss has proposed an amendment stating that the new rights of news publishers "would not extend to simple hypertext links, accompanied by individual words ". But this suggests that if you have a hyperlink with more than one word – maybe you're creating a link to a news item using the title as link text – then you could run into newly created linkage rights.
"It's unclear what it is," says Danny O'Brien, a law critic at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And O & # 39; Brien argues that it is far from certain that news publishers would earn money with a new link right. He referred to recent experiences in Germany and Spain, which had adopted similar legislation at national level. Google has responded to German law by removing Google News news sites, agreeing to add them only if they agree to waive these new link rights. The German publishers, deprived of Web traffic, quickly accepted the conditions of Google.
Spain then passed a similar law, except that it prohibited Google from applying for free licenses. Google responded by shutting down Google News in Spain, which cost traffic to the sites.
Of course, the fact that Google is ready to showcase the example of Spanish publishers by closing Google news in Spain does not necessarily mean that Google will be ready to do the same thing in Europe, as this would bring a much bigger blow to Google. Google's business. But O & # 39; Brien points out that Google News is not really a great tool for Google. The Google News home page does not even contain any ads.
