One of the music industry's dumbest, most pernicious talking-points is the "value gap" (AKA the "value recognition right") which is code for, "Online platforms should employ an army of copyright lawyers to assess everything that users share for copyright compliance."
This idea raises its head periodically, most recently in a sneak European Commission proposal. The Copyright for Creativity group's video does an excellent job of busting the myth.
Copy explains the so-called 'value gap'. The issue at stake is the liability of online platforms for content uploaded by their users that could infringe copyright, packaged under the label ‘sharing of value’. Under the disguise of a copyright review, the European Commission sneaked in a proposal imposing obligations for online platforms to filter user upload content to fix this 'value gap'. Can you imagine getting strip searched on the Internet? The filtered content could be anything: GitHub code, Wikipedia contributions, documents shared on Dropbox, etc.. You name it, the EC wants industry to filter it. In practice this would require that online platforms extensively monitor anything being uploaded and delete it if it could generate a legal risk. This threatens human rights protected by European and international law, and would result in a huge ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of expression, massive private censorship, and undermine innovation and competition.
