EU Lawmakers Want Your Opinion About How We Share Music Online

Admit it, the internet has made the world a lot more complicated.

Not only was it forever going to be that little bit harder to finish doing any work, what with endless access to cat videos, porn, and any TV series a couple of clicks away, but it also put elements of the music industry into a legal free-fall. As of now though, the European Commission has given everyone the chance to have their say about how copyright law needs to be changed in the EU.

This is a pretty big deal. First of all, let's just get one thing out the way. The vast majority of us have probably partaken in some form of illegal file sharing, streaming, and/or downloading. Some of you may have even broken copyright law, and without being aware of it too. This consultation gives anyone the chance give their personal recommendations about what they think about current laws, and how future laws could be shaped. It encompasses topics that would effect file-sharing, remixing, downloading, and even how libraries and other archives should be run. Also, companies who are losing out on a shit-tonne of money are all too aware of this. They'll be taking a consultation like this very seriously, and doing their best to swing the law in their favour. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I reckon the more average people respond to this, the better thought-out these laws should eventually become.

The eighty-point questionnaire might seem daunting, but you can choose to answer as many or as little questions as you like. To make it a little bit simpler though, here's a breakdown of what we thought may be the main interest points for some of you, along with which questions are relevant to certain topics. You might not care about library classifications, but we're guessing some of you might be pretty pissed off if torrents were to become illegal.

Links to the questionnaire can be found at the bottom of the article.

Should There Be A Single EU Copyright Title? AKA, If you care about Spotify, YouTube and streaming in general.

Questions: 77 and 79

We've all been on YouTube and the overlay message telling that it's "Not available in your country" has popped up, or you've tried using Spotify and it just won't work. This is usually down to the fact that copyright law is so damn complicated that it varies depending on where you live, which in turn creates licencing issues between countries. A single EU copyright title would make things a lot more simple for everyone: from the every day person, to the label owners and music publishers.

Case in point is the dispute going on between Google and GEMA, the German performance rights company that became infamous after trying to hike it's fees up so much in 2012, that Berghain threatened to close.  Not content with just pissing off clubbers, their dispute with Google has meant that a whole raft of YouTube videos are blocked in Germany. It made GEMA look like petty dicks, especially as the block can be got round with an add-on that takes a few minutes to install on any browser, but it does mean a bunch of recording artists don't get the royalties they usually would from YouTube views in Germany. It's problems like this that a single European copyright title could potentially solve - creating a standardised law that would apply throughout the EU.

Answer questions 77 and 79 with a Yes, and you can give more information about your personal experiences in questions 1 to 7.

Berghain, one of the tentative victims of GEMA.

Hyperlinking and Browsing, AKA If you care about using the internet like a normal person at all.

Questions: 11 - 12

This is probably one of the most worrying points of the survey we came across. These questions are asking if you think that hyperlinking to websites you visit, and if they are linked to a piece of work that is copyrighted, should be "subject to the authorisation of the right holder". In other words, if you create a hyperlink to a download, or your computer makes a cache of a website that contains work that has a copyright, that could be seen as an infringement of copyright. That's potentially opening up copyright infringement to a ridiculously wide definition. Have you ever hyperlinked to a song that you didn't know was an illegal download? Or even just posted a link to to someone's Facebook page, about where to stream the latest Game of Thrones episode? All that could make you liable for infringing copyright.

Yes, it's a tenuously linked photo, but I did mention Game of Thrones, and any article is better with Khaleesi in it.

Limitations, Exceptions and File Sharing, AKA Filesharing, torrents, peer-to-peer networks.

Questions: 21-26 

This is where it gets a bit complicated, and any discussion of this is going to start splitting opinions pretty widely, especially in the music world. It must be pretty heartbreaking to be a producer or a record label owner, and Google search your latest release to find countless free links to your labour of love. File sharing is a touchy subject, but the idea of governments trying to legislate the act of file-sharing online is a) really fucking stupid b) a little scary. Plenty of music gets sent around completely legitimately every single day, so if and when you start trying to mess about with how information is shared on the internet, you're going to cause a lot more problems than solve them.

There's recently been a concerted attempt by the UK government to try and gain some sort of control over this; even going as far as blocking sites about gay and lesbian lifestyle content as well as somehow winding up blocking access to Childline, the NSPCC, The British Library and a bunch of other charitie websites. The only good thing the filters seemed to achieve was blocking the website of Claire Perry, the MP who campaigned for the filters because she mentioned porn and sex so many times on her site. Fortunately for her, a clever soul has made a Google Chrome add on to bypass the filters, fittingly called "Go Away Cameron".

Controlling the internet just leads to going round in circles and people bypassing it, ands generally wasting everyone's time. This point's especially important because the majority of people who actually bother to fill out this questionnaire are probably going to be those with vested interests: the giant record labels, music publishers, film studios, i.e. the type of companies that really, really don't like torrents or file sharing, regardless of how they're used.

David really doesn't like people watching porn.

Copying and Storing, AKA Using cloud services to store your music.

Questions 64-67

This is another point that could completely change the way we pay for, share and spread music, as the consultation is opening up the discussion for the way copyrighted works can be copied and stored. Right now, you can buy an MP3 and have it available at all times through online cloud storage services; in your workplace, at home, or wherever else you may be. There are going to be some companies who will feel that's unfair. There is a chance that, in the future, extra charges could be included if you want to store your music in a cloud.  This could affect everyone from touring DJs and producers, who use clouds to back-up their sets and live shows, to labels who file-share with artists, right down to the average music fan who just wants their music collection - their potentially legitimately bought music collection - readily to hand. In short, not great.

This all may seem a bit of a long process, but the questionnaire is actually pretty straightforward and, on the most part, is just asking for people's opinions. You can download the full questionnaire with instructions about how you email it back to the European commission here, and Copywrongs.eu put together a helpful page to direct you to the questions that could affect you the most, which you can see here. Do it.

You can follow Patrick Carnegy on Twitter Here: @patrickcarnegy