How can online content be shared in ways that protect intellectual property rights? That’s one of the questions behind a proposed law that moved a step closer to approval in the European Union recently.

It’s also a question that we here at Po.et spend a lot of time pondering. And while we are in agreement with the EU legislators behind the proposed law that current processes for sharing and licensing online content are broken, we think the solution they envision is far from ideal.

The proposed law includes two articles that concern us. One, Article 13, would place the burden on digital content publishers to ensure that all of the content they publish is in compliance with any licensing agreements that may apply to it, even if those agreements are not made clear when the publishers acquire the content. The other, Article 11, would mandate that sites that republish news articles pay a fee to the outlets where those articles originated.

We understand the EU’s concern with enforcing copyright agreements and protecting intellectual property. However, we believe its approach is flawed as it is difficult to enforce and dramatically stifles creativity and innovation in digital content.

The Problem With Online Content Sharing

It’s an understatement to say that the ways in which digital content is currently licensed and distributed have problems.

Today, content producers, owners and publishers have very little real control over how other people consume or reuse their content. In practice, tracking unauthorized reuse of content is very difficult because there is no automated means of identifying licensing violations. That makes it easy for anyone to share or link to information without the content owners’ permission. It also means that content creators don’t always receive credit or payment for their work.

Relatedly, it’s often hard to figure out the licensing terms that govern a given piece of content. Many websites don’t post copyright notices at all. When they do, they can be hard to find and interpret. There’s certainly no way to maintain consistent, universal records regarding copyright status of each piece of content on a website.

Nor is there a good solution for allowing content owners to tailor licensing terms to a particular situation. For example, if you don’t want to permit outright copying of a piece of digital content, but you are willing to allow it to be “remixed” in order to generate new, original content — which is precisely what happens when memes are born — establishing licensing terms toward that end is challenging. Enforcing them is nearly impossible in many cases.

Regulation Is Not the Answer

The EU’s proposed law aims to help address these problems in two main ways:

It would require content publishers to determine which licensing requirements govern user-contributed content. It would impose a “link tax” on websites that link to news items that were originally published elsewhere.

In other words, the EU believes that the answer is more regulation of the ways in which online content is shared.

We disagree, for two key reasons:

Lack of enforceability: From a pragmatic perspective, the regulations that the EU envisions would be difficult to enforce. No matter how many laws you write requiring website owners to ensure that they have the rights to publish content before they do, finding violations of the laws would require a great deal of manual effort. There’s just no good, automated way in most cases to determine which licensing terms govern a given piece of content. (We won’t even get into the very thorny question of how you determine which content is subject to EU regulation in an online world that lacks clear political borders.) Threat to creativity: At an intellectual and philosophical level, we also believe the EU’s proposal is misguided. Making it harder or riskier (from a legal perspective) to share online content won’t really help anyone. Instead, it will make it more difficult for content producers to create innovative, original content. It will also make it harder for publishers to make good content available to consumers, and to generate revenue by doing so. We worry that more regulation of digital content will simply lead to less creativity.

An Alternative Approach

We’re not here just to criticize. We’d like to propose a better solution for digital content sharing.

We believe that the way to make content distribution fairer for everyone, while also incentivizing creativity, is to provide digital tools that make it easy for anyone to register, distribute and discover online content — which is exactly what the Po.et project aims to do. Through the Po.et network, content distribution and discovery can be automated. In addition, because the Po.et network enables content creators and owners to set custom licensing terms, it allows for flexible sharing of content that protects the rights of producers and owners without stifling creativity.

Because blockchain technology provides the backbone for the Po.et network’s content-registration system, Po.et is able to achieve all of this in a decentralized fashion. No single group can censor the underlying network or modify the data recorded by it, which means privacy rights are protected and community-based consensus forms the foundation for making decisions. We believe this approach is fairer than one based on regulation that is imposed and enforced by a central government agency.

To conclude, EU lawmakers are right that we need better ways of sharing digital content to preserve the integrity and value of original content. But regulatory requirements that are neither feasible to enforce, nor supportive of creativity, are the wrong answer.