Article 13 and the Power of Builders
The EU recently just enacted a law on copyright that has a lot of people up in arms.
The jist of the law is that the responsibility of copyright infringement online is the responsibility of the publisher. So that means, that if you want to post a Taylor Swift video on Youtube, then Youtube must have the license to that video and then match the license to your content.
The requires a lot more diligent from platform companies. Conversely, it also is a welcome boon to creators and large labels that have copyrighted material and don’t want it shared without permission. So the proponents, naturally, fell to those categories, big, open tech companies vs large record labels and content creators.
This leaves the rest of use figuring out how this works, what we can and can’t post and what ramification these changes have on us. For the most part, you can post anything you want but the platform might not have that license and will just delete what you’ve posted unless it falls into one of the exceptions.
One of the major changes that is becoming evident is that smaller platforms are going to need to screen all their content for copyrighted materials and wont have the man-power to screen all that content as they scale. This leads to the obvious gap in technology. When there’s a gap in man-power, this is an opportunity for technology to add immense value. Google has already been working on a cloud-based solution that acts as a copyright filter. This multi-million dollar solution adds value in a space that big tech opposed in the first place.
Even when “big tech” fails, it wins. That’s the power of software building in a world that in increasingly ruled by technology. As more of our data is being used to curate our lives, we can expect a battle for how the internet platforms are going to handle our data. Whether “big tech” wins or loses, if we don’t start building forward thinking tools, they’ll be the ones implementing that future.
