The EU Could Vote to Wreck the Internet Tomorrow
The EU is preparing to vote Wednesday on sweeping new copyright guidelines that could dramatically reshape the internet and potentially harm your ability to share content online.
As noted previously, the proposal is being driven by rights holders frightened by technological change, including brick and mortar publishers eager to blame companies like Google for their failure to evolve in the modern internet era.
And while the EUâs new Copyright Directive may be a well intentioned effort to modernize EU copyright rules, it still contains numerous provisions that could significantly harm the open internet. Most of those provisions remain largely intact despite a July vote that sent the proposal back to the drawing board in the wake of widespread activist backlash.
The most problematic provisions of the plan include new licensing fees for sharing anything more than âinsubstantialâ portions of content. Such a âlink taxâ could prove costly for small news outlets, and, depending on final wording, could put volunteer-centric organizations like Wikipedia at risk since the original proposal failed to include a noncommercial exception.
The most controversial component of the plan mandates that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption (read: most of them) would need to employ automated copyright systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works at the website ownerâs expense.
As weâve consistently highlighted, such filters routinely donât work very well.
Googleâs Content ID system, for example, cost $100 million to develop, and routinely flags content for takedown thatâs perfectly legitimate, and often not even covered by copyright. Earlier this year, a musician that uploaded a 10-hour video filled with nothing but white noise received five different takedown requests courtesy of companies that sell sleep therapy products.
Fighting these takedown requests can often be a costly and sisyphean affair, as recently documented by a German music professor who faced numerous takedown requests for classical music pieces that were in the public domain under German law.
âWe already know that these systems are historically faulty and often lead to false positives,â the Wikimedia Foundation said in a blog post this week. âFor example, consider the experience of a German professor who repeatedly received copyright violation notices when using public domain music from Beethoven, BartĂłk, and Schubert in videos on YouTube.â
Itâs not hard to see how taking such a broken system and foisting it upon the better part of an entire continent could prove problematic.
And while there were more than 203 new amendments added to the EU copyright proposal ahead of tomorrowâs vote, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has complained that many of these changes are compromises in name only.
These non-improvements were courtesy of a ârenewed lobbying campaign from the music and mainstream news industryâ and âa conflicted and wavering set of Internet tech giants,â noted the EFF in a recent website post. The EFF has argued that Article 11 (the link taxâ) and Article 13 (mandatory copyright filters) should be deleted from the text entirely.
Activist and author Cory Doctorow tells Motherboard that itâs impossible to know which direction the vote will go ahead of Wednesdayâs vote, and that even if approved, it will still be some time before the law is fully imposed across the EUâs 28 member nations.
âAfter the vote, thereâs closed-door negotiations, another vote in January, and then national implementations in 28 member states,â Doctorow noted. Those individual countries will then have some leeway in interpreting the final directive and turning it into functional law. Said interpretations could result in measures that are better, or worse, than the original proposal.
The EUâs copyright plan was introduced in 2016, and has been bogged in confusing gamesmanship ever since. One thing remains clear: if passed with its most problematic components intact, the EUâs plan would not only impose new operational and cost burdens upon countless websites, but could also potentially harm free expression online.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwp87k/the-eu-could-vote-to-wreck-the-internet-tomorrow
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