Controversial new IP legislation has today received final approval from the EU Council.
Policymakers say that the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market – better known as ‘Article 13’ – will help protect copyrighted material and encourage social sharing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to take greater action against infringers.
However, campaigners, including the likes of Google and more than five million people who have signed a petition to halt Article 13 – argue that the legislation marks the first step to internet censorship.
The UK was among the 19 European Council members to support the passing of the law, while just five countries – Italy, Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – opposed the move.
Under the new legislation, which is designed to make copyright rules “fit for the digital era”, content-sharing platforms must license copyright-protected material from the rights holders.
Without explicit consent, companies who host copyrighted material must demonstrate that they made “best efforts” to get permission from the content’s owner, to ensure that material specified by rights holders was not available, and it acted quickly to remove any infringing material of which it was made aware.
Those against the legislation argue that although companies will not be forced to filter what users are uploading, they will effectively be left with no choice.
Video-sharing giant YouTube already has filtering technology in place – known as the Content ID system – to detect infringing material, but this would be much too expensive to design and implement for smaller platforms.
Likewise, critics have argued that machines make mistakes and could be over-cautious, censoring any text, picture, sound or video containing copyrighted material – effectively banning ‘memes’ and all other forms of transformative work.
Commenting on the approval of Article 13, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said: “With today’s agreement, we are making copyright rules fit for the digital age.
“Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong rights for users, and responsibility for platforms.”
EU member states now have two years to adopt the rules.