The Committee for Culture and Education (CULT) and the Committee for Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) certainly didn’t prioritize culture, education or research in today’s copyright votes.
Open access down the drain
Both votes were in favour of the extra copyright for news publishers creating charges for the use of snippets and links.
Incredibly, the ITRE committee – responsible for research and usually a staunch defender of open access – even voted to extend the extra copyright to academic publications, which would make open access publishing virtually impossible. It would stop people from linking to academic content, despite the content itself being free. This would apply to both online publications and print journals. The chilling effects on the spread of academic works and information would be substantial.
The EP Committee for research making open access publishing virtually impossible since 2017! Tweet this!
Link previews like this one would require a license.Fueling the Censorship machine
When it comes to the provision on forcing online platforms to use content filters, both committees followed the European Commission’s proposal, including and underlining the liability of the online platform hosting providers. 
The obligation would be harmful to freedom of expression as machines can’t tell if content is protected free speech or an infringement, and would take down legal content.
This filtering demand could also break EU startups. SoundCloud‘s senior policy manager has said that they would not exist today if this content filtering demand had been in place when they were a startup.
This proposal would not only lead to economical disadvantages for the EU and kill innovation, it is also in violation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which forbids the indiscriminate monitoring of all users’ uploads.
The EP Committees for research and culture voted against research and culture in today’s copyright vote Tweet this!
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