German Data Privacy Commissioner warns at new Copyright Directive will increase the tech oligopoly, make EU companies dependent on US filter vendors, and subject Europeans to surveillance by US companies

Ulrich Kelber is the German Data Privacy Commissioner, and also a computer scientist, and as such, he is uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive, which will be voted on at the end of this month, and whose Article 13 requires that all online communities, platforms and services block their users from committing copyright infringement, even if the infringing materials are speedily removed after they are posted.

In a new official statement on the Directive (English translation), Kelber has warned that Article 13 will inevitably lead to the use of automated filters, because there is no conceivable way that the organisations that run online services could examine everything their users post and determine whether each message, photo, video, or audio clip is a copyright violation.

Kelber goes on to warn that this will exacerbate the already dire problem of market concentration in the tech sector, and expose Europeans to particular risk of online surveillance and manipulation.

That's because the smaller companies, based in the European Union, are required to block all infringement, even if they are very small and specialised (the Directive gives an online community three years' grace period before it acquires this obligation, less time if the service grosses €5m/year). These small- and medium-sized European services will not be able to afford to license the entire catalogues of the big movie, music, and book publishers, and will have to rely on filters to block all that material they can't license. Read the rest