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France could implement article thirteen this summer via new anti-piracy law

By | Published on Monday 1 April 2019

Copyright

Each member state of the European Union will have two years to implement the Copyright Directive that was passed by the European Parliament last week, including the still super controversial article thirteen (actually seventeen in the final draft). But France could get much of it up and running as soon as this summer via an audiovisual law already in development.

The directive is still to be rubber stamped by the EU Council, but the Parliament vote was seen as the last major hurdle for the copyright reforms to cross.

The music industry, of course, has welcomed article thirteen, which will increase the liabilities of user-upload websites of the YouTube kind, which in the past have always relied on the copyright safe harbour when their platforms have been used to facilitate copyright infringement. The tech sector, meanwhile, still argues that safe harbour reform will be damaging to the internet at large.

French culture minister Franck Riester welcomed the copyright reforms during a speech at the telly focused Series Mania festival in Lille last week. According to Digital TV Europe, he said that EU lawmakers had passed the directive despite a massive campaign of “disinformation” and that, in doing so, had “resisted” the power of big tech. He then insisted that “the directive will change nothing for internet users, but will change everything for content creators”.

Riester also used his speech to confirm that the French government would get about implementing the new European copyright rules as quickly as possible, with much of it being enabled by the aforementioned anti-piracy focused audiovisual law. That proposed legislation also includes the creation of a blacklist of piracy websites – and proxies used to access said sites – which the government will seek to have blocked throughout France.



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