YouTube and music industry are both wrong on EU copyright rules
Free expression is at risk in corporate fight over responsibility for infringement
YouTube and the music industry are battling it out over a section of the EU copyright directive, as the European Parliament and Council enter into final discussions about the proposed regulation. At issue is whether the streaming site and other internet platforms should be held responsible when their users post content that violates someone else’s copyright.
But the fight over article 13 is not just a corporate tug of war. Nothing less than our freedom of expression online is under threat from both sides. And as usual in copyright debates, while both sides talk a good game about the supposed interests of artists, it remains up in the air whether they will end up benefiting from the law.
YouTube has repeatedly warned that the European Parliament’s version of article 13 might force it to block millions of videos in Europe. That concern is valid. The parliamentary text would make internet platforms liable for all copyright infringements no matter what lengths they go to to prevent them.
Reducing copyright violations to zero is an impossible task. There is no global registry of copyrighted works, so platforms have no way of knowing for sure which content might get them in trouble. The only possible solution would be to allow only trusted parties such as big companies to upload works. The internet would cease to be a place to “broadcast yourself” and would come to resemble cable television.
This scenario has many video creators up in arms. Video titles such as “My channel will be deleted” are not just clickbait: they are also a realistic projection of what may happen if the parliament proposal becomes law.
At the same time, no one should make the mistake of assuming that YouTube is lobbying for a free and open internet. Instead it wants the EU to go with the council’s version of the text, which has been approved by the member states’ national governments. That version allows platforms to escape liability if, and only if, they implement state-of-the-art filters. In this version, every video user’s post must first be approved by algorithms looking for copyright infringements.
We know from experience that such filters are prone to making mistakes. They are guaranteed to take down perfectly legal content, since they are fundamentally unable to distinguish permissible works, such as parodies, from infringement. Creations that survive in a legal grey area today, such as cover versions and memes, will be the first to go.
These filters are biased towards big companies’ lists of what to block, while individual creators are treated as guilty until proven innocent. Such filters are easily abused by trolls and anyone else wanting to take content offline for malicious reasons. In short: upload filters are a serious threat to our freedom of expression.
YouTube and its owner Google have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their “Content ID” upload filter and it still keeps making mistakes and causing creators headaches. Requiring all platforms to deploy such software will give YouTube a clear competitive advantage and secure its dominance for decades to come. Start-ups and other competitors who cannot afford to develop their own filters will either need to shut down — or license Content ID. Google could become the main arbiter of what Europeans may post or upload to the web.
Axel Voss, the MEP who wrote the parliament’s text, now suggests that the music industry and YouTube ought to sit down to hammer out a workable compromise between these two scenarios.
But I say no to both. Neither option is acceptable — and no compromise is possible without independent creators and users at the table. More than 3.1m people have signed a petition to protest against this development. The people of Europe do not want their freedom to post and upload online to end up as mere collateral damage in a corporate tug of war.
While the threat these scenarios pose to fundamental rights is obvious, it is much less clear how they would lead to additional revenues for creators — the goal that both sides keep claiming they want to achieve. At the same time, clauses that I believe would have brought actual improvements for artists, such as the protection from unfair contracts that were in article 14 of the parliamentary draft, are in danger of being quietly dropped in negotiations.
If the draft law continues to prescribe either inescapable platform liability or upload filters, Europeans will have no choice but to demand that their representatives reject the directive as a whole when it comes up for a final vote in the new year.