The French government is very much for Articles 11 and 13, while the German govt ... can't make up their minds. One of the German coalition parties is against, including the justice minister, but she still voted in favour of it. Quoting this [1]:
> Wenn Barley im Kabinett nicht zugestimmt hätte, hätte sich Deutschland im Kreis der EU-Staaten enthalten müssen –- dann wäre die nötige Mehrheit nicht zustande gekommen.
Translated:
> If Barley had not agreed in the cabinet, Germany would have had to abstain in the circle of EU states -- then the necessary majority would not have been achieved.
The French government is so much for the directive that the French ambassador even tried to convince SPD party members... which is diplomatically very impolite, you don't just meddle with interior politics of another country [2].
There were some rumors that Germany giving in here is a high level backroom deal to secure French support for the gas pipeline in the Baltic sea linking Russia and Germany (which the US are opposed to).
Great question! I don’t know France that well. Perhaps there are no IT companies in France dealing with user content in a significant way? Perhaps debate on the matter is stifled by incompetent media not understanding questions of importance that would make them realise how important news about this is?
I would argue that it is maybe even worse, as there is a potential conflict of interests of our main press agency, AFP, about this topic, as they are a huge proponent of Article 11. French media are very reliant on that news agency, so we don't hear about the protests about it, and the public do not care.
It doesn't help that our main EFF-equivalent, La Quadrature du Net, didn't have a very clear position about the copyright directive at some point [0].
I don't know for sure but it seems to be mostly music copyright companies pushing for articles 11 and 13. There reasoning seems a bit unclear but then again music licensing are some bizarre aspects to it. But I think it's important to understand the who and why behind articles 11 & 13 in order to understand what the proposed issue is. It's not unlikely that the media and copyright industry would try to reach farther than they need either intentially or unintentially due to misunderstanding the technical details.
For the first example, The British Phonographic Institute (BPI) has a statement argueing that big tech companies, under current safe harbor laws, are allowed to profit off user uploaded content if it contains music. The statement says:
> This so called “safe harbour” from liability means that sites can provide a vast global jukebox of music whilst arguing they don't even need to negotiate a licence to do so.
I can't think of a single site that operates in this manner. Besides upload filters, Youtube allows copyright holders to flag videos for copyright violation. Does this work differently in the EU than the US currently? The system seems to be very effective to the point that it's abuse is widely critized. Are other sites currently implementing a subpar system? Are there EU hosted sites that are currently providing these "global jukebox's" ? I guess I haven't seen a single online site in a while that provides unlicensed music in the manner that BPI describes. The best example was Grooveshark but that's been defunct for years.
I don't think money would be spend on lobbying if they didn't think there would be a return; therefore there must be some industry, site, or platform that EU copyright holders think they can extract rent from or push more people into buying music. Given that the most likely form of music copyright infringement is having music in the background of a video uploaded to some social media site, I guess it seems that copyright holders are after the ad revenu of user-generated/uploaded content sites (Facebook, Reddit, etc). If their music appears in the background of a video, they want a slice of the ad-revenue the site collects. But I think many sites would opt to just muting the audio (like Twitch already does).
If videos with background music are the major target of this legislation and would impact any site that allows users to upload videos, the expense of building an identification system and forking over a portion of the ad-revenue is likely less than using ML to selectively remove/replace the background music while leaving other sounds in-tact. In the short term I expect sites to just mute copyright infringing portions.
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