European Union Agrees to New Copyright Law
13 Fevereiro 2019 - 10:11PM
Dow Jones News
By Valentina Pop, Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey
BRUSSELS -- The European Union agreed on a new copyright law
aimed at reining in tech giants and throwing a lifeline to news
publishers.
The Wednesday deal comes after months of opposition and lobbying
from internet giants and open-internet activists that led to a
stalemate among EU governments.
Two controversial parts of the draft bill held up negotiations.
One, aimed at platforms that allow users to upload content, would
make the platforms liable for copyright violations. The other would
allow news publishers to negotiate licenses with aggregators such
as Alphabet Inc.'s Google. Any search results that go beyond one
word or "very short extracts" of news articles would be subject to
such licenses.
The deal was made possible after France and Germany proposed a
compromise last week, giving smaller internet companies some
exemptions from the rules. The compromise coincided with a separate
deal in which France agreed to support Germany on a natural-gas
pipeline with Russia, according to officials in Brussels and
Berlin.
"The negotiations were difficult, but what counts in the end is
that we have a fair and balanced result that is fit for a digital
Europe," said European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip. "The
freedoms and rights enjoyed by internet users today will be
enhanced, our creators will be better remunerated for their work,
and the internet economy will have clearer rules for operating and
thriving." The bill is expected to be formally approved by
mid-April, after which European Union governments will have two
years to include it in their national laws.
Copyright scanning is something many bigger, established sites
such as Alphabet's YouTube already do voluntarily. But some
tech-lobby groups say that smaller companies would go under if they
had to deploy filters to detect copyright violations.
"Requiring platforms to use upload filters would not just lead
to more frequent blocking of legal uploads, it would also make life
difficult for smaller platforms that cannot afford filtering
software," said Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament
from Germany who advocates internet freedom.
Many publishers have long fought for Google and other online
aggregators to pay for the snippets of news content they display.
Publishers argue that news content is a significant attraction for
services like Google, drawing visitors who then might use other
Google services. The publishers say that entitles their companies
to a cut.
Google, for its part, argues that it already boosts publishers'
revenue by driving user traffic to their websites and apps from its
Google News service. The company says Google News doesn't generate
any revenue on its own because dedicated Google News pages don't
carry ads -- though Google also displays news articles at times
atop general search pages that can also carry ads.
Google executives have said they might shut down Google News if
it is obliged to pay for licenses to display even short snippets of
news stories, much as Google did in Spain after that country passed
a similar law in 2014.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which
represents Google, Facebook Inc. and other tech companies, urged EU
governments to reconsider before formally adopting the law. "We
fear the law could harm online innovation, scale-ups, and restrict
online freedoms in Europe," said CCIA Vice President Christian
Borggreen.
Earlier this year, as part of Google's lobbying effort, it
performed what it described as an experiment, showing users what
they could expect to see if they search for news on Google under
the proposed EU legislation. In Google's experiment, the company
assumed that rather than paying for licenses it would simply stop
displaying snippets of news stories, providing only single links
with publication titles but no information about the stories to
which those links led.
Google said the experiment led to a 45% decline in traffic to
publishers' websites from Google News.
Several groups representing publishers said in a joint statement
that they believed the experiment was a ploy. "Google prefers to
provide a bad product rather than ending their freeriding of the
work of journalists and publishing houses," the groups said. They
said if Google actually did such a thing, people would abandon
Google.
The publisher groups on Wednesday welcomed the EU agreement.
The draft directive has been the subject of heavy lobbying on
both sides, with open letters to negotiators. Publisher groups put
out a letter from an Agence France-Presse war correspondent this
week, saying that "failure in your talks risks condemning hundreds
of media outlets."
Similar efforts to give publishers a way to negotiate with the
platforms for payment for the use of their content are continuing
in the U.S.
Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, last year
introduced a bill that would waive antitrust rules preventing
publishers from organizing to negotiate with platforms such as
Google and Facebook. The bill didn't pass, but now that the
Democrats control the House, he plans to re-introduce the
legislation, his spokesman said.
Write to Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com, Sam Schechner
at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 13, 2019 18:56 ET (23:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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