Lawmakers Toss Publishers Copyright Bill Under The Bus

Michael Hedges July 5, 2018 - Follow on Twitter

Internet freedom has suffered in recent years as trolls, bots, propaganda and hate speech tainted the concept. Still, there are more internet users every minute of every day, most generally pleased to access a sorts of news, information, music, videos, gossip and cat photos. While the internet has offered global access to anything that can be digitized, even dodgy stuff, proximity has been lost. This has not gone unnoticed.

A draft of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market failed to win approval at the European Parliament (EuroParl). The vote was always to be a big deal. Voting for sending the draft on to the Member States and the European Commission were 278 MEPs, against 318 with 31 abstaining. The draft Directive now goes back to the “drawing board,” observed many. A revision and another vote at EuroParl is expected in September.

This draft of the Directive, unsurprisingly, was quite conservative, protecting the old at the expense of the new. The old, in this case, meant legacy newspaper publishers and established creatives in the audiovisual arts. Also protected were, to a great extend, giants of technology. Newcomers to those fields and users, particularly those who have reinvented the media sphere to their liking, would have been punished, perhaps throttled. The EU Directive on Copyright currently in force was adopted in 2001, three years before Facebook launched.

There’s no getting around it: the internet as conceived and thrived is off life-support for the rest of the summer. Article 13 of the draft Directive would have required social media portals to screen user uploaded content for copyright violations. YouTube, owned by Google, owned by Alphabet, already does this. For lesser mortals it would have meant giving up a key attribute to their survival. Add to that was the haunting argument about censorship.

The music business - from publishers to artists - painfully made the transition from “plastic ware” to more lucrative revenue streams. Meager and fleeting returns from downloads, broadcast rights and streaming media have opened the door to the most analogue source of all: Live events. Tour bus manufacturing could be a big business again.

Vivendi, principal owner of Universal Music, is buying the French Garorock music festival, reported Digital Music News (July 4). The company already owns festivals in Spain and the US plus, not to be forgotten, the ticketing service See Tickets. These venues draw crowds, which include brand loyal followers. Nothing beats that.

Article 11 would have been the end of the line for popular news aggregators. Pay publishers for identifying snippets and links or else. The Spanish government tried legislating a “link tax” a few years ago and Google simply walked away.

Even with that and a similar German experience big publishers have expended considerable time, talent and money to lobbying for better access to Google money. The vote was lost due to "manipulative anti-copyright campaigners, US internet giants and vested interests who benefit from stealing and monetising publishers’ valuable content,” said a European Publishers Council (EPC) statement shortly after the rejection.

Through this week online encyclopedia Wikipedia presented to its Italian, Spanish, Polish, Latvian and other users a stark message about the internet. "The directive would threaten online freedom and would impose new filters, barriers and restrictions to access the web,” said the Spanish Wikipedia. Site visitors were urged to “contact your MEP.”

The raporteur (similar a show-runner) for the copyright directive draft was German conservative (CDU) MEP Axel Voss. He accused those opposing the draft of mounting a “beautiful fake news campaign,” quoted by news portal golem.de (July 5) and “unabashed manipulation” from Google, Facebook and Amazon. Leading the opposition, German Greens/Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda said that if the measure passed “the internet will increasingly come to resemble cable TV, where a few big players control what goes on air.” Frau Reda is 31 years of age and Herr Voss 55; perhaps revealing.

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