Red Alert: The EU Copyright Directive (XBIZ)
Read the full article by Corey Silverstein at XBIZ.com
If you operate a tube style platform such as YouTube, your world is about to change courtesy of the European Parliament. Less than a year after the GDPR became enforceable, Europe is at it again and this time, tube sites are the primary target.
On March 27, 2019, the European Parliament voted to adopt the European Union Directive on Copyright in the Single Market (the “Directive”) which was first introduced in 2016. The vote tally was 348 to 274 with 36 abstentions. The Directive, which is commonly being referred to as “Article 13” or “Article 17” (note that Articles 13 and 17 are only two parts of the Directive and the Directive has other controversial components) puts more responsibility on services that permit user-submitted content such as YouTube and social media platforms, to stop the sharing of copyright-infringing content.
The Directive was fiercely contested by some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Google, who argued that the new rules would be catastrophic for Europe’s creative and digital economies. Twitter is also concerned about the potential impact on the “open, creative and conversational nature of the internet.” Meanwhile, copyright holders such as Paul McCartney support and argue that the Directive is meant to compensate copyright holders for the works that they created.
The 64 pages of amendments adopted for the Directive can be viewed online at EuroParl.Europa.eu, in addition to a press release titled “Questions and Answers on Issues about the Digital Copyright Directive,” which I encourage everyone to read.
