19 nations including The UK and Germany give thumbs-up to EU’s Copyright Directive

Last month, the European Parliament passed the Copyright Directive that includes Article 11 and Article 13. The directive got 348 votes in favor whereas 274 were against, and 36 declined to vote. Yesterday, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, France and Germany were amongst the 19 nations that agreed to the EU’s Copyright Directive. Majority of the EU ministers voted for it and just few in the likes of  Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden opposed it. Considering the majority supporting it, the directive has been passed.

According to Article 11 or link tax, news aggregating sites need to obtain a license before linking or using a snippet of news articles. The motive behind this article was to help original content creators gain some revenue from services like Google News and Apple News.

Article 13 is for “meme ban” or the “upload filter”. According to Article 13, online content sharing platforms like Vimeo, YouTube, and SoundCloud need to take care of the content they put in order to prevent copyright infringement by their users. This also makes these platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement by their users.

Even though the copyright directive was passed in the EU, the legislation still needed to be approved by the Council of Ministers before formal adoption. A majority of 55% of Member States that represent 65% of the population was required to adopt the legislation. In reality, this was achieved with 71.26% votes in favor, and so the Copyright Directive will now pass into law. With both Germany and the UK agreeing to the directive, the Copyright Directive is now adopted.

EU member states will have two years for implementing the law which will require platforms like YouTube to sign licensing agreements with creators to use their content. If they fail to do so, the infringing content would have to be taken down and shouldn’t be uploaded again to their services.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncke said in statement that “With the passing of the legislation, Europe is making copyright rules “fit for the digital age.”

He further added, “Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong rights for users and responsibility for platforms. When it comes to completing Europe’s digital single market, the copyright reform is the missing piece of the puzzle.”

Antonio Tajani, president of European Parliament, and the European Council, Donald Tusk, still needs to sign the directive.

As there are still two years for this directive to be implemented, the impact of this action will only be witnessed once the directive officially gets in action. But it seems the big and small scale tech companies will be the ones getting affected. Also, the publishing firms who post content on a regular basis may get affected because of the limitation on using the source link of original content.

The actual impact of the law and how it plays out in practice remains yet to be seen. The member states will have two years to transpose the thing into their respective national legislations.

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