Basic Points of the new internet copyright rule are:

Internet platforms are liable for content that users upload
Some uploaded material, such as memes or GIFs, now specifically excluded from directive
Hyperlinks to news articles, accompanied by “individual words or very short extracts”, can be shared freely
Journalists must get a share of any copyright-related revenue obtained by their news publisher
Start-up platforms subject to lighter obligations
The free internet faces many battles. We have the morality battles, privacy wars, plagiarism skirmishes, security standoffs… In this battle for the right to internet godfatherism, internet giants such as Facebook and Twitter often fall prey to the predatory nature of politicians and other suited or uniformed folks. Their secret weapon? Regulations, more regulations!

In this reactionist era, we have seen how the internet has been increasingly policed by acts of law, public hearing of it’s giants and a total lack of citizen input to the directions those law or hearings take. Over the years, 2 continents that ironically preach more freedoms are the main bad guys when it comes to the free internet.

I challenge you to do an analysis on how many times the United States and European Union have dragged certain aspect of the internet to court or their Congress hearings or to their Parliamentary hearings compared to other continents like Asia and Africa. The Russiagate annoyance led to the the invitation of Mark Zuckerberg to congress, led to some stupid algorithm to counter fake news (As if algorithm are sentient), the European Union case is not so much about reactionist tendencies like the United States, it’s more of a table shaking experiment.

On the positive side of the spectrum, this new copyright rules for the internet seems to be in favor of the little man to some extent. I love and dislike the new rule.

The new legislation has been met with cheers from big publishers and record labels, and dismay from the rest of the internet, with many fearing it will kill creative freedom with big tech like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter being forced to block content that might infringe on copyright. It has been suggested that online platforms can embed filters that would automatically analyze the content being uploaded, compare it to a database of copyrighted works, and stop it from being released if found in violation of copyright law.

Article 11 of the law known as the “link tax” requires a blogger, a news aggregator or a media-monitoring website to seek permission from the copyright owner to share links and snippets of its content.

However, for many netizens the most nefarious part of the directive is that it could have outlawed memes and GIFs, previously protected under a parody clause. Many breathed a sigh of relief when the European Parliament noted that sharing memes and GIFs would be “specifically excluded” from its scope, but others remain skeptical about an automated filter’s ability to tell parody from copyright infringement.

According to the European Union:

Creatives and news publishers will be empowered to negotiate with internet giants thanks to new copyright rules which also contain safeguards on freedom of expression.

The directive aims to ensure that the longstanding rights and obligations of copyright law also apply to the internet. YouTube, Facebook and Google News are some of the internet household names that will be most directly affected by this legislation.
The directive also strives to ensure that the internet remains a space for freedom of expression.

Tech giants to share revenue with artists and journalists

The directive aims to enhance rights holders’ chances, notably musicians, performers and script authors, (creatives) as well as news publishers, to negotiate better remuneration deals for the use of their works when these feature on internet platforms. It does this by making internet platforms directly liable for content uploaded to their site and by automatically giving the right to news publishers to negotiate deals on behalf of its journalists for news stories used by news aggregators.

Locking in freedom of expression

Numerous provisions are specifically designed to ensure the internet remains a space for freedom of expression.

As sharing snippets of news articles is specifically excluded from the scope of the directive, it can continue exactly as before. However, the directive also contains provisions to avoid news aggregators abusing this. The ‘snippet’ can therefore continue to appear in a Google News newsfeeds, for example, or when an article is shared on Facebook, provided it is “very short”.
Uploading protected works for quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody or pastiche has been protected even more than it was before, ensuring that memes and Gifs will continue to be available and shareable on online platforms.

Many online platforms will not be affected

The text also specifies that uploading works to online encyclopedias in a non-commercial way, such as Wikipedia, or open source software platforms, such as GitHub, will automatically be excluded from the scope of this directive. Start-up platforms will be subject to lighter obligations than more established ones.

Stronger negotiating rights for authors and performers

Authors and performers will be able to claim additional remuneration from the distributor exploiting their rights when the remuneration originally agreed is disproportionately low when compared to the benefits derived by the distributer.

Helping cutting edge research and preserving heritage

The directive aims to make it easier for copyrighted material to be used freely through text and data mining, thereby removing a significant competitive disadvantage that European researchers currently face. It also stipulates that copyright restrictions will not apply to content used for teaching or illustration.

Finally, the directive also allows copyrighted material to be used free-of-charge to preserve cultural heritage. Out-of-commerce works can be used where no collective management organisation exists that can issue a license.
How this directive changes the status quo
Currently, internet companies have little incentive to sign fair licensing agreements with rights holders, because they are not considered liable for the content that their users upload. They are only obliged to remove infringing content when a rights holder asks them to do so. However, this is cumbersome for rights holders and does not guarantee them a fair revenue. Making internet companies liable will enhance rights holders’ chances (notably musicians, performers and script authors, as well as news publishers and journalists) to secure fair licensing agreements, thereby obtaining fairer remuneration for the use of their works exploited digitally.

The wordings of the EU new copyright rule looks nice enough but why is the internet sad about the affair? Websites and businesses across Europe protested against the controversial changes to online copyright being introduced by the European Union.

Ahead of the final vote on the legislation on March 26th, a number of European Wikipedia sites went dark for the day, blocking all access and directing users to contact their local EU representative to protest the laws. Other major sites, such as Twitch and PornHub, are showing protest banners on their homepages and social media. Meanwhile, any users uploading content to Reddit was shown this notice:



Although the directive mostly contains common-sense changes for the internet age, two provisions have been singled out by critics as potentially dangerous.

These are Article 11, which lets publishers charge platforms if they link to their stories (the ‘link tax’), and Article 13, which makes platforms legally responsible for users uploading copyrighted material (the so-called ‘upload filter’).

Champions of the directive say these laws will give publishers and content creators the tools they need to reclaim the value of their work from US tech giants. But critics say the politicians behind the legislation do not understand the breadth of the laws they are proposing, and that the directive, if implemented, will harm free expression online.

Article 13 is particularly dangerous, say critics. It will make all platforms hosting user-generated content (everything from Imgur to Tumblr to YouTube) legally responsible for users uploading copyrighted content. The only way to stop these uploads, say critics, will be to scan content before its uploaded, leading to the creation of filters that will likely be error-prone and abused by copyright trolls.

Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, said the rules would be a “net loss for free knowledge.” Volunteer editors for the German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak Wikipedias have all blacked out their sites for the day — an action that recalls the much more widespread internet blackouts that took place in 2012 to protest the controversial US SOPA bill.

As well as the website blackout, more than five million internet users have signed a petition protesting Article 13.

The joke will most likely be on content creators, the very people the new laws are meant to protect, while also leaving internet users with less to laugh about, literally.

Content creators who oppose the new rule say that it could end up censoring their work instead of protecting copyrighted material as intended.

At issue is a portion of the proposed directive called Article 13, which requires internet platforms to police content for copyright violations before it goes up, rather than responding to violation complaints on a case-by-case basis, as they do now. In order to contend with the massive amounts of content being uploaded every moment to sites like YouTube, for example, the platforms will need to install “upload filters” which will analyze works and reject copyright violators. But the automated filters aren’t exactly discerning, and they won’t be able to consider all the nuances of intellectual property law, which does allow copyrighted materials to be used for parody, news, and when a work is transformative, for example.

An upload filter won’t necessarily be able to distinguish between a meme, say, that relies on a copyrighted image for humorous purposes, and infringement. That means content based on copyrighted materials, but fairly used, will end up censored, according to the legislation’s opponents, who have dubbed Article 13 the “meme ban.”

This legislation will harm independent and commercial creators, as well as the cultures in which they operate, says digital rights activist Hannah Machlin, who is working with Create Refresh, a group of artists and about 40 organizations, including Creative Commons and Wikimedia France, to oppose Article 13. Machlin argues that the filters will end up censoring political satire—and free speech, as a result. Parodying political events and figures is critical to maintaining debate in a lively democracy, she contends, but the upload filters won’t recognize the content.

Beyond parody, the upload filters will restrict the circulation of all kinds of art, she argues. “The filters won’t know when nudity is artistic as opposed to pornographic,” Machlin tells Quartz. And creators of many forms which rely on sampling will suffer, like DJs. On a deeper level, the legislation will have a chilling effect on art in general, as all creative work is highly referential, argues street artist Jack El Diablo on the Create Refresh website. Restrictions on use, monitored by machines, will end up stunting creativity, rather than protecting the rights of content producers, he and others believe.

Web Takeover

Paradoxically, the new law will likely also end up consolidating the power that major tech companies already have on the internet, rather than just making them more responsible netizens as initially intended. Giants like Google, which will have to create a filtering algorithm, will end up selling their filtering services to smaller platforms that can’t afford to develop their own. And that means big companies will end up being the European internet’s de facto intellectual property police and will have access to even more data than ever before. Machlin and others are worried about handing over all this power to major corporations.

Any site that hosts user-generated content will need a filter if it’s been online for three years, generates more than €10 million annually (about $11.33 million), and has more than 5 million unique monthly visitors. Although Article 13 doesn’t explicitly mandate automated upload filters, this is the only feasible way to handle the mass of content going online all the time. So, the practical result will be automated culling of creative content done according to algorithms which are designed by tech giants with their considerable means.

Smaller platforms will use the filters created by large IT companies for this purpose, just as they already use analytics tools by Facebook, Amazon and Google, according to Ulrich Kelber, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information. Article 13 will thus consolidate big tech’s hold on the internet and presents a huge data privacy risk, he says. In a Feb. 26 statement about the copyright directive, officially translated into English for the Foss Patents blog, Kelber warns:

At the end of the day, this would result in an oligopoly consisting of a few vendors of filtering technologies, which would then be instrumental to more or less the entire Internet data traffic of relevant platforms and services. The wealth of information those vendors would receive about all users in the process is evidenced by, among other examples, current media coverage of data transfers by eHealth apps to Facebook. Therefore, the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information sees a clear and present danger of a further concentration of data in the hands of an oligopoly of vendors as an adverse effect of the present EU proposal.

In September, The Verge wrote about the new EU copyright directive, stating, “Exactly how the legislation will be interpreted will be up to individual nations, but the shift in the balance of power is clear: the web’s biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet.” The law hasn’t even been finally voted upon, and it will take two more years for individual nations to integrate the EU legislation into their own legal frameworks, but already that initial perception seems both naive and dated.

Based on Kelber’s concerns, it now seems much more likely that the copyright directive will only tighten big tech’s hold and that upload filters could end up trapping small platforms, creators, and internet users in the wide net being cast in the name of creativity.

Fun facts about this controversial law is that Beatles star Paul McCartney, an artist, backed the law, but Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web, cautioned against it.

From https://decoffeehublounge./2019/03/27/making-sense-of-the-new-eu-internet-copyright-rule/