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On Tuesday, September 26, I was invited to speak at the Digital Europe Working Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) in the European Parliament on the issue of copyright reform. Current debates circle mostly around two new articles proposed by the European Commission. Article 11 proposes to introduce a new neighbouring right for press publishers, following the (so far mostly failed) examples of Germany and Spain. Article 13, in turn, wants platform owners to implement upload filters as a means of copyright enforcement, thereby undermining liability exceptions of the EU E-Commerce directive.
The key point I was trying to make was that targeting large platforms such as Google and Facebook with ever stricter copyright regulation won’t hurt them but rather their competition and anyone else. Even now we can observe that, due to its market power, Google was able to more or less write its own copyright rules for its video platform YouTube. Actually, this had also been necessary, given the misalignment between European copyright regulation and every day online practices based (e.g., creating and sharing user-generated content) upon new digital technologies.
As a consequence, YouTube effectively functions as a transnational rights clearing center and has brought back registration requirements to copyright law in action. However, rights clearing only works on YouTube’s proprietary platform and with remuneration rules negotiated between Google and rights holders; this further strengthens Youtube’s already dominant position in the market place Introducing an upload filter requirement would only further strengthen Google’s market position, making it even more difficult for rights holders to negotiate fair remuneration.
As a way forward, I proposed introducing harmonized and remunerated exceptions for remix and bagatelle uses instead. These would be practical not just for Google but also for anyone else and help to re-align copyright law in the books with copyright law in action.
Please find a video (slides and audio only) and my slides below: Read the rest of this entry »
governancexborders.com 