Amendments to EU copyright proposals welcome but insufficient, say IP experts ahead of Wednesday's vote

Academics welcome removal of upload filters and exemption of platforms like Wikipedia, but say it 'misses the opportunity to strengthen the position of creators sustainably'

Ahead of Wednesday's vote in the European Parliament on controversial changes to EU copyright laws, a group of academics has welcomed changes to some of the more contentious proposals but says that some worrying aspects remain.

MEPs rejected the original draft of the Copyright Directive in July. The main sticking points were Article 11 (the ‘link tax') and article 13 (proposals to make internet platforms more responsible for policing copyrighted material), but there were other concerns too, such as Article 3 which limits the right of some data mining to research organisations.

In a statement, European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP), a scientific association for the economics and law of intellectual property (IP) comprised of prominent academics and legal experts, responded positively to the removal of the requirement for online service providers to deploy upload filters from Article 13.

Upload filters are a particular cause of concern for those who fear automated policing of rights could damage internet freedoms. There is a significant potential for false positives and, at worst, filters could be tweaked by censors, opponents fear; what's more, technologically viable filters able to distinguish copyrighted video, audio images and text do not yet exist. While the proposer, German MEP Axel Voss, has removed mention of such systems from the latest draft, the need filters may be implicit, however.

"Removing the references to filters while requiring cooperation from service providers so that infringing works uploaded by users 'are not available on their services' may amount to a filtering requirement, with fundamental rights implications," the academics say.

EPIP welcomes the narrowing of the category of service providers required to comply with Article 13. Small enterprises, non-profit encyclopedias (e.g. Wikipedia), cloud services for individual users, online marketplaces and open source software development platforms (e.g. GitHub) are exempt from further copyright controls in the new draft, the aim being to focus on global services like YouTube by forcing them to obtain licences before broadcasting copyrighted content.

The academics say that Article 11 is unworkable in its present form with certain users such as bloggers now exempt, but confusion over the words allowed in hyperlinks remaining.

"Rather than removing the problem (requiring an additional layer of licensing where copyright already exists), [Voss] introduces reassurances," the statement says, with the recommendation that Article 11 be deleted altogether.

Draft changes to provisions for data mining, for example to facilitate the development of AI algorithms, represent "an improvement", EPIP says, but Article 3 is still limited "unnecessarily to ‘research organisations for the purposes of scientific research by such organisations'". Forcing businesses to jump through licensing hurdles could stifle European competitiveness in an important emerging area, the organisation says.

While the amendments are positive, not enough has been done to alleviate the concerns of either side of the hotly contested debate, the signatories to the statement say.

"The proposal … misses the opportunity to strengthen the position of creators sustainably, and thereby to bring more balance to European copyright law. Proposals to include exceptions for enabling re(-uses) of protected works that most digital consumers have long taken for granted are (still) absent from the proposed text. We support proposed exceptions for using pictures of publicly displayed artworks or works of architecture (so-called ‘freedom of panorama') and for creative and expressive uses (e.g. 'memes') under an exception for user-generated content. Both of these are not present in Mr Voss' text."