Ever since the early file-sharing days, discussions have been going on regarding digital copyright protection. The most recent discussions have mainly revolved around the EU’s proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market1. The main goals of this directive are to:
- legally protect press publications;
- correct the disparity in profits made between content creators and internet platforms;
- improve cooperation between rightsholders and online platforms.
There is a huge difference between profits made by platforms and search engines (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Google) and profits made by content creators (e.g. news outlets, artists, film studios). The lack of sufficient earnings for the latter is one of the reasons for the decrease in quality news articles. Because of the importance of quality, independent journalism for a liberal democracy to work, I believe the EU’s intentions in this regard are perfectly justifiable. However, the way in which these intentions are to be substantiated through the proposed directive is far from justifiable and demonstrates little technical understanding.
Article 13 of the Copyright Directive requires online services (e.g. forums, platforms, online file storages) to identify and remove any content that has been posted or will be posted without the rightsholder’s consent. This would effectively result in a filter on every file you upload. Apart from the fact that this might be incompatible with earlier UN treaties2, the practical execution of this directive would be very complicated. It would require online services to check each and every song, video, text document and any other type of file that is uploaded. It is impossible to do this manually, due to the sheer number of daily uploaded content. Hence, this would be automated and it would be up to algorithms to decide whether something is to be uploaded or not. However, even the most advanced algorithms for this (such as the ones used by YouTube) are far from perfect since they often fail to capture sarcasm, context and who the actual rightsholder is3. If this directive were to take effect, it would have a dramatic influence on how the internet is used and what can still be uploaded online.
A vote on this directive has been postponed to 12 September 2018 to give more time for discussion and amendments. Let us hope that the calls for amendments by companies, civil rights organizations4 and academics5 will change the directive for the better.
Sources:
2 https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Opinion/Legislation/OL-OTH-41-2018.pdf
3 https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/when-filters-fail/
5 https://www.ivir.nl/academics-against-press-publishers-right/
Hi Chris,
It is indeed a very doubtful set of regulations that the EU is proposing. The question, however, remains what may be a correct directive that can be executed by the EU without harming the open character of the internet. Most probably, it still has to re-place the value of information from platform to the actual content, which means that a part of the financial benefits that Facebook and Google currently enjoy from sharing the information goods has to be taken away from them.
We just need to find a way without harming the limitless sharing possibilities of the internet.
Great post Chris!
As such a filter would have drastic implications for our free-speech, let’s indeed hope the directive will be changed for the better. However, I also acknowledge the merits on which the directive is based, that is protecting the rights of the independent content creators. The scale of the problem became evident to me after watching this video about how Facebook is stealing videos from content creators (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q).
I believe that we as content consumers should help the content creators when we spot stolen content by posting the link to the original content, if possible, in the comments section, and informing the original content creator, who is the only person who can file a copyright report. If more people would be aware of this and act upon it, we could make a significant impact and make the whole copyright filter, which probably does more harm than good, irrelevant.