Google lashes out at new EU copyright laws and urges Brussels to reconsider

Google urged the European Union to reconsider their latest copyright rules as they could force platforms such as YouTube to pre-preemptively take down content or risk getting sued.

MEPs are set to vote this month on the final approval of the copyright directive but Google has warned that some of the regulations could “hold back” Europe’s digital sector.

Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice-president for global affairs said: “Having studied the final text of the new copyright directive, we agree that the directive would not help, but rather hold back, Europe’s creative and digital economy.

“This [directive] hurts small and emerging publishers, and limits consumer access to a diversity of news sources.”

He also warned that lack of clarity about when platforms had acted in “good faith” to remove content would likely “result in online services over-blocking content to limit legal risk”.

“And services like YouTube accepting content uploads with unclear, partial, or disputed copyright information could still face legal threats,” he wrote in a blog post.

“This would be bad for creators and users, who will see online services wrongly block content simply because they need to err on the side of caution and reduce legal risk”.

Under the terms of the EU’s agreement, content publishers gain strong new rights and protections against firms like Google, Apple and Facebook that routinely “scrape” content and share it without paying the owner.

Google says its tests using a moderate version of what's proposed in one of the articles regarding news publishers led to a 45% reduction in traffic to the sites.

"Our experiment demonstrated that many users turned instead to non-news sites, social-media platforms, and online video sites —another unintended consequence of legislation that aims to support high-quality journalism. Searches on Google even increased as users sought alternate ways to find information”, Walker added.