The European Parliament has approved a package of dramatic changes to copyright law that will have big implications for the future of the Internet.

"We're enormously disappointed that MEPs [Members of European Parliament] failed to listen to the concerns of their constituents and the wider Internet," said Danny O'Brien, an analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The legislation makes online platforms like Google and Facebook directly liable for content uploaded by their users and mandates greater "cooperation" with copyright holders to police the uploading of infringing works. It also gives news publishers a new, special right to restrict how their stories are featured by news aggregators such as Google News. And it creates a new right for sports teams that could limit the ability of fans to share images and videos online.

Today's vote was not the end of Europe's copyright fight. Under the European Union's convoluted process for approving legislation, the proposal will now become the subject of a three-way negotiation involving the European Parliament, the Council of the Europe Union (representing national governments), and the European Commission (the EU's executive branch). If those three bodies agree to a final directive, then it will be sent to each of the 28 EU member countries (or more likely 27 thanks to Brexit) for implementation in national laws.

That means that European voters who are concerned—or excited—about this legislation still have a few more months to contact their representatives, both within their national governments and in the European Parliament.

Heightened liability for technology platforms

Early drafts of the proposal specifically called for technology platforms to use "content-recognition technologies" to filter out content that infringed copyright. The version approved by the European Parliament, sponsored by German MEP Axel Voss, drops all mention of filtering technologies.

Instead, the new language simply shifts liability onto the shoulders of technology platforms and lets them figure out how to deal with it: "Online content sharing service providers perform an act of communication to the public and therefore are responsible for their content and should therefore conclude fair and appropriate licensing agreements with rightholders," the new legislation says. The bill calls for a dialogue to "define best practices to ensure the functioning of licensing agreements and cooperation between online content sharing service providers and rightholders."

The legislation avoids mentioning any specific technological approach to policing online infringement, allowing supporters to plausibly claim that this is not a filtering mandate. Yet it seems pretty clear what this will mean in practice. Big content producers want to see YouTube beef up its Content ID filtering technology—and for other online platforms to adopt similar strategies. Shifting liability for infringement from users to the platforms themselves will give content companies a lot of leverage to get what they want here.

There are a couple of obvious dangers in this. One is that online providers will become so worried about liability for infringement that they'll start taking down a lot of legitimate content—for example, content that parodies a copyrighted work or otherwise exercises the European equivalents of fair use rights. To deal with this danger, the directive mandates that online platforms provide "effective and expeditious complaints and redress mechanisms."

The challenge is that there's an inherent tension between the interests of copyright holders and users. From the perspective of big content owners, an "effective and expeditious" takedown regime is one that takes down content first and asks questions later. They argue that giving users too much due process allows them to abuse the system, repeatedly uploading copies of infringing files. But critics say that YouTube's efforts to appease rightsholders has created a system where it is too burdensome for users to pursue legitimate appeals.

Balancing fairness to content creators against fairness to users is inherently tricky. Rather than trying to address the issue directly, the European Parliament is simply pushing the issue down to the national level, letting governments in Germany, France, Poland, and other European governments figure out the messy details.

The other big danger is that these new regulations will be overly burdensome for smaller online services. YouTube spent $60 million developing the Content ID system; obviously a startup trying to compete with YouTube is unlikely to have $60 million available to spend on a competing system. So there's a danger that shifting responsibility onto online platforms will have the practical effect of cementing the dominance of today's major platforms.

The legislation approved by the European Parliament attempts to deal with this by including a carve-out for small businesses. The new rules only apply to "online content sharing services," and the definition of that category excludes "microenterprises and small sized enterprises," which are defined as having fewer than 50 employees. Of course, that means that a would-be YouTube competitor could suddenly be hit with a bunch of new legal obligations on the day it hires its 51st employee.

New rights for news publishers and sports teams

As we discussed in yesterday's article, the legislation requires a new copyright for news publishers to restrict how people summarize and link to their articles. The goal is to get Google, Facebook, and other technology giants to pay news publishers licensing fees for permission to link to their articles.

Critics have derided this as a "link tax," and they've pointed out that similar efforts were not very successful in Germany and Spain. Google responded by simply de-listing German and Spanish news sites from the Google index, an action that hurt the publishers a lot more than it hurt Google.

Advocates argue that de-listing every news site in Europe is going to be a much more drastic and costly step than de-listing news sites in any one European country. Hence, the theory goes, Google and other technology giants will have little choice but to come to the table and pay licensing fees.

But the legislation approved on Wednesday remains vague about how this will work in practice. It doesn't make clear what kinds of links or summaries will be allowed and which will require a license. It says that publishers' rights "shall not extend to mere hyperlinks, which are accompanied by individual words." But does that mean Google will need a license to link to an article using more than one "individual word" from the article? It's not clear. Once again, these details may ultimately be hashed out through 27 different bills passed by 27 different national governments.

In addition to approving new rights for news publishers, the legislation also narrowly approved a new copyright for the organizers of sports teams. Copyright law already gives teams the ability to sell television rights for their games, but fans have traditionally been free to take pictures or personal videos and share them online. The new legislation could give sports teams ownership of all images and video from their games, regardless of who took them and how they are shared.