ARTICLE 13 IMPERILED, SAY VIVENDI, OTHERS

Vivendi, the IFPI and IMPALA and 14 other music-biz entities have signed an open letter warning that recent alterations to the draft of Article 13 in the new European Copyright Directive fails to make YouTube legally responsible for copyright-infringing material uploaded by its users.

The implication of this strongly worded missive is that members of the European Commission were actually swayed by Lyor Cohen’s laughably disingenuous stumping against Article 13 following the passage of the European Copyright Directive in September.

“We urge you to remember,” the letter cautions, “that the overall aim of the original European Commission proposal was to correct the distortion of the digital marketplace caused by User Upload Content services, which enable users to upload content onto their sites and then profit from the availability of creative content without returning fair revenues to rights holders, who create and invest in such content…"

“Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the text now put forward by the European Commission would need fundamental changes to achieve the Directive’s aim to correct the Value Gap/Transfer of Value."

MBW, the first media outlet to report this news, explains that the “Value Gap” is industry slang for the average amount of money paid by YouTube per-stream, which the music industry says is much smaller than that paid out by Spotify, Apple Music and the other streaming platforms.

The letter argues that “solutions that seek to qualify or mitigate the liability of Online Content Sharing Service Providers should be considered with an abundance of caution to avoid the final proposal leaving rightsholders in a worse position than they are in now,” adding that “unclear or open-ended provisions potentially obliging rightsholders to play the main role in preventing unauthorized uses of their works fail to provide the necessary legal certainty and therefore fail to provide a meaningful solution to the Value Gap/Transfer of Value.

“Furthermore, any proposal whereby services can effectively choose the level of diligence which will shield them against liability would perpetuate the Value Gap/Transfer of Value and wholly undermine this crucial draft legislation.”