Felix Reda

Before the summer, the European Parliament decided to rethink its position on EU copyright reform plans, including upload filters and a “link tax”, after massive protests.

Refusing to address the problems of his proposals in meaningful ways, rapporteur Axel Voss (EPP) failed to build broad consensus around an alternative plan. Consequently, over 200 individual proposals for changes were filed. MEPs will vote on all of them on Wednesday, September 12.

Below, I am publishing the alternatives MEPs will choose from. Call your MEP today and urge them to choose one of the options that avoids filtering uploads or restricting links!

cc-by Oli R

Article 13: Upload filters?

Upload filters with limited exceptions remain upload filters: Expensive, yet error-prone censorship infrastructure that will over-block legal posts, because it can’t tell allowed uses of copyrighted material (like parodies) from infringement. The safeguards proposed by Voss and Cavada are not enough to address the concerns raised by academics, internet experts, civil rights defenders and many others.

Limiting the scope of legal liability to music and video hosting sites is a step in the right direction, saving a lot of other platforms (forums, public chats, source code repositories, etc.) from negative consequences.

“Outsourcing” the inspection of published content to rightholders via an API – and with a fair process in place – is an interesting idea, and certainly much better than general liability. However, it would still be challenging for startups to implement.

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Article 11: A “link tax”?

With their proposals, Voss and Cavada are finally admitting that my warnings were well-founded, after trying to deny it for so long: The new right established by Article 11 would indeed significantly threaten the hyperlink, a core building block of the internet.

Allowing links to include “individual words” of the linked-to article is almost worse than the rejected text, though: It implies that using the whole title of an article in a link is NOT allowed. That, of course, is common practice on the internet today – and it causes no harm whatsoever to news publishers. Cavada’s exception for “very short excerpts” simply copy/pastes the approach of the failed German neighbouring right, where courts have been debating for five years what “very short” means, without coming to any conclusion. Publishers have lost millions in court costs in the process and innovative news startups have gone out of business. With both of these proposals, most of the criticisms voiced by 169 copyright academics about creating such a new right still stand.

The reasonable alternative remains the so called “presumption rule” that simplifies how press publishers handle copyright issues, without touching your freedom to link.

Forcing platforms to give press publishers full control over how their articles are displayed (using Robots.txt) privileges one interest group over any other for no clear reason, but at least it would avoid the significant collateral damage to the freedom to link that a new exclusive right would cause.

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Article 3: Text and data mining

The Text and Data Mining issue has received less public attention – but if left unfixed, it will limit how individuals, journalists, startups and many others can work with data and thwart Europe’s ambitions to become a leader in the AI industry.

While us Greens have always supported “the right to read is the right to mine”, we decided to also introduce MEP Voss’ original compromise proposal, which he later withdrew, because it may have better chances of getting a majority. (If neither of the alternative proposals does, the original text still stands.)

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The “better copyright” package

I’ve tabled several further amendments to fix some bad decisions narrowly made by the Legal Affairs Committee [Download]:

1. Add a copyright exception for user-generated content (tabled with the ALDE, GUE and EFDD groups as well as over 50 individual MEPs from across the political spectrum) – previously rejected in the Legal Affairs Committee by a single vote
2. Add a copyright exception for freedom of panorama (tabled with GUE and 50 individual MEPs) – previously narrowly rejected in the Legal Affairs Committee
3. Clarify that links aren’t copyright infringement – previously rejected in the Legal Affairs Committee by a single vote
4. Remove the proposed extra copyright for sports event organizers – previously narrowly added by the Legal Affairs Committee
5. Revert the Legal Affairs Committee’s harmful change to Article 6, which currently says that you cannot use a copy made under one copyright exception for another copyright exception. For example, university libraries would not be allowed to use copies of books initially made for preservation purposes for education.

Update 6 September 2018: The full list of amendments is now available here.

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This vote is our best chance to prevent EU copyright reform from causing lasting harm to the open internet. All of you helped earned us this second chance by protesting against upload filters and a link tax before the summer – together, we made history.

Now we must follow through: Call your MEP today and urge them to choose one of the options that avoids filtering uploads or restricting links!

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