The EU’s Copyright Directive Opens the Door to Massively Increase Big Tech Monopolies and Censorship


The EU’s new new Copyright Directive mandates that any online community, platform or service that has existed for three or more years, or is making 10 million euros a year or more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily, which is impossible. All but the largest tech companies will be able to afford automated copyright filters, which would hand them a monopoly while expanding government censorship.  The current Copyright Directive would also allow news sites to decide who can link to their stories and charge for permission to link, which will limit the availability of information and commentary on the news.  Activists are urging Europeans to contact their political representatives to stop the Copyright Directive as the politicians are vulnerable right now, before the European Parliament elections scheduled for May.

Despite ringing denunciations from small EU tech businesses, giant EU entertainment companies, artists’ groups, technical experts, and human rights experts, and the largest body of concerned citizens in EU history, the EU has concluded its “trilogues” on the new Copyright Directive, striking a deal that—amazingly—is worse than any in the Directive’s sordid history.

Take Action

Stop Article 13

Goodbye, protections for artists and scientists

The Copyright Directive was always a grab bag of updates to EU
copyright rules—which are long overdue for an overhaul, given that it’s
been 18 years since the last set of rules were ratified. Some of its
clauses gave artists and scientists much-needed protections: artists
were to be protected from the worst ripoffs by entertainment companies,
and scientists could use copyrighted works as raw material for various
kinds of data analysis and scholarship.

Both of these clauses have now been gutted to the point of
uselessness, leaving the giant entertainment companies with unchecked
power to exploit creators and arbitrarily hold back scientific research.

Having dispensed with some of the most positive versions of the
Directive, the trilogues have also managed to make the (unbelievably
dreadful) bad components of the Directive even worse.

A dim future for every made-in-the-EU platform, service and online community

Under the final text, any online community, platform or service that
has existed for three or more years, or is making €10,000,001/year or
more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that
infringes copyright, even momentarily. This is impossible, and the
closest any service can come to it is spending hundreds of millions of
euros to develop automated copyright filters. Those filters will subject
all communications of every European to interception and arbitrary
censorship if a black-box algorithm decides their text, pictures, sounds
or videos are a match for a known copyrighted work. They are a gift to fraudsters and criminals, to say nothing of censors, both government and private.

These filters are unaffordable by all but the largest tech companies,
all based in the USA, and the only way Europe’s homegrown tech sector
can avoid the obligation to deploy them is to stay under ten million
euros per year in revenue, and also shut down after three years.

America’s Big Tech companies would certainly prefer not to have to
install these filters, but the possibility of being able to grow
unchecked, without having to contend with European competitors, is a
pretty good second prize (which is why some of the biggest US tech companies have secretly lobbied for filters).

Amazingly, the tiny, useless exceptions in Article 13 are too generous
for the entertainment industry lobby, and so politicians have given
them a gift to ease the pain: under the final text, every online
community, service or platform is required to make “best efforts” to
license anything their users might conceivably upload, meaning that they
have to buy virtually anything any copyright holder offers to sell
them, at any price, on pain of being liable for infringement if a user
later uploads that work.

News that you’re not allowed to discuss

Article 11, which allows news sites to decide who can link to their
stories and charge for permission to do so, has also been worsened. The
final text clarifies that any link that contains more than “single words
or very short extracts” from a news story must be licensed, with no
exceptions for noncommercial users, nonprofit projects, or even personal
websites with ads or other income sources, no matter how small.

Read full article here…