Even the rightsholders think Europes Article 13 is a mess, call for an immediate halt in negotiations

With only days to go before the planned conclusion of the new EU Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market, Europe's largest and most powerful rightsholder groups -- from the Premier League to the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Association of Commercial Television in Europe -- have published an open letter calling for a halt to negotiations, repeating their message from late last year: namely, that the Directive will give the whip hand to Big Tech.

Article 13 -- which still mandates copyright filters for big platforms, despite months of obfuscation -- is the brainchild of the music recording industry, who invented the idea of the "value gap" as a synonym for "when we negotiate with YouTube for music licenses, we don't get as much as we'd like."

Seen in this light, the unworkability of Article 13 is a feature, not a bug. Putting Google on the hook to give in on license negotiations or be forced to do the impossible is a powerful negotiating stick for the recording industry to hit Google with.

The problem is that this tool will not only be wielded by record executives against Google: it will allow any of the Internet's two billion users to claim copyright over anything (including the record industry's most popular works) and improperly collect license fees, or simply block the material from public view.

That's not the only problem, though. In the course of negotiating Article 13, European lawmakers made concessions that make the proposal (barely) coherent and affordable by Google (though not, importantly, by Google's small European competitors, who stand to be squashed flat by the dancing elephants of Big Tech and Big Content). Read the rest