Are you aware of the new Copyright Directive that the EU wants to take forward for next year? If you like to send gifts and memes to your friends, you upload and watch videos on YouTube, or you write and share articles on the web, you should definitely pay attention to the upcoming regulation: On September 12, the European Parliament voted on the reform proposal of the EU Copyright Directive and approved the two controversial articles 11 and 13, which establish a charge to aggregators and social networks for linking news on their pages and obliges platforms to filter the content that the users upload to detect if they commit copyright.
The proposal must be discussed now between the EU Council and the European Parliament, but the opponents to the Directive have claimed that these two articles are a serious threat against freedom on the internet. The movement #SaveYourInternet, which is composed of organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), European Digital Rights (EDRi) and the Spanish activist group Xnet (the founding member in Spain of the coalition), has launched a campaign across all the EU countries to prevent the final approval of the text.
For those who are interested in knowing the arguments of the detractors of the Directive, I have interviewed the communication manager of Xnet, Sergio Salgado, about the organization’s point of view on the consequences of the new Copyright regulation and the aim of their campaign.
What should you know about articles 11 and 13?
On one hand, we have “the upload filter” established by article 13, which forces platforms to monitor the content uploaded and to delete it if a violation of copyright is detected. The detractors have argued that the users’ content might be deleted without their consent (affecting artists, gamers, illustrators as well as bloggers) and that the audience will no longer be able to enjoy diverse kinds of entertainment. “The days of communicating through gifs and memes, listening to our favorite remixes online or sharing videos of our friends singing at karaoke might be coming to an end,” claims #SaveYourInternet on their website.
“We could simply think that they [EU] will not be able to change something as natural on the internet as sharing, but actually they can. Article 13 requires the implementation of prior, automated and massive censorship of all the contents that are uploaded to the Internet,” said Salgado, who also believes that this mechanism would allow giant platforms to selectively remove those contents considered as “annoying” under the pretext of “copyright infringement”, generating a defencelessness to the user. On the contrary, the European Parliament states that the text “includes provisions to ensure that copyright law is observed online without unfairly hampering the freedom of expression that has come to define the internet.”
It was also discussed whether the Directive will impact negatively on the small platforms due to the costs of having to develop expensive filtering technologies. However, after the amendments made by the MEPs to the original text, the Directive specifies that small platforms, online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, or open source software platforms, such as GitHub, will be excluded from the requirement to comply with copyright rules. These changes have not convinced Salgado though, who insisted that “if this measure is approved only giants like Google will be able to pay and apply these systems, while small platforms will disappear from the internet to avoid legal risks.”
On the other hand, article 11 introduces “the link tax”, which allows the media to charge aggregators and social networks for linking news on their pages. The objective is that artists, script authors, news publishers, and journalists get paid for their work when it is used by sharing platforms. The text also specifically requires that “journalists themselves, and not just their publishing houses, benefit from remuneration.” So, what is wrong with that? I, as a journalist, asked Salgado.
“These arguments have been constantly repeated by the lobby of the big copyright monopolies to misinform,” he answered. Salgado states Spain as an example of a country that has changed its law to apply charges in order to link to news websites (referring to the “Google Tax”) and he reminds the final consequences of doing it. “Google closed ‘Google News’ in Spain without any harm to their business while small independent news platforms have to deal now with many obstacles to do their jobs. No one in their right mind would launch an innovative start-up with this law,” he stated.
While for Salgado the small news platforms are in danger, for those in favor of the Directive this article could actually be one of the solutions to face the crisis of journalism. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ), for instance, supports it claiming the “need to establish fair practices in the online exploitation of news content.”
So, is it possible to fight for copyright without affecting the freedom in the internet? “Copyright is important, specifically the rights of the authors to live with dignity of their work, but this is not what is being discussed within this Directive,” answered Salgado. For the activist, the problem of the regulation is that “it aims to create a new Internet where you can only link and upload content with a license, and all those licenses belong to a few copyright monopolies, not to the authors.” Salgado points out that the opponents of the Directive stand for the author’s rights, and that the problem lies in the fact that “the regulation put the rights of the big copyright monopolies over the freedom of expression.”
From now on, the text will be modified behind closed doors and the final vote will probably take place in January 2019. The aim of #SaveYourInternet now, said Salgado, is to inform the public about “the hidden dangers of the new European Directive,” so they put pressure on MEPs to reject the regulation. “More than two million European citizens mobilized against the Directive. It may be that the Spanish media and parliamentary forces have not wanted to pay attention to this threat, but a large critical mass of citizens is aware of it,” he said. Is there a chance that the MEPs will rectify? Salgado remains positive: “We can win. This has happened other times (one of the most recent cases was the Net Neutrality campaign) and this is a historic opportunity to create copyright laws in Europe that are up to the 21st century,” he concluded.
