As I’m writing this, today (12 September 2018) is the day that the European Parliament has voted to adopt some controversial and bitterly argued changes to copyright legislation. There has been heavy lobbying on both sides. There’s a distance to go yet, with further dialogue etc due before individual countries can start to implement the changes. And the implications for the UK with Brexit looming are even less certain.
Why does it matter to publishers, content owners and content users, with so much yet to play out? Because working with digital copyright in a practical context, which already involved a fair number of grey areas and difficult-to-assess risks, just became a bit more complex and unpredictable.
Isn’t it all irrelevant to the UK because of Brexit? Not if you’re publishing online or using content on, or from, the internet. That’s pretty much all of us in the corporate or commercial world, plus many others beyond. We already have to think about a variety of national copyright systems when we publish online (not only UK regulations), and we’ll still need to do the same beyond Brexit.
One of the things that has been adopted today is the so-called ‘link tax’, which is actually more about headlines, text and content rather than the sharing of simple links. It might (if rights holders want to enforce it) mean paying to display snippets of content, disrupting not only aggregated news services but also potentially e-learning and online publications. But charging for snippets will reduce traffic to your site… these are not easy choices for content owners to make.
Also controversial is the responsibility placed on websites and platforms to remove content which infringes copyright. How you assess what is or isn’t copyright infringement – very fast indeed, with flawless accuracy and at unimaginably vast scale – is, of course, the difficult bit.
In our copyright work, we’re used to looking for clues about whether the user who uploaded a particular image, video clip or article actually owns it or not. But even with our experience, it’s not always easy to tell. The automated filters used by the big platforms have already thrown up some publicly-visible mistakes: blocking legitimate content and penalising users, or failing to spot infringing content. This is going to be messy. I’m told there’s also a proposal for a similar change in UK legislation, irrespective of what’s decided in the EU.
If you’re a publisher, all the more reason to put your rights management house in order. That includes image rights, which often get forgotten in older works. A lack of clear information can restrict you from exploring sales opportunities, and can even affect the value of your company.
If you use or own digital content, all the more reason to have clear guidelines for your staff about how copyright material should be acquired and used. It’s all about reducing the risks.