The proposed changes on the EU copyright that had raised fierce debate among the internet giants and content creators was rejected. Thecontroversial overhaul of the legislation would have added more burden of checking for copyright infringements to the websites and made platforms to pay for associating to the news.
A significant number of musicians had backed the changes citing that the websites had taken advantage of them when using their content. However, the critics argued that the new changes in copyright law would deny freedom to the internet and hamper creativity.
The proposal aimed to align EU’s copyright laws to the current generation needs and be in line with the digitalization of the world but led to protests from the website users and a lot of debate before 318 voters in the EU parliament eventually rejected it against 278 supporters on Thursday.
In an attempt by the EU to modernize its copyright legislation, they proposed the bill which was to be passed to a law called the Copyright Directive. However, the proposal had two highly contentious parts are the likely reasons why it failed when presented to the House.
Article 11, which was the first part, indicated that the newspaper and other outlets needed protection from exploitation by internet giants such as Google and Facebook that could get their content and use it without paying even a dime. However, the opponents argued that it had a likelihood of becoming a link tax and thus would result in challenges with the fragmentation of sentence being used as a linkage to other news channels.
The second part of the proposed legislation that was much-debated was article 13.It gave a considerable responsibility on websites to impose patent rules, and if passed would mean that any online platform that permitted handlers to post text, image, recording or coding would require a way to evaluate and filter information.
Buying an automated copyright system is the most common method to do this,but it is expensive. For example, the one used by YouTube has a price tag of $60m (£53m), and thus the critics felt that such filters would have to apply to every website if the thirteenth article became law. Additionally, the legislators were worried that these patent filters might effectively prohibit memes and new recordings which employ copyrighted content. Citing this differences and concerns, EU parliament, though by simple majority opted to ignore the proposed controversial copyright law.
