The way This Site – and others – uses images may have to change radically after the European Parliament approved new laws on copyright.
The European Copyright Directive requires organisations to pay licence fees to publications like newspapers for linking to their material (Article 11) and demands that websites that host user-generated content prevent copyrighted material from being uploaded without permission, or be held liable for their users’ copyright infringement (Article 13).
It means you can wave goodbye to that old, trusty meme based on a line from a movie – the line and the image are copyright material and your host, including Facebook, Twitter and the other social media platforms, will have to pay for its use. The combined bill could equal the GDP of a small – or indeed large – country and nobody in business is likely to accept that kind of risk.
And it means I’ll need to rethink the images I use here. I experimented with ‘cartoonising’ images of political figures as illustrations, about a year ago, but some readers complained. It may be that I’ll have to stop using images for a while, although that would certainly harm the number of visits to the site; people are attracted by appropriate imagery.
It seems, thanks to the European Parliament, the future is blank.
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