The European Parliament will Vote on the Disputed Copyright Directive

The European Parliament will vote today on the Copyright Directive, which, in an effort to protect copyright, risks changing the way social networks, content sharing platforms and search engines work, reports Dnevnik. 

Despite the many criticisms that the text of the directive is unclear, dangerous for freedom of speech, contrary to other directives and does not solve the problems of the creative industry, the European People's Party (EPP), in the person of the rapporteur Axel Foss, is determined to pass it during the parliament before the May elections.

In its current form, the directive is simply an example of bad lawmaking, the chairman of the board of the Digital Republic Association, said lawyer Anna Lazarova in an interview with Dnevnik. "The best option would be for Parliament to reject this directive and start from the beginning (...) The directive does not carry out real reform or solve the problems of the digital single market, but tries to address certain problems in certain industries without general solution"

Taxes on links

Art. 11 obliges sites to pay the media to quote anything except "individual words or very short excerpts" of their publications - an exception is made for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia but not for smaller search engines that could become competitors of Google. In fact, such laws aimed precisely against it were adopted in Germany and Spain.

"In Germany, publishers did not win anything from this proposal because Google simply changed the news display in Google News and stopped showing the long excerpts that would require a license, resulting in fewer people going to news websites because they were more likely to click on a link if there is an excerpt. "Publishers gave Google a free license to use excerpts, but did not do so for smaller search engines across Europe, ultimately giving Google a competitive edge." , said in an interview with "Dnevnik" the shadow rapporteur for the directive, Julia Reda of the Pirate Party.

After a question by Dnevnik if the requirements put small media and content creators in the vulnerable position that big sites do not want to pay for their content and therefore not distribute it, Foss pointed out that it would be beneficial for them to unite and to conduct collective bargaining for rights. "All creators and publishers already depend on the big platforms, especially from a big search engine, and we as legislators have to make sure this dependence is more balanced," he said in February.

Art. 13 obliges sites and apps where users can upload material, make an effort to buy licenses in advance for anything users can upload, and prevent copyright violations.

The European Parliament recalls that the directive "does not specify or list what tools, human resources or infrastructure may be needed to prevent the occurrence of non-remunerated material on the site, so there is no requirement for filters. However, if large platforms do not offer any innovative solutions, they may prefer to introduce filters - such filters are already being used by large companies - the criticisms that they sometimes remove legally contained may in some cases be justified, but they should be targeted at the platforms that design and implement the filters and not the legislator. "

This point of view, however, was disputed, apart from Internet activists, and by UN Special Rapporteur David Kay. "This massive pre-post filtering pressure is neither necessary nor proportionate to copyright infringement online," Kay wrote in a statement.

He also points out that there are no specific requirements for platforms to protect freedom of expression, and it is unclear how they will distinguish the legitimate use of copyrighted works - such as citation, criticism or parody. "Even experienced lawyers have difficulty distinguishing copyright offenses from exceptions," added Kay. "The lack of clear and precise language in the directive will create even more legal uncertainty."

The Council has proposed Art. 13 to be considered by the next European Parliament, but according to the rapporteur this is "unacceptable" because the creative industry will remain unprotected at the time, and there is no guarantee that the next line will be able to reach an agreement. France and Germany agreed that they want exemptions for small platforms - we can not accept that, he told Dnevnik in February because "we can not just continue adding exceptions."

In the end, these exceptions were accepted, but they only apply to sites that were created less than three years ago, have less than 10 million euro turnover per year and less than 5 million unique users per month. The violation of even one of these conditions - such as the three years since the page was created - sends it within the scope of the directive.

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