Those who backed the new copyright law claimed that it will guarantee a fair share of revenue to flow from the IT companies to the authors of intellectual property.
What they haven't realized is that paying authors a fair revenue when a copyrighted content is shared is still a problem below the horizon. Or, to be more precise, it's also a problem, and it requires a good degree of innovation (see micro-payments, content consumption tracking, Blockchain+smart contracts etc.) in order to be tackled.
But we haven't gotten there yet because the real problem is upstream: HOW do we recognize that some uploaded content is copyrighted in the first place, and who's the right copyright holder for that content?
How do we do it in a scalable way on platforms where thousands or millions of videos, images or posts are shared per day?
How to pinpoint the right copyright holders for a certain content, taking into account that the current situation is extremely fragmented to say the least, that there are multiple national societies for authors that have barely progressed technologically in the last decades (nor have been pushed to do so), that many of them haven't even digitized their own records, let alone provide a unique database where the information about their intellectual property can be publicly accessed?
And finally, how to find the right balance between blocking the unauthorized publication of copyrighted content and avoiding an over-zealous approach where companies start blocking legit content as well? (Hint: it's not by putting strict time constraints on taking content down and threatening huge fines on companies).
YouTube has already had for some years some content filtering algorithms that automatically block the upload of copyrighted material. It has taken years to build to a company with the size of Google. It required billions of videos to be collected and labelled, massive investments in manual reviewers and engineers, and it's still an algorithm that makes lots of mistakes. How do we expect a smaller start-up to successfully implement a better solution?
How could the EU regulators fail to see that this law will create more entrance barriers than those it promises to take down? Google, Facebook etc. have been fighting against this law because it's really bad for the internet in general, but they'll be the ones to benefit most from it. Sure, they'll have to pay a higher toll to make business in Europe, but it's guaranteed that they won't have many competitors. Because, unless the EU pushed for a more distributed and open access to intellectual property, they will be the only ones who can afford to build an infrastructure that really complies with the new regulation.
It's really a shame because the law could have been written in a way that would have really solved the problem without creating new ones. Even people like Tim-Berners Lee (the dude who created the web) and people at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley have raised their voice: the EU had the moral obligation to sit with them and listen to their concerns before going down its path, and it failed to do so.
There were tons of better ideas. Pushing the associations of authors and artists to digitize their information and make it available in open format. Make a shared database of copyrighted content. Expose an API that businesses can use, where you provide a snippet of some content or its hash digest and the system will tell you whether it contains any copyrighted material, and who are the authors. Set up a continental infrastructure for micro-payments to make sure that authors receive their fair share for each play or view, regardless of where the content is consumed. These are big things to build and no company is really incentivised to do it alone: that's when politics should step in and remove the blockers on the way. Unfortunately the EU this time has chosen the "we set the bar, we don't know if it's too high, and actually we don't even care, good luck you guys" approach without listening to anyone. And that's a huge shame on them.