The proposed Copyright in the Digital Single Market has not been passed by MEP’s in the European Parliament today.
278 MEP’s voted in favour of the proposed copyright law, but were defeated in their motion as 318 voted against it.
The Directive will now be sent back to committees to be reworked and all EU MEP’s will get to vote on Articles 11 and 13 in September.
Great success: Your protests have worked! The European Parliament has sent the copyright law back to the drawing board. All MEPs will get to vote on #uploadfilters and the #linktax September 10–13. Now let's keep up the pressure to make sure we #SaveYourInternet! pic.twitter.com/VwqAgH0Xs5
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) July 5, 2018
Controversial
The two most controversial sections of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market are Article 11 also known as the Link Tax, and Article 13 which deals with uploading of material.
Article 11 of the directive aims to tackle the unfair use of published content online.
The directive sets out that news organisations and publishes now have an inalienable right to seek remuneration whenever a website or platform quotes a piece of their original content and then links back to the publishes site via a hyperlink or an embedded link.
Article 11 was amended by German MEP Axel Voss before it passed through committees so it now states that publishers have: “an inalienable right to obtain a fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses.”
This means that publishers and content creators are legally required to chase remuneration from anyone that links top their content. This takes away the option of free consent by organisations to the use of their content on other platforms.
Article 13
Article 13 deals with the European Commission’s upload filter proposal and sees greater copyright regulation onuses put on websites that facilitate any type of content upload from its users. This means that websites need to have licensing agreements with content creators if they are to have it on their site.
However, it would be nearly impossible to get a licences from every right holder individually and there is currently no catch all organisation that represents all the worlds’ copyrighted content.
This new Directive puts the onus on platforms and websites to control what is uploaded to their sites and to ensure it is within accepted copyright law.
The EU Directive itself lays out its solution which is: “The use of effective content recognition technologies,” this amounts to an upload filtering system that scans for copyrighted content.
If it had passed online operates would have had to install some form of content filtration system at a significant cost to their operation.
For a more detailed view of the history of this proposal see our earlier coverage here.
