You heard correctly: nowadays there is no association representing the youtubers.

So, they have gone on their own a group of European creators, with the aim of telling the politicians of Brussels all the problems we would have if this was approved Article.

Possibly this can cause some migration of talent outside countries of the European Union and towards the United States. 

Some creators within the European Union will stop creating content and others from outside the union will be blocked within Europe.

For example, only in Spain there are more than 1000 YouTube channe;s that generate enough audience so that their authors have something like a salary and can dedicate themselves to create content and in some cases even to hire people.

Something similar happens in other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter that the creators of online content are already a small industry that has 1000 workers in the UK and that generates value for the whole society.

It is true that YouTube is a US company, but the youtuber with the most subscribers in the world is Swedish and the youtuber with the largest audience in the Spanish-speaking world is Spanish.

This means that in Europe there is no lack of creators, but the problem is that there is no association that represents youtubers; the great mass media or the record companies have their employers and their unions. Youtubers… not because they have started very little by little.

The story of any YouTube channel is the following: you start with your own resources, upload videos because you like them and, as you grow, there comes a time where you can dedicate yourself to this one hundred percent.

A European directive to regulate copyright on the internet, article 13, is as catastrophic as it is painted and what is more important what youtubers can do about it.

Article 13 paragraph 4. YouTube is responsible for the content that is on the platform, but has limited liability and this means that YouTube would be required to inform them that there may be songs on your platform and you have to ask them if they want to block them or if they want to be paid a license, so according to this version of article 13 if YouTube shows that you have done everything possible to protect the copyright you cannot sue.

YouTube could become a television channel where only the great creators could survive because they can afford a lawyer to manage their copyright.

Now the filter works well, because if you try to upload a movie or a series, a song, because it detects you and the video is blocked and that’s it, but it also works very badly. For example, James Rouse blocked a piece that is public domain that was touching him because I said I have detected this, and I think you do not play it.

On the other hand, the filter does not detect when you are uploading an entire movie or when you have uploaded an eight-second fragment into a video where you can be doing a didactic analysis, but the filter does not understand contexts, the filter only knows if the content is and will eliminate it.

With this law, social networks are going to have to make their filters work much more aggressively.

For example, in a day in which one hundred videos are uploaded, seventy of them are videos without third-party content, twenty-five of them use third-party content but legally and five of them use third-party content making the copyright infringement, but If social networks make filters work more aggressively, almost all these videos will be deleted or, at least, everything will be blocked preventive until you start a manual filter.

Obviously, it will better capture the copyrighted content, but it gives problems to almost half of the content creators who had done nothing wrong, and this can be explained with an example: it’s like a fishing net if you make the holes in the network finer you get more things, but you do not get them selectively.

That is why there are people who call them the meme, although in the European Union they say that today the memes will remain legal, but it will be very difficult to create content without problems.

Those who support the directive are large companies that say they are not paid enough compared to what they receive from Spotify and may be right, but they will isolate the European Union from the rest of the world.

There are many against this, even the founder of Wikipedia and most of the creators of content and even many consumers who feel that they are going to be isolated, but nobody really is against the essence of the directive to fight for Copyright.

The European Commission cannot approve directives, they have to propose them to the parliament and the European Council and it is these two institutions that write two different versions of the directive and this is where the problems begin: the providers of content dissemination services perform an act of communication towards the public, which basically means that YouTube becomes unlimited responsible for the content that is published on the platform.

We are only in the middle of the road.

The process to get a European directive is the following: first the European Commission proposes it and there we have the first draft of article 13, then the parliament draws up its text and votes and there we have the second draft article 13, but there is a third actor: the European Council and they also have their own version of Article 13.

On the one hand we have the representative of the European Commission who enters with his advisors, on the other the representatives of the parliament and the other to the council, all of them come with their advisors, in total, we talk about 30 people who meet every week to amend what is voted in parliament, being a very slow process.

The directive was already voted in favor on September 12, it should be said that although the directive received four hundred and thirty-eight votes in favor and two hundred and twenty-six against, article thirteen received only three hundred sixty-six in favor and two hundred and ninety-seven against. The final version of the directive will be voted between January and April 2019 so there is still time to change the formulation of article thirteen.

The certain thing is that once it had been ratified in the parliament it would have to take it to the national parliaments, that is, each member country would have to draw its own law following the guidelines of this directive and that is where the creators come back online.

But… what about UK?

A very striking thing with the creators of the United Kingdom is that although they were all against Brexit in general, they suddenly started to think that if Great Britain leaves the European Union and does not apply article thirteen, we will be able to continue creating content. continue to consume content from the United States and other countries and suddenly there is a good part of people who were very opposed to Brexit, but now it is very confusing.

Although it must also be said that it depends on whether the Brexit becomes aggressive or softly, maybe they end up covered by article thirteen of this directive or, maybe not.

“We are going to imagine that I upload a video clip of a music group for example of ACDC without their permission, that is, I am doing something illegal at that moment ACDC or the record company that has its rights can denounce me, but it denounces me and can demand that I pay a fine millionaire to me, but the problem is money because I cannot pay a millionaire fine because I simply do not have a million euros, then ACDC they go to YouTube and ask you to remove the video. For these things YouTube has a special filter called content ID, in this case they send their song to YouTube and YouTube scans the song and looks for all the videos where it appears and blocks them. This is what the law says, but now comes the interesting part because at this moment ACDC arrive and they say to YouTube: and if instead of removing the songs you pay us a license? So far, the law does not say anything about that, that is, YouTube is forced to remove the song if they ask, but the law says nothing about negotiating contracts. However, as the people of YouTube is very great tells them do not worry we are going to do business, if you think I’ll pay a percentage of the money we generate with the ads that go in that video, that is, they negotiate a contract and you will say it is a high percentage or a low percentage because according to the record companies it is quite low. We only know one thing, associations like impala that are the ones that represent the record companies in Brussels want YouTube to pay them more and for that they need a stronger position in the negotiations with a new copyright law and this is how in 2016 the European Commission released the first draft of the so-called directive for copyright in the European single market. According to this YouTube law and all other content platforms are obliged to compensate the copyright owners, being much more favourable.”

“Let’s go back to the example of ACDC, now not only they denounce me for violating their copyright, but also YouTube.”