Owen Williams is a self-hired journalist and developer building experiments in the news and beyond at Charged. Previously, he became Head of Digital at VanMoof and an Editor at The Next Web. Earlier this week, the European Parliament voted to ratify notorious copyright rules that threaten to change the Internet as we know it. Both articles 11 and thirteen have wide-reaching consequences that affect Europe’s capability to compete as a destination for startups—the risks will be too high for even the “most secure” of bets.
Let’s recap what those pieces of new law virtually do. Article 11 is an erroneous attempt to assist publishers better monetize their content: it requires everybody the use a “snippet” of any journalistic content to purchase a license from the writer. The law would affect all of us, from Facebook or Twitter, displaying an excerpt of an article on your timeline, to a domain like Crunchbase, truly quoting a headline.
This piece of legislation turned into aimed at sites like Google News—an aggregator—wherein customers can see hundreds of chunks of articles to determine if they should click on it within the first vicinity. Similar legislation was carried out previously in Spain and Germany, with large effects, including Google News shutting down, which caused a dramatic drop in site visitors for nearby publishers.
Article thirteen forces whatever that can be categorized as a “platform” to automatically filter all uploaded content material for any ability copyright infringement. Backed via the music industry, the regulation forces sites like YouTube or Facebook to surveil all uploads and catch violations earlier than they’re made public despite fact suggesting that this is technically impossible to obtain.
Not most effective are big industrial structures affected, and prone to fines, network-run agencies are as well. Everything from your favorite discussion board to the network-created content material on Twitch will require their owners to by some means determine what constitutes ‘copyrighted’ content and mechanically take it away from their websites.
Both of these proposals are frustratingly vague in their definition of what infringes and offer very few loopholes for startups to leverage against bigger, better-financed players that seem to penalize them. Article 11 defines a snippet so vaguely that even quoting a headline might be considered a contravention. Article 13 simply requires that all copyrighted content material ought to be stored at the time of the ad.
