European Parliament Advances Copyright Bill Despite Critics
With the law’s provisions, news publishers would have “the right to negotiate payment for ‘digital use’ of their content by tech firms,” and “require online-video sites like Google’s YouTube to pay ‘proportionate remuneration’ for their works, and take measures to prevent uploads of content for which it doesn’t have a license.” Publishers say social media and aggregators undercut their own efforts to build a subscriber base.
The impact of such a law is unknown. WSJ notes that, “when Spain passed a similar law, Google shut down its local Google News service” and “when Germany passed a copyright law, publishers gave Google licenses for free rather than lose traffic.”
The tech industry argues that being responsible for “ensuring that no unlicensed copyright material is uploaded to their services would create a costly obligation that would discourage smaller companies from offering services,” but the bill’s supporters say the law’s language exempts “small and micro” platforms. The law will also “exempt noncommercial encyclopedias like Wikipedia from the rules.”
The law’s most controversial articles are Article 11, “which proposes a neighboring copyright for snippets of journalistic content — requiring news aggregators such as Google News to gain a license from the publisher to use this type of content … [and] Article 13; which seeks to shift liability for platform users’ copyright infringements onto the platforms themselves.” With regard to the latter, opponents say it will force them to use filters “to monitor all content before it’s posted, having a chilling effect on Internet expression.”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/european-parliament-advances-copyright-bill-despite-critics/