While the protests and the petition signatures were clear, the directive to restrict copyrighted material, known as Article 13 in the EU, received a “yes.”
Video on YouTube will likely no longer include “remixed” content once individual nations of the EU establish how they’re going to legislate protection for mainstream media, its images, film clips, and music. For years now, the Internet has taken liberties in the name of freedom, to borrow from established media and then return to it transformative work, for the purpose of review, satire, parody and other kinds of humour. This will likely end.
On YouTube, content filters for video uploads could become stodgy, and uninventive. Removing freedoms to speak with ideas recycled from mainstream media inhibits Internet creators’ ability to articulate. These come in the form of memes, even when it is an upset to the original, and identities in solidarity with views closely held to championed archetypes. In the face of traditional media protected by Article 17 in the EU, emerging voices can and will fall by the wayside.
If the nations of the EU no longer can upload or view content that contains copyrighted elements, for YouTube, a platform that facilitates hundreds of millions of hours of new and original video every day, doors are closing for what is a livelihood for hardworking creators.
In addition, the possibility that social accounts would be charged fees to link to web pages is a terrible limitation for small bloggers, with pages that have no hope of affording such a privilege. This was the spring, of 2019, when Articles 11 and 13 became Article 17. There is every possibility that the restrictions on uploading copyrighted content in the EU will drift into the same freedoms available regardless of where the Internet is accessed and overtake them.
A content filter is complex; it could be, despite how valuable original content is for Google and for Facebook and Twitter, that content filters will only function effectively if they are applied universally, and not just in the EU. This could be a matter of months or years from now, but the challenges facing the EU, by creators on YouTube, and users enjoying social, and the right of Google to chart the world as it’s understood online, should be informing you. You should at least consider the possibility that you need to be informed.
Kelly Sikkema
Article 17 will heavily favour the promotion of mainstream media. Independent voices will lose the opportunity to include portions of copyrighted media, and this could mean a “talking head” style of video on YouTube rather than video containing the freedoms we enjoy now. All art and video would be required to be free of copyrighted material, which I think is a practical impossibility.
There are creators who thrive on the “remix” of media images or industry music or PC games. Formerly, they were smart enough to make a living doing that, and exceptionally. Their opportunities are going to disappear.
The outcome of Article 17 in the EU is only just beginning to take shape, but there will be changes for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube that Article 13 is necessitating, the requirement to filter content video users upload. Users on the Internet, with the support of the infrastructure of YouTube and Google, will have to strategize differently once Article 17 goes into effect. It is a sea change.
You are welcome to “like” this post, follow the blog, and/or leave a comment. Whatever your age, if you are interested in tech, you stand alongside the brightest minds challenging the narrative of the mainstream media.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 