Carl Mortished: Copyright, memes and even more muddied waters

Do you upload memes and, if so, do you do it more than you should, especially when you are at work or when you should be paying attention to your spouse/partner/parent/child/best friend? If so, you might be interested to know that your annoying, obsessive habit has become a key battlefield between the so-called tech giants (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and the publishing industry.

The trouble with memes is that they may contain copyright material. (For anyone of my generation or older who needs help, memes are those silly jokes — cat pictures, cartoons, mash-up images — that get circulated virally on the internet.) Sometimes they incorporate imagery, words or music created for a commercial purpose. The right to reproduce those images, words or music ultimately belongs to an artist or a publishing organisation and the protection of that right has become the subject of the row.

The tech tractor giants have made hay with intellectual property rights while the field mice (publishers, artists, musicians) slept in the straw. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest et al have exploited a legal vacuum over copyright on the internet. The tech giants have also exploited a great lie — that they are not engaged in publishing — a falsehood swallowed greedily by legislators in the early days of the internet when the world was entranced by its seeming ability to enhance personal freedom.

We now know that the internet is not an idea but a device which can exploited ruthlessly by powerful people for their (often tax-free) personal gain or malign purpose, just like any other tool.

The EU’s draft copyright directive puts an obligation on the tech companies and their platforms to police copyright, ensuring that protected content posted on their platforms has been licensed. The social media giants correctly feared another effort to make them accountable, to block their ability to blunder roughshod over anyone’s lawn. They fought back hard. Google used its Digital News Initiative, which provides grants for new digital journalism, to tell members of its network to lobby MEPs to vote against the law. They achieved a temporary victory last week in the EU parliament halting the proposed law’s progress; it has been sent back for further debate in September.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; the Copyright Directive, like all new law in difficult areas, is badly drafted and vaguely worded. Opponents, including the German MEP Julia Reda, campaigned on two issues: that the new law created a “link tax” that would prevent social media users from sending links to news articles without proof of a licence to use. News organisations have long complained that Google hoovers up journalism without paying for it but the new law might create a copyright to a headline, say “Boris quits Cabinet”.

Over the top, you might think, because copyright is a right that protects creativity, not generic material. Yet it’s a bit rich for social media companies to complain about the biteback from publishers; after all, who’s been secretly stealing your personal data online and selling it willy-nilly to advertisers for decades?

But the main row is about the Directive’s article 13 which would oblige big social media platforms to establish upload filters on their sites to ensure the material posted is not in breach of copyright. Reda, a member of the “Pirate Party”, and other libertarians, complain this is a “censorship machine” that would stop you innocently posting an image of unknown origin on Facebook.

Copyright is a social good. It means that artists, writers and musicians are protected from the playground bullies who would steal their years of toil, give it away to millions and profit by selling piggyback advertising. Copyright law allows copying for the purposes of review, critique, non-profit education and satire. However, the issue here is not personal freedom but who is making big money: all you really need to know is that YouTube controls 60% of music streaming but only pays 11% of musicians’ revenues.

There is a weird political thing going on in which libertarians supporting big capital (in the form of the tech giants Google and Facebook) have become allied with social libertarians, such as Reda, who yearn for a sort of free-for-all, borderless world. It’s worth remembering that original pirates were not gentle hipsters but violent gangsters who wrecked, raped and thieved as they rampaged across the high seas.