EU copyright directive will harm access to knowledge, says Wikipedia

Wikipedia last week announced that is not supporting the EU Copyright Directive in its current form. Allison Davenport, Technology Law and Policy Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation, wrote that the copyright directive will harm access to knowledge, benefit large corporations and rightsholder industries, and aims to control the sharing of information online.

Wikipedia says that the two most harmful provisions, Articles 11 and 13, have stuck around despite the criticism and are now a part of the final text that the EU Parliament and EU Council concluded last week. Here the reasons pointed out by Wikipedia:

Article 11 will require licenses for all online uses of news content apart from a few exceptions. This means that websites which aggregate, organize, or make sense of the news will no longer be able to display snippets alongside those articles, making it much harder for users to find and use information online.

Article 13 will impose liability on platforms for copyright-infringing content uploaded by users unless they meet a number of stringent requirements.  Wikipedia says this will dramatically decrease the diversity of content available online if websites strictly comply with these requirements, and it sets up a system for private enforcement of copyright through upload filters that can lead to over-removal of content due to fear of liability and false positives.

The last step for the approval of the EU copyright directive will be at the end of March when the European Parliament will have a yes or no vote. If approved, EU countries would then be required to enact laws within 24 months to support the Directive.

Kent Walker, SVP of Global Affairs at Google, also pointed out yesterday that the latest version hurts small and emerging publishers, and limits consumer access to a diversity of news sources.