Took the former view and voted yes to require tech titans like google you tube and facebook to scan uploaded content for copyright violations and compensate content providers for using their work could the scabbing process wind up blocking not only Copyright Infringement but creativity and open exchange that prospect drove hundreds of thousands of european Internet Users to the streets in protest copyright cashing in on the internet thats our topic here our casts grace is a berlin based freelance author who often writes about tech and she says it is a perilous time for content creators but europe caps police the entire internet. Alan posner is an author and commentator for the daily newspaper divis he says europe is forcing the internet giants to respect intellectual property and pay for it and thats good news for everyone except google. And its a pleasure to welcome. To the show he heads the department. And he says for free and open we need free and open exchange on the web this reform. So let me start with you and lets begin with the absolute basics what is the filter and why does it strike terror into the heart of the content creator community. Is a system that is at the. Its installed on the platform. And it scans the uploads and compares that to a database and if it finds a protected work that is supposed to block it stopping the upload or its putting the upload before a person to check whether there was a license for this work and so thats the basic technology and why are people so worried about load filters in the wake of this new directive well because the technology is very powerful and if you have those kinds of systems everywhere on the internet they can they can be abused to block stuff that is not just of Copyright Infringement but for other reasons maybe the government doesnt like it and claims copyright and by that filtering stops publication and in general. The exchange of information on the net and that is what the net is about and that is about exchanging things except exchanging views sixth exchanging opinions and nowadays when people use graphics or music and visual content to express themselves much more than in the past in the possibles mostly text people were texting but now the web is becoming all the internet is. Coming on a much more visual place which which makes the power of those blocking systems even greater and the perils the people attribute to them so well and help me out a little bit here because as i understand stand at the law doesnt explicitly require that platforms use an upload filter so how great is this risk that such filters will now be put into place and will essentially screen out not only a Copyright Infringement but lots of other useful material as well where the law doesnt exclude the use of copyright. Which is what people are protesting against because its totally impossible for a platform like shall we say a you tube where people upload millions of of videos and so every day to screen individually per person so you have to have an algorithm working to check that as john just said so the only way at the moment if you dont want to employ hundreds of thousands of people to destroy your your your your your Business Model is to use an algorithm and you know i think basically these are a group of thems are benign most copyright holders have registered with someone who represents them that for instance in germany its the g. M. A. Game which represents musicians they already have contracts with with with you tube for instance so you tube and you pays a certain amount of their profits to these copyright holders already. So. The question is could these upload food as be a misused b could they make mistakes and the answer to both is just they could but you have to ask yourself what would be alternative your tentative is that people who produce music could produce takes to produce videos who are content providers are simply being ripped off. On a minute to minute basis and the profits all accrue to. Huge tech giants as weve. As weve heard so the question is do we want to give copyright holders content providers a share of the cake the answer is yes is this the best way to do it the answer is yes are there problems the answer is yes so gray still wish you said in your Opening Statement that this is a perilous time for content creators now i know that you have written a guide for crafters and you have also cofounded a craft show in the past so tell us if someone is genuinely creating original material wouldnt he or she welcomes stronger copyright protection why do you say its a perilous time well its a perilous time that no one has quite yet figured out how to make money from being a content creator in the new Digital Economy musicians are getting pennies per thousands of plays from streaming services the idea that everyone who is a content creators registering their work with a Copyright Agency its completely untrue anyone who is posting and images on instagram that they have taken is creating copyrightable works but is not registering voters with the Copyright Office by any means same goes for a person who sings a song that they made up on you tube and they own that copyright but there are certainly not going to be filing paperwork for every time they post a short video no one has yet figured out how to make. Content creation really profitable the internet least of all the newspapers who are also tightly involved in this copyright battle so alan what im hearing there from from grace is that essentially the payments that could now be collected will never reach up and coming Young Artists who dont have affiliations with established publishers or established agencies is there some truth to that. It if they dont have if these young or old. Content i did youd rather set up and coming ok up and coming content produces dont have some kind of Organization Behind them yes theyre going to get ripped off. Ever since i was twenty ive been a member of the German Organization called hog evolved which which which protects my copyright is used as an author and i get paid for that so i dont and i at that time i wasnt i was only pennies and i got fractions of pennies but i did it because i felt thats what you do i dont see why you cant if you want to earn money on your stuff that you upload then why dont you join its not a question of paperwork you could do it online its three clicks no literally like that for every single Instagram Post didnt make it you know if you were to say yourself as an author that i dont think that type of protection exists currently for you tube. To grab or anything like that isnt that a great offering in john lets bring in can we please not forget all the creativity on the net that is not made for profit i mean of course it is very important that people who want to live from their creativity can do so so thats not the question the question is whether we want to and force their rights in a way that flattens out Everything Else and thats whats happening right now this is one way to do it i mean you say its the best way but theres other ways to get remuneration to creators without having these huge collateral effects of were going to see it with this directive and thats the critique really ellen regardless of how the provisions are implemented here isnt this certainly going to create more your ocracy. At the moment theres no bureaucracy right the. Every lol creates an agency that in forces it and creates controls and so on you can call that bureaucracy thats typical sort of silly. Can value city can value valley speak thats framing isnt it that you know your opinion is trying to enforce laws laws that already exist if you have a copyright someone has to pay you for using it so how to enforce that law against the huge tech giants who are international thats what this is about and thats not bureaucracy that the main intent is the rule of law now would this law possibly flatten normal creators i dont know if i upload one of a photo taken of my cat onto facebook and someone else uses it and i havent copyrighted in any way well thats fine is fine by me i love all sorts of people to see my cat right and people post cat jokes and so on let that be but if someone wants to live off a website that posts cat jokes or cat photos then have them register its you know. I call it all going izing to enforce your rights which has been. The bedrock of Civil Society since the eighteenth century may i just ask. To what degree the way that this law is implemented is really already set in stone certainly members of the German Government have been saying since passage of the directive that it. Changes drastic as what many people fear and the German Justice minister for example said she doesnt like the idea of upload filters but shes absolutely determined to implement this law in such a way that it quote unquote does not disrupt freedom of expression on the web so is there more flexibility here than meets the eye. For i mean for a start we have to assume the worst if a law is made and if its and false. And the. First have to be implemented into national your state that is going to take a couple of years its going to take a maximum of two years thats the rule. We asked some some very high ranking law professor whether this law as it was now. Allows for what for example the federal government has said they want to do in germany and they said no on the basis of this text this Software Solution that the German Government is now proposing is not even possible on the european law because if you want to have an exception to copyright thats a very very strict regime and the e. U. It says you need to have an exception. In the european law and then you can do it on the National Level and doesnt exist in the text thats why up until the last minute people said please open up this article thirteen again to make at least this possible and that would lead to a kind of. A flat fee rule to the creators would be paid through collecting societies on a flat basis but not on an individual basis and this individual thing is what makes filtering necessary and. Certainly this new directive is provoking genuine and heated opposition from young europeans in particular protests here in berlin and throughout the e. U. Have brought thousands into the streets. Of d. C. Young people are upset about the new legislation they say it could lead to online censorship mantras traditions on freedom of speech. Young the speech of the first and other worry that the internet as we know it will cease to exist kinds of my spirit wont be able to use the original works of others to create something new it will smother creativity on the internet. Supporters of Filter Technology including groups from the Music Publishing and Video Industries say it will help cut down on piracy. And he took what is climb to big platforms are trying to protect their financial interests theyre trying to convince the kids that this will ruin the internet so they claim that you wont be able to have your own channels on you tube anymore it could well its just going to go. Under the previous two so. All this opposition has made some politicians nervous. Because theyre worried about losing a lot of young voters so how can we protect copyrighted material on the internet. Grace others talk about upload filters and censorship machines the big dangers for content creators is it possible the tech giants themselves were behind some of these arguments and even helped incite the protests i think that it doesnt get enough credit to the people of the internet who see very fundamental changes potentially being made. Because this isnt just riling up people in europe this would potentially affect the entire internet as we know it which is a scary prospect. John as we heard there some politicians have absolutely. Downplayed the authenticity of the protests theyve said this is just a tempest in a teapot as it were now i looked it up this morning the average age of e. U. Parliamentarians is fifty four years is it possible that many of those who voted for this directive simply dont really get the internet i think they dont get. The feeling that people have because they dont get the internet i think i think thats the like this of a gap between the generations yes i think so so alan very guarded list of whos right on the merits is such a generation gap risky at this point in time given that we have just two months until some very critical you elections. Its probably risky but i think politicians need to. Explain to the people who are demonstrating that the idea that you get something for free. Is wrong you dont there is no such thing as a free lunch there is no such thing as a Free Internet it was a beautiful idea i signed onto it twenty years ago myself i thought yeah thats it but its naive and its dangerous. The fact because we pay for everything we know we pay for everything that supposedly for free with our data we also pay. Other people pay content providers pay by getting ripped off and the people who get this data and who use it and who make billions on ripping off other peoples content in Silicon Valley and others and elsewhere they are just laughing at us so the fact that europe now says no sorry. You know there is nothing is a free if you want free public transport taxpayers pay if you want free healthcare taxpayers pay it if you want Free Internet content providers and you pay it with your data and the fact that there is no freedom this is something that politicians have to explain to young people because theyre not used to it but its a fact of life but now young people are having to explain to politicians how the internet works and how the sharing of information and. By measure content happens on the internet theres no way to wall off any segment of the internet and not have it affect the entire ecosystem i think there just remains a fundamental misunderstanding from the point of parliamentarians who voted for this as to how the internet works also that the framing that the young people want everything for free is a very dangerous one because they are not against creators being paid just against the means that are now employed to do that and politicians just kind of went through it like this and thinking all these young people theyre just shouting because they want to get everything for free nothing is for. I guess the young people know that but they just dont want to get the internet as we know it destroyed on the just for the money that they destroyed your you represent we can media we can is explicitly exempted from all the thing really the text of it just what it takes ok you may have a problem with the odd photograph im sure you get around that time so that youll be able to employ a couple of people are going to help you with that explicitly also people Young Creative who makes a video in in her living room using beyond backing track and so on whatever shes not going to be because the she has to have two Million Viewers or so before its even sort of comes into the focus of the opcode filter and this is not it being explained to young people that young boy we saw i think was a boy saying that he wanted to use other peoples stuff to be creative he can no one is stopping him and no ones telling him that no one is stopping him but thats what you think is going to happen in the future but the young people to people obviously dont trust the politicians and obviously to a large extent dont text dont understand how the internet works they make a rule that works in that way thats a trust problem i think and the exact execution of how these rules are going to be enforced is completely unknown at this point the idea of an upload filter is what boils down to when it comes down to it. The. The very specific nuances of copyright large stream lee extremely complicated and theres absolutely a justified fear that the small content creators will get caught in the webs of load filters id like to widen our focus just a little bit in the last few minutes of the program and i must say amongst the young people i spoke to at this weeks protest after the directive was passed a lot of anger was reserved not just for politicians but also for the tech giants does the new law leave their power undiminished. Yeah from billions of consumers is available on the internet and processing it has become a lucrative industry. Last year googles Parent Company alpha about reported a total death income of thirty billion dollars much of it from advertising. Google is able to create personalized ads that target people who might want to buy a product that helps to boost to have or ties in revenue. Big internet corporations like google hard part of the Digital Ecosystem but critics say they have too much power and can influence the behavior of consumers and politicians do these corporations pose a threat. John the head of wiki p. D. s or not we can media but your cousin as it were tweeted after the new directive was passed that the new law quote is not about helping artists its about empowering monopolistic practices would you agree with that and would you say that in the end the tech titans will be laughing all the way to the bank despite this new law. And on a relative if you compare it to the smaller ones i guess the giants will profit because they have the systems to to what is now required on the law and the respect they will in other respects i guess they will get targeted with claims for compensation payments so its a two sided thing i would say well if we look at it you digital policy as a whole isnt europe in fact doing more to curb monopoly power and practices on the internet than any other region in the world at the moment absolutely i mean to take china for instance because of the internet for outside influences have their own people like bob and so on to provide content that america almost totally unregulated europe is the biggest market in the world and what were doing now is attempting without Data Protection laws with a copyright protection laws. With the. Upcoming. Monopoly