What is Article 13? We explain the EU’s new copyright law

If we have a deal, the legislation will likely be translated into UK law but if there is no deal we understand that it won’t apply to the UK. UK Music is the industry organisation behind the British Music industry, representing organisations such as the BPI, Musicians Union and PRS. It welcomed the move as “a huge step forward for creators, the UK music industry and the millions who love the music we produce.” Google doesn’t like it and claimed that it could “change the web as we know it”.

The article intends to get news aggregator sites, such as Google News, to pay publishers for using snippets of their articles on their platforms. Press publications “may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers,” the Directive states. The Directive on Copyright would make online platforms and aggregator sites liable for copyright infringements, and supposedly direct more revenue from tech giants towards artists and journalists. Almost the entirety of the internet thrives on a law called Fair Use.

1. Notably, the final directive made it clear which sites would be liable for copyright infringement.
2. The European Parliament approved the draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in September 2018.
3. There are fears it could outlaw news aggregators as we know them or even prevent any sites other than giants like Google, which could afford a license, from linking to articles at all.
4. For example, new music tracks remixing and sampling other artists could find themselves blocked.

Currently, YouTube can use algorithms and other clever sauce to detect copyright content after it has been uploaded, sometimes this can be a long time after upload. And generally your content is not removed, you just can’t put advertising against it. It refers to services that primarily exist to give the public access to “protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users”, so it is likely to cover services such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Soundcloud. While this is a European matter, the outcome affects all internet users and services around the world. As we saw after the implementation of GDPR, some services blocked European users rather than complying with the law. This edition of the directive expanded the definitions, made concessions, and included clarifications.

What is the EU Article 13?

Like many legal documents, it isn’t immediately clear what that means. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. It’d force all online platforms to police and prevent the uploading of copyrighted content, or make people seek the correct licenses to post that content.

What is Article 13 and if it’s that bad, why aren’t people panicking?

Ultimately, it all depends how much internet platforms invest in artificial intelligence. If the AI is good enough to work out the difference between a meme and thieving copyrighted material, Article 13 could work. Because the onus will be on individual websites and internet convert russian rouble to euro service providers, they will also face the repercussions. As such, some fear that they will aggressively seek to delete content which is potentially troublesome.

The video could then be taken down, regardless of whether they had a valid claim, with the creator all but powerless to prevent it. This is one of the reasons to host videos on Vimeo rather than YouTube. After the draft legislation was published, many critics argued the case that the EU’s Article 13 proposal would be the end of meme culture. By similar logic, popular remix culture would be lost so that could mean the end of user-generated remixes and parodies, and of the platforms that host them like YouTube and SoundCloud. This is a transformative change from the way the internet has developed.

“The onus will be on, for example, the social media platforms to filter their content and ensure that copyright is not breached on their platform,” says Shriane. The final version of Article 13 says services must make “best efforts” to remove copyright-protected videos in cases where “the rights holders have provided… the relevant and necessary information”. Article 13 says content-sharing services must license copyright-protected material from the rights holders. Many of the world’s most popular websites rely on user-generated content. Notably, social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter would be affected by the legislation as their platforms depend upon it.

Article 13: Europe’s hotly debated revamp of copyright law, explained

However, critics say the opposite is true, with smaller websites most adversely affected by the directive. On April 15, 2019, the European Council – the political body composed of government ministers from each of the 28 EU member states – voted to adopt into EU law the copyright directive as passed by the European Parliament in March. Six member states (Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden) voted against adopting the directive while three (Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia) abstained from the vote. This will affects our ‘Muricans in the United States too, since many sites we use on a daily basis are accessible worldwide.

Both the Copyright Directive and GDPR could dramatically affect and change things about the internet as we know it. But they also differ significantly, not just in scope, but also in how they’re viewed and received by the world beyond Brussels. The EU’s proposed European Copyright foreign currency time deposits Directive is being called a war on memes.

Thus citizens of Europe who are against Article 13 are advised to get in touch with their MEPs before this vote. However, more broadly, internet users are concerned about the impact of the legislation on copied or remixed content. In addition, some argue that the proposal gives no indication about which internet platforms would need to introduce these new filters. To become law, EU member states must pass legislation that adheres to the rules set out in the directive, so it is likely to be some time before the restrictions take effect. There is likely to be a series of campaigns against the changes as well as legal challenges in national and EU courts. The rules are also intended to challenge the power of tech giants like a roadmap to continuous delivery pipeline maturity Google and YouTube, forcing them to pay for content they aggregate.

The Directive on Copyright has gained vocal critics on both sides of the debate, but you can broadly chunk up defenders and detractors into two categories. One random discord server I was in just linked everyone to saveyourinternet.eu because apparently EU is trying to kill internet as we know it. Saveyourinternet.eu has a great tool for finding and contacting your MEP, and has a few prewritten scripts and talking points for them. Phone calls are generally the most effective method, since you know they actually answer them. If you’ve been lurking around the internet recently, you may have seen a lot of drama about this “Article 13” in the EU going around. Since most of the other sites are political action groups that want your money, and many others do a garbage job of explaining this, I’ll try to explain this as briefly and simply as possible.

With such confusion, some creators have instead turned instead to copyright alternatives like copyleft. Copyright differs between countries, with some taking a much harder stance, while others mostly ignore it. The European Union (EU) currently has 28 member states, the UK’s exit—or Brexit—notwithstanding. The union represents one of the most significant trading blocks in the world, and as such its regulatory framework has worldwide repercussions. However, given that Britain has adopted other European-wide rulings such as General Data Protection Regulation into its own legislation, there’s a chance the same would happen in this case too. These are just some of the possibilities, but because of how vague the law is, it’s hard to see how it might be upheld when the time comes.

“Platforms unable or unwilling to pay licensing fees would need to shut down or disallow users from sharing links with snippets,” said Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda. An organized campaign against Article 13 warns that it’d affect everything from memes to code, remixes to livestreaming. Almost 400,000 people have so far signed a Change.org petition against the provision. Those votes happened just weeks after Europe’s last big piece of internet-related legislation — the General Data Privacy Regulation ( GDPR) — kicked in. Although websites less than three years old, or with less than €10 million annual turnover are exempt, the websites will still need to plan for when those caveats no longer apply to them.

This is the part of the Directive on Copyright that has most people worried. Once YouTube became the internet’s de facto video site, copyright holders began to pressure Google to remove unlicensed copyrighted content. The reason why this article has been dubbed the “meme ban” is that no one is sure whether memes, which are often based on copyrighted images, will fall foul of these laws. Article 17 clarifies that a service must seek authorization from the rights holder to display copyrighted content. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, “Article [17] advocates argue that online services won’t need to filter if they license the catalogues of big entertainment companies.”

If you thought Article 13 is controversial, Article 11 could be more so. It forces search engines and other aggregators to pay license fees on short snippets of content. Google even shared sample search pages back in January which removed the bits that could potentially fall foul of the legislation.