With GDPR in charge, the upcoming challenge for the tech companies of US is the EU copyright reform. The legislation is gaining a steady pace and will be acquiring the link tax approach which has already been applied across Europe.
The main intention is to balance the copyright laws of Europe. The European Commission intends to fix the broken laws and rules’ set in order to develop a single digital market.
Julia Reda who is a member of the European Parliament has been giving warnings about the negative after-effects of the pending legislation. According to Julia, there are two major issues of the law. They are:
- Link tax requires permission and license fees to establish the links on a digital content except for copyright.
- The digital platforms are vulnerable to copyright infringement with several exceptions. So, to harmonize the issue, the content sites would be forced to scan the content before uploading to avoid any kind of copyright infringement which ultimately leads to censorship.
Earlier, the European governments had furnished some guidelines for the rapid removal of the illegal content. It was primarily presented as terrorist content which includes child abuse, hatred, violence, and several others plus the copyright infringement too.
A blend of motivations is happening in reality. One is developing an equal set of laws related to copyright in Europe. The EU wants to equate the playing field between the internet companies and the traditional publishers as they are claiming the basic fairness of such copyright laws.
If the proposed law gets passed, it can be a necessity for Google to pay, even for the snippets of the content that has copyright issues in search results. As GDPR is already facing some unforeseen consequences, this proposed should be evaluated in a very careful and serious manner taking into account the concern of the critics before passing it in the European Parliament.