EU Passes New Copyright Rules That Could Have a Disastrous Effect

Restrictive copyright rules under consideration could have a huge, negative effect on the freedom and openness of the internet.

ANDREW AITCHISONGETTY IMAGES

European Parliament has passed bill that could have a disastrous effect on the internet as we know it. The EU's Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which was first introduced way back in 2016 and was passed by the EU Parliament on Tuesday, contains an article to force platforms to pay a tax to publishers whose content is shared on their services, and another that forces publishers to install automated filters to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material

Article 11, which concerns aggregators like Google News which may share content from publications on its own platform, grows out of experiments in Germany and Spain that are ostensibly designed to give local publishers a cut of the profit that giant American companies like Google and Facebook make by advertising against the links and snippets of text their users post. The rule has had disastrous and counterproductive effects where it has been implemented. In Spain, the legislation caused Google News to pull out of the country entirely. Further studies show that the law caused a $10 million loss to the industry, primarily shouldered by smaller publishers that relied on the tech giants for distribution.

This new incarnation, which covers all of the EU's 28 member countries (with specific details of implementation left up to each individual country) will make it more difficult for publishers to simply pull out of Europe entirely, but likely not without additional collateral damage. Publishers, who will take a considerable hit if they lose access to giant platforms, would have an incentive to perhaps cut some sort of deal with behemoths like Facebook or Google

However, as writer and activist Cory Doctorow pointed out in an article at Motherboardwhen the bill was up for a vote in 2018, the likely cost of such compromises is almost certainly the devastation of smaller publishers and smaller platforms, neither of which will have the leverage to broker a truce or the resources to navigate the regulations. The result? A tightening of big tech's stranglehold on the web. 

Over the course of the bill's life, some modifications have been made in hopes of mitigating these concerns. 'Snippets' of news articles are allowed to be shared without payment, as are hyperlinks and even 'very short' articles in their entirety. Non-commercial encyclopedias like Wikipedia and open-source software platforms like GitHub are also exempted from any restrictions. And while this is certainly better than a more explicitly draconian approach, the grey area leaves a lot of room for interpretation that could result in a chilling effect regardless. 

Article 13, meanwhile, deals with horrors that have haunted the internet in the United States as well. Much like the proposed SOPA and PIPA acts of 2012, the measure would require platforms to create and maintain expensive, expansive systems to monitor uploaded images and video for potential copyright violations. It's also similar to YouTube's currently existing ContentID system, famous for its perpetual over-zealousness which bad actors have been known to weaponize by submitting false copyright claims to exploit the system's bias towards ostensible copyright holders. Fortunately, the passed legislation has measures to try and limit the amount of collateral damage here as well, with memes and GIFs specifically excluded from the directive.