PurpleFog: PurpleFog: This is of course a great step in the right direction for us content creators

Not necessarily, especially if you sell or distribute your digital work via online marketplaces and platforms (like we do here on AJ).

The intention is that all online platforms (over 3 years old and/or have over 5M monthly visitors and over €10M yearly revenue) that allow user generated content to be uploaded, will be liable for copyright infringements, rather than the uploaders - as it has been for years.

As such, companies will be subject to first scanning all copyrighted material before it’s made available on the platform - much like YT’s ContentID. This is obviously to make sure no infringing material is being uploaded from the outset. This is very crudely explained in this post-Article13 vote interview with Alex Voss here.

This would include platforms such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp and presumably many royalty-free licensing sites. It’s extremely expensive to implement such technology however and there’s a fear that most platforms will simply geo-block all users from member states of the EU and smaller, independent platforms will be priced out anyway, as they simply cannot afford to conform to the intended laws.

The knock-on affect could be quite significant and potentially changes the royalty-free music landscape massively, for a number of reasons. A couple that come to mind - if sites like YouTube block EU member states from accessing their platform (consisting of over 500M citizens), then that would have a pretty big impact on the amount of uploaders and customers looking for RF music for their YouTube videos.

Also, there’s a big chance this would have a direct effect on AdRev registered composers. If EU member states can’t use or have limited access on the platform, then we should expect a significant drop in monetization revenue from that too - as there will be less viewers digesting ads.

The only way around all of this and avoid having to use costly upload filters, as advised by the Copyright Directive, is if the platform firstly licenses the material directly from the contributors / uploaders or have some kind of legal arrangement with them…Interestingly, this is exactly what Envato is already doing with it’s Elements contributors.

All that said, everything is still up in the air and mostly based on wild speculation and tin-foil-hat opinions; whilst we know it’s implementation is in 2 years time and on a per member state basis, it’s still not clear on how any of this will be actually implemented, at least until it officially becomes law after Council has officially adopted it on April 9.