Copyright: Compulsory filtering instead of obligatory filtering – a compromise?

Tomorrow, 5 September 2018 at 12h CEST, is the deadline to table amendments to the proposed Copyright Directive. The new deadline for amendments to the text was opened as a result of the vote last 5 July. At that vote, the Parliament decided not to give the mandate to negotiate to the JURI Committee on the basis of the text it had previously adopted.

Last Friday, Rapporteur Axel Voss MEP sent his colleagues a proposal for a “compromise” that he characterised as “balanced”. Mr Voss claims the new text does not contain obligatory filtering and therefore is a real compromise.

It is true that the text no longer contains the wording of “prevent the availability” or “content recognition technologies”. Instead, the ”compromise” states simply that any platform that helps users to share content (“content sharing service providers”) will have full liability for every piece of content hosted at their servers.

If adopted, platforms that host content would have no option other than to implement upload filters, as they would be liable for every single upload from every single user – a risk that no commercial company could afford. Platforms have no choice other than to filter in an unaccountable regime that offers users no real redress mechanisms. This is not a compromise, but a more insidious effort to achieve the same result – mass filtering.

Read more:

EP Plenary on the Copyright Directive – Who voted what? (23.07.2018)
https://edri.org/who-voted-what-in-the-ep-plenary-on-the-copyright-directive/

Press Release: EU Parliamentarians support an open, democratic debate on Copyright Directive (05.07.2018)
https://edri.org/press-release-eu-parliamentarians-support-open-democratic-debate-around-copyright-directive/

Action plan against the first obligatory EU internet filter (28.06.2018)
https://edri.org/strategy-against-the-first-obligatory-eu-internet-filter/

Moving Parliament’s copyright discussions into the public domain (27.06.2018)
https://edri.org/moving-parliaments-copyright-discussions-into-the-public-domain-2-0/