“Compromise on copyright: No upload filters!” Was the title of a decision by the CDU a few weeks before the EU copyright reform was passed last year. Even then, the promise to dispense with upload filters when implementing the directive in German law was not very convincing. The controversial article 17 leaves platforms little choice but to use an upload filter. Internal documents of the federal government now show that the CDU has not only forgotten its election promise, but is actively trying to achieve the opposite.

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Diana Levine, CC-BY

) In the Edit Policy column, former MEP Julia Reda comments on developments in of European and global digital politics. In doing so, she wants to show that European and global network policy developments can be changed and encourage political commitment.

Lump sum compensation through collecting societies Article 17 makes commercial platforms liable for their users’ copyright infringements. The only way to avoid this liability is to seek licenses for copyrighted content and to block copyright infringements for which the rights holder has not given you a license. Since platforms live on user-generated content, they cannot limit in advance which licenses they need for legal operation. That depends on what content is uploaded to the platform by third parties.

There will also always be rights holders who do not want to grant licenses for their works, and instead they will be blocked request of uploads. Platforms under Article can only do without upload filters if the legislator allows the use of copyrighted content on these platforms lump-sum allowance and the rights holders are compensated for these uses via collecting societies.

Flat-rate license – A barrier to copyright The idea of ​​such a blanket license was the core of the position paper that CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak tried last year in the face of mass protests against the copyright reform to swear his party to renounce upload filters. The paper says: “All content can be uploaded. Below a time limit, uploads are free of license fees. Above a time limit, the platform must acquire licenses for copyrighted works that have a digital fingerprint (identification of the author). Legally, the flat-rate license model represents a barrier to copyright. ”

In other words : All uploads are legalized – short excerpts from external works should be able to be used free of charge, for long excerpts or entire works the platforms have to pay a statutory flat-rate fee. If all uploads are legal, the use of upload filters will be superfluous.

SPD proposal not very user-friendly The SPD-led Federal Ministry of Justice has a significantly weakened version of this CDU proposal in its draft bill for the German implementation of Article 17 According to the proposal of the Ministry of Justice, only the use of short excerpts from protected works should be permitted and remunerated at a flat rate, up to 20 Seconds of video or audio, up to 1000 character T ext, or image files up to 20 kilobytes. In addition, uses that generate significant income should not be able to benefit from this exception.

This draft is obviously already much less user-friendly than the CDU promise to make upload filters completely superfluous. Longer excerpts or entire works must be automatically blocked according to the Ministry of Justice’s plans. There is no longer any question of doing without upload filters. The only goal is to “avoid upload filters as much as possible”. But even this small concession to the users, who loudly warn against the blocking of legal content by upload filters, is a thorn in the side of the CDU-led ministries.