photo by Sina Technology

Agreed by the EU countries on Wednesday, an overhaul of the EU Copyright Law will be launched, which may force enterprises like Google and Facebook pay publishers for news snippets to and filter out copyright-protected content on the platforms including YouTube and Instagram. A majority of EU diplomats agreed the revamp while Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Poland refused to back the deal and two other EU countries abstained.

In September, 2018, the EU Parliament passed the controversial proposal EU Copyright Directive with 438 votes in favor, 226 against and 39 abstentions. According to the EU legislative procedure, the bill will be negotiated by the EU parliamentarians with the 28 EU member countries and the EU Commission after passed. Last week, there reached a consistent agreement on the negotiation among the EU countries, the EU parliament and the EU commission.

In Google’s statement early this month, the newly revised EU copyright law will damage EU’s booming innovative economy including  creators on YouTube, without carefully balancing. Therefore, there’s an urgent need to amend the present law.

Google also claimed that as a company aiming at providing high-quality news, it would suffer since there’s a fundamental misconception of titles and snippets (outlines on the news search websites) among the public according to recent discussions. Reducing snippets to several words or simple extracts may create more difficulties for customers to find out the contents and lower the overall throughput for news publishers.

February 21, 2019

Source: Sina Technology