Article 13 and Article 11 passed – so what now?

On March 26th, 2019, the European Parliament voted to approve the Directive on Copyright and the Digital Single Market. This piece of legislation is in theory aimed towards protecting the press publications and bridging the gap in the profits of internet platforms and content creators. It was initially introduced in June of last year to replace the EU’s outdated rules on copyright.

In the light of many European cities like Berlin and Amsterdam being known as “the start-up hubs”, it’s no surprise that the law hasn’t caught up to the fast-paced technological developments. This Directive might be trying to do just that. However, the initiative proved to be highly controversial amongst both internet platforms and content creators, meaning it's simply bad for everyone.

In particular, Articles 11 and 13 of the Directive (commonly known as “the link tax” and “the upload filter”) have drawn much resistance and criticism from government officials, legal professionals, content creators, and internet users. However, they’ve also received a lot of support from industry players representing big content creators, like music producers that want to push out smaller creators.

In short, the piece of EU legislation is one of the most polarizing ones of the last five years, if not longer. It’s led to a Change.org petition to stop it, websites like Wikipedia shutting down for a day as a protest, and hundreds of thousand of people across Europe taking to the streets. It seems that people believe that the EU legislators’ efforts to strike a balance between the interests of users, creators, news aggregators, and tech companies will backfire and eventually lead to the World Wide Web ceasing to be “World Wide”.

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