Explorations of the cost of article 13: recent developments

 

18 December 2018

An article by Martin Doucha suggests that article 13 poses a great risk of collateral damage to copyright-compliant platforms, which is furthermore likely to far outstrip the value of any legitimate claims issued by rightsholders. In sum, they suggest that this collateral damage may result in a loss of 15.5 billion euros in revenue brought by online platforms, excluding any micro-transactions between users and creators therein.  This revenue may be lost where platforms close or block EU users due to high compliance costs, non-infringing content is removed, or revenue for creators is lost.

Elsewhere, Mike Masnick (editor of Techdirt) criticizes the effectiveness of similar efforts already made by YouTube in creating ContentID, a feat reportedly costing 100 million USD. They cite anecdotal evidence, including bogus claims against legitimate uses, concluding that if such an expensive system is incapable of accurately identifying infringement, cheaper and less sophisticated systems will be “an unmitigated disaster”.