Why in news?
The European Parliament recently approved a new copyright legislation, increasing the responsibilities of technology platforms and the rights of content producers.
What is the legislation on?
- It is commonly known as the EU Copyright Directive, or the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.
- It aims at balancing profits for the creators and profits for platforms that make the content publicly available.
- These platforms are online service providers that organise, promote, or categorise copyright-protected content uploaded by users.
- These include Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit and YouTube.
What are the key proposals?
- Article 11 allows publishers to gain copyright protection on their content that is being used by online content providers.
- The law makes it necessary for online content providers to get authorisation from the content creators.
- Without this, the provider will have to prevent availability of that content.
- This would give publishers the extended rights over online use of their content.
- But, it still allows for
- the legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users
- mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words
- Article 13 makes online content platforms liable to take “effective and proportionate measures” on copyright violations.
- It mandates them to remove violations expeditiously and demonstrate efforts to prevent future availability.
- This shifts the burden from the copyright holder to the platforms.
- Another key provision is the exemption to scientific researchers using text and data mining technologies, and educational purposes.
- The law also gives small enterprises more leeway in removal of unauthorised content.
What are the concerns?
- Platforms such as Facebook and Google make a lot of money from content that is made by others.
- However, technology platforms, academics, industry pioneers, and rights organisations are concerned of threats to freedom of expression and to “open online sharing”.
- Specifically, the “upload filter” of Article 13 could encourage companies to deploy algorithms that play it safe and over-restrict content.
- The resulting “censorship machines” will not be able to differentiate parodies, satire, and memes.
- This could turn the internet into a place where everything uploaded must be cleared by lawyers before it can find an audience.
What are the similar measures elsewhere?
- In 2013, a German law allowed publishers to stop search engines from using their news content beyond the headlines.
- The law was later diluted to allow for snippets of the content.
- In 2014, Spain passed a similar law giving publishers the right to levy licensing fees on online content aggregators.
- In response, Google News closed operations in Spain and removed Spanish media outlets from the platform.
- Both these laws have been dubbed the “Google tax”.
- YouTube’s “Content ID” system deploys filtering against copyright violations.
- However, Google marks a distinction between -
- proactive monitoring of content uploads
- Content ID’s mandate to simply react to infringement notifications in accordance with US Laws
- The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 exempts online service providers from manually screening or automatically filtering out copyright infringement.
- This places the burden on copyright holders to request the removal of violations.
- In India, the Information Technology Act of 2000 clears online-platform liability if the company can prove that
- there was no knowledge of the infringement
- due diligence was taken to prevent the violation
What next?
- The European internet-related legislation has consistently ruled far more strongly against Internet companies than the US.
- This significantly includes the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Now, before it becomes law, the EU Copyright Directive will go through “trilogue negotiations” until early 2019.
- This would be among the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament.
- Views from all stakeholders will be directed to Members of the European Parliament.
- After that, the Directive will need to go through the 27 member states.
Source: Indian Express