Poland Sues to Stop EU Copyright Directive on Free Speech Grounds

CYBERSPACE—The new, highly controversial European Union copyright directive that was approved earlier this year by both the European parliament and the EU member states has drawn alarm from internet freedom activists, who say that two key provisions of the bill would have a chilling effect on online expression, restricting the freedom to link and upload content. Now those activists have been joined by a prominent European government, as Poland has filed a lawsuit to stop the bill, which Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (pictured above) announced last week on his official Twitter account. The new copyright directive, which EU member nations now have two years to implement, “may result in adopting regulations that are analogous to preventive censorship, which is forbidden not only in the Polish constitution but also in the EU treaties,” Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Szymanski said in a statement, quoted by the news site The Verge.  When the copyright directive came to a vote of the member nations in April, 19 of the 28 countries voted in favor. But Poland along with Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden opposed the measure. In fact, the Polish delegation voted 33-8 against the measure, with eight members of the group casting no vote. On the Polish Prime Minister’s Twitter account, Morawiecki called the new law “a disproportionate measure that fuels censorship and threatens freedom of expression.” At issue are two articles of the bill. Article 11 establishes a “link tax,” requiring online platforms to pay a fee or royalty when they share stories from other publishers, as AVN.com reported earlier. While the bill currently does not require a tax on merely hyperlinking a story, social media sites and search engines will now need to pay when third-party articles are shared on their platforms. The other controversial section, Article 13, puts the onus on platforms—such as YouTube or Facebook—to prevent potentially copyright-violating material from appearing on their sites before the material is uploaded. That means sites will need to implement “upload filters”—algorithms that supposedly check for copyright violations as content is uploaded.  But those algorithms are not only subject to frequent errors, but could also be used for censorship or privacy violations. Currently, sites such as Google, Facebook and others are not legally responsible for copyright violations committed by third parties, as long as they make diligent efforts to remove violating material once they are informed of its presence on their sites. Photo by Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain