Mexico. Last week, the European Parliament approved with 438 votes out of a total of 664 an amendment to the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market 2016/0280 (COD). The amendment seeks to improve conditions for digital content creators and to bring the European Union's policies into line with the current state of affairs. Despite the majority support reflected in the last vote, this regulation has not been free of criticism.
This legislative proposal has generated controversy due to the consequences of the changes and additions made to Articles 11 and 13 of the directive that originally dates from 2001. These could radically change the way Internet users share and access the information available on the network.
With regard to Article 11, known as the link tax, the proposed amendments seek to incorporate into the regulatory framework the new reality faced by the creative industries in terms of their relationship with consumers. Today, increasingly importantly, Internet users obtain content that is relevant to them through "intermediaries" and not directly from its creators. In that sense, the directive would call on national authorities to implement actions that allow content creators to participate in the profits generated by intermediaries (Google News, Facebook, Flipboard, etc.) for the dissemination of their works.
The discussion about the regulation becomes more complex when it comes to Article 13, known as upload filter, where it is considered that a company that protects and / or accesses large amounts of content uploaded to the network by its users can be subject to legal demand by those who own the copyright of the content. With this, companies such as Google, Facebook or Youtube could be sued for containing copyrighted content without a prior agreement.
One of the main criticisms of these measures is that they could be detrimental to users' freedom of expression. It has been argued that the possibility of sanctions for the operators referred to could lead to limitations on lawful expressions of certain types of content including sometimes generated by users from third-party content (for example memes). It should be noted that the same directive mentions, in Article 13, that the coordination resulting from these measures must not result in the impediment of the availability of content that does not infringe rights, including by providing for mechanisms for complaints and correction of excesses in their application.
Although the directive still requires the approval of the European Commission and also its subsequent implementation (to some extent even interpretation) by the member states, it is expected that the next vote, which will take place in January 2019, will remain in the same direction as the one that happened last week.
What is a reality is that while we continue to move towards the digitalization of part of our lives, we will have to get used to acquiring rights and obligations just like in non-digital life. We wouldn't expect things that are protected in the physical world to stop being in the digital world, would we?
Text written by Gonzalo Rojon, from The Competitive Intelligence Unit.
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