Europe, towards changing the paradigm of copyright on the internet

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]On September 12, the European Parliament adopted the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Marketafter amending the initial proposal that was rejected in July. However, it still has to be endorsed by the Council and the Commission so that, once they reach a consensus, the European Parliament can approve the final articles of the measure, in a vote that is expected to take place next January.If this EU directive is finally approved, the various Internet content aggregators -that is, platforms where news links or any type of content from countless different sources, such as YouTube- will have to change their business model, since articles 11 and 13 represent a radical change to the current legislation.Thus, Article 11 is aimed at the media, giving press publishers the power to decide whether their news can be disseminated in whole or in part on other digital platforms or even charge a fee for the digital use of their content.But Article 13 is the most controversial, as it establishes that online platforms must "adopt, in cooperation with right holders, the appropriate measures to ensure the proper functioning of the agreements concluded with right holders for the use of their works or other subject matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject matter identified by right holders in cooperation with service providers".This article puts in check the big technology companies that have already put the cry in the sky, as they become responsible for copyright infringement. Until now, only when they were warned that these rights were being infringed and did not act accordingly, were they liable. Now, however, they are expected to be proactive in ensuring that no content is uploaded on their respective platforms without the corresponding authorization and, if so, to obtain it from the owners and pay these authors if their work is finally reproduced.At first glance, the first thing that comes to mind is that streaming or downloading platforms will find it even more difficult, which I personally find necessary because violating the intellectual property rights of the owners of the same is detrimental to our culture, as it prevents these authors from being able to support their creations, and therefore, stop creating.However, these measures will also make it much more difficult to use the Internet as we were used to because, to give you an idea, they can affect even memes that use protected images.This future regulation is in line with the direction of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as we remember the important and recent Judgment in case C-161/17 of last August 7, where the CJEU strengthened the copyright of photographs on the Internet. In that judgment it pointed out that "withoutprejudice to the exceptions and limitations exhaustively provided for in the Directive, any use of a work by a third party without the prior consent of the author must be considered to infringe the author's rights" since "the publication, on an Internet site, of a photograph previously published on another Internet site - after having been copied, between those two publications, The publication of a copyrightedwork on an Internet site other than the one on which the initial communication was made with the authorization of the copyright holder must be considered as making the work available to a new public".

Georgina García-Más (Attorney at Law T&l)

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