I spent most of this week on a business trip to Madrid. The trip was organised by the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) and focused on the issue of copyright infringement.
The trip was a follow-up to last year's debates, when the JURI Committee and the European Commission argued over recommendations for combating online piracy in relation to the broadcasting of sporting and other events. The European Parliament decided that additional measures were needed to protect copyright on the internet, while the European Commission believes that everything is already regulated and that it is solely a matter of law enforcement.
Meanwhile, Spain is the only country in the EU to have a precedent for legal proceedings aimed at punishing the illegal streaming of sports matches.
We held more than ten meetings in total, including with representatives of LALIGA, a private association of two dozen football clubs that owns the audiovisual rights to broadcast matches. It must be said that this is a huge amount of money: such rights are estimated to be worth two billion euros per season. It is understandable that LALIGA is demanding additional measures from the EU to protect copyright. According to them, there is organised crime behind the pirate broadcasts on websites with paid (cheap) subscriptions, so that people pay criminals and cause huge losses for the industry. According to Eurostat, 48% of EU residents use some form of pirated content.
How can this be combated? There are not many ways. Websites can be blocked, for example, but this does little good; pirates are cunning, and besides, blocking a website requires a court order, and we are talking about live broadcasts. Pirates and/or their customers can be caught, and LALIGA proposes all sorts of tough measures in this regard. In fact, under Spanish law, even consumers of pirated content can be punished, but we were told that there is a political decision not to punish consumers. Only distributors.
There are precedents for this: the police told us about an organised criminal group, a family of engineers, where the youngest (!) criminal was 75 years old. They had been involved in pirate broadcasts for several years, earned millions, laundered money and bought up real estate. None of them are in prison. In Spain, if you have not committed a serious crime, you can buy your way out by paying for the damage caused. Rights holders, as we were told, are always willing to accept money. This is the principle of ‘live and let live’ in action.
I listened to all this and thought that there is another side to the coin. When the European Parliament was discussing the copyright directive, the famous musician Wyclef Jean came to visit us. He produced Whitney Houston, recorded a hit with Shakira, and so on. He came to ask MEPs to stop messing around. Wyclef Jean grew up in Haiti, in the slums, and if he hadn't listened to pirated music on the internet in his youth, he would never have made it out of those slums.
The paradox is that it is often not the authors who fight for copyright, but the rights holders. And for them, it's purely a question of money. In addition, many of them clearly do not understand what the internet is and do not see that the world has changed. We met with a representative of a media association, who said: ‘We have one message for you: bring everything back to how it was.’ No one can bring everything back to how it was. There are social networks, bloggers, VPNs and much more. No EU directives will stop progress or put the genie back in the bottle. We need to find new mechanisms for relations between rights holders and consumers, while maintaining a balance so as not to make music or sports broadcasts inaccessible – and not to destroy future talent, which often grows precisely on pirated versions. Yes, it is clear that rights holders are losing money. But that is no reason to shut the door on reality.
I, along with other members of the delegation, will formulate our conclusions and present them to the JURI committee. For now, we have two completely different messages: some believe that new mechanisms are unnecessary and we should focus on implementing existing ones; others believe that it is time to look at the problem in a new way, because those in favour of strengthening the existing mechanisms do not understand how they work. Of course, we will decide collectively what to do about this in the Parliament.