YouTube Battles EU Over Copyright Laws

YouTube has existed in an odd copyright grey area since its inception. Intellectual property holders usually take it upon themselves to police their content, and YouTube does its best to accommodate them and have any copyright material promptly removed from the site (even when they don’t need to, but that’s another story). Meanwhile, the EU is currently working on their new Copyright Directive, a set of articles to protect intellectual property as a law. Sounds good on paper, but a couple of these articles could pose problems to customer-facing platforms like YouTube.

Articles 11 and 13, colloquially known as “The Link Tax” and “The Meme Ban,” respectively, would force YouTube, as well as other social media platforms, to incur fees any time one of its users violates copyright, in addition to taking measures to prevent those kinds of videos from being uploaded at all. Google, who owns YouTube, has argued that this would essentially force them into a massive campaign of censorship against its entire worldwide userbase, which would be extremely unethical (not to mention business suicide).

Google, through YouTube, has begun a lobbying effort to fight the law and negotiate the articles’ language down to something more reasonable. Both YouTube staff and users have spoken in support of this effort. There has been some success on this front, with the language toned down from what was originally proposed back in June, but the EU is still insistent on limiting many things that would affect YouTube’s users adversely.

The bill is planned to be ratified some time in January. If Google wants to get any more changes made, they’ll need to work fast.

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5 years ago
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