Tensions have been building in the tech world after the European Parliament voted in favor of a new law on Tuesday. The new law concerns content uploaded to the Internet and copyright. Some critics of the law, including within the Parliament itself, have called the new law a dark age for Internet freedom.
The controversies mainly concern Article 13. According to this, the various online services and platforms will be responsible for anything that users upload.
“YouTube, Facebook and Google News are some of the services that will be directly affected by this law,” the European Parliament said.
This legislation, however, will not only affect Europe, since the Internet is global. There will certainly be consequences outside Europe as well. Something similar happened when the EU enacted the GDPR.
The European Parliament ignored the will of over 100,000 protesters and the advice of experts, academics, technologists, United Nations human rights experts.
The final decision on the implementation of the law has not yet been taken, as it first needs approval from the Council of the European Union. The vote is expected to take place on April 9. If approved, it will be published in the Official Journal. After that, member states will have two years to implement the law.
Another part that will certainly bring controversy is Article 11. According to it, search engines and news aggregation pages will have to pay a tax if they want their results to be displayed.
Google , mindful of this possibility, had stated in January that it might remove Google News from Europe entirely .
How does the law affect ordinary citizens?
According to the European Parliament, the aim is for copyright law to apply to the Internet. Article 13 ensures this. If someone wants to upload something online, they must ask permission from the copyright holders (or at least try to get permission).
"This legislation is an important step towards correcting a situation that has allowed some companies to earn huge amounts of money without properly remunerating the thousands of creators and journalists who do all the hard work," said Axel Voss, rapporteur for the European Parliament.
If the legislation is approved and implemented, platforms and services will have to create special filters that will control the content that users want to upload. The legislation does not impose this method, but rather the platforms will resort to it. Otherwise, how will they control the content that is uploaded?
However, the new legislation will allow the uploading of material to non-commercial websites, such as Wikipedia, and to open-source platforms, such as GitHub.
GitHub was happy to be exempt from the law, but it sees it as a challenge for software developers. Tal Niv, GitHub’s vice president of law and policy, said: “Anyone developing a platform with EU users for the purpose of sharing links or content faces a lot of uncertainty.” “The consequences include not being able to build features that internet users expect today and having to implement very expensive automated filters.”.
Furthermore, this law puts a brake on the creative side of the Internet.
“We listened to the concerns that arose and chose to double down on the guarantee of freedom of expression,” Voss said. “Memes, gifs and snippets are now more protected than ever.”.
