With the approval in the European Parliament of the
final text of the Copyright Directive, which will be definitely put to
the vote in a very few months’, the European Union has lost a historic
opportunity to produce copyright legislation adapted for the Internet in
the twenty-first century. What the European Parliament will finally
vote on is a technophobic text, tailor-made for the interests of the
copyright monopolies which, moreover, doesn’t guarantee the right of
authors to have a reasonable standard of living as a result of their
work.
If the law is eventually passed, it will be used for
wholesale curtailment of freedoms and more censorship, in keeping with
the bizarre idea that anything that doesn’t produce hard cash for the major players– which doesn’t mean authors! – has to be prohibited and eliminated.
This is a tragedy for workers in the domain of
culture who (with a few, brave, and praiseworthy exceptions) have once
again been frivolously incapable of informing themselves about the real
state of affairs. They have passively swallowed the version fed to them
by their masters and, avidly playing the victim, have become the chief
mouthpiece of freedom-killing propaganda without the slightest
understanding that this is not going to enhance their rights but will do
away with the rights of everyone.
Alarm bells started ringing almost two years ago
when we discovered that, rather than being a proposal for an obsolete
copyright law, the directive is being used as a Trojan horse to
introduce surveillance, automatic data processing, government by opaque
algorithms, and censorship without court orders, etc.
This threat to such basic rights as freedom of
expression and access to culture and information lurks in ruses which
are mainly hidden in two articles of the Directive:
Article 11: no link without a license. Article
11, otherwise known as the “Linktax” article, has created a new
economic “right” for magnates of the written press. This ‘right’,
moreover, implies indefinitely restricting the possibility of citing the
press online.
If this seems absurd, arbitrary and
counterproductive, we invite you to read the proposal itself. This is an
ambiguous text, described by the jurist Andrej Savin as “One of the worst texts I have ever seen in my 23-year-long career as a law scholar.” Given
its muzzy formulation, the safest response for any platform will be not
to link to any media publication without explicit permission.
This perverse measure will be the equivalent, on a
European scale, to the “Google tax”, which is already in force in Spain
and Germany. Even its promoters were soon to regret it, when Google shut
down Google News in Spain after it was approved. The Google tax is
paradoxical and those responsible for initiating it know very well it
won’t work in Europe. For example, Xnet revealed that the big German
publishing company Alex Springer was paying itself – having linked up to
pay itself – in an outlandish pretence that “everything’s fine”.
Where are they trying to go with this? What sense is
there in this move by the press barons to push laws which prevent you
from linking up to their content, disseminating it, and commenting on
them? Is this just a mix of ignorance and greed, or something like
shooting yourself in the foot?
There is certainly something of this involved, but
we believe that this is a mix of ignorance and greed which, in the end,
means cutting off your nose to spite your face (when you’re trying to
damage someone else’s face). With laws like this, the press barons can
engage in legal harassment to the point of closing down social
aggregators and communities like Meneame or Reddit, eliminating any new
competitor, consolidating their monopoly, and thus becoming the lone
voice on the Internet, the only ones who speak. In short, they are
aspiring to become a new kind of television.
Article 13: no uploading content without a license. Platforms
– from medium-sized providers of services storing subject material
through to the giants of the Internet – will be considered responsible
for any copyright infringement committed by their users, and they are
bulldozed into taking preventive measures. In other words, this isn’t a
matter of eliminating content but directly preventing people from
uploading it.
Of course, nobody is forcing them to do anything.
They are simply being made responsible for material uploaded by their
users. It’s like a car salesman being held responsible for crimes
committed by people who buy his cars. This can only end up with
algorithmic upload filters being applied to absolutely everything or, in
other words, prior, automatic, and massive Internet censorship. This
can only end up with algorithmic upload filters being applied to
absolutely everything or, in other words, prior, automatic, and massive
Internet censorship.
Recently, YouTube prevented the pianist James Rhodes
from uploading one of his own videos in which he is playing Bach. This
kind of “error”, which always favours privatisation of the public
domain, is the everyday reality for all authors who use YouTube.
And this isn’t just about the “errors” that lead to
the privatisation of the public domain. It is about the difficulty or
impossibility of uploading on the Internet any kind of derivative work:
parodies, memes, remixes, fandom, satires, and so on or, in other words,
the very essence of culture, political freedom and freedom of
expression.
Repeating the Medieval Experience of the Invention of the Printing Press
This whole setup, which looks like a science-fiction
dystopia, an impossible attempt to lock the doors when the horse has
bolted, or an exaggeratedly grim prophecy being spread by concerned
activists, is already being implemented today on big platforms.
At present, there are two options:
The Spotify model
In this case, the platform would
acquire all national and international licences and then make all
contents available unidirectionally in such a way that users can’t
upload content. Even so, in the case of Spotify, one of the few giants
with the resources to do this today, paying the copyright monopolies has
raised its overheads so much that, despite its commercial success, its
medium-term sustainability isn’t guaranteed. If this is the situation of
Spotify, it’s not difficult to imagine what will happen to medium-sized
Internet companies.
This model has another defect which is obvious to
most artists. The amount of money the real authors receive in the end is
zero or almost zero. The amount of money the real authors receive in
the end is zero or almost zero.
TheFacebook/Google model
These new Internet monopolies refuse to share the
cake with the old copyright monopolies and therefore opt for
large-scale, automatic filtering of all content. They will find it
easier to adapt to Article 13 since now they will only need to apply the
filtering mechanisms before uploading takes place.
This technology, besides being opaque and exclusive,
is very expensive. Since it will be obligatory, it will also mean that
these giants are very unlikely to have competitors that have any chance
of prospering.
Google has spent approximately 100 million dollars
to create the technology that has so far enabled it to respond to
copyright claims coming in from only 1% of its users.
The effect which these arbitrary regulations will
have on free Internet conversation, on diffusion of culture and
information, and access to them will be devastating.
