> 1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies.
I will be extremely surprised if that will be required from small companies, considering the directive expressly says that "special account shall be
taken of [...] ensuring that the burden on SMEs
remains appropriate and that automated
blocking of content is avoided."
(SME = Small and medium-sized enterprises)
There is also no language saying that pre-screening is required, only that "online
content sharing service providers and
right holders shall cooperate in good faith
in order to ensure that unauthorised
protected works or other subject matter
are not available on their services", which could, IMO, be satisfied by a DMCA-style complaints process.
> The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all.
IMO trying to fix the false positive issue is the best part of the directive, as it requires access to human review, reasonably justified decisions, and it requires users to have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes. This would be a big improvement over the current Youtube system.
You're citing the European Parliament language; the current ongoing trilogue negotiation is between this and the original council text. The SME exemption is seen as a controversial addition by some of the Council negotiators, and may go away or be watered down.
A couple of things to note -- this "compromise" text moves Article 13 into being a blanket liability, which means that intermediaries can be sued unless they get prior authorisation from all rightsholders. Given that anyone is a rightsholder for their own material, that seems... unlikely. The only conceivable alternative under the rest of the proposal is some sort of copyright filter — but even then, it has to be effectively perfect, so that's potentially not enough.
The other point is to note that under this language, being an SME is one of seven factors that may or may not make you liable; thus injecting even more uncertainty into whether you will be liable for the actions of your users.
(Disclosure: I work at EFF, and have been tracking this for some time.)
> IMO trying to fix the false positive issue is the best part of the directive, as it requires access to human review, reasonably justified decisions, and it requires users to have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes. This would be a big improvement over the current Youtube system.
Will it? That sounds expensive at scale. I can see how some hosting services might decide that the thing to do is clamp down on who gets to publish things to help keep reviewing and appeals costs under control.
I mean, vetted creators of content are where all the money is to be made anyway, so why bother with the extra costs and pseudo-judicial process that comes with letting random people share media? Seems kinda unprofitable.
"The category of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is made up of enterprises which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding 50 million euro, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding 43 million euro."
The other method is to rearrange the business model to introduce shell SMEs or affiliates that pay licenses for subdomains (or what have you) to corporate and have very small actual roles aside from being the unregulated party.
The EU added restrictions related to the data itself to prevent outsourcing the liability in the case of GDPR, it will be interesting to see how well they can define and prevent structuring in this case.
I will be extremely surprised if that will be required from small companies, considering the directive expressly says that "special account shall be taken of [...] ensuring that the burden on SMEs remains appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided."
(SME = Small and medium-sized enterprises)
There is also no language saying that pre-screening is required, only that "online content sharing service providers and right holders shall cooperate in good faith in order to ensure that unauthorised protected works or other subject matter are not available on their services", which could, IMO, be satisfied by a DMCA-style complaints process.
> The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all.
IMO trying to fix the false positive issue is the best part of the directive, as it requires access to human review, reasonably justified decisions, and it requires users to have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes. This would be a big improvement over the current Youtube system.
(source PDF: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//... )