The Dark Ages of the Internet have begun.
That’s how much the European Copyright Directive is going to change everything you used to
know about the Internet.
From place of ultimate individual empowerment, innovation, and freedom, Internet will now
be a tool for automated surveillance and centralized control.
The European Union’s Copyright Directive is another hit that is going to leave a mark
on the face of the Internet.
This is how Europe will destroy the Internet.
Traditionally, those who uploaded content were primarily responsible for its legality.
This rule has been discarded.
The directive makes online platforms liable for the content generated by their users.
That means that on top of punitive and vaguely worded terms of services, Internet gate-keepers
like Facebook, Google, or Twitter will be required by law to proactively monitor and
censor content.
These online platforms will be required by law to create automated mechanisms to filter
infringing content.
Such technology would essentially turn into “upload filters”.
These automated filters won’t be recognizing between infringing and legitimate content,
like parodies, satire, commentary or other instances of fair use.
To balance the flaws of automated upload filters, the directive also requires platforms to build
staffed systems for filing complaints for illegitimate takedowns.
All of these measures specified in Article 13 would significantly increase the costs
of running online platforms.
The tight grip of corporate gate-keepers will be even further enforced.
By pricing out their competition through legal barriers and costs, Google, Microsoft, Apple
and other tech giants will reaffirm their dominance in Europe.
Only big already established websites will be able take the burden of the copyright law.
It will be difficult for small start-ups and new alternatives to find investors due to
increased risk of liability for copyright infringement.
This will reduce the much needed competition to social media sites like Facebook or YouTube
which have been abusing their dominant positions for years.
This copyright law is so punitive it’s unlikely modern Internet-enabled technologies and platforms
would exist if Article 13 had been in place before.
Copyright holders are now granted an ultimate veto over platforms to determine what goes
and what doesn’t.
Emergence of copyright trolls is going to become a daily nightmare that small platforms
and independent creators won’t have means to deal with.
Copyright holders will be able to claim remuneration from any party using their content in any way.
YouTube creators are most likely going to be hit the hardest by this as they’ll be
treated guilty until proven innocent not only by the YouTube’s own copyright system, but
by the European law as well.
YouTuber’s position in Europe is thus going to lose all legal ground.
Article 11 is going to grant publishers the so called “link tax”, which would require
sites like Google and Facebook to pay publishers for hyperlinking their content and showing
snippets, thumbnails, or excerpts from their articles.
But it is very possible that content aggregators like Google will simply discontinue their
services in European countries rather than pay the link tax.
This has already happened to Google News in Spain in 2015, after the government mandated
that Google pays publishers a fee for linking to their content.
In the end, content publishers suffered a decrease in traffic from 6 to 14 percent and
news coverage became less diverse and more concentrated overall.
Content creators from outside of Europe will also see significant decrease in viewership
as European audience will automatically be barred from viewing protected content.
It’s very likely that YouTube will develop a tool that will automatically block viewership
of videos with protected content by audience from European countries.
News aggregators might end up not showing European content to European users anymore.
Privacy will be significantly reduced.
The Copyright Directive is going to have contradictory effects to GDPR that was set to protect privacy
of European Internet users.
Since much of the legal and technological requirements to abide by the new copyright
law will be too expensive for small European businesses, they’ll have to outsource content
monitoring and filtering to much bigger global corporations based in China or the United States.
This copyright law is thus a gateway to automated surveillance.
There is no incentive from the directive to let legitimate content through the upload
filter obligation.
Big publishers and established media organizations will easily get priority over independent
creators and journalists, which will result in further televization of Internet content.
This will be Internet without content neutrality.
Many websites will simply cut off their services to European users.
Similar case happened when the US government enacted the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking
Act, which also holds platforms liable for the content generated by their users.
Reddit and Craigslist simply shut down their personals’ sections because they couldn’t
risk the costs of the new obligations.
Political power will be able to censor much of their opposition by calling for copyright
takedowns.
Similar occasion happened in Ecuador where the government sent at least 74 DMCA notices
on behalf of politicians, political parties, state media, and state agencies.
Fake news will see a new emergence as they would be less likely to claim “link tax”
than legitimate news outlets.
Implications of this copyright directive are so severe the United Nations Human Rights
Council denounced these efforts saying: States and intergovernmental organizations
should refrain from establishing laws or arrangements that would require the “proactive” monitoring
or filtering of content, which is both inconsistent with the right to privacy and likely to amount
to pre-publication censorship.
Enacting this law will shift the balance of power in favor of US-based news providers
and content hosts.
But even they were lobbying heavily against this law.
Why?
Because Google might be held liable to pay billions to music industry for their claims
they make on various Google services, including YouTube.
For two decades now, publishers and artists have been losing revenue from traditional
streams due to emergence of Internet-based competition.
YouTube, iTunes, eBay, Spotify and other services have drastically changed how people consume media.
Publishers and artists claim YouTube pays them too little for playing their music on
their platform.
While YouTube pays 67cents per user annually, Spotify rewards artists with $20 per user
annually.
Music artists would say this is a value gap that’s unacceptable.
YouTube argues this revenue would otherwise not be generated, because it’s coming from
people who would not pay for their music anyway.
Instead of adapting to the new environment, the industry decided to change the rules of
the game that would benefit them.
The key player influencing the vote in the European Parliament were German lobbyists.
Axel Springer, a major German publisher, has for decades had close ties with German political
class including Angela Merkel.
Their Trojan horse, Günther Oettinger serves as a European Commissioner for Budget and
Human Resources and was a European Commissioner for Digital Economy.
For years Oettinger was pushing for stricter copyright laws that would favor publishers
like Axel Springer.
The Chairman and CEO of Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, is a member of the European Publishers
Council and president of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers.
Copyright lobbyists even infiltrated the circles around Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker,
who were also joined by Swedish Bonnier, a media group of 175 companies in 15 countries,
Spanish PRISA, and Spain’s Prime Minister Mariono Rajoy.
European Union wants to make Continental markets more resistant to the dominance of US corporations.
But the cost of achieving this goal appears to be too high.
This strategy aims to benefit European corporations more than it benefits European people.
EU decision makers generally lack democratic accountability, so any major legal change
is in their hands, and the hands of the lobbyists.
Internet users like you and me are just caught in the cross-fire between lobbyists from different
industries and the politicians they are trying to influence.
I would like to end this video with a quote from Cory Doctorow from the Electronic Frontier
Foundation: We suffered a crushing setback today, but
it doesn't change the mission…
If this vote had gone the other way, we'd still be fighting today.
And tomorrow.
And the day after.
The fight to preserve and restore the free, fair and open Internet is a fight you commit
yourself to, not a fight that you win.
The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
If you are looking to join the fight to take back the Internet, share this message on your
platforms of choice.
Subscribe to my channel and find out more about how you can take control of your digital rights.