Will the EU Kill Video Streaming?
Will the EU Kill Video Streaming?
A copyright ‘directive’ could make it impossible for
YouTube, much less an upstart, to do business.
By Brian Dellinger June 5, 2019 6:36 p.m. ET
The European Union’s Directive on Copyright in the
Digital Single Market takes effect June 7. It is intended to update European
policies regarding online intellectual property and shelter fledgling European
technology companies against competition from Apple, Google and other foreign
tech giants. The irony is that the new directive may end up hampering web-based
initiatives everywhere—particularly the very companies it is meant to protect.
Of particular concern is Article 17, which limits the “use
of protected content by online content-sharing services.” It would make
social-media and video-streaming sites liable for preventing repeat instances
of copyright infringement on their platforms. These sites function by allowing
people to post content freely without waiting for review by human moderators,
and a restrictive standard of liability would stifle the atmosphere of
user-created content and popular images, videos and songs.
Under existing laws, like America’s Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998, a hosting site doesn’t become liable for
copyright-infringing content posted by users until it is notified of the
violation by the IP license holder, at which point it must remove the content.
EU officials complain reasonably that this system struggles to keep up with the
heavy volume of material posted to Google-owned YouTube and similar sites, with
new illicit copies put up faster than they can be flagged and pulled down.
Yet the proposed solution imposes an unreasonable burden
on the hosting sites. Under Article 17, sites must show they have “acted
expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the
rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the
notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their
future uploads.” In other words, once YouTube has been notified about an
infringing video, the site becomes responsible not only for removing that copy
of the work, but also for blocking any future attempts by users to post the same
content, even before the new post has been flagged.
This standard is untenable. YouTube monitors copyright
infringements as well as it does through an automated filtering system called
Content ID, which reportedly cost about $100 million to develop. But even that
system has its flaws, failing to catch videos that hide infringing content with
simple tricks (like adding visual “noise” around the edges of the screen) while
sometimes blocking legal use of copyrighted works for review or parody.
It’s unlikely that any filter in the near future will be
able to inoculate platform sites against infringing content. And although the
directive doesn’t mandate automated filtering, human monitoring would be
prohibitively expensive for a site like YouTube, where users upload about 400
hours of video every minute.
Article 17 would have an even harsher effect on upstart
sites. Niche platforms use the same speedy, user-driven upload options to
compete with larger peers, but unlike Google, they are unlikely to have tens of
millions of dollars to spend on filtering technology. The final version of
Article 17 recognizes this burden and grants exceptions to smaller companies,
but these protections end once a company’s annual sales reach €10 million, long
before many would be able to afford state-of-the-art filtering. In this way the
directive might hamper the growth of European web companies—the very thing it
is intended to promote.
Making matters worse, an EU “directive” doesn’t have
regulatory force, but merely sets priorities that must be translated into
regulations or laws by all the member nations (including the six that voted
against the copyright measure). Given the international nature of the web,
whichever of those nations adopts the strictest interpretation of the directive
will effectively set the limits for all the rest and potentially shape
media-sharing rules the world over. It isn’t yet clear what form these final
regulations will take. For now, content hosts must wait to see whether the
emerging rules will pick winners, or whether they will all lose together.
Mr. Dellinger is a computer science professor at Grove
City College.
Appeared in the June 6, 2019, print edition.
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