The EU may push a law to ensure artists receive fair shares of profits from media publishers.

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission states:

“I want journalists, publishers and authors to be paid fairly for their work, whether it is made in studios or living rooms, whether it is disseminated offline or online, whether it is published via a copying machine or commercially hyperlinked on the web.”

Video sharing website, Youtube and other media publishers might be forced to increase revenue for music creators to ensure fair shares of the profits. This will be in effect if it is approved by the European Commission.

Artists’ profits should increase

The main reason for this law is to increase copyright protection for artists to ensure the streaming service does not have too much power over an artist’s profits. In the end, this will shift the profit shares in favour of the music industry rather than the streaming companies.

The copyright rules will also allow publishers to negotiate with search engines and aggregators such as Google News to compensate publishers for republishing articles. Today, Google generates a lot of revenue through ads on Google News which the European Commission finds it is mandatory to improve copyright rules.

Youtube and Dailymotion are already taking steps to prevent content that don’t follow guidelines from showing up.

Google’s response

Google, the owner of Youtube has posted a blog post regarding the potential copyright law. They say that they love the EU for improving copyright policies for artists but do not enjoy the idea of content being filtered by online services before being published. They say that it would “effectively turn the internet into a place where everything uploaded to the web must be cleared by lawyers before it can find an audience.”

Caroline Atkinson, Vice President of Global Policy at Google comments on the post:

“We’re reassured that the Commission has recognised that content-management technologies like YouTube’s Content ID plays an important role in tackling the unauthorised use of protected content (although we’d caution against rigid requirements that smaller and start-up companies may find hard to implement).”

Moderating technology such as Youtube’s Content ID have done a great job of ensuring any content against guidelines are removed or demonetized in order to give credit to the copyright owner.

Blockchain-based answer

Right now, the main objective of the Commission is to give content creators a fair pay for their work by demanding companies to give creators a bigger percentage of ad-revenue. Perhaps blockchain-based media platforms will have a more positive turnout for content creators without the use of a third party.

With Blockchain-based social networks continuous growth, the EU so far does not have a problem with them, perhaps it might be from the community moderators who flags guideline breaking content? Or the fact that all revenue earned from the content goes directly to the author rather than through a third party?

Since this proposal is recent, it will take several months before it comes into effect or pass through the European Parliament.