EU copyright directive 2018 (a few quotations about Article 13 and 11)

Hello,

i would like to ask You to please check the information regarding Eu Copyright directive that will be voted upon in June 2018.

Here are most relevant information about risks of approving this directive proposal i have found:

1) Article 13

"This [law] will lead to excessive filtering and deletion of content and limit the freedom to impart information on the one hand, and the freedom to receive information on the other."
– 57 signatories (https://www.liberties.eu/en/news/delete-article-thirteen-open-letter/13194) representing fundamental rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders

"States and intergovernmental organizations should refrain from establishing laws or arrangements that would require the “proactive” monitoring or filtering of content, which is both inconsistent with the right to privacy and likely to amount to pre-publication censorship."
– United Nations Human Rights Council report (https://freedex.org/a-human-rights-approach-to-platform-content-regulation/)

"The proposed measures will require monitoring and filtering of anything that European citizens upload to content-sharing services

The impact of making internet hosting providers liable for activities about which they have no knowledge would be huge. It would, in reality, require both extensive monitoring of everything uploaded to the internet and deletion of any communications that generated a legal risk for the provider. This would result in a huge “chilling effect” on freedom of expression, and massive private censorship, undermining innovation and competition"
– https://edri.org/files/copyright/copyright_proposal_article13.pdf

"By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet, from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users."
– Letter https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf
– Article about the letter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ring-alarm-eu-copyright-filtering-proposal

An example of problems the Article 13 can bring to internet services:
https://blog.github.com/2018-03-14-eu-proposal-upload-filters-code/

Funny (?) animated video showing Article 13 supporter Axel Voss "breaking" the internet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AfoFU2bg8I

2) Article 11

"It has been suggested that the right will prevent the re-use of snippets from, and hyperlinks[1] to, publicly available websites. If these claims turn out to be true, the new right will also harm freedom of expression and freedom of art, and impede innovation" (Article 11)
– https://www.ivir.nl/academics-against-press-publishers-right/

For the updates, please read last post of this topic, i am updating this topic.

Majority of the EU Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) voted for both the link tax and internet upload filters: https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/not-giving-up/

Europe wants internet companies to filter our uploads

https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/censorship-machines/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8pi6e5GLaQ

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"We oppose this EU copyright package because of its detrimental effects on internet freedom, access to knowledge, and collaboration online." source: Wikimedia Foundation

48 hours remaining before the vote in the EU parliament

The European Parliament has sent the copyright law (automatic recognition and filtering of the internet uploaded content and the linking tax) back to the drawing board. Vote was 318 vs 278. So there is time for the discussion and the modification or the removal of the questionable articles 11 and 13. All MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) will get to vote on #uploadfilters and the #linktax in September 10–13, 2018. https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1014850204355432448

thes are very strict

Join the protest on copyright action day in your city TODAY: https://saveyourinternet.today

Within 3 days (Wednesday 12th of September, 2018), MEPs will vote on amendments of the Copyright directive!!
it is important vote. Contact you MEPs if you feel this is important issue.

https://www.liberties.eu/en/news/draft-copyright-directive-amendments-analysis/15721
https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/
https://www.create.ac.uk/policy-responses/eu-copyright-reform/#summary

There seems to be the copyright directive proposal after the September 12, 2018 European parliament vote. This proposal will be used as a basis for "trilogue" negotiations (and possible slight modifications i assume) and then its final form will be voted in European parliament (EP) at the end of 2018 or at the beginning of the 2019. Note that the proposal can be read in most or all EU languages (buttons on the top).

On that page, in the amended/adopted text i found following interesting parts:

ARTICLE 11:

Quote:

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"1a. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall not prevent legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users."

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-> it seems to me that regular users should not need to worry linking any articles..(including copying article title or one or two sentences of the article) also small site owners i think also do not need to worry doing the same, because press publishers "may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration", the "may" looks to me like the site owners should not be penalized or sued for the linking in case press publisher not get in contact with them to make a deal for getting provisions for the linking) - i may be wrong

ARTICLE 13:

Quote:

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"When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remains appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided ."

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It is good that small to medium enterprises (companies) should be excluded, i guess it means they do not need to filter any content! "Only" big enterprises like Google, Vimeo etc. will probably have to filter copyrighted works i think. The solution to this filtering (or censorship) would be to use different website which will allow the content upload. For example, an artist/author of an "copyrighted" meme will see his content automatically blocked, because it was not published, he either move to different site and say to his fans where he moved.. or he upload it to other website where it is allowed and link to it from original site.

So after all as i understand it, it may not be so huge issue for the internet as it may seemed and described by Julia Reda and others. But certainly from my standpoint it is not good to make platforms filter the content, because it will without doubt cause false positives.

Quote:

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When the negotiators meet again in January they still have to find agreement on Articles 13 and 11 and a number of other parts of the directive. The language that is in the table for these articles continues to be highly problematic (see our most recent analysis for Article 13 here and for Article 11 here) and unless there will be mayor improvements on these articles as well, the overall directive is still very likely to do much more harm than good.

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Source: https://www.communia-association.org/2018/12/21/copyright-reform-still-stalled-good-news-public-domain/

13th of February 2019 - European Parliament and the Council found a compromise on the reform of the EU´s copyright laws! So we have final text and what remains is the vote in the EU parliament (around April 2019).

Final unofficial text of the Article 13 of the EU Copyright directive as dealed around 13.02.2019 in trilogue:
https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Art_13_unofficial.pdf

Julia Reda EU MEP for Pirate party blog article about the final directive text: https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/eu-copyright-final-text/

communia-association.org reaction on final copyright directive text (as seen in this article: "the text that was agreed on yesterday is the worst version that we have seen yet. After three days of negotiations, the negotiators have agreed on a text that would benefit big corporate rightsholders, Google and other dominant platforms at the expense of users, creators and the rest of the European internet economy."

edri.org article says "The text, prepared by France and Germany, will be put to a vote between March and April in the European Parliament and could become law soon afterwards."

Techdirt (Mike Masnick) says in this article: "It is not just to close the (made up, mythical) "value gap." It is to fundamentally change the internet away from an open system of communications -- one that anyone can use to bypass traditional gatekeepers, to a closed "broadcast" system, in which key legacy gatekeepers control access to the public, via a complicated set of licenses that strip all of the benefits and profits from the system."

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Above mentioned articles looks alarming, though i read the above linked final text of article 13 and while i am not a lawyer it do not looks that bad to me.

Following makes an impression to me that the EU member states (when applying the law if approved in EU) should make sure that the content providers have an exception for the:
"quotation, criticism, review" and content submitted for "the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche"

->

- "Member States shall ensure that users in all Member States are able to rely on the following existing exceptions and limitations when uploading and making available content generated by users on online content sharing services: a)quotation, criticism, review, b)use for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche."

- "(39a) The steps taken by the online content sharing service providers should be without prejudice to the application of exceptions and limitations to copyright, including in particular those which guarantee the freedom of expression of users. Users should be allowed to upload and make available content generated by users for specific purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody or pastiche. This is particularly important to strike a balance between fundamental rights in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, in particular the freedom of expression and the freedom of the arts, and the right to property, including intellectual property. For these reasons, these exceptions should be mandatory in order to ensure that users receive uniform protection across the Union. It is important to ensure that online content sharing services operate an effective complaint and redress mechanism to support these uses. "

Which seems positive, thought i would guess overfiltering would win over users right to upload content?
At same time seems contradicting when they are making content providers liable for the uploaded content (which makes them develop upload filters/upload monitors) and at same time say that general monitoring should not happen:

->

- "7. The application of the provisions in this article shall not lead to any general monitoring obligation as defined in Article 15 of Directive 2000/31/EC."
and
- "The obligations established in Article 13 should also not lead to Member States imposing a general monitoring obligation. "


Here is Article 15 of that 2000/31/EC Directive:

"Article 15

No general obligation to monitor

- "1. Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity."

Another positive thing for webmasters is that here seems that the article 13 apply only on big content sharing services which does it for profit (have ads on sites for example) and for which this content sharing activity is main purpose:

- "The definition of an online content sharing service under this Directive should target only online services which play an important role on the online content market by competing with other online content services, such as online audio and video streaming services"

- "The services covered by this Directive are those services, the main or one of the main purposes of which is to store and enable users to upload and share a large amount of copyright protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit therefrom, either directly or indirectly"

- "The definition does not include services which have another main purpose than enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from this activity. These include, for instance, electronic communication services within the meaning of Directive 2018/1972 establishing the European Electronic Communications Code, as well as providers of business to-business cloud services and cloud services, which allow users to upload content for their own use, such as cyberlockers, or online marketplaces whose main activity is online retail and not giving access to copyright protected content. Providers of services such as open source software development and sharing platforms, not for profit scientific or educational repositories as well as not-for-profit online encyclopedias are also excluded from this definition."

to me it do not looks as dangerous as some articles suggest. (depends on how particular member states apply the law..)

Also, the Online content providers will be liable for unauthorized content distribution if they "fail to act expeditiously to remove from their websites or disable access to the notified works" + be "liable if they fail to demonstrate that they have made their best efforts to prevent the future uploads of specific unauthorised works"