Let’s recall: On January 18, negotiations about the new EU copyright law came to an abrupt halt after member state governments failed to settle on a common position on Article 13, which would force internet platforms to censor their users’ posts using upload filters.
Without such an agreement, the final “trilogue” meeting, at which the law was supposed to be finalised together with representatives of the European Parliament, had to be called off – and time was running out, with EU elections that will reshuffle all the cards looming in May.
Contrary to some reports, though, Article 13 was not shelved because a majority of EU governments have come to understand that upload filters are costly, error-prone and threaten fundamental rights.
Without doubt, the unprecedented public opposition contributed to 11 member state governments voting against proceeding, up from just 6 last year. Still, there remained a majority in favour of Article 13 in general – just disagreement about details. This has now been resolved, and the process of enacting the law is back in motion – read on below.
An agreement required a compromise between France and Germany, who due to their size can make or break a majority. Both support upload filters – they just couldn’t agree on exactly who should be forced to install them:
🇫🇷 France’s position:
Article 13 is great and must apply to all platforms, regardless of size. They must demonstrate that they have done all they possibly could to prevent uploads of copyrighted material. In the case of small businesses, that may or may not mean using upload filters – ultimately, a court would have to make that call.
(This was previously the majority position among EU governments, before Italy’s newly elected government retracted their support for Article 13 altogether.)
🇩🇪 Germany’s position:
Article 13 is great, but it should not apply to everyone. Companies with a turnover below €20 million per year should be excluded outright, so as not to harm European internet startups and SMEs.
(This was closer to the European Parliament’s current position, which calls for the exclusion of companies with a turnover below €10 million and fewer than 50 employees.)
What brought them together: Making Article 13 even worse
In the Franco-German deal [PDF], which leaked today, Article 13 does apply to all for-profit platforms. Upload filters must be installed by everyone except those services which fit all three of the following extremely narrow criteria:
- Available to the public for less than 3 years
- Annual turnover below €10 million
- Fewer than 5 million unique monthly visitors
Countless apps and sites that do not meet all these criteria would need to install upload filters, burdening their users and operators, even when copyright infringement is not at all currently a problem for them. Some examples:
Upload filters required
- Discussion boards on commercial sites, such as the Ars Technica or Heise.de forums (older than 3 years)
- Patreon, a platform with the sole purpose of helping authors get paid (fails to meet any of the three criteria)
- Niche social networks like GetReeled, a platform for anglers (well below 5 million users, but older than 3 years)
- Small European competitors to larger US brands like Wykop, a Polish news sharing platform similar to Reddit (well below €10 million turnover, but may reach 5 million visitors and is older than 3 years)
On top of that, even the smallest and newest platforms, which do meet all three criteria, must still demonstrate they have undertaken “best efforts” to obtain licenses from rightholders such as record labels, book publishers and stock photo databases for anything their users might possibly post or upload – an impossible task. In practice, all sites and apps where users may share content will likely be forced to accept any license a rightholder offers them, no matter how bad the terms, and no matter whether they actually want that rightholder’s copyrighted material to be available on their platform, to avoid the massive legal risk of coming in conflict with Article 13.
In summary:
- France’s and Germany’s compromise on Article 13 still calls for nearly everything we post or share online to require prior permission by “censorship machines”, algorithms that are fundamentally unable to distinguish between copyright infringement and legal works such as parody and critique.
- It would change the web from a place where we can express ourselves (with some moderation applied after-the-fact on platforms) into one where big corporate rightholders are the gatekeepers of what can and can’t be published in the first place. It would allow these rightholders to bully any commercial site or app that includes a posting function.
- European innovation on the web would be discouraged by the new costs and legal risks for startups – even if they only apply when platforms turn 3 years old, or achieve some success. Foreign sites and apps who can’t afford armies of lawyers would be incentivised to just geoblock all EU-based users to be on the safe side.
Now everything hinges on the European Parliament
With this road block out of the way, the trilogue negotiations to finish the new copyright law are back on. With no time to lose, there will be massive pressure to reach an overall agreement within the next few days and pass the law in March or April.
Most likely, Germany’s and France’s compromise will be rubber-stamped by the Council on Friday, 8 February, and then a final trilogue negotiation will take place with the Parliament on Monday, 11 February.
MEPs, most of whom are fighting for reelection, will get one final say. Last September, a narrow majority for Article 13 could only be found in the Parliament after a small business exception was included that was much stronger than the foul deal France and Germany are now proposing – but there’s unfortunately no reason to believe that Parliament negotiator Axel Voss will stand his ground and insist on this point in trialogue. Instead, it will come down to the final vote in the plenary in March or April, where all MEPs have a say.
Whether MEPs will reject this harmful version of Article 13 (like they initially did last July) or bow to the pressure will depend on whether all of us make clear to them:
If you break the internet and enact Article 13, we won’t reelect you.Tweet this!
➡️ You can quickly and easily email your MEPs using this tool at SaveYourInternet.eu.
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Thank you
This Article 13’s just SSOO annoying. Can’t it just turn itself into a vapour trail and disappear for good?
If Article 13 is passed, is it a problem all over the world?
There are several ways in which Article 13 will have repercussions outside of Europe. It would apply to all internet platforms that are available to EU consumers. They would only need to apply these rules to Europeans, but they may choose to apply them to all their users for simplicity’s sake. In practice, EU law could not be directly enforced on companies that don’t have a local office in Europe (or bank accounts or servers) – although sites that continue to ignore Article 13 may well find themselves ordered blocked by European internet providers. (They may of course choose to block EU users themselves, preemptively.) Another aspect: The passing of Article 13 in the EU will surely embolden the big international media companies who lobbied for it to try to get laws to the same effect passed in the US and other countries. The topic may even make its way into future international trade agreements between the EU and other countries and be copied to other countries that way.
If you approve the European copyright directive, I, like millions of other European citizens, do not vote you in the next election, because this directive represents a real censorship that limits our freedom on the Web. Sincerely.
I was reading from others that chat apps like Discord and mesanger are exempt from art 13. Is that true? Or does the exemption only apply to the pm features and not group chats?
Ultimately, courts would have to make that call. Private communication like PMs and emails is explicitly excluded – but large chat groups anyone can join may well be interpreted as public platforms, in which case Article 13 would likely apply.
This is nothing but censorship and further thought control.
Why are my comments being censored here!?
I do not support this article. EU should not become a totalitarian society such as China. We should have the link without any censorship.
An absolutely unnecessary resurfacing! The European Union was supposed to be a symbol of unification and creativity! Not a totalitarian gulag hellbent on ruining the best method of creative expression known to mankind!
This is all because there is NO ONE from the previous 2 generations in the EU Parliament. They’re scared. I don’t want big business to control what i put out there, and as an online author, this will ruin everything i do for a hobby!
Article 13 needs to be shelved. We already have all the copyright we need, this is just a plot to allow big business to bully the common man and siphon more money from us
If this becomes law, I’d probably have to support parties who want my country to leave the European Union…
Unfortunately, it makes even less sense to regulate the internet in 28 different ways on one continent…
What provision is made for licenses where the copyright holder expressly permits use under certain conditions? The Creative Commons licenses allow different degrees of use; there are probably others. Would images also require Model Release consent, where people are shown? And what of photographs taken from public space, but looking at “restricted” areas?
How is user-generated content defined? If I’m the “user” of a cloud service provider (dropbox?), or a “user” of a virtual server provider, or a “user” of a service that enables the easy creation of websites like squarespace, would that count as user-generated content and the respective companies would have to somehow check if the “content” does not infringe any copyright? What if the user-generated content is encrypted?
The Directive targets services where you post content publicly and it is somehow organised or promoted (including by algorithms). Private cloud services are explicity excluded.
Aren’t you forgetting Bandcamp from the list of affected websites? It is the main platform specifically used by the indie musicians who the major label [insult removed] are pretending to care about.
Hello, I’ve got back to “Copyright Directive” topic after leaving it months ago, since, as it often happens in such cases, it’s really difficult for someone to form a clear opinion, because of all the possible ramifications and voices on the topic.
It’s clear to me that this directive is pretty much out-of-time, an attempt to tackle a modern phenomenon with an anachronistic approach. However, the principles it originates from may be understandable and my question is: what would then the parties opposing it suggest to protect the intellectual work of artists and professionals at the time of Internet? Thanks
Long answer: Musician and games developer here. The question of how we can “prevent infringement/piracy” of our work is nothing but counterproductive. The real question is how we can ensure that artists have a good quality of life, and can continue to do what they like.
Artists, musicians in particular, need to understand that being able to create their art alone for a living always has been, and always will be a one-in-a-million chance. And it has nothing to do with talent; look through BandCamp, and you’ll find tons of unknown artists who are just as talented as anyone on the radio. Even if we could completely stop piracy and raise streaming royalties, that dosen’t change the fact that almost EVERYONE who grew up playing music wishes they could do it for a living, even though the average person only needs so much new entertainment. Therefore there would still be way too much “competition” (as an indie, I don’t like using business terminology to describe arts).
However, just because you can’t make your art into your job dosen’t mean you ever have to give it up, or even that you have to identify with your day job. Our society defines people way too much by what they NEED to do to make money, whether that is also the thing they WANT to be recognized for or not.
It is easier than ever to make music, release it, and gain some sort of following, if you want to share your work with the world. But that is only because of open internet platforms like YouTube, Soundcloud, and especially Bandcamp, which accept submissions from absolutely anyone. These attempts to stop piracy would take that away.
Because you can now make and release music from anywhere, more and more places across the U.S. and world have thriving music scenes, even non-traditional arts towns like Pittsburgh, OKC, Tampa, Detroit, and Indianapolis, where I live. Here in the Circle City, we only had four local music venues at the start of the decade, two of which only played punk music (not that punk is bad), but now we have 17 local venues, and tons of artists of all genres. So clearly, music is not “dying because of piracy”, or being “devalued because it is free”. But our local music scene, along with those in other non-traditional arts towns, would not have grown so tremendously during this decade if it wasn’t for open internet platforms empowering smaller artists and giving them a platform to share their work with the world.
Even worse than the vigorously anti-piracy and anti-Spotify artists are the ones who DO realize that “oversaturation”, not piracy and streaming, is the biggest obstacle to them working as an artist full time, but support laws like this anyway. They will say that almost all of the new work released
by so-called “hobbyists” (a musician is simply a musician) online is “low-quality”, but Eric Pedigo, The Trees, Amity Beach, Ylliy, and many others I could mention prove that claim to be nothing but an extremely dehumanizing overgeneralization towards “hobbyists” and their great art, who deserve a platform just as much as these narcissistic “industry professionals”. Of course SOME really bad music is released by “hobbyists” and very small indies, but lots of major label artists are also awful.
So once again, a way to ensure our artists have a good quality of life and can continue making their art is the real issue, not preventing piracy or raising streaming rates. First, artists need to stop stigmatizing themselves and each other for having a day job and not working as an artist full time. For the ones who can’t find a day job, the solution is a universal basic income, which will be necessary at some point even if this weren’t an issue at all, due to automation of jobs (it isn’t just routine manual jobs that are prone to automation anymore). And of course, the ones who are lucky enough to make a living from their art alone, whether directly, or through an indirect method, such as crowdfunding, will be just fine as it is.
Short answer: Nothing
Hello, so what happens to the E-Commerce Directive and the case law ? are they not relevant if Article 13 passes?