With this week’s reported bomb threat against a key legislator in the EU—as a result of its newly minted copyright directive—tensions are running high and outcomes are uncertain
By the time our next edition of The Hot Sheet arrives, the European Union’s new copyright directive for the Digital Single Market framework will either have been adopted after protracted three-way talks (called “trilogue”) or, as one of our best sources says, it “will end without result and then years and years could go by.”
In February, a Council of the European Union session voted in favor of the bill. What’s ahead, though, is a new trial by political fire for this controversial set of proposals. Debate should occur on the morning of March 26 (Strasbourg time), with a potentially final Parliamentary vote that afternoon or on March 27.
It’s important for non-Europeans to follow more for how it involves ownership of and access to online content than for what it says about book publishing and copyright protection.
In our September 19 edition last year, we broke our EU copyright reforms coverage into two parts: one looking at shared copyrighted material online and the other at royalties issues. The reforms relating to royalties reflect the very damaging effects of a German Supreme Court decision in 2016: publishers were no longer entitled to some 50 percent of authors’ copyright revenues collected and dispensed by the copyright collection agency in Germany. Many publishing houses faced severe financial strain after being ordered to return those copyright revenues. Thanks to Article 12 of the current legislation, EU member-states can again be compensated along with their authors in library-loan activity and in copyright exceptions. We’re assured by many in the European books community that the compromises they had to make leave no one entirely happy, but that they’re relieved to have found compromise at all and largely feeling positive about the result.
For the online copyright issues, however, the real battle for public sentiment is in what’s known as Article 13. This section concerns Silicon Valley’s operations in the content space. Article 13 could require the biggest actors—such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook—to enter into licensing agreements with rights holders of media content. This means that advertising revenues received by the big content providers might have to be shared with content creators.
Europe’s relationship with the big tech powers has been challenging for many years. This morning, news broke that the European Union has levied what CNN Business reports as a third major penalty on Google: an order to pay €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) “for abusing its dominant position in online search advertising.”
So contentious has the debate become that on Tuesday, March 19, The Parliament magazine’s Martin Banks reported a bomb threat against Axel Voss, the leading Member of European Parliament (MEP) on the project. “The regional daily newspaper General-Anzeigerm,” Banks writes, “reports the existence of a post on a Finnish forum which states that a device planted at the CDU politician’s office in Bonn will be detonated if the European Parliament votes for the planned changes to EU copyright law next week.”
Banks’s story, in fact, may have one of the cleanest takes on the furor, describing the months-long battle this way: “The vote marks the final stage in what has been a protracted and stormy process in pushing the directive through Parliament. The debate has seen Internet giants like Google square up to organizations representing publishers and artists.”
Many authors and publishers are backing the copyright directive, even with its imperfections. Some 270 cultural organizations and associations have banded together to urge passage. Polling in at least eight countries seems to show citizens seeing a need for more regulation of the tech powers.
Bottom line: In the US legislative process, sometimes a controversial rider attached to a bill takes the spotlight from the bill itself and jeopardizes the bill’s passage. Although Article 13 is not a rider, it threatens the same effect on the copyright directive. If you’d like to see an attempt to clarify on a cooler level what 13 is meant to do, MEP Helga Trüpel’s manifesto aligns with the thinking of many in the book publishing community. We’ll plan to update you in our next edition, assuming that the vote has indeed taken place.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
