Not every country agreed to implement the directive, but most did so this morning …
CNET reports that 19 of the 28 EU countries voted to approve the legislation.
Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland and Sweden voted against adopting the directive, whereas Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia abstained. In total 19 countries voted to approve the legislation.
Back in January, the company showed why, illustrating what its news results would look like without the inclusion of headlines, snippets and photos pulled in from the publisher sites.
A similar thing happened in Germany, when publishers pressured Google into removing excerpts from links – until they saw the impact on traffic. At that point, most of them changed their minds.
Both cases show that Google is serious when it says that it might simply close down the service in Europe.
The legislation could also have a significant impact on YouTube. Google last month said that there was ‘legal uncertainty‘ over how copyrighted material in user uploads would be identified.
Again, Google’s safest approach might be the most drastic: to block all user-uploaded containing third-party music or video excerpts from elsewhere.
There is still a potential breathing space: the EU gives member countries up to two years to implement the EU Copyright Directive into their own laws.
Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:
