UN Special Rapporteur urges the European Union to align its Copyright Directive proposal with international human rights standards and reasonable liability regime

The UN Special Rapporteur David Kayne stated that the European Union’s Copyright Directive proposal should not impose a liability regime on online platforms that put in risk freedom of expression. Article 13 of the latest version of the proposal provides that content sharing platforms must license copyright protected material from the rights holders. The service provider will be held liable if it cannot prove that the content was licensed, the rights were not available and that it acted quickly to remove infringing material. Kayne considers that article 13 seems to drive online platforms toward monitoring and restriction of user-generated content. He claims that this pressure for pre-filtering content is “neither necessary nor proportionate” to address copyright violations online.​​