Why I Am Deeply Concerned: About today’s Vote of the European Parliament on New Copyright Legislation

I thought at first to be ambivalent with regard to today’s vote of the European Parliament to pass new – and highly disputed – legislation on copyright. But the more I re-cap, the more certain I am:

Hardly any author – or creator – will earn an extra dime from a future „ancillary copyright“ (‚Leistungsschutzrecht in German, where that concept originated from), given the typical author contracts with publishers; and second, as importantly, it will create yet another big burden, and risk factor, to any smaller, or non-profit, web content platform, which hosts “significant” amounts of content that they necessarily will want to “promote” – which is the new formula in the proposal that has been approved today by the European Parliament.

So the debate about fundamental rules of conduct in the digital sphere became, more than ever before, a game limited to the ‚big boys‘, like big traditional media, big Internet platforms, and big politics.

The rest of us may hope for a few softening amendments between now and the final vote in January 2019. Yet we will be expected to stay still, and wait for such benevolent gestures from behind the sidelines.