start with Julia Rida. She is the member of the European Parliament for European Pirate Party and vice chair of the Greens IFA group.

And her first talk at 31C3, she talked about copyrongs. And now we go one step further to copyrongs 2.0. The stage is yours. And give a warm round of applause, please, for Julia Rida.

Hello, everybody. I was here two years ago for 31C3, and back then I was a freshly elected member of the European Parliament, and I was quite optimistic that finally the time had come for a meaningful copyright reform in Europe.

And actually, things were going OK for about a year. The Parliament actually proposed some improvements to copyright law based on my initiatives, and then nothing really happened for about a year until everybody's favorite year came around, 2016.

If you think that 2016 was a terrible year, ask a copyright activist. Within one week, in September, two pretty dramatic things happened. First, the European Commission released its proposal for the long awaited reform of copyright law. And you're going to hear me rant about it for the next hour.

So that gives you an idea about how bad it was. And the other thing that happened during that week was that the European Court of Justice made a ruling where it decided that hyperlinks can constitute a copyright infringement. So you would think that a person who is linking is not the one who is actually putting the stuff online.

So they shouldn't be liable for copyright infringement. However, the European Court of Justice asked itself, well, what if the person who is linking to that content actually knows that that content is illegal? They think in this case there should be a copyright infringement. So they decided that this is the case now.

And then they decided that if this link is made with a profit motive, somebody is trying to make money, then you can pretty much assume that they know that whatever they are linking to is a copyright infringement. And they actually have to prove that they didn't know, which is quite a difficult thing to do. So in this particular case, it was about a right wing populist website that was

for profit, that was linking to unreleased Playboy photos. So you might think, OK, maybe I don't feel too bad for them specifically. But what does it actually mean for other websites? Will they now have to monitor continuously everything that's going on on the website that they have said a link to?

To find out, we can look at one ruling that already took place based on that by everybody's favorite court, the District Court of Hamburg. I see there are some some fans of the District Court of Hamburg in the audience.

So the District Court of Hamburg had a case where somebody had linked from their own website, from their About Me page to a different website on which there was a photograph that looked a little bit like this. It's not exactly this picture, actually, with some UFOs. And this photo had been modified.

The photographer of the original picture without UFOs had put the photo under a Creative Commons license. And the person who put it on their website actually attributed it to the correct photographer. However, they did not mention that the original picture actually didn't contain UFOs, so therefore it was a copyright infringement.

So the court decided that since the website owner of the website who linked to this sells educational materials on the same domain, not on the About Me page and not related to this particular link, they have a profit motive for that link, which is quite a stretch. So the defendant in this case, the person with the About Me page,

had an obligation to actually verify that everything on the website they were linking to is legal. A Heizer journalist tried this out in practice and actually wrote to the court asking, hey, I want to write about this court case and I want to link to the website of the District Court of Hamburg. Can you please verify to me that everything on your website is legal?

For some reason, the court didn't want to do that. So if you have a website yourself, you may wonder now, hang on, I have some links on my website. Am I actually committing copyright infringement?

I can help you there. It's quite easy to find out with this handy chart. So whether your link is a copyright infringement depends on whether the link tries to circumvent a paywall, whether it was published or the thing that you're linking to, the content that might be infringing, whether it was published with the rights holders consent or not,

whether you as the website owner who is linking have a profit making intention, whether you knew that the content you're linking to was unlawful. All these things can have an impact on whether your links are legal or not. So the claim that the link is under threat from copyright law is by no means an exaggeration at this point.

And what neither court considered, neither the European Court of Justice nor the District Court of Hamburg, is the following scenario. So if linking to an infringement can be an infringement of copyright law, shouldn't then linking to the link to the infringement also be an infringement of copyright law.

So anyone who was wondering whether their website is violating copyright law at this point, chances are, if the website is in any way commercial, then the answer is yes. But not everything about 2016 was bad. There are some good news I can report. There's this.

Günther Ervinger, the digital commissioner who is responsible for copyright law in the European Commission, but perhaps best known for being too close to lobbyists, for example, flying around in their private plane.

The guy who called net neutrality net neutrality defenders Taliban and used racist slurs for Chinese people. This guy is leaving. He's leaving his post as digital commissioner. It's not entirely good news, unfortunately, because he's actually being promoted

to be the commissioner responsible for the EU budget and human resources. That means, among other things, it will be his job to enforce the code of conduct for commissioners. That says how they have to deal with lobbyists and their diversity strategy. So that's an interesting choice. But at least for us, we can say he's gone.

Unfortunately, he left a copyright proposal this September. And this proposal is here to stay. This copyright reform actually could have been great two years ago when the new commission was starting out, there was actually a wide acknowledgement that there was a problem with copyright law, that it was too complicated.

But the appointment of Günther Ertinger as the digital commissioner was a bad sign already back then. Unfortunately, he surpassed even our worst nightmares and managed to make a proposal that achieves the unimaginable to make a bad situation even worse. This proposal, even though Commissioner Ertinger will no longer be responsible

for her for it, is now out of the hands of the European Commission. So the guy who is taking over, Vice President Ansep, he will still participate in negotiations. But mostly this will be up to the European Parliament and the Council, where the national governments of the EU are organized. And both of these bodies can reject the proposal or make changes to it.

So this is where we are going to have to change and to stop this legislation, and in order to show you why, I have prepared 10 everyday things that would become illegal. You won't believe number eight.

Number one, sharing news from 20 years ago. So if you have a website with a list of online news articles, for example, about the copyright wars, with short quotes like this, you better take it offline before this law is in place.

Number two, tweeting a creative headline. So here you don't actually even have to link to any newspaper content. The publishers are getting a new right and they hope that in a case like this, where you're tweeting Wir sind Pabst, it's a famous headline from German tabloid newspaper Bild after the election of the last pope.

It means we are the pope. And the publishers hope that whenever you tweet something like this, Twitter will pay them a blanket license for that in order to keep it legal. But if they don't do that, and I don't think they will, then you will be liable for copyright infringement or this new publishers

right infringement if you tweet something like this. Number three, sharing a magazine article on social media. Twitter and Facebook and a lot of other social media create automatic previews from a URL look something like this. This will be no longer legal.

They would have to disable this function and not just for links to news, but also any magazine article or any blog article, as long as the blog has multiple authors. Number four, pinning a photo to a shopping list using Pinterest or another visual bookmarking service like this.

Number five, indexing the web. Luckily, not all of the web. I mean, the problem here is that a search engine that is indexing the web for you and showing you search results will have to make copies

of those indexed web pages. This will no longer be allowed for news websites, magazine websites and blogs unless they have given specific permission for it. Number six, unmonitored photo uploads. If you're using a host provider such as Photo Community,

this is a website where people are sharing their photographs. This company will have to make sure that whenever somebody uploads something that it is not a copyright infringement. So they will have to scan all the photos that are being uploaded for potential copyright infringement. And this applies to all kinds of different copyrighted content,

such as, for example, software. So this obligation can apply to a platform such as GitHub, which is also a file hoster. And if you're uploading your commits there, they may very well be under a free license. However, they are still protected by copyright,

so they will have to make sure that nothing illegal is being uploaded there. Number eight, the same will go for Wikipedia. So you might think now, OK, all the stuff that is on Wikipedia is either already in the public domain or it's Creative Commons. So what is actually the point of this? Unfortunately, this new law does not distinguish between hosting platforms

where there actually is a significant problem with copyright infringement or not. So unfortunately, platforms like GitHub or Wikipedia would be affected by this. And nine, I think this one is a little bit less of an everyday thing than the other examples, at least for now.

If you want to train your artificial intelligence with publicly available content on the Web, such as large bodies of texts or pictures, you will have to probably make copies of them in some form. And the new proposal may also cause problems with that. And finally, number 10, all the stuff that is already illegal,

that makes no sense whatsoever, is going to remain illegal because almost none of the many, many things that all of you and lots of other people have highlighted to the Commission as being fundamental problems with copyright law have not been addressed in this proposal.

So, for example, taking photos of architecture or public artworks in public places will continue to be a copyright infringement in many European countries. And also the large amounts of online pop culture that are going on that are not really in line with the copyright law, such as reaction GIFs,

let's play videos, lip dubs and remixes. They are not being addressed at all. So people will continue to do a lot of great cultural activity that just doesn't really fit the copyright system. And this one may surprise you a little bit. One hosting provider that actually won't

be affected by these laws at all is Mega Upload. The law is not actually aimed at sites that play fast and loose with copyright. It's meant to get the really big moneymakers, the social networks and the search engines, Google mostly, to pay money to struggling European cultural industries.

And this is all that this law is aimed at. So how can you get such wildly contradictory and weird results? Well, there are two proposals in this new draft copyright law that Günter Ertinger has presented that cause all these problems. One is an attack on the hyperlink beyond all the problems with linking

and copyright that we already have, and the other one is an attack on the legally sound hosting of files on the Internet. So the first one is it comes in the form of a new extra layer of copyright protection for the benefit of publishers.

This is a so-called neighboring right, and it applies on top of the copyright that journalists already get in the articles they write and that they usually transfer in the form of exclusive rights to the publishers. So it's not like the publishers cannot enforce journalist copyright at the moment. But this is an extra layer of protection that would apply

in addition to the already existing copyright. This is the legal text or part of it where you can see, OK, we're talking here about a new protection for press publications, which will allow the publishers on the one hand to control the copying of those articles and the making available of those articles on the Internet.

And this right lasts for 20 years after a publication of a press publication. This may sound familiar to you. There has been something similar introduced in Germany a few years ago where the the amount of protection is one year because they consider,

well, actually news articles are not that valuable after a while, but they consider 20 years is a good time for this new protection and it would actually apply retroactively. So that means if you are running a website with a list of news stories about the Napster case, with quotes from articles about the copyright

wars in different ways, this will be illegal. You may think now, but wait a second, isn't quoting generally legal? Isn't there a copyright exception that allows us to quote? Well, in a lot of European countries, the quotation exception, for example, in Germany only applies when the quotes are in the broader context of criticism or review.

So simply having a list of interesting articles where you are taking the headline of that article or the short part of the text wouldn't count. You actually would have to write some kind of academic treatise about the thing. And who is actually the intended target of this proposal? So what is Ertinger trying to achieve?

Who does he want to pay money for these new snippets to the publishers? He has actually answered that in a number of interviews. And what he said there is the targets are Twitter, the iPhone, tablets and Facebook.

I think it gives you a bit of an idea of his technical understanding between the differences between an online service, a particular company's product and the technology. But, OK, I think the gist of it is that the kinds of automatic previews that a lot of social networks do when you post the URL will no longer be allowed.

And you really have a problem if the URL itself already contains the headline, which, let's face it, is not that uncommon. So and it's also it's very odd to see how this would play out, because the publishers actually employ social media experts who optimize these

previews to make sure that as many people as possible click on them and they change the codes of their websites to make sure that exactly the right pictures and text are chosen for those previews. But even though this law goes beyond the failed German version of this law, the Leisungschutzrecht, the logic is quite the same here.

We look at which companies are making money in the Internet ecosystems. Oh, they're all American tech companies. Let's take that money from those companies that are sending traffic to the German publishers who, by the way, are also lobbying for this law. And let's have them give us this money

on top of the traffic that they're already sending them. Günter Ertinger has also told us something about what exactly how short a text can be, so it applies to it. And he says that, yes, headlines are intended to be covered by this. So this really creates a problem for hyperlinks,

where very often the headline is part of the URL. And he says we're not talking about purely factual headlines like airplane crash in Africa. I think he thinks that Africa is a country. Otherwise, I'm not sure why he thinks this is a common headline.

But in any case, there is nothing in the law that actually exempts single words or small snippets of text from this protection. And Ertinger and the publishers keep saying that individuals won't be affected by this law. But actually, there is no exception for private individuals or for non-commercial use in this law, unlike the German one, by the way.

So something like Wir bit sind paapst will be an infringement under this new law. And unlike what Ertinger says here, it probably won't matter at all whether it's a purely factual headline or not, because these neighboring rights to copyright don't have a requirement that the thing they protect is an original intellectual creation, because the publishers aren't originally

creating anything in the first place. So the only way that somehow factual headlines could be exempted is if a court decides we can't actually tell whether it was taken from this newspaper article or from another one. So what is up with this indexing thing?

I think this is probably a really big problem with this law that not everybody has fully considered, because the indexing, of course, of websites creates copies. And you may think, well, if somebody takes a full copy of an article, isn't that a copyright

infringement already? It would be. But so far, this is legal under the only mandatory copyright exception that all of the member states in the EU have to do, which allows the copy in the making of so-called incidental copies that are part of a technological process for the sole purpose of enabling a lawful use.

So you could say, of course, so far, the displaying of search results has been a lawful use. Therefore, this kind of copy that is just necessary for search engines is not an infringement. However, as soon as the search engines are no longer allowed to show the snippets of news articles, of course,

the indexing of news websites will no longer be legal either. So that's a bit of a headache and I'm not sure they have fully considered this. So when you look at the definition of a press publication, which is the stuff that's going to be protected by this new right, it's not just about news articles as such, but rather everything that is

published in a press publication online. So this could include, for example, what they call other works, could be pictures or stuff like that. And this is why Pinterest, for example, that only allow you to pin pictures, will have to negotiate a license with the publishers.

However, I don't think that Pinterest will be too much up in arms about this proposal because they have a much bigger problem. The article 13 is probably the most dangerous of this new proposal. It contains the monitoring obligation for host providers that I have mentioned earlier.

So who is covered by this new obligation? It's hosting providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works uploaded by users. So when they fall under this definition, they will have to choose between two alternative obligations.

Either they get a license from the rights holders, probably from collecting societies or large rights holders organizations, and they will have to make sure that those licenses are enforced and helpfully in the recitals that go along with this proposal. The commission suggests that they could enforce them by using content monitoring technologies.

If they don't want to do that, then they have to prevent the availability of copyrighted works identified by the rights holders, for example, by using content monitoring technologies. So those are the two options. If you're familiar with Internet law a little bit,

the way it works at the moment is if you run a file hoster and somebody notifies you that there is a copyright infringement on your service, you have to take it down. It's a notice and takedown procedure. And the preventing availability that is included in this new provision, of course, implies that these retroactive takedowns after the infringement

has already taken place will not be enough anymore. Preventing availability means that the content needs to be controlled and scanned before the upload actually becomes accessible to the public. And if you're looking at this, it might all look a little bit familiar to you.

And there's clearly an elephant in the room here, and that's YouTube. If you look at the analysis, the economic analysis of why the commission is doing this, it all comes down to the music industry complaining about YouTube. And this is connected to their content ID, content monitoring system

that is used to find protected pieces of music on YouTube. What the music industry has done about YouTube so far is they have tried to enter licensing deals with YouTube, and actually these licensing agreements are in place in most countries, but the rights holders are not very happy

with those deals because they think that YouTube doesn't pay enough. And this new law is their solution to this problem. So they want to make the licensing deals that they already have with YouTube the less painful option, because the other option, the content monitoring technologies,

in the case of YouTube, is something that YouTube only offers to a relatively small number of smaller rights holders. So content ID is not available for everyone who uses YouTube. And they think that if YouTube can no longer threaten, OK, well, if you don't take our licensing agreement where we pay you very little,

then we'll just take down all the content. But the rights holders actually want to be on YouTube. So they're in a very weak bargaining position. And they think that this law will somehow make it so unattractive for YouTube to take down the content that they will pay them more money. It's a bit of a gamble, and it's also not a very obvious way of addressing this problem,

because unfortunately, you can't pass a law that only applies to YouTube. They've tried, believe me. So this law would, of course, apply to all kinds of host providers and all types of copyrighted works, as long as there are large amounts uploaded by users.

So the question of why GitHub now falls under this? Well, you can look at the content that is stored there. It's software. Software is covered by copyright law. And the question is, is GitHub an information society service provider that provides access to large amounts of works uploaded by users?

So an information society service provider is a service that is provided and it says so in another law, normally for remuneration. So what does that mean, normally for remuneration? It means that, for example, if GitHub or also photo community are freemium services, which they are.

So there's a free version of it, but you can pay to get some extra feature. Then it's a service normally provided for remuneration. So they're covered by this. However, also non-commercial host providers can accidentally be covered by this provision. A service normally provided for remuneration can be, for example,

a service that regularly asks for donations. And this is where Wikipedia comes in. And even something like Archive.org, where academics are uploading articles, could be covered by this new provision if there are similar services available that do charge money that are in some way in competition with Archive.org.

So in this way, even a service that is completely non-commercial and completely for free to use can still fall under this definition. You may also wonder, well, is this really a problem for Archive.org or for Wikipedia? Because there aren't really a lot of infringements taking place there.

But nowhere in the Article 13 does it actually say that this only applies to host providers with large amounts of copyright infringements. It just says large amounts of uploaded works. So CC licensed content or articles that have already been published

with an academic publisher and then are put on archive would very well fall under this definition. And there's the final question, what exactly large amounts of works means? It's completely undefined. And probably the 28 member states of the European Union would find different definitions of this. So that's a great idea if you want to encourage trade.

But all of these services that I've named host well over a million works. So we can assume that they would all be covered. So that means that host providers find themselves in a very difficult position under this new law because they must either pay rights holders for content they don't really want to use in most

cases or start filtering everything that's uploaded. But filter for what exactly? I mean, the YouTube case is relatively straightforward and maybe the photo community case as well. If you're looking for recordings of music or photographs, you can use a fingerprinting technology where you check every upload against the reference database.

It's not completely trivial, but it's doable. Unfortunately, copyrighted works can be all kinds of things. For example, the sculpture on this slide is protected by copyright and a photograph of this sculpture, at least if you're in a country without freedom of panorama, would also be a copyright infringement, which means that this technology would actually have to identify

a photograph of this sculpture from every possible angle. Translations of texts can be copyright infringement. So the software would need to make sure whether a translated text is actually equivalent to the same text in another language that is protected. Also, using a character from a popular novel or a popular film in your own film

or reusing code of somebody else in your own software without respecting the license conditions, for example, because you didn't post the GPL notice, all of these can be copyright infringements and they're not as easy to detect as somebody has uploaded a music video to YouTube.

And as we have learned in the beginning, hyperlinks can be a copyright infringement if the person who linked to the infringing content had knowledge that it was infringing. So what does that mean for host providers? Will they have to scan not just the content that users upload,

but also the content on websites that the users link to, possibly the content of websites that link to the websites that users link to? And will they have to scan users brains to find out whether they knew that this was a copyright infringement? So it's a very difficult technological challenge, I think,

but at least you'll all be getting a lot of work from this. There's just one big problem with Ertinger's plan, aside from the kind of technological issues there are, there's a legal problem. And that is that this new proposal violates existing EU law.

Remember the current notice and takedown procedure that I've told you about. It protects host providers and also other types of providers, such as Internet service providers and intermediaries from liability for the actions of their users. This is written in the e-commerce directive, another piece of EU legislation.

And this e-commerce directive includes what is called the safe harbor. And the safe harbor means as long as a host provider takes down the legal content, as soon as it gains actual knowledge about it, then they are fine, they're not liable for what the users are doing. So how does that fit?

I mean, in the same law, it actually says explicitly that these intermediaries cannot be forced by law to scan everything that the users upload. They only have to do the notice and takedown. So how can the providers prevent the availability of specific works on their services without scanning everything that is uploaded?

The Commission's quite creative solution to this is that in the recitals of this new proposal, and recitals are supposed to be explanations of a new law that don't change its content all that much, in these recitals, they simply redefine what an intermediary host provider is

under the e-commerce directive by saying that the safe harbor only applies to a host provider if they are not optimizing the presentation of the uploaded works or promoting them, even by automated means. So that means that Wikipedia or GitHub, who are actually presenting

the uploaded content in a meaningful way, providing search functions, providing articles of the week, et cetera, they would no longer fall under the safe harbor and would be directly liable for any copyright infringement by their user. But mega upload, which doesn't provide a search function where people are just

ignored by the safe harbor, makes a lot of sense. However, I think there is a chance that even if this law is passed, that this won't work out, because the Court of Justice of the EU has in the past not only ruled that putting such an obligation on a service

provider to scan for copyright infringement doesn't just violate the e-commerce directive, it violates the fundamental rights to privacy, to freedom of speech, to freedom of information, and to the freedom to conduct the business. So we'll see how that works out in practice, but I wouldn't recommend

to just wait until the European Court of Justice rules on this law, because that could take many years and the damage to the Internet ecosystem in the meantime could be quite significant. Finally, there is this proposal on text and data mining exception, which is also part of this proposal,

that most people would think this is a good thing. There is a new exception to copyright, so there are some more flexibility added. But there is a problem with this, because text and data mining so far has been more or less a legal gray zone. It's a question of whether or not you can copyright material that you already have legal access to for the purposes of data mining.

So, for example, researchers who analyzed the vocabulary in Agatha Christie novels had to take copies of all the novels to find out whether the author developed Alzheimer's disease over the course of her life by seeing how broad the vocabulary was.

Now, the thing here is that theoretically, it's perfectly possible to do this without making copies. You just have to sit down and basically do the counting manually. But of course, this is really inefficient. And especially in research, text and data mining is just becoming increasingly something that researchers want to do to make their research more efficient.

And they were actually the ones who asked the European Commission for clarification that this kind of copying is not a copyright infringement by introducing such a text and data mining exception. And the main reason was to stop academic publishers from bullying them and saying, no, you can't download these articles for text and data mining.

You need a license for that. The commission proposed an explicit exception for text and data mining. That's good, but unfortunately, in this proposal, it only applies to research organizations. The problem with that is if they're explicitly allowed the research organizations, it may follow or a judge may argue that individuals or companies

who want to do text and data mining are then explicitly forbidden. And that would mean that individuals or companies training their artificial intelligence with stuff they find on the Internet may run foul of copyright law. Also, there is not really much movement on bringing an end to geoblocking. So this video is not available in your country and messages like that,

even though the commission two years ago said that it was a priority to get rid of that. So that is by and large what we have in this new proposal. So you may wonder, OK, how could it be that two years ago the commission said, we're going to make everything easier, we're making it simpler. We want to unleash Europe's digital potential.

So how did we end up with this? The easiest explanation for that is that this copyright reform was hijacked by a number of powerful industry interests. This is a picture of Commissioner Ertinger with a number of Axel Springer lobbyists. Axel Springer is one of the publishers who first lobbied for the Leistungschutzrecht in Germany and is now behind

the lobbying effort for the extra copyright for publishers on a European level. So they get a tool against Google and Facebook. The German collecting society Gemma, that could never agree with YouTube on a deal, got something to pressure YouTube into making a licensing agreement.

And the film industry got spared from a ban on geoblocking, which they continue to want to do. So this reform is clearly not about how to make copyright fit for the digital age or how to use technology's potential to create new business models that actually work with the Internet. Instead, it's about how can we change

the Internet so the old media companies don't have to? And how can we subsidize our European cultural industries with the profits of American technology companies? And two basic building blocks of the Internet are attacked by this proposal. The freedom to link and share news on the Internet is fundamental for the freedom of speech online.

We are seeing with the monitoring obligation a privatization of law enforcement where the takedown of illegal material will no longer be done on the basis of court orders, but by private companies who will probably err on the side of caution and take down more than they actually have to.

It will probably keep startups and smaller Internet companies small and actually ensure the position of the large multinational companies that this proposal is supposedly targeting. And at the end of the day, only companies like Google or Facebook can actually afford the content recognition technologies that would be required to

comply with this law, and they can probably even count on getting a free license for using new snippets from publishers because of all the traffic that they're actually sending to the publishers websites. In this proposal, no attention is actually paid to non-commercial projects or to open licenses and the interests of individual users.

The problem is that this will not work for anybody. The protectionism of these past business models won't actually save these industries from having to change and go with the times. And I'm afraid that at the end of the day, these measures will end up hurting those who promote them today.

So if you look, for example, at the effects of this right for publishers, probably people will not start paying them, but rather link to websites that do not require this sort of thing. So for the EU based publishers who are asking for this, it would probably mean fewer readers and less revenue. It probably won't be a problem for any of the misinformation or propaganda

sites who are getting their funding from different ways and whose main purpose is to be spread as far and wide as possible. I think copyright law is fundamentally the wrong tool to stop or to shape this technological and structural change that we're seeing in the media industry.

So it's now up to us to do something about this. And I think that actually there is hope. There is, especially when it comes to this new proposed neighboring right for publishers, because it's already relatively unpopular in the European Parliament. The European Parliament has already voted

against such ideas in the past when it made its recommendations. And there is by now a pretty large group of members of the European Parliament from across the political spectrum who are pledging that they want to save your right to link. And I think it's important, though, first of all, to support them publicly.

I think we're always, well, pointing out when a politician is doing something wrong and sometimes these people are going against their own party line and saying this is something that is just not going to work. And also these members of parliaments need to be made aware of the dangerous court rulings that are actually making linking a copyright infringement itself.

And this is something that we could actually fix through a change of copyright law. One civil society organization, Open Media, has started a campaign page, savethelink.org, where you can write to members of parliament or just get informed about the topic at large. And

I've also written about it extensively. I've just published a blog post with these 10 things that the EU Commission wants to make illegal. It's great if you spread this news. It's actually quite easy to contact your own representatives in the European Parliament because they do not get contacted all the time.

When the parliament is in session, you actually have a good chance of simply getting them on the phone. And the debate about this proposal in the national public is also dearly needed because at the end of the day, the council, where the national government sits, will have just as much influence over where this copyright proposal is going to go as the European Parliament has.

And finally, if you yourself have heard something in this talk where you feel this is going to affect me directly for example, if you run a file holster or a discussion forum and you think it may fall under this definition, talk about it and talk about whether or not it's possible for you to actually comply with this law and write about it

and spread the news to other people. Finally, you can also contact me directly if you want to join the fight against these proposals. And I hope that over the course of the next year, we'll be able to beat these proposals and can hopefully go back to the urgent task of actually making copyright law easier and saner for everybody.

I wish you all a great New Year 2017. And I hope you remember it's up to all of us to make sure that it's better than the last one. Thank you.

So we have time for questions and please queue up at the eight microphones we've spread out throughout the hall and we start with our signal angel.

A question from the Internet, please. Does a bitter end file or a magnetic link count as an illegal illegal contents, since it's technically impossible to verify the content without downloading it? I think it's a bit tricky. There have been court rulings in the past that argue that the

website, the Pirate Bay, was at least had a so-called accessory liability. So there are different ways you can be liable. You can be liable simply because you have committed a copyright infringement. And this is what this new question of whether linking is a copyright infringement or not is about.

But you can also have an accessory liability where a court can prove that you aided and abetted the copyright infringement of somebody else. So even if technically this link would not be a copyright infringement, it's still possible that you, as the person running the website, would be liable for it.

So and next, please, microphone three. Yeah, hi. A question I know, as far as I know, in education, there will be no exception for education. So it will still be difficult for teachers and everyone to share this material. And the question, my question would be whether this is also discussed

within the revision project. And maybe you can give some insights on that. There is one exception that applies to education that is in the proposal. I have not mentioned it because it's not really clearly good or bad. What this proposal does is it says that it will be mandatory for every member

state in the EU to allow the use of of different copyrighted content for digital teaching activities. So, for example, if you are using some kind of online service for students to download texts or if you're live streaming your lectures to students

in other countries, however, there are two caveats with this. One is that the member states can decide for themselves whether or not there is a compensation for this. And, for example, in Germany, there is an exception for education. However, it hasn't really worked recently because

the compensation, the collecting society that is responsible for collecting the compensation. This guy is waving at you. The money that the collecting society is collecting, they have gained a court ruling that said that the universities actually have to tell them who exactly

or how many times a particular work has been used and so on. So the bureaucratic effort is so large that because of the compensation requirement, it hasn't really worked very well. That's one problem. The other problem is that this proposal also says that if there are appropriate

licenses available on the market, then the member state can decide that the exception doesn't apply. And this is also something that we know from the German context, that a publisher may say that there is an appropriate license available, but it actually is not really usable for institutions. So

there is definitely an attempt from different educational organizations to improve this exception. And I think the most important thing would be to address these two parts and make sure that this exception would actually apply in practice. But in any case, it would not be the same as a general education exception

that applies also to what is happening inside the classroom or what is happening in non-formal education. It's really only for digital users because the commission says this is where there is a cross-border problem. So there's definitely a lot of room for improvement when it comes to this provision. We go ahead with microphone number four here.

Yeah, this history you told reminds me a lot of what we heard in Spain a couple of years ago when they pushed a law that basically forced Google to pay newspapers for the news it linked. And the result was that Google closed Google News in Spain. So I wonder if this

this case made these people reconsider some positions. The people in the European Commission who made this proposal know perfectly well about the failure of the Spanish law, and they know perfectly well about the failure of the German law, and they decided to do it anyway, which they call an evidence-based approach.

The European Commission actually did a public consultation where thousands of people wrote to them and told them what they think about this question of a neighboring right for press publishers. And there were actually a number of Spanish publishers who said,

we changed our mind. We don't want this anymore. It has actually harmed us in Spain. We're getting less traffic. We're getting less ad revenue. Please don't do this. But the majority of publishers who wrote, and I think most of them, most of them were German again, still were in favor of this. So I think it shows that it's really

important to find also differing voices among the rights holders. It's not like every author thinks that this kind of copyright law is a good idea and probably not even every publisher or any rights holders organization. So I think it's really important to try to find these different voices

and see that not everybody agrees with this approach. So we have a lot of questions queued from the outside, so we take another from the signal angel, please. How is this regulation relevant to businesses not based in the EU, but in the USA or in Russia?

That's a very complicated question. So copyright law is territorial, which means that the copyright law applies of the country in which the Copyright Relevant Act is taking place. When it comes to copying, that's relatively easy. If you're I don't know, you're at home and you're making a copy

and you live in Germany, then German copyright law applies. If you're making something available on the Internet, it's a lot more complicated and it's not actually fully decided whether it's the country where the server is hosted, it's the country where the website is legally established, or it could even be the country where the user is located.

So this is one of the reasons why you see geoblocking sometimes, because a rights holder can actually go to court in the country where the content is available. So if something is on the Internet, that's pretty much every country. And that's also one of the reasons why we need a European copyright instead of 28 different ones, because if you want to actually know for sure

that what you're doing is legal, you pretty much have to have a doctorate in copyright law and have studied all the 28 different laws. And that's just for the European Union. Will you go ahead with microphone number one over here? Yeah, to elaborate on that, would it help to escalate the situation?

For example, when we're talking about our friends from the court in Hamburg, we just have to look at their decisions and what they link to in their decisions and declare it illegal in their decisions to have perhaps a means to just tell them that they have a link linking to an illegal thing

and therefore they have to take it down or they are responsible for it and then escalate it on a European level, just hack the process? Well, the court rulings themselves probably don't have links as such. They may have strings of texts that indicate the location of URLs.

But of course, that's not the same thing as a link. It's actually quite an interesting philosophical distinction that if you can click on it, it's a link. If it's just the text, then, well, I suppose it's not a link. It's just a string of text. Copy pasting a string and not having the link directly would also be an option? I don't know.

Sometimes I think that it's actually the European Court of Justice that is trying to hack the system by making laws or making rulings that just make no sense whatsoever that will force us to reform the exclusive rights that underlie the copyright law. Because if a link can can be a communication to the public and therefore a copyright relevant act, well, then everybody is infringing

on copyright and maybe we need to change it at some point. So I think you might have some some friends at the European Court of Justice who are hackers themselves. We continue with microphone eight at the left hand side top, please.

What chances are that the current proposal is refused? The status quo is kept. And if it is kept, what do we do about it and against it? I'm not sure that rejection of the entire proposal would be such a good idea, because, for example, there is this exception for education

that at least if it's improved, could be a step in the right direction. There is also an exception. Now, this is really revolutionary. That would allow libraries to make copies of books that they already have. So I don't actually want to reject the entire thing.

I think ideal would be to reject the Article 11, which is this neighboring right for publishers and the Article 13, which is the content monitoring provision and the recitals that are redefining what a host provider is and then try to improve the other parts. And the way to do this is, of course, a little bit more difficult than, for example, with ACTA or SOPA and PIPA, where you could

simply go to the streets and say, reject this entire thing. I think if it stayed the way it is, then we should reject it. Then it's doing more harm than good. But we actually have a number of people working on it in the European Parliament who are relatively sensible. The rapporteur for this proposal is a member

of the European People's Party, the Conservatives. And she's from Malta. Her name is Therese Comodini, and she has actually promised to meet every single stakeholder who asks for a meeting with her and is willing to come to Brussels. So if you are feeling like a lobbyist today, you could also try and explain this to her.

And my impression of her has been that she at least tries to understand how this stuff works technologically and tries to find a solution that works for everybody. So I think what we need to do now is really start a public debate about these things, and especially when it comes to the neighboring right, the debate has already changed considerably when this was being discussed in Germany a few years ago.

The publishers were basically having a field day. All the media were writing that this is a great thing. This is very different today. You have a lot of especially online journalists who are writing against the best interests of their publishers, as they should. And so you can see that that there is a way

of addressing this and making it a public issue. And if we do that, then I think it's possible to delete these two proposals and make sure that the rest of the proposal actually gets turned into something meaningful and something that will make the situation better. We continue with microphone number two here in the front.

Thank you, Julia. Excellent talk so far. What if I even follow all these rules and check the link and everything is fine, then publish it? And as a sudden the content behind the link changes and it has a copyright conflict, do I still get into jail? So the European Court of Justice says if you're a commercial provider,

there's a rebuttal, a rebuttable assumption that you knew the content was illegal. So if you can prove, for example, that you haven't clicked the link since the content was changed or something like that, for example, your website has been completely static since then. Then maybe you can get out of it.

But generally, if it's a commercial website and you're linking to it, then the assumption is that you knew about it and you're liable unless you can prove the opposite. We can hack this by this way. So we continue with microphone number four back there. Hello. You talked about Google

and having problems with indexing the Internet. So this would also hit archiving pages like Wayback Machine. That would mean we would lose all independent archiving of the news of the last 20 years. What do you think about this? Well, there are a lot of archiving websites like the Internet Archive

or all the abandonware websites for old software and stuff like that that basically operate on the assumption that the people who are the right soldiers probably don't care about this anymore. Nobody is really hurt if there is abandonware available because it's no longer commercially on the market.

And so they can rely on this notice and takedown mechanism. They only have to take it down if the right soldier tells them to. But the right soldier never will because there is no damage. So this actually works pretty well. And for them, they wouldn't have to take down the content with this monitoring technology either unless the right soldier notifies them.

However, all it takes is one right holder to tell them you need to make sure that my stuff is not available. That would require them to install this content monitoring technology. So the administrative and financial overhead would become a lot larger and probably it would make the running of not for profit

abandonware websites pretty much, well, impossible unless you have somebody with really deep pockets. The only ones who might be able to do it would be libraries that would be able to rely on an exception or another. But if it's platforms where the users actively upload stuff, then they would fall under this.

OK, we go over to our signal angel, please. What should we expect from the new digital commissioner? So for the time being, the new digital commissioner is Andrus Ansepius. He has been the vice president of the European Commission

for Digital Affairs, and he's from Estonia, which is one of the more digitally minded countries in the EU. I think on the plus side, you can say that he certainly has a lot more understanding of the technological topics than Ertinger does. On the negative side, well, you can accuse him of having been in favor of Aktau when he was prime minister of Estonia.

So but I think at least he's he's kind of willing to talk to people. And he generally also has more sympathy for smaller companies, for startups. So he probably will want to try to create an ecosystem where they can actually grow. So I think that's good.

However, we don't know whether he will be the digital commissioner in the long term, because the reason for this reshuffle is that the Bulgarian commissioner left her job and went to the World Bank. And now Bulgaria will need to appoint a new commissioner. However, Bulgaria is having a constitutional crisis.

I don't need to go into the details, but they haven't appointed anyone yet. And as soon as that happens, the commission may decide to change their the distribution of tasks completely again. We go ahead with microphone number one, please. Hi, Julia. Thank you very much for your talk. I have a question as a travel photographer.

I put the pictures around the world on my blog. Am I screwed right now? Well, if you are uploading your own pictures to your own blog and other people can't upload anything to your blog, then you're not a host provider. You're just well, you're basically running your own website. So this new provision only applies to host providers

that provide a service for other people. So at least on that front, you're fine. I would be careful with the linking that you do, but it's probably OK. Thanks. Microphone number four, please. OK, so first of all, thanks for your work and an amazing talk. I have some question regarding remedies and a new law, because as far as I know,

actually, under the old notice and take down law, when there was an infringement, but nothing happened after the notice. Actually, neither the user nor the hosting website would really risk anything. So would that change?

Maybe the proposal includes a provision that says that the host providers need to put in place a complaint mechanism that would be available both to the rights holders if their stuff is actually continuing to become available. And also for the users, for example, if stuff has been taken down, that is.

and infringement. Unfortunately, I don't think this will really work for the users because the exceptions to copyright law are different in every country and they also are not considered to be rights themselves. So basically a platform could simply write into their terms of service we only accept licensed content and we don't care whether this is legal as a parody or

whatever. So the remedies are not really clear. It also says that there has to be some kind of round table where all the different stakeholders come together so the host providers, the rights holders and so on and it really shows that the Commission is thinking of large companies like the big major labels but not individual rights holders who are most certainly not gonna

start a round table. So I'm afraid that is all the time we had for Q&A with this talk so thank you Julia Reda for this amazing talk and the time you took for question answering.