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.
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Google has previously argued that record labels benefit from the millions of viewers YouTube provides, who otherwise would be unlikely to pay for music.
Included on the agenda were proposals for a revised and highly anticipated copyright framework, which forms part of the EC’s Digital Single Market strategy and follow extensive consultations with stakeholders across the music and tech industry.
The body which represents the British music industry said this week that YouTube was still not paying artists enough for their music.
The new rules, while falling short of totally abolishing safe harbour regulations, are significant in that they vow to “reinforce the position of rights holders to negotiate and be remunerated for the online exploitation of their content on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube or Dailymotion”.
And Joe McNamee, executive director of European Digital Rights (EDRi), a lobby group usually found on the opposite side of the online privacy debate to Google, described the proposal as poison for Europeans’ free speech, for European business and for creativity. “New online services such as music streaming, video-on-demand platforms and news aggregators have become very popular, while consumers increasingly expect to access cultural content on the move and across borders”, the commission said.
More than 1,000 artists, including Lady Gaga and Coldplay, signed a letter calling on the Commission to take steps to address the “value gap”.
In Germany publishers decided not to charge Google for using their snippets rather than lose the traffic Google News brings them.
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Google, which owns YouTube, called the proposal “worrying”.
