The EU’s new directive – Article 17 – represents a key moment in copyright protection and compliance across Europe, with new laws coming into effect in 2021. As a rights holder, now is the time to plan ahead and put in place solutions to protect your content and prevent costly legal fees created by copyright infringement cases.
Under the new directive there are four major requirements that B2B consumers of your content, such as growing digital platforms, social media channels or content aggregators, will need to meet:
The digital platforms, social channels and content aggregators of this world will want to work with you to prevent unlicensed versions of your content getting onto their platforms and shared via their services. They’re not going to want to incur fines; while you will want to save on copyright infringement investigations and resulting legal costs.
Our Idem17™ solution is a tool that a rights holder hosts to provide the means for B2B content consumers to check if an image, video or piece of audio belongs to the rights holder, all via an API.
Encourages rights holders and B2B content consumers to work together more effectively to prevent copyright infringements, as Idem17™ can be offered to digital, social and content companies as a way to query content.
Supports everyone’s best efforts to gain authorisations to display content, as Idem17™ seamlessly seeks proof of ownership with the rights holder via the API before anything can be uploaded and shared.
Takes action based on agreed parameters, such as images and videos to identify, helping all involved to take down anything that is problematic, particularly known bad content that infringes copyright.
Scans millions of visual assets in seconds and makes highly precise matches, meaning there are no longer any excuses for non-compliance as problematic and bad content can be easily identified and removed.
Article 17 is a watershed moment for both rights holders and B2B consumers of their content, with Idem17™ the cost-effective solution.
For the rights holder, by licensing our API you get an automated first line of defence which negates the need for costly manual checks and saves on expensive investigations and claims that result from infringements. With B2B consumers able to query content via the API, infringements are even prevented from happening in the first place. A win-win all round.
Article 17 is the EU’s copyright directive that will come into European law in 2021. The directive specifically states that content-sharing services must license copyright-protected material from rights holders before it can be re-shared on a digital or social platform.
Having not updated its copyright laws for nearly 20 years, the directive’s opening explains why such a shift in policy is necessary:
“Digital technologies have radically changed the way creative content is produced, distributed and accessed. We are adapting the EU copyright rules to new consumer behaviours in a Europe which values its cultural diversity.”
But what do these changes mean in practice and how might they look in the real world?
