The European Union has moved forward with a very controversial piece of legislation. It’s known as the Copyright Directive.
The vote was pretty strong with 438 in favor and 226 against. This is, of course, after two articles, 11 and 13 were amended — these are also known as the link tax and upload filter. The vote does still need to be approved and officially passed in January 2019. After that, the directive needs to be implemented by individual European states, which means that it is likely going to greatly vary from country to country.
Article 11 would essentially give publishers a way to make money when companies such as Google and Yahoo link to their stories. Article 13 goes a step further and makes Facebook and YouTube, as well as other platforms, stop users from sharing unlicensed copyrighted material.
The reason why people are unhappy with this move is that Article 13 can turn into a way of censoring people. This can happen by simply saying that any direct mention to the source can be an unlicensed use, which would, of course, mean that no one can really talk about it without getting their content taken down.
Article 11 is a little different. Taxing services like Google News has, according to The Verge, not gone well in the past. This time, the issue is that taxing a service that curates news and delivers it to people is wrong since it’s providing a service that many people don’t have the time to do themselves.
The defense of these two articles is that the entire directive is just feared by large U.S corporations who have a hold on the market. That’s why they’re apparently focusing so much on Article 11 and 13. They don’t want to lose out on such a large portion of their market.
Another argument that some people who are in support of the directive is that it will help European publishing. The entire thing does make more sense when you think about it. If a company in the U.S can’t really get a hold on the market in Europe because it’s just too expensive since the link tax and Upload filter exists, then it leaves room for another company to come in and deal with the issue and market.
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