YouTube's current Content ID gives copyright owners the right to claim ownership of content already live on YouTube. The system then allows them to either block the video or monetise it by running advertising against it. It's an already unpopular system due to its propensity for false positives and abuse, and this would be heightened if potentially infringing videos could not be uploaded at all.
The final wording of Article 13 sets out exactly which platforms will need upload filters and which ones won't. The only way a site that hosts user-generated content can avoid putting in place a upload filter is if it fulfils all three of the following criteria: it has been available for fewer than three years; it has an annual turnover below €10 million; it had fewer than five million unique monthly visitors. As you can probably guess, this means a huge number of sites – from fishing forums to niche social networks – that will need to install upload filters.
The reason why this article has been dubbed the “meme ban” is that no one is sure whether memes, which are often based on copyrighted images, will fall foul of these laws. Proponents of the legislation argue that memes are protected as parodies and so aren’t required to be removed under this directive, but others argue that filters won’t be able to distinguish between memes and other copyrighted material so they’d end up being caught in the crossfire anyway.
Article 11 aka “the link tax” explained
The article intends to get news aggregator sites, such as Google News, to pay publishers for using snippets of their articles on their platforms. Press publications “may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers,” the Directive states.
No one is really sure how this one would work either. How much of an article has to be shared before a platform has to pay the publisher? The Directive states that platforms won’t have to pay if they’re sharing “mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words,” but since most links are accompanied by more than a couple of words it seems that many platforms and news aggregators would fall foul of this rule.
The Directive does contain an exemption for “legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users,” so it doesn’t look like individuals sharing links on social platforms will have to dip into their pockets. But even this is open to interpretation. Is someone with a huge following on social media, who posts adverts to that audience, a “private and non-commercial” entity