EU MPs have passed the controversial law, whose Articles 11 and 13 have raised concerns among the online community on how they would affect the future of content sharing.
The former says that search engines, like Google, and news aggregate platforms should pay to use links from news websites, but the one that really stirred emotions is the Article 13 by which tech companies would be held responsible for content posted without a copyright license.
Tech companies have opposed the changes, saying it would require expansive filters to be introduced to prevent copyright violations, and other critics have also voiced concerns on what the copyright bill would mean for quotations, parody and memes and said it could result in “over-blocking” to ensure compliance, which is why many have branded this bill “meme killer”.
YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki even issued a rallying cry to its ‘influencers’ asking them to “save” the internet as Article 13 threatened “to shut down the ability of millions of people to upload content to platforms like YouTube.”
The changes however are welcomed by record labels and mediators who collect royalty rights, saying these updates are the only way to ensure artists receive fair compensation for content from tech platforms.
Although the debate was often described as battle of David and the Goliath, whereby David would be the users and small publishers, we believe Wired magazine put it more correctly saying it’s more of a Goliath vs. Goliath story, whereby one side are record labels, and the other are tech giants and social platforms.
EP chairman Antonio Tajani said the new legislature will “put an end to the existing digital Wild West by establishing modern rules.”
On the other hand, Google said the measure would “lead to legal uncertainty and will hurt Europe’s creative and digital economies,” adding: “The details matter, and we look forward to working with policy makers, publishers, creators and rights holders as EU member states move to implement these new rules,” a spokesperson said.
Sophie Goossens, counsel at law firm Reed Smith, suggested that it won’t be the tech giants like Google and Facebook that suffer, but smaller companies that don’t have the capital and expertise to implement the changes necessary.
“The largest technology platforms have already implemented upload filters but such technology can be expensive to acquire or take a long time (and a lot of money) to develop internally. There is a concern that it will be the smaller, European technology companies that will be most severely impacted by this new requirement, rather than the US technology giants,” she said.
EU member states will have two years from the publication of the new laws into implement them into their own legislation.
