The European Union has approved the new Copyright Directive
More protection for Copyright, but free circulation of information may be obstacled 13 September 2018
On 12 September 2018, with 438 votes in favor, 226 against and 38 abstentions, the EU Parliament approved the new Copyright Directive, already approved on 20 June 2018 by the EU Juridical Commission. The Directive tends to protect copyright more, especially in relation to news, even if some state that this new Directive represents an obstacle to the free circulation of the same.
In any case, the two most controversial articles are Articles 11 and 13.
Article 11, also called "link tax" recognizes copyright for the whole EU on journalistic publications in order to regulate the use of short text extracts (the snippets). Anyone who wants to share a link to a text must pay a commission to the body responsible for publishing the text. This right has a duration of 20 years starting from 1 January of the year following the year of publication. The uses in proven and non-commercial form are excluded from this.
Article 13 called "upload filter" provides that the on-line platforms perform a check on what is uploaded by users in order to ensure that contents protected by copyright are not published. In order to avoid this, the article suggests that agreements are signed between online platforms and publishers in order to regulate the use of information. A kind of license agreements. The rule explicitly excludes free encyclopedias like Wikipedia, small news aggregators and open source platforms.
