European Citizens: You Stopped ACTA, But The New Copyright Directive Is Much, Much Worse: Speak Up

from the protect-the-internet dept

It's understandable that people are getting fatigued from all the various attacks on the internet, but as I've noted recently, one of the biggest threats to our open internet is the incredibly bad Copyright Directive that is on the verge of being voted on by the EU Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee. The Directive is horrible on many fronts, and we've been highlighting two key ones. First, the dangerous link tax and, second, the mandatory upload censorship filters. Each of these could have major ramifications for how the internet will function.

Incredibly, both are driven mainly by industry animus towards Google from legacy industries that feel left behind. The link tax is the brainchild of various news publishers, while the upload filters are mainly driven by the recording industry. But, of course, what should be quite obvious at this point is that both of these ideas will only make Google stronger while severely limiting smaller competitors. Google can pay the link tax. Google has already built perhaps the most sophisticated content filtering system (which still sucks). Nearly everyone else cannot. So, these moves don't hurt Google. They hurt all of Google's possible competitors (including many European companies).

Six years ago, there was another threat in the EU for a horrible copyright plan, which was the ACTA "anti-counterfeiting trade agreement" being pushed (note a pattern here) by legacy copyright industries, looking to expand copyright law in a misguided attack on Google. Like this time, the horrible plan was being mainly pushed by the EU Commission. But with ACTA, the EU Parliament stepped up and rejected ACTA. However, that only happened after citizens hit the streets all over Europe to protest ACTA.

It is impossible to expect that every time politicians are about to do something bad on the internet or with copyright law that everyone can take to the streets. That's not going to happen. But the new Copyright Directive is significantly worse than anything that was in ACTA, and if the EU Parliament doesn't realize that by next week, the internet we know and love may be fundamentally changed in a way that we will all come to regret. I mentioned these already, but check out SaveYourInternet.eu, ChangeCopyright.org and SaveTheLink.org.

You can (and should) also follow MEP Julia Reda who has been leading the charge against these awful proposals and who has been posting how to help stop it on her website and on her Twitter feed. You can also listen to Reda discuss all of this on our podcast.

Filed Under: acta, copyright, copyright directive, eu, eu parliament, link tax, snippet tax, upload filters

Top German Publisher Says: 'You Wouldn't Steal A Pound Of Butter... So We Need A Snippet Tax'

from the articles-11-and-13-must-go dept

Last week, Mike provided a virtuoso excoriation of the European publishers' shameless demand to be given even more copyright control over tiny snippets of news stories as part of the awful EU copyright directive. As that post pointed out, the publishers' "mythbuster" did nothing of the sort, but it did indicate a growing panic among the industry as more critical attention is brought to bear on the ridiculous "snippet tax" -- Article 11 of the proposed new EU copyright law -- which has already failed twice elsewhere. The German site Über Medien -- "About Media" -- offers another glimpse of publishers trying desperately to justify the unjustifiable (original in German). Actually, it's one publisher in particular: Mathias Döpfner. He's the CEO of the German company Axel Springer, one of the world's largest publishers, although even his company is unlikely to benefit much from the snippet tax. Speaking on Austrian television, Döpfner made a rather remarkable claim:

It's about the question of whether the intellectual good that is produced is a protected good or not. At the moment it is a good that is not protected in the digital world. Anyone can take an article, a video, a journalistic element that a publisher has prepared, copy it, put it in another context and even market it successfully.

Yes, the boss of one of the biggest and most successful publishers in the world is claiming that digital material is not protected by copyright, and that anyone can take and use it, which is why new laws are needed. Since he was talking about the EU's Article 11, he also seems to be conflating using snippets with taking an entire article. To underline his point, Döpfner offered a homely comparison:

If I can go to the grocery store and just grab a pound of butter or a carton of milk without paying for it, why should anyone come and pay for it, and why would anyone else offer butter or milk?

But that's not what Google is doing when it uses snippets. It's more like it is taking a picture of the pound of butter, and then showing people the photo along with the address of the grocery store when they search for "butter" using Google's search engine. Google is not stealing anything, just sending business to the store. It's the same with displaying snippets that link to the original article. The Über Medien post rightly goes on to note that publishers don't really have a problem with Google showing snippets and sending them traffic. But their sense of entitlement is so great they want to force the US company to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic. Or, to put it in terms of Döpfner's forced analogy:

Publishers do not want Google to stop stealing butter and milk in their supermarkets. The publishers want to oblige Google to steal bread and milk from them and pay for it.

The fact that the head of German's biggest publisher resorts to the old "you wouldn't steal a car/pound of butter/carton of milk" rhetoric shows just how vanishingly thin the argument in favor of a snippet tax really is. It's time for the EU politicians to recognize this, and remove it from the proposed copyright directive, along with Article 13's even-more pernicious upload filter. EU citizens can use the new SaveYourInternet site to contact their representatives. Ahead of the important EU vote on the proposed law early next week, now would be a really good time to do that.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: article 11, copyright, copyright directive, eu, link tax, mathias dopfner, snippet tax
Companies: axel springer, google

EU Parliament Members Play Hardball On Terrible Copyright Policies, Article Highlighting Sketchy Tactics Magically Disappears

from the not-cool dept

Last week we wrote about how the new proposal for the EU Copyright Directive has some really destructive ideas in it, and is very close to becoming official. Last week (on GDPR day) the various EU member states basically gave the proposal their blessing, and the only thing left is that the Legal Affairs Committee in the EU Parliament who will vote on June 20th (or possibly the 21st). Many, many experts have raised serious concerns about elements of the proposal -- including the link tax and the mandatory filters for content, both of which will create tremendous problems for innovation and speech online. We'll have even more on this next week, but for now, it's worth looking at just how messed up the lobbying process has gone as supporters of the bill (including big publishers and legacy copyright industries) want to get it across the finish line, apparently not caring very much how they do so.

Earlier this week, MEP Julia Reda alerted the world to an article in EU Today, which described how the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) was using another party, the EPP, to basically shake down other MEPs to get them to vote, saying that if they didn't do so, they will effectively be stripped of all power, blocked from being given reports or parliamentary positions. At one point the article said the following:

But the German EPP party has been accused of “openly lobbying” on behalf of Axel Springer by contacting members of the legal affairs committee and urging them to back the proposals in a vote by the committee on 20 and 21 June.

It is claimed that some committee members have been told of “possible repercussions” if they fail to support the proposal.

They have allegedly been told that to “stay away” from the meeting if they intend to reject the new law, with substitute members, who are more sympathetic to the plans, lined up to vote instead.

British MEP Dan Dalton, a member of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee (LIBE), said: “I am not surprised by this, given how controversial this issue is, even within the EPP. But it doesn’t reflect well on the EPP that they want to silence their own members on an issue as controversial as this.” Dalton, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group and who opposes the so-called “neighbouring right” in the directive, added, “By resorting to these methods it only further demonstrates that there are huge concerns throughout the European parliament, including within the EPP with the neighbouring right.

In the screenshot that Julia posted, there are other details:

If you can't see that, it says:

A member of the JURI committee, who said he did not wish to be named, said, "I know that several members of our committee have come under huge pressure to vote in favour of this particular proposal. The German CDU, via its EPP affiliate, has been reportedly pressuring them to vote what you might call the 'right' way. As part of their efforts to convince them to do this there have been reports of threats of members not being allocated reports and parliamentary positions if, basically, they don't do as they are told. The alleged involvement of the German publishers gives cause for some concern.

He added, "I understand how things work in this parliament and lobbying is part and parcel of the EU decision making process but when it comes to 'threats and warnings' that is crossing a line."

That part of the article is not in the version I see in the Internet Archive, but rather in Reda's tweeted screenshot. However, the Google cache version I currently see includes the quote that Reda screenshotted. You can also see it on Archive.Today.

And if you're wondering why I have to point to the Internet Archive version, the Archive Today version, and the Google Cache version, it's because EU Today magically decided to entirely memory hole the original article. It does not exist. You don't even get a typical 404 page, but rather the following error message: "Unable to find the template "_layout" in "404" at line 19." Someone was apparently in quite a rush to make that article disappear.

Instead, EU Today published a "similar" article by the same reporter, Martin Banks. Incredibly, the new version, is... well... quite different. It notes in one sentence that "German publishers have strenuously denied knowledge of members being put under any undue pressure on the issue by the EPP" which is an odd statement in the first place, because why would German publishers know what's happening in the EU unless... they were involved in it. But then the EU Today piece gets even odder. Rather than following up on any of what it originally reported, and then memory holed, instead it flips the script and claims that the real heavy handed lobbying is coming from those darn internet companies:

Rather, it is claimed that what lobbying has taken place has been by the "big internet players" with one MEP saying, "Much pressure is being put on MEPs but this is coming from big internet players against the neighbouring rights for the press publishers."

Later, the article posts an entire statement from the German Press Publishers Association, which is pushing for the link tax, and expresses its support with the following utter nonsense:

A spokesman for the German Press Publishers Association also told this website they were unaware of any such pressure being applied.

“We got the impression that there is a very lively and open discussion in the Committee.We support the draft of the European Commission and have welcomed the recent decision in the Council,” added the spokesman.

The publishers go on to state, “To remain competitive and independently financed, Europe’s publishers need to be able to compete on all platforms.

“Whilst publishers have successfully transitioned from analogue to digital, they will only reach their potential with an appropriate and updated legal framework that addresses the complexities of online copyright and licensing and gives publishers the legal resource to protect their investment in the original, professional content that underpins the freedom of the press and democracy.”

They add, "What publishers need is a “publishers’ right” granting publishers the legal protection and clarity already afforded to broadcasters and film and music producers."

Of course this is laughable. We've already seen how this has played out in practice in both Germany (where it flopped and where publishers sheepishly agreed to give a free license to Google after Google stopped including snippets), and in Spain where it did massive damage to independent news providers.

There is no need for this law and basically everyone other than giant legacy publishers are against the link tax, recognizing that it would harm just about everyone else, including everyday internet users, smaller publishers and smaller internet platforms (the big guys can pay). Of course, maybe that's the goal of the big publishers: to harm smaller competitors.

Still, it is quite incredible the EU Today posted details of thuggish threats trying to pressure MEPs on the Legal Affairs Committee to support this, and then disappeared all of those quotes, and appears to have replaced them with a new article that accuses the other side of lobbying too aggressively, though the only evidence given is publishers saying this and then an MEP complaining about receiving some emails. Emails lobbying for a position are quite different than threatening to strip elected officials of power if they don't vote for what is nothing more than a hand-out to a few large publishers.

I wanted to ask EU Today why they did this, but when I click on their "contact us" link it just takes me back to the top of the page. I was also looking for some background on EU Today, and found that their "about us" link also just returned me to the top of the page. The same is true for the privacy policy of the site, which may create some issues with the GDPR, but I guess that's a whole other issue...

Filed Under: ancillary rights, copyright, copyright directive, eu, eu parliament, link tax, neighboring rights

EU Publishers Acknowledge Snippet Tax Concerns, But Say: 'It's OK, You Can Trust Us'

from the yeah,-sure dept

Techdirt has been following the ridiculous proposal to extend EU copyright even further to include tiny snippets from articles for years now. The idea has already been tried twice in the European Union, and failed dismally on both occasions. In Spain, a study showed the move there caused serious economic damage, especially to smaller companies; German publishers tacitly admitted the law was pointless when they granted Google a free license to use snippets from their titles. More recently, the European Commission's own research confirmed that far from harming publishers, news aggregators have a positive impact on the industry's advertising revenue. Despite the clear indications that a snippet tax is a terrible idea, some want to go even further, and make it apply to hyperlinks too. Writing in the French newspaper Le Monde back in December, large news agencies including Germany's DPA and France's AFP complained that sites:

offer internet users the work done by others, the news media, by freely publishing hypertext links to their stories. […] Solutions must be found. […] We strongly urge our governments, the European parliament and the commission to proceed with this directive.

Now EU publishers have weighed in on the snippet tax, formally known as Article 11 of the proposed Copyright Directive. Their latest position paper, embedded below, makes a confession:

We acknowledge that concerns have been raised that Article 11 as proposed by the Commission may have a negative effect on the legitimate personal non-commercial use of excerpts from press publications by a natural person by way of hyperlinking or sharing.

But there's no reason to worry, they say, for the following reason:

However, we would like to emphasize that it is in publishers' interest to make their products available as widely as possible, on as many platforms as possible and this is why publishers themselves encourage their readers to share articles and news on social media for free.

In other words: trust us, we won't misuse a new right to forbid anyone from sharing even tiny snippets. Except, of course, copyright holders have repeatedly abused their intellectual monopoly to censor material, in precisely this way. EU publishers want this new right to block snippets to apply even to single words:

We therefore question the necessity of introducing in the new [EU] Presidency's compromise text, a reduction of the scope of protection granted to press publishers to acts of reproduction and making available to the public performed by "service providers" and excluding "individual words or very short extracts of text".

They also want to extend the scope of the snippet ban:

In our view it is essential that any commercial entity or organisation, regardless of their business model, including those currently licensed by press publishers, exclusively or collectively, continues to be within scope of protection. Typically these organisations can be aggregators, media monitoring and press clipping agencies, individual companies, or public institutions.

This isn't just about making search engines pay for the privilege of using snippets of text: it would include every company, of whatever size, and every public body, however meritorious or altruistic its activities, that uses them. The new position paper is important because it makes clearer than ever before that the snippet tax is not about stopping a few big players like Google from indexing stories from publications. After all, that could be easily achieved by blocking the crawlers using the robot.txt file. Article 11 is about something much bigger. It is the latest expression of the publishing industry's apparently infinite sense of entitlement -- that it has a right to control even "individual words or very short extracts of text" used by "any commercial entity or organisation, regardless of their business model", as the document puts it. The egotism of publishers is so monstrous that they don't even care if achieving this insane level of control over the Internet goes against their own economic interests, as the evidence shows it will. Power, it seems, is more important than profits.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: aggregation, copyright, copyright directive, eu, link tax, publishers, snippet tax

Free Software, Open Access, And Open Science Groups Join Fight Against EU Copyright Directive's Terrible Ideas

from the how-to-destroy-Europe's-science-and-tech-future-in-one-easy-move dept

Techdirt has been covering the EU's plans to "modernize" copyright law for years now, and noted how things seem to be getting worse. Two ideas -- the so-called link tax and the upload filter -- are particularly one-sided, offering no benefits for the public, but providing the copyright industry with yet more monopolies and powers to censor. That much we knew. But two new initiatives reveal that the harmful effects are much, much broader than first thought.

The first, dubbed "Save Code Share", comes from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), and the open source organization OpenForum Europe (disclosure: I am an unpaid Fellow of the associated OpenForum Academy, but have no involvement with the new project). The two groups are concerned about the impact of Article 13 of the draft text (pdf) -- the upload filter -- on coding in Europe, as they explain in a white paper:

large businesses, SMEs and individuals relying on current tools to develop software, especially in FOSS [free and open source software] or collaboratively, could be faced with automated filtering which could engender 'false positive' identifications of infringing software, which in turn could cause developers' dependencies randomly to disappear and so literally "break" their builds, resulting in lost business, lost productivity, less reliable software, and less resilient infrastructure.

The problem they identified is that widely-used version control systems (VCS) like GitHub seem to meet the definition of "information society services" laid down by the proposed EU Copyright Directive, and as such would be required to filter all uploads to block copyright infringements. Moreover, as the white paper points out, developer Web sites would not only be held responsible for any material uploaded by users without permission of the copyright holders, but would also seem liable for illegitimate distributions of derivative works in violation of the applicable license.

GitHub and other similar services could also be required to sign licensing deals with other copyright holders, although what kind and with whom is totally unclear. That's because the ill-thought-out Article 13 was designed to catch unauthorized uploads of music and videos, not of software; but its current wording is such that it would seem to apply to VCS platforms as much as to YouTube -- a ridiculous situation. Destroying the indigenous software industry in Europe is presumably not the EU's intention here, and so the FSFE and OpenForum Europe call for Article 13 to be deleted completely.

The other new initiative, an open letter from a coalition of European academic, library, education, research and digital rights organizations, agrees, and wants Article 11 -- the link tax -- thrown out too. Here's why:

The extension of this controversial proposal [the link tax] to academic publications, as proposed by the [European Parliament's Industry, Research and Energy] Committee, significantly worsens an already bad situation. It would provide academic publishers additional legal tools to restrict access, going against the increasingly widely accepted practice of sharing research. This will limit the sharing of open access publications and data which currently are freely available for use and reuse in further scientific advances. If the proposed ancillary right is extended to academic publications, researchers, students and other users of scientific and scholarly journal articles could be forced to ask permission or pay fees to the publisher for including short quotations from a research paper in other scientific publications. This will seriously hamper the spread of knowledge.

Similarly, the coalition believes that the upload filter required by Article 13 of the current Copyright Directive draft will have a major, negative impact on the world of open access and open science:

The provisions of Article 13 threaten the accessibility of scientific articles, publications and research data made available through over 1250 repositories managed by European non-profit institutions and academic communities. These repositories, which are essential for Open Access and Science in Europe, are likely to face significant additional operational costs associated with implementing new filtering technology and the legal costs of managing the risks of intermediary liability. The additional administrative burdens of policing this content would add to these costs. Such repositories, run on a not-for-profit basis, are not equipped to take on such responsibilities, and may face closure. This would be a significant blow, creating new risks for implementing funder, research council and other EU Open Access policies.

These latest interventions are important because they show that the reach of the Copyright Directive's worst elements is much wider than originally thought. They emphasize that, by lobbying for these extreme measures, the copyright industry seems not to care what collateral damage it causes in the EU, whether to the public at large, to the local software industry, or to the entire process of scientific research. The white paper and open letter provide additional, compelling reasons why both Article 11 and Article 13 should be dropped from the final legislation. If they aren't, the danger is that the full potential of the huge and rapidly-growing high-tech ecosystem in Europe will be sacrificed in order to prop up the relatively small and sclerotic copyright industries that refuse to adapt to today's digital environment.

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Filed Under: copyright, copyright directive, eu, open access

Leaked Plans Shows Top EU Body Backing Copyright Industry Against The Public, The Internet, And Innovation

from the whatever-happened-to-Estonia's-deep-understanding-of-digital? dept

Techdirt has been covering the slow and painful attempts by the EU to make its copyright laws fit for the digital age for nearly four years now. Along the way, there have been some good ideas, and an astonishingly bad one that would require many online services to filter all uploads to their sites for potential copyright infringements. Despite the widespread condemnation of what is now Article 13 in the proposed Copyright Directive, an important new leak (pdf) published on the Statewatch site shows that EU politicians are still pushing to make the censorship filters mandatory.

The document is an attempt by Estonia, which currently holds the Presidency of the Council of the EU -- one of the three main European Union bodies -- to come up with a revised text for the new Copyright Directive. In theory, it should be a compromise document that takes into account the differing opinions and views expressed so far. In practice, it is a slap in the face for the EU public, whose concerns it ignores, while pandering to the demands of the EU copyright industry.

Estonia's problem is that the whole idea of forcing Web sites to filter uploads contradicts an existing EU directive, one from 2000 on e-commerce. This created a safe harbor for sites that were "mere conduits" or simply hosting material -- that is, took no active part in publishing material online. The Directive explicitly says:

Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.

Most of the leaked document is a forlorn attempt to circumvent this unequivocal ban on upload filters:

In order to ensure that rightholders can exercise their rights, they should be able to prevent the availability of their content on such [online] services, in particular when the services give access to a significant amount of copyright protected content and thereby compete on the online content services' market. It is therefore necessary to provide that information society service providers that store and give access to a significant amount of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure the protection of copyright protected content, such as implementing effective technologies.

It is reasonable to expect that this obligation also applies when information society service providers are eligible for the limited liability regime provided for in Article 14 of Directive 2000/31/EC [for hosting], due to their role in giving access to copyright protected content. The obligation of measures should apply to service providers established in the Union but also to service providers established in third countries, which offer their services to users in the Union.

In other words, even though Article 14 of the E-commerce Directive provides a safe harbor for companies hosting content uploaded by users, the EU wants to ignore that and make online services responsible anyway, and to require upload filtering, even though that is forbidden by Article 15. Moreover, this would apply to non-EU companies -- like Google and Facebook -- as well. The desperation of the Estonian Presidency is evident in the fact that it provides not one, but two versions of its proposal, with the second one piling on even more specious reasons why the E-commerce Directive should be ignored, even though it has successfully provided the foundation of Internet business activity in the EU for the last 17 years.

Jettisoning that key protection will make it far less likely that startups will choose the EU for their base. The requirement to filter every single upload for potential infringements will probably be impossible, and certainly prohibitively expensive, while the legal risks of not filtering will be too great. So the Estonian Presidency is essentially proposing the death of online innovation in the EU -- rather ironic for a country that prides itself for being in the digital vanguard.

The leaked document also contains two proposals for Article 11 of the Copyright Directive -- the infamous link tax. One takes all the previous bad ideas for this "ancillary copyright", and makes them even worse. For example, the new monopoly right would apply not just to text publications in any media -- including paper -- but also to photos and videos. In addition, it would make hyperlinks subject to this new publisher's "right". The only exceptions would be those links not involving what is termed a "communication to the public" -- a concept that is so vague that even the EU's top courts can't agree what it means. The other proposal completely jettisons the idea of any kind of link tax, and instead wants to introduce "a presumption for publishers of press publications":

in the absence of proof to the contrary, the publisher of a press publication shall be regarded as the person entitled to conclude licences and to seek application of the measures, procedures and remedies … concerning the digital use of the works and other subject-matter incorporated in such a press publication, provided that the name of the publisher appears on the publication.

This is something that has been suggested by others as providing the best solution to what publishers claim is a problem: the fact that they can't always sue sites for alleged copyright infringement of material they have published, because their standing is not clear. It effectively clarifies that existing copyright law can be used to tackle abusive re-posting of material. As such, it's a reasonable solution, unlike the link tax, which isn't.

The fact that two such diametrically-opposed ideas are offered in a document that is meant to be creating a clear and coherent way forward is an indication of what a mess the whole EU Copyright Directive project remains, even at this late stage. Unfortunately, the Estonian Presidency's unequivocally awful drafts for Article 13 suggest that the EU is still planning to bring in a law that will be bad for the Internet, bad for innovation, and bad for EU citizens.

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Filed Under: copyright, copyright directive, estonia, eu, filtering, intermediary liability, link tax, monitoring

The EU's Proposed Copyright Directive Is Likely To Be A Wonderful Gift -- For US Internet Giants

from the law-of-unintended-consequences dept

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt ran through the catalog of horrors that make up the EU's new Copyright Directive proposals, pointing out that they would be a general disaster in their current form. Of course, the misery would not be evenly spread: some would suffer more, some less. Indeed, an earlier open letter to the European Commission from a bunch of tech companies (including Techdirt), published on the Don't Wreck the Net site, pointed out one group who wouldn't have too much of a problem with the changes:

The largest companies have the resources and staff to deal with increased regulations and burdens. Startups do not.

That is, the big online companies can weather more or less anything: it's the smaller ones -- particularly startups -- that will have difficulties. That warning was issued before the details were known, and now Joe McNamee from the European digital rights group EDRi has penned a very similar analysis based on the newly-published plans:

There is a lot of noise in the press and among lobbyists about an alleged hostility of the EU towards big American internet companies. Reality is more nuanced and more surprising -- the policies appear to be hell-bent on giving Google new monopolies, to the detriment of European citizens and European internet companies.

The most astonishing of these policies is the proposal in the new Copyright Directive for mass, preventive filtering of information as it is being uploaded to the internet in Europe -- a policy so restrictive and absurd that even China or Russia would baulk at the notion. An anti-Google measure? Hardly. Google actively lobbied the Vice-President of the European Commission about the alleged virtues of its content identification system ("contentID"), even if they hadn’t expected the Great Firewall of Europe to be the result.

Even if the Copyright Directive manages to pass through the EU legislative system without any changes -- which seems unlikely -- Google would be in a strong position, because it already has the content ID technology in place that will allow it to comply. Although McNamee suggests that as a result Google would be "uniquely placed to license such software to European internet providers," it's more likely that it would keep it for its own exclusive use. However, the US company Audible Magic would doubtless be more than happy to license its widely-used content identification system as an alternative. And irrespective of whether it's based on technology from Google or from Audible Magic, it's hard to see how this outcome helps the European tech industry. Moreover, McNamee is certainly right about the likely outcome of bringing in an insane "ancillary copyright" in the EU, which would require Internet companies to pay a fee to use news snippets:

In Germany, where this policy has already been adopted, Google has the economic muscle to simply refuse to pay and suddenly it is not Google, but the publishers, who have a problem. Publishers put their content online in order for people to view it and to make money from advertising that is on their sites. They need Google News more than Google News needs them. So, the outcome is that everybody pays except Google. The Spanish government came up with a cunning plan, they passed a similar law to the one in Germany, but required Google News to pay. Result: Google News Spain shut down, to the detriment of smaller Spanish news outlets in particular and, again, everyone except Google loses.

The rest of the EDRi post points out other fundamental flaws in the proposed EU Copyright Directive. But the key point is that far from stimulating the European digital economy, the EU's deeply-flawed plans are likely to boost the power and the profits of the largest US Internet companies. That may be good news for them and their shareholders, but it isn't really the European Commission's job.

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Filed Under: contentid, copyright, copyright directive, eu, eu commission
Companies: google