Is EU copyright reform bringing modernization or new challenges?
EU Commission announced that legislative work about reform and modernization of copyright legislation is coming to an end. The new set of rules are primary trying to ease cross-border access to content online, create wider opportunities to use copyrighted materials in education, research and cultural heritage and to create better -functioning copyright marketplace. However, the expert community is really worried about the real effect of these changes, especially proposed article 13 of Copyright Directive. This article requires internet platforms that host a large amount of user-generated content and that optimize that content, to take measures that should enable functioning of agreements concluded with rights-holders for the use of their works. In essence, this article would require internet platforms to police content on their platforms in order the remove the ones that infringe right holders copyright. This would severely affect freedom of speech and can lead to some form of censorship, especially in regard to memes, re-mixes, and similar content. The very application of algorithms and various filtering mechanisms would, even more, threaten freedom of speech. Numerous organization already addressed their concerns in the letter addressed to EU Parlament. Another disputed provision of this Directive is article 11 that should impose so-called “snippet tax” which would require companies to pay some form of tax when they use short extracts from other news publications. The next step for this proposal is voting in EU Parlament that should be at the end of the month.