Article 13: are we heading for mass internet censorship?

Controversial EU

Controversial EU legislation on copyright
could destroy world wide web as we know it

In Depth

The amendments to the EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single
Market were approved by the European
Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs on Wednesday.
The changes include the addition of Article 13, a measure that
critics say would force publishers to install automated filters to
prevent the uploading of copyrighted material.

Last week 70 leading figures in the field of technology signed a letter opposing the law change.

The signatories, who include world wide web inventor Tim
Berners-Lee and co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, wrote: “The
damage that this may do to the free and open internet as we know it
is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial… The
cost of putting in place the necessary automatic filtering
technologies will be expensive and burdensome, and yet those
technologies have still not developed to a point where their
reliability can be guaranteed.”

Summarising their arguments, Raegan MacDonald, a policy advisor
at Mozilla, told The Next Web: “I think Article 13 is the
biggest threat to the internet as we know it right now.” 

What is Article 13 proposing?

Until now, the so-called Ecommerce Directive has given online
platforms “broad protection from being subject to copyright
penalties when they simply acted as a conduit for user uploads”,
says Gizmodo.

Article 13 will hold those platforms responsible for any content
that their users upload, meaning that the platform is liable for
any copyright infringement.

What’s wrong with that?

Mozilla’s MacDonald argues that Article 13 threatens the
continuation of a healthy and open internet, in part because of the
breadth of the definition in the proposal.

“The way this article is drafted, it kind of assumes that it’s
being specific while it’s being extremely broad. So it’s not just
about audio/visual content, it’s about all types and forms of
copyright. It would be including lots of type of different content,
even code sharing,” she says.

Activist Cory Doctorow agrees, calling it a “foolish, terrible
idea”. Doctorow says that the protections necessary to comply with
Article 13 – probably in the form of sophisticated upload filters –
are not up to scratch.

Writing on news website Boing Boing, he said: “No filter exists that can even
approximate this. And the closest equivalents are mostly run by
American companies, meaning that US big tech is going to get to spy
on everything Europeans post and decide what gets censored and what
doesn’t.”

According to Gizmodo, what is “possibly the most important
problem with Article 13 is that it makes no exceptions for fair
use, a foundation of the internet and essential caveat in the law
that allows people to remix copyrighted works”.

Internet memes – “which most commonly take the form of viral
images, endlessly copied, repeated and riffed on”, notes Wired – could fall into a number of the
categories prohibited by Article 13. This would create “an
improbable scenario in which one of the internet’s most distinctive
and commonplace forms of communication is banned”, Wired adds.

What do Article 13 supporters say?

Defenders of the legislation say that critics are exaggerating
as a result of assumptions they’re making about how the legislation
will be implemented.

Axel Voss, rapporteur of the European Parliament for the
Copyright Directive, believes that the proposed reform will greatly
benefit both European citizens and publishers.

“I feel that the criticism hasn’t been really balanced and not
based on the actual text we’ve proposed,” Voss told The Next Web (TNW). “That’s why all these
claims of censorship and upload filters are all a total
exaggeration.”

Voss “points out that there’s no mention of upload filters in
the proposal and that it’s simply making it mandatory to prevent
copyright infringement from happening in the first place, something
which is already existent in EU law”, adds the tech news site.

Many publishers are also in favour, including the Independent
Music Companies Association (Impala).

“This is a strong and unambiguous message sent by the European
Parliament,” executive chair Helen Smith told the BBC.

“It clarifies what the music sector has been saying for years –
if you are in the business of distributing music or other creative
works, you need a licence, clear and simple. It’s time for the
digital market to catch up with progress.”