"Surrender or Fight" -- EU Passes Copyright Directive That's "Extinction-Level Event" for User-Creation Content Platforms, Including Worlds Like Minecraft, Roblox, Second Life, VRChat & High Fidelity

Today the EU voted for Article 13, which imposes heavy filter requirements on platforms with user-generated content, including virtual worlds like Minecraft, Roblox, Second Life, VRChat and High Fidelity. For users of these platforms, the changes they're facing will be drastic. As the EFF's Cory Doctorow explains here:

Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run by the big platforms. They'll compare your posts to databases of "copyrighted works" that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything that appears to match the "copyright database" is blocked on sight, and you have to beg the platform's human moderators to review your case to get your work reinstated.

There are still ways to oppose this directive from going into effect, but for reasons explained below, it will be very difficult to stop this freight train now.

And so companies with user-created content platforms now face a stark choice. As Cory puts it to me:

"Surrender. Seriously, there's nothing to be done. It's an extinction-level event for them. Try to find a buyer with $1-300M to implement a filter before they get shut down by litigation after the rules go into effect. Or fight."

And companies have roughly two years to do that: "Assuming they get through the vote this Spring, national legislatures will have to implement by 2021, I believe."

Again, protest may still change this, but companies have to prepare for this worst case scenario now. (And here's why the directive would still penalize companies based outside the EU, and companies with platforms where the content is on user servers.) Cory passed along an update on what happens next on the legislative level:

Practically speaking, there are several more junctures where Europeans can influence their elected leaders on this issue.

*Immediately: the Directive will now go into "trilogues" -- secretive, closed-door meetings between representatives from national governments and the European Union; these will be hard to influence, but they will determine the final language put before the Parliament for the next vote (Difficulty: 10/10)

* Next spring: The European Parliament will vote on the language that comes out of the trilogues. It's unlikely that they'll be able to revise the text any further, so this will probably come to a vote on whether to pass the Directive itself. It's almost unthinkable that the Directive won't pass (though it if it did, it would certainly teach the stakeholders a lesson about hitching their wagons to copyright extremists with farcical, magical technology mandates)

*After that: 28 member states will have to debate and enact their own versions of the legislation. In many ways, it's going to be harder to influence 28 individual parliaments than it was to fix this at the EU level, but on the other hand, the parliamentarians in member states will be more responsive to individual internet users, and victories in one country can be leveraged for others ("See, they got it right in Luxembourg, let's do the same)

* Somewhere around there: Court challenges. These measures are absolutely unconstitutional under European law. There's just no way that spying on everything every European utters online and arbitrarily blocking some of it will be found legal under EU law. Unfortunately, court challenges are slow and expensive.

So given all that, UGC-based companies and startups will need to start preparing, and face roughly two stark choices -- spend massive amounts of money to create copyright filters, or prepare to sell out to a major Internet company which already has such filters or the money to make them.

Comments

[Guni Greenstein]

I am absolutely not happy about this because of the potential for abuse and future introduction of censorship by governments ("hate speach", nudity etc).

But as far as the economic impact on small companies: can't we expect some third party service providers to emerge offering such a filter service or software for validating content files to smaller UGC companies? Why would Linden Lab need to create their own filter?

[Tarx]

Great EU passed the CD now a six year old won't be able to jump on Minecraft or second life and say he f***Ed your mom. But seriously if our governments are more concerned about the lingo or visual problems in games and social media, than they are about actually running a country well and keeping it's people happy. Whoo, we are in deep deep shiiit! Wait... Did our governments ever?

[irihapeti]

is end of days for host server owners coining it by making available other peoples stuff without their consent

the EU has this right and it is a good thing, as not all our stuffs wants to be free

for my own stuff (which is everything I make) I put it into the Public Domain. Which tells everyone that my own stuff does wants to be free, because it is

unlike some other peoples stuff which don't wants to be free. Because as a creative they are trying to make a living from their work, like a real job. And not have to work as a night cleaner which is also a real job but one they would rather not have to do

as for new startups and existing businesses who want to continue making available other peoples stuff without their consent then is pretty much Cry Me! as far as I am concerned

[montecore babcock]

Would SL be able to avoid that by shutting down it's European logins?

[Vin]

There is, of course, a third choice: Build a Reverse Great Firewall around Europe and block European users from the internet. Some companies have already done that over the GDPR, and they don't seem to have suffered.

[Veridian Nexus]

This is the start of Censorship if the people of Europe do not fight back and resist this then this will be the end of free thought on the internet for you all. The EU in the form it is in now must go it has become an evil Censoring monster who seeks to control every aspect of your lives slowly increasing its power like a cancerous tumor. Cut out this tumor its almost to late! WWG1WGA