Digital Signature Licitness for Startup Business Plan in European Union

How to eSign a document: digital signature licitness for Startup Business Plan in European Union

Copyright reform can kill our company I'm an entrepreneur from Belgium We are a small team of developers We're a startup based in Berlin with 35 employees PCloud is a company established two years [ago] We're three months old. Our mission is to use artificial intelligence to solve online misinformation Not only what we've seen with news, but misleading claims by, for example, politicians We created software for musicians allowing them to write, play and print sheet music Tersee is a real-time search engine for news and current events We help companies aggregate hundreds of thousands of user opinions Our mission is to bring forward the news and stories that really matter on the internet Our software currently has been downloaded almost 20 million times and it's the world's most popular notation software We have more than seven million users worldwide Menéame has about 250,000 daily visits We are backed by the Google Digital News initiative to promote innovative things in news What we have to do is huge amounts of text and data mining We process around 50,000 publicly accessible documents, blogs, articles and so on every minute We need to use news and social media snippets to train our algorithms to understand what are claims Having to build filtering technologies would not be feasible for us Not only because we don't have the funds, but also we have a very specific content type, being sheet music, for which there is no technology available to do easy similarity matching or copyright filtering That would take enormous technical effort to implement which at this moment is kind-of impossible A law designed for Google is severely affecting us In 2013, the German "ancillary copyright law for press publishers" was introduced The large German publishing companies [...] threatened us with a lawsuit After four years, it's still unclear whether or not this law applies to our search engine The unclear legal situation made it very difficult for us to find any investors We already spent a lot of money on lawyers that we would have liked to spend on development If the European Commission implements Article 13, I'm sure that this would be a threat for the businesses in Europe It will put European companies at a disadvantage worldwide If those changes get through, we would not be able to run this website anymore And through that our community would not be able to express their creativity anymore If they win, this would probably mean the end for our search engine We want to be able to continue what we are doing The news ecosystem is kind-of broken, but it needs people like us and other companies to try and solve it If this type of obligation had existed 10 years ago, we [SoundCloud] wouldn't exist today The next Facebook and Twitter won't happen in Europe because this law cripples European startups during their expansion phase