EU Copyright Directive

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

1. the legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users
2. 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 -

1. proactive monitoring of content uploads
2. 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

1. there was no knowledge of the infringement
2. 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