germany street by street. colorful. the wifely are just. the most traditional. thing to do all at any time. check in with a web special. take a tour of germany state by state on d w dot com. welcome to quadriga rarely has a piece of e.u. legislation provoked protests and pressure as intense as those surrounding a new directive on copyright protection in the internet will it stay in the wild west world of digital copyright infringement or drive

a nail in the coffin of free expression on the web the majority of parliamentarians took the former view and voted yes to require tech titans like google you tube and facebook to scan upload it content for copyright violations and compensate content providers for using their work could the scanning process wind up blocking not only copyright infringement the creativity and open exchange that prospect drove hundreds of thousands of european internet users to the streets in protest copyright cashing in on the internet that's our topic here our cast's grace still bush is a berlin based freelance author who often writes about tech and she says it is a perilous time for content creators but europe can't police the entire internet. alan posner is an author and commentator for the daily newspaper de vets' he says europe is forcing the internet giants to respect intellectual property and pay for . and that's good news for everyone except google. and it's

a pleasure to welcome. to the show he heads the department of law and policy and media and he says for free and open we need free and open exchange on the web this reform could cause great damage. so let me start with you and let's begin with the absolute basics what is a filter and why does it strike terror into the heart of the content creator community. is a system that is at the. it's installed on the platform. and it scans the uploads and compounds that to a database and if it finds a protected work that it is supposed to block it stopping the upload or it's putting the upload before a post to check whether there was a license for this work and so that's the basic technology and why are people so

worried about load filters in the wake of this new directive. well because the technology is very powerful and if you have those kinds of systems everywhere on the internet they can they can be abused to block stuff that is not just of copyright infringement but for other reasons maybe the government doesn't like it and claims copyright and by that filtering stops publication and in general it can it can. the exchange of information on the net and that is what the net is about and that is about exchanging things except exchanging views sixth exchanging also opinions and now a days when people use graphics or music and visual content to express themselves much more than in the past in the possibles mostly text it was

a text thing but now the web is becoming all the internet is becoming a much more visual place which which makes the power of those blocking systems even greater and the perils that people attribute to them so oh and help me out a little bit here because as i understood stand it the law doesn't explicitly require that platform's use an upload filter so how great is this risk that such filters will now be put into place and will essentially screen out not only copyright infringement but lots of other useful material as well well that doesn't exclude the use of copyright. which is what people are protesting against because it's totally impossible for a platform like shall we say a huge people upload millions of of videos and so every day to squeeze individually per person so you have to have an algorithm working to check that as john just said so the only way at the moment if you don't want to employ hundreds

of thousands of people to destroy your you or your business model is to use an algorithm. and you know i think basically these are a group of them saw benign most copyright holders of registered with someone who represents them that for instance in germany it's the g.m.a. game which represents musicians they already have contracts with with with you tube for instance being a content creator in the new digital economy. are getting pennies per thousands of plays from streaming services the idea that everyone who is a content creators registering their work with a copyright agency it's completely untrue anyone who is posting in images on instagram that they have taken is creating copyrightable works but is not registering those with the copyright office by any means same goes for a person who sings

a song that they made up on you tube and they own that copyright but there are certainly not going to be filing paperwork for every time they post a short video no one has yet figured out how to make. content creation really profitable the internet let it least of all the newspapers who are also tightly involved in this copyright battle so alan what i'm hearing there from from grace is that essentially the payments that could now be collected will never reach up and coming young artists who don't have affiliations with established publishers or established agencies is there some truth to that. it if they don't have if these young or old. content i think you'd rather set up and coming ok up and coming content produces don't have some kind of organization behind them yes they're going to get ripped off. ever since i was twenty i've been

a member of the german organization called fall gevalt which which which protects my copyright is used as an author and i get paid for that so i don't and i at that time i wasn't i was only pennies and i got fractions of pennies but i did it because i felt that's what you do i don't see why you can't if you want to earn money on your stuff that you upload then why don't you join isn't a question of paperwork you could do it online it's free clicks no literally like that for every single instagram post it'll make and you know if you register yourself as an author that i don't think that type of protection exists currently for you tube. to grab or anything like that isn't that a great offering in john let's bring in can we please not forget all the creativity on the net that is not made for profit i mean of course it is very important that people who want to live from their creativity can do so so that's not the question the question is whether we want to and false their rights in

a way that flattens out everything else and that's what's happening right now this is one way to do it i mean as you say it's the best way but there's other ways to get remuneration to creators without having these huge collateral effects that we going to see through this directive and that's the critique really ellen regardless of how the provisions are implemented here isn't this law in the certainly going to create more you're ocracy. the way well that's fine is fine by me i love all sorts of people to see my cat right and people post cat jokes and so on let that be but if someone wants to live off a website that posts jokes or cat photos then have them register it's you know. i call it all going to enforce your rights which has been. the bedrock of civil society since the eighteenth century magistad. to what degree the

way that this law is implemented is really already set in stone certainly members of the german government have been saying since passage of the directive that it won't change as drastic as what many people fear of the german justice minister for example said she doesn't like the idea of upload filters but she's absolutely determined to implement this law in such a way that it quote unquote does not disrupt freedom of expression on the web so is there more flexibility here than meets the eye of i mean for a start we have to assume the worst if a law is made and if it's and false. and the. first have to be implemented international your state that is going to take a couple of years it's going to take a maximum of two years that's the rule but we asked some some very high ranking law professors whether this law as it was passed in brussels allows for what for

example the federal government has said they want to do in germany and they said no on the basis of this text this software solution that the german government is now proposing is not even possible on the european law because if you want to have an exception to copyright that's a very very strict regime and the e.u. it says you need to have an exception. in the european law and then you can do it on the national level and doesn't exist in the text that's why up until the last minute people said please open up this article thirteen again to make at least this possible and that would lead to a kind of. a flat fee rule to the creators would be paid through collecting societies on a flat basis but not on an individual basis and this individual thing is what makes filtering necessary and you know. certainly this new directive is provoking genuine and heated opposition from young europeans in particular protests here in berlin

and throughout the e.u. have brought thousands into the streets. these young people are upset about the new legislation they say it could lead to online censorship and restrictions on freedom of speech. young the free to be first in their area that the internet as we know it will cease to exist. it won't be able to use the original works of others to create something new it will smother creativity on the internet. supporters of filter technology including groups from the music publishing and video industries say it will help cut down on piracy. is crime the big platforms are trying to protect their financial interests they're trying to convince the kids that this will ruin the internet they claim that you won't be able to have your own channels on you tube anymore you couldn't well that's just ridiculous and you could if you didn't have the privilege to see. all this opposition has made some politicians

nervous. because they're worried about losing a lot of young voters so how can we protect copyrighted material on the internet. grace others talk about upload filters and censorship machines and the big dangers for content creators is it possible the tech giants themselves were behind some of these arguments and even helped incite the protests i think that it doesn't get enough credit to the people of the internet who see very fundamental changes potentially being made. because this isn't just riling up people in europe this would potentially affect the entire internet as we know it which is a scary prospect. john as we heard there some politicians have absolutely downplayed the authenticity of the protests they've said this is just a tempest in

a teapot as it were now i looked it up this morning the average age of e.u. parliamentarians is fifty four years is it possible that many of those who voted for this directive simply don't really get the internet i think they don't get. the feeling that people have because they don't get the internet i think i think that's the like this of a gap between the generations yes i think so so alan very guard lissa who's right on the merits is such a generation gap risky at this point in time given that we have just two months until some very critical e.u. elections. it's probably risky but i think politicians need to. explain to people who are demonstrating that the idea that you get something for free. is wrong you don't there is no such thing as a free lunch there is no such thing as a free internet it was a beautiful idea i signed onto it twenty years ago myself i thought yeah that's it

but it's naive and it's dangerous. the fact because we pay for everything we know we pay for everything that supposedly for free with our data we also pay. other people pay content providers pay by getting ripped off and the people who get this data and who use and who make billions on ripping off other people's content in silicon valley and others and elsewhere they are just laughing at us so the fact that europe down says no sorry. you know they're nothing is a free if you want free public transport taxpayers pay if you want free health care taxpayers pay it if you want free internet content providers and you pay with your data and the fact that there is no freedom to this is something that politicians have to explain to young people because they're not used to it but it's a fact of life and no young people are having to explain to politicians how the internet works and how the sharing of information and. by measure content

happens on the internet there's no way to wall off any segment of the internet and not have effects the entire ecosystem i think there just remains a fundamental misunderstanding from the point of parliamentarians who voted for this as to how the internet works also that the framing that that young people want everything for free is a very dangerous one because they are not against creators being paid just against the means that are now employed to do that and politicians just kind of went through it like this and thinking all these young people they're just shouting because they want to get everything for free nothing is for. i guess the young people know that but they just don't want to get the internet as we know it destroyed on the just for the money that they destroyed your you represent we can media we can is explicitly exempted from all the thing really the text of it just what it takes ok you may have

a problem with the odd photograph i'm sure you get around that i'm so that you'd be able to employ a couple of people are going to help you with that explicitly also people young creative who makes a video in the living room using beyond ses backing track and so on whatever she's not going to be because the she has to have two million views or so before it's even sort of comes into the focus of the opcode fields and this is not being explained to young people that young boy we saw i think was a boy saying that he wanted to use other people's stuff to be creative he can no one is stopping him and no one's telling him that no one is stopping him but that's what you think is going to happen in the future but the young people people obviously don't trust the politicians and obviously to a large extent don't text don't understand how the internet works they make a rule that works in that way that's a trust problem once and the exact execution of how these rules are going to be

enforced is completely unknown at this point the idea of an upload filter is what boils down to when it comes down to it. the. the very specific nuances of copyright large stream lee extremely complicated and there's absolutely justified fear that the small content creators will get caught in the webs of filters i'd like to widen our focus just a little bit in the last few minutes of the program and i must say amongst the young people i spoke to at this week's protest after the directive was passed a lot of anger was reserved not just for politicians but also for the tech giants does the new law leave their power undiminished. from billions of consumers and is available on the internet and processing it has become a lucrative industry. last year google's parent company reported a total net income of thirty billion dollars much of it from advertising. google is

able to create personalized ads that a target people who might want to buy a product that helps to boost to have or ties in revenue. big internet corporations like google are part of the digital ecosystem but critics say they have too much power and can influence the behavior of consumers and politicians do these corporations pose a threat. john the head of wiki p.d.'s or not we can media but your cousin as it were tweeted after the new directive was passed that the new law quote is not about helping artists it's about empowering monopolistic practices would you agree with that and would you say that in the end the tech titans will be laughing all the way to the bank despite this new law. and on a relative if you compare it to the smaller ones i guess the giants will profit because they have the systems to what is now required the law and in that respect

they will and in other respects i guess they will get targeted more with claims for compensation and payment so it's a two sided thing i would say well if we look at it you digital policy as a whole isn't europe in fact doing more to curb monopoly power and practices on the internet than any other region in the world at the moment absolutely i mean to take china for instance because of the internet for outside influences have their own people like ali baba and so on and provide content that america almost totally unregulated europe is the biggest market in the world and what we're doing now is attempting with our data protection laws with a copyright protection laws with. upcoming. monopoly laws to do something about about monopolies you can't get hold of because they're not like steel works all works which companies would sit somewhere

and you can sort of grab them they're everywhere and nowhere and we're trying and i think it's great that we're trying we may be making mistakes i'm you know i'm not. dogmatic but i think we're going in the right direction. greece the e.u. commissioner who imposed record anti-trust finds on apple google best idea she described package of the new directive quote unquote as great news how do you square that with her strong. down on antitrust and trying to. essentially grade in these giant companies i think coming from the united states where deregulation has been the rule for the past for my entire lifetime basically i never thought we would see the day when some of these tech giants start getting broken up i think that is the path that we're going down worldwide within the united states that's even a discussion as to whether these companies should be broken up and will be broken up but i think the way that the e.u.

is trying to legislate the internet amounts to a new kind of colonialism honestly so even in the u.s. graces just said broken up even in the u.s. which of course is home to these big tech. and there are increasing calls for the breakup of these giant companies do you in fact think that's the road we're going down and if we look at the precedent of microsoft in two thousand would you say that was an effective way to take that job i have to but if you look at the systems european union users and their offices all microsoft i think it didn't work so i think nobody contests the fact that some of those titans as you call them are just too big for any market model to to work but a point is always to say don't use the copyright law to to fix that and to trust lawyers competition law to do that and that is what it is he was also doing right

now and that's the the right tools and don't do it with copyright law because that affects everybody on the net since the internet came about so that's the wrong tool . e.u. elections two months from now what would you want to see a new e.u. commission and or a new e.u. parliament to do in this area to bring these huge tech companies under some form of control go down the same road going now which is not breaking them up into smaller entities which will then develop into big and cities but empower the citizen give you the right to take your own data away from these people take when you leave facebook take all your danger away from facebook take it to somewhere else when you decide not to use google to have that taken away from google take whatever you want what's already happened now the data protection or to go further down that path it's to absolutely know who's got what on me it's the individual

citizen not the state that needs to control these tech giants and europe is helping us do that very briefly if i go back to our title cashing in on the net until now that has been largely the prerogative of these huge companies what do you think will it change in future their business models won't change i don't think so at all and i think that the idea that this type of copyright law could then somehow distribute that money to individual content creators is dubious at best jon. i agree with chris. ok if that is the sort of ads or ellen. that i think europe's doing a good job let's let's pray for europe right. great last words but thank you very much to all of you for being with us and thanks to you out there for tuning in see you soon.

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