The powers in Europe are considering changing its copyright law. Initially, this news may receive a lukewarm reception until a more explicit look is made.
This move would actually strike at the heart of the internet’s openness and accessibility as a platform by raising new barriers to interactive online services around the world.
The goal of these copyright changes is to adopt new protections for publishers and artists. But if they are put in place, the burdens they would place on internet platforms would curtail the kind of quick uploading, sharing, commenting and responding that makes the Web so useful.
Additionally, there is no reason to believe that these new plans would actually benefit the journalists and artists in whose name the measures are being proposed.
Take one proposal: a fee payable to news publishers when online platforms such as search engines and news aggregators reproduce even short excerpts of news, typically accompanied by a link to the original article.
Although the link tax is intended to address a real problem (declining revenues of news publishers has affected their ability to fund quality journalism), similar laws introduced in Germany and Spain further decreased publishers’ revenue by reducing their traffic from links on third-party websites.
A second European proposal would create a new obligation for websites that host content uploaded by users to install automatic filters to scan that content for matches with copyright works, as a basis for new revenue-sharing arrangements that they would be forced to enter into with copyright owners.
Among many problems with this second “upload filtering” proposal, not the least is that it may contravene European law, which explicitly disallows any obligation on internet platforms to conduct general monitoring of what their users do -- which this proposal seems to require. There also are insurmountable problems with entrusting algorithms to distinguish infringing uses of copyright materials from legal ones.
The exact language of the two proposals is in flux, because they are each the subject of ongoing compromise negotiations between three institutions of the European Union. Those contentious negotiations were due to wrap up next month, but signs point to a likely extension.
This move would actually strike at the heart of the internet’s openness and accessibility as a platform by raising new barriers to interactive online services around the world.
The goal of these copyright changes is to adopt new protections for publishers and artists. But if they are put in place, the burdens they would place on internet platforms would curtail the kind of quick uploading, sharing, commenting and responding that makes the Web so useful.
Additionally, there is no reason to believe that these new plans would actually benefit the journalists and artists in whose name the measures are being proposed.
Take one proposal: a fee payable to news publishers when online platforms such as search engines and news aggregators reproduce even short excerpts of news, typically accompanied by a link to the original article.
Although the link tax is intended to address a real problem (declining revenues of news publishers has affected their ability to fund quality journalism), similar laws introduced in Germany and Spain further decreased publishers’ revenue by reducing their traffic from links on third-party websites.
A second European proposal would create a new obligation for websites that host content uploaded by users to install automatic filters to scan that content for matches with copyright works, as a basis for new revenue-sharing arrangements that they would be forced to enter into with copyright owners.
Among many problems with this second “upload filtering” proposal, not the least is that it may contravene European law, which explicitly disallows any obligation on internet platforms to conduct general monitoring of what their users do -- which this proposal seems to require. There also are insurmountable problems with entrusting algorithms to distinguish infringing uses of copyright materials from legal ones.
The exact language of the two proposals is in flux, because they are each the subject of ongoing compromise negotiations between three institutions of the European Union. Those contentious negotiations were due to wrap up next month, but signs point to a likely extension.
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