So the European Parliament went and voted yesterday (I'm writing this the morning after, still on my first coffee) to approve a negotiating mandate for the Copyright Directive, including the two provisions everybody's been screaming about for months: Article 13 and Article 11. The vote was 438 to 226, with 39 abstentions, which is not exactly close. A bunch of MEPs who'd been on the fence apparently decided the "protect creators" framing was easier to vote for than to explain voting against.
Quick version for anyone who hasn't been following: Article 13 would make platforms that host user-uploaded content legally responsible for copyright infringement in that content, which in practice means everyone expects they'll have to run some kind of automated filter on uploads. Article 11 is the one people call the "link tax": it would let news publishers charge platforms (think Google News, or aggregators, or arguably anyone quoting a headline) for showing snippets of their articles.
I run a link-heavy blog. Have since November 2011. I quote headlines, I embed tweets, I screenshot the occasional article and link back with a line of commentary. That's basically the entire format of a blog like this one. So when a law shows up that specifically targets "snippets," my ears go up a little differently than they do for, say, the average Twitter user worried about meme filters.
Here's the thing though, and I want to be careful here because I think a lot of the coverage yesterday oversold the immediate danger. This isn't a finished law. This was Parliament approving its position so it can go into trilogue negotiations with the Council and Commission. There's another vote coming, probably early next year, before any of this actually becomes binding text that EU member states have to implement into their own national laws. So nothing changes on this blog today, or this month, or probably this year.
What actually worries me isn't the doomsday "the internet is ending" framing that was all over my feed last night. It's much narrower than that. Article 13's filter requirement is the part I think is legitimately bad, because automated content filters are dumb instruments applied to a genuinely nuanced problem. Fair use, parody, criticism, quotation — a filter trained to catch copyrighted audio or video doesn't know the difference between piracy and a five-second clip used in a review. YouTube's Content ID system already gets this wrong constantly, and that's one company with a decade of investment in the problem. Now imagine every platform with user uploads in the EU needing something similar, on a much tighter budget, much faster.
The link tax piece, honestly, I think is going to end up mattering more for the big aggregators than for a blog with maybe a few hundred regular readers. Spain tried something similar back in 2014 with Google News and the result was Google just pulled News out of Spain entirely. Germany did a smaller version and most publishers ended up granting Google a free license anyway because losing the traffic was worse than the theoretical licensing fee. I'd bet on something similar happening here, which tells you a lot about who this provision actually protects (hint: not small independent writers, mostly big publishing houses who lobbied hard for it).
One detail from yesterday I liked: a bunch of Wikipedia language editions (Italian, Spanish, Polish, a few others) went dark for a day last week in protest before the vote, redirecting to a banner explaining Article 13. Didn't stop anything, obviously, but it's a good reminder that Wikipedia will happily throw its whole homepage into a form of civil disobedience over stuff like this, which I respect even when I'm not sure the tactic works.
Anyway. I'm bookmarking this one to revisit once there's actual final text, because "Parliament approved a negotiating mandate" is not the same sentence as "this is now the law," no matter how many outlets ran headlines yesterday that made it sound that way. Going to go refill this coffee and actually get some writing done that isn't about EU procedure.