This image could not have been used here after Article 13 is implemented. Lia Li/Shutterstock
Article 13 and its Impact on Internet Expression
Written by Viljar Kjeilen (NO)
There has been much talk recently of the EUs “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market” (DCDM) colloquially referred to as “the meme ban”, and specifically articles 11 and 13. Concerns have been raced that article 13 will hurt websites, and especially small ones, as it places the responsibility of copyright infringement on the host, rather than on the individual user, and consequently result in stricter regulations on content. Polish prime minister and member of the national conservative party “Law and Justice” Mateusz Morawiecki claims article 13 will lead to preemptive censorship, by censoring content before it is published, which violates Polish and European Law.
Article 11 regards the way search engines particularly, must create agreements to display publishers’ work product on their site, this mainly refers to news headlines and articles. As an example this means Google would have to pay licensing fees, or create an agreement with the New York Times, to display article headlines or quotes from their paper.
The second controversial legislature in the DCDM is the infamous article 13, which is what Wired refers to as “the meme ban”. Article 13 states that social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube must create agreements between the rightsholder and each platform, in order to display the rightsholder’s content, furthermore if this agreement is violated the platform themselves are liable, rather than the user who published it. Secondly, it stipulates the platform must enact measures to prevent unauthorized use of copyrighted material, suggesting content recognition software as adequate. And thirdly, Article 13 demands mechanisms for users to solve disputes on application of the content protection process.
It is an open secret that during the creation of the DCDM, legislators’ minds were mostly on big-business, and the law’s effects on a larger economic scale. Member of the European Parliament, Julia Reda, states in her WIRED editorial;
“(The DCDM) does not recognize and legitimize the masses of new creators[...] Instead, lawmakers looked at copyright primarily through one very particular lens: that of big media companies, with their waning control over distribution channels.”
While it is positive that the EU is creating a uniform law for the internet across Europe, it should not be at the expense of content creators or smaller social platforms, and arguably, not purely in the pursuit of profit.
As it is laid down, the winners of the DCDM are large publishing corporations, such as music companies, stock photo providers, book publishers, the press, and Google, who can now sell their content recognition software to other websites. Article 13, as it stands, will complicate things for social platforms, but the measures article 13 demands are already in place on pages like YouTube and Facebook. Their transition will be rather seamless.
The losers, however, are content creators who use anything they themselves do not own. Creators will have to jump through even more hoops to display their work. Except the hoop is now a net which, to avoid lawsuits, will unquestionably block
content that is currently above-board. Google's content recognition software has no way to accurately determine if a video including copyrighted material falls under fair use or not.
Article 13 creates an interesting question; is it more important to be able to express yourself freely, or to have ownership of your creative product? The latter question begs the mentioning of alienation. A process in which, simply put, our drive for creative expression is replaced by the pursuit of profit, and we get estranged from our creativity and by extension, ourselves. If our motivations for self-expression is purely economic, true art may hang in the balance.
The future of internet expression is something we can only see the silhouette of, and with the DCDM ratified, it is opaquer than ever.