
The latter had persuasively argued that such a law would suppress internet freedom and stifle creativity. These are the arguments which enabled the Society of Authors, the Alliance for Intellectual Property and Proponents, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group to finally win over a healthy majority of MEPs who up to last July had favoured the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) comprising the internet juggernauts of Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Netflix. So why should digital creators, artists, broadcasters and journalists be discriminated against just because location shifts to the World Wide Web? Why shouldn’t their work on the Web be regarded as intellectual property and be compensated? Don’t singers/musicians keep on receiving royalties for filling airtime? Which is why they keep on making money after passing away, even though royalties do not equate copyright. Isn’t plagiarism a crime? Which is why academic and artistic honesty must be taken seriously. The exception being material that is not copyrighted.Īs inconvenient as it may be, this directive is long overdue. The bad news is that the days of worry-free Ctrl +C, Ctrl +V are over too.įollowing the EU Copyright Directive Amendments (Articles 11-13) enacted on September 12, 2018, we need to ask for and obtain the author or copyright holder’s permission to use any content on the internet … and spell out accreditation when go-ahead is granted.


The good news is that our search is over. With a Cheshire smile and a gleeful blurting of ‘YES!’ we click away without batting an eyelid. Precious time is spent scrolling down myriad visuals until ‘the one’ appears.

Unless you don’t use a computer, copying and pasting is part of our keyboarding lives – especially when it comes to downloading images/video clips to finish off a presentation, blog/vlog post or website update. Forget generation gap issues in our ‘Copy & Paste’ habits.
