The European Parliament will Vote on the Disputed Copyright Directive

The European Parliament will vote today on the Copyright Directive, which, in an effort to protect copyright, risks changing the way social networks, content sharing platforms and search engines work, reports Dnevnik. 

Despite the many criticisms that the text of the directive is unclear, dangerous for freedom of speech, contrary to other directives and does not solve the problems of the creative industry, the European People's Party (EPP), in the person of the rapporteur Axel Foss, is determined to pass it during the parliament before the May elections.

In its current form, the directive is simply an example of bad lawmaking, the chairman of the board of the Digital Republic Association, said lawyer Anna Lazarova in an interview with Dnevnik. "The best option would be for Parliament to reject this directive and start from the beginning (...) The directive does not carry out real reform or solve the problems of the digital single market, but tries to address certain problems in certain industries without general solution"

Taxes on links

Art. 11 obliges sites to pay the media to quote anything except "individual words or very short excerpts" of their publications - an exception is made for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia but not for smaller search engines that could become competitors of Google. In fact, such laws aimed precisely against it were adopted in Germany and Spain.

"In Germany, publishers did not win anything from this proposal because Google simply changed the news display in Google News and stopped showing the long excerpts that would require a license, resulting in fewer people going to news websites because they were more likely to click on a link if there is an excerpt. "Publishers gave Google a free license...