Critics say it could do serious damage both to legacy media companies and internet upstarts.
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YouTube and other sites such as Dailymotion would have an “obligation to deploy effective means such as technology to automatically detect songs or audiovisual works”.
The new proposals still have to be approved by the European parliament and council of ministers and are likely to take months to come into force.
Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of British labels trade body BPI, also called the EC’s plans “encouraging” saying that “the explosion of music streaming offers the prospect of a new era of sustained growth”.
Europe has opened a new battlefront in its war against big US tech, announcing draft rules that could force YouTube and others to pay more money to the music industry.
The commission said the new rules will give journalists and news publishers better control over who can use their content and how it is used.
Jean-Michel Jarre, CISAC president, said: ‘The European Commission has made an effort to respond to the chorus of voices calling on government support to address the unfair situation in today’s digital market, where major players are using the works of creators to generate colossal revenues without fairly remunerating them.
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Please visit http://www.businessdayonline.com/en/youtube-to-pay-more-for-music-in-europe/ to access this member content. “But the future is jeopardized by a substantial “value gap” caused by user upload services such as Google’s YouTube that are unfairly siphoning value away from the music community and its artists and songwriters”, the letter stated. In his speech, Juncker did not go into the details of the proposal, but the draft text leaked earlier this month, including giving newspaper and other journalistic writings a 20-year online copyright and require online aggregators to acquire a license from the copyright holder before posting even a couple of sentences from the article text. The President said that 5G services should be commercially available in at least one major city in each European Union member state by 2020.
