The Internet Takes a Beating from Brussels

The European Parliament has just voted to impose a restriction on information available for use on the Internet including aggregators (at BoT, for example, we link to news-sites bringing them visitors). These ‘copyright’ laws, to be introduced in the next couple of years, are of course plainly designed to benefit agents, lawyers, impresarios and publishers (rather than musicians, writers and artists). From Meneame comes ‘...There are two particularly sensitive articles, the best known one obliges the platforms to take responsibility for the contents uploaded by their users. The theory is that a platform like YouTube should detect if a copyrighted movie – or a glimpse of one – is being uploaded. The practice is that any platform, including Github (for code) or Menéame (comments) should implement an active surveillance system that compares everything with a non-existent database. The incentive for platforms to play it safe and erase everything doubtful (including parodies, criticism or analysis) is too dangerous. But for the part that touches Menéame, there is an even sadder article. The famous "link tax" is approved, which means that the aggregators (at least the ones based in the EU) in theory will have to pay for linking contents, in contrariness to how the system currently works and what common sense dictates...’. The reason appears to be that while this would hurt all news-sites to some degree, it would by necessity hurt the smaller ones (who can’t afford sometimes ‘tame’ journalists and aren’t fed regular corporate press-releases) more.

Who owns the most enthusiastic news-providers in Spain, including the daily newspapers that make up the powerful AEDE (Wiki) and so on, we ask ourselves.

Público provides some background here (in a longish but instructive quote): ‘...The Banco de Santander, the one that got the Socialist government to pardon Botín, has money in Mediaset Spain. Telecinco belongs to them. The bank also has plenty of money in the PRISA group, which controls El País, El Huff Post, the SER and DIAL radio chains. The Banco Santander likes you to know who is in charge, and when it suits them, they buy the covers of all the written newspapers of Spain. The BBVA, the one that pays the Comisario Villarejo to investigate even governments, has serious money at Atresmedia, where the PLANETA group is, the one that has just published the book written by President Sánchez. Atresmedia controls the two TV channels Antena3 and La Sexta. Also invested there is the Banco Sabadell, the one who said that we needed a conservative version of Podemos. The CaixaBank, which has recently been accused of laundering money from Chinese mafias, has also invested in Atresmedia, as well as in El Periodico de Catalunya and the PRISA group.  ... In turn, a far from small part of the Banco Santander, 6%, is held by Blackrock, an investment fund that also holds 5% of the BBVA. Blackrock participates in nineteen Ibex 35 companies, with a total investment of 12,200 million euros.

The media generally lose money as we know. A naive question: why do the banks invest in media companies that are losing money?...’. Brussels to the rescue via its euro-deputies.

Evidently, the copyright defence in Brussels is not entirely about saving a few euros for some starving artists.

Hardwaresfera says ‘...The first thing is that it is the end of streaming games on YouTube and Twitch, since these will become illegal. This is because, since the games are copyrighted and used for profit, streaming is not possible. Neither will brief up-loads of music or image may be used in videos, while brands or games may no longer be mentioned nor images of third parties be shown – without explicit permission. Add to this, applications such as TikTok, Spotify or Facebook will be obliged to block copyrighted content...’.

Google says it is making changes to its platform (Google News, long departed from Spain, will disappear from all European sites). ‘...Google also has big changes planned for YouTube. They will apparently install or enable in the coming weeks a new filter using Artificial Intelligence. This will review each and every one of the videos and will detect even if a brand or a videogame is named. If the channel is detected, it could receive a penalty, demonetize the video, temporarily disable direct, prohibit uploading videos for a period of time and even erase the channel...’. Here are the parties which voted in Brussels for this, including from Spain, the PP, the PSOE, Ciudadanos, PDeCAT and the PNV. Podemos and ERC voted against. The senior PP man in Brussels, Esteban González Pons, said “I believe that the legislation is ambitious and protects quality journalism and the salaries of journalists”.

With luck, new politics forthcoming from the upcoming European elections may produce a brake on this corporate wet-dream.

Of course, like any Internet law, there are ways around it – including using a VPN and thus ‘pretending’ that your computer is outside the area of censorship.