European Parliament approves the Copyright Directive, a controversial law that includes Article 11, dubbed the “link tax”, and Article 13, the “upload filter”
New copyright rules that include some payment to publishers—Toughest in world privacy rules—New state laws on terrorist content/hate speech, EU directive coming—Repeated privacy/antitrust enforcement.U.S. in past year:—None of that @eff : In one of the most contentious decisions in the European Union's history, the European Parliament today voted to approve a directive that undermines Internet users' ability to share their work and creates new limits on their ability to link, quote, and critique the news. Owen Williams / @ow : here's another fun thing that goes hand-in-hand: blocking european customers from accessing your service—which is a logical course of action here—is also now illegal @jessassin : Let's create a law to control a market, without a fundamental understanding of how it works. Great idea! http://twitter.com/... Guillaume Champeau / @gchampeau : One simple thing to fight for in national implementations of #Article13: don't ever enforce it until rights holders publish an open database of their protected works, so they can be identified. It must be a prerequisite as you can't ask platforms to guess what's protected or not. http://twitter.com/... Cllr. Keith Redmond / @cllrkredmond : This is an unmitigated disaster. Picture the GDPR nonsense on every website you visit and now imagine that by a hundred as you'll be blocked by tons of sites outside the EU and have loads of restictions on sites inside the EU. Why do they need to constantly interfere?! http://twitter.com/... @eff : BREAKING: Europe's MEPs cave to lobbyists, ignore five million online petitioners, hundreds of thousands of protesters, and approve #article13 and #article11. Find out what happens to the disastrous Copyright Directive next: https://www.eff.org/... Owen Williams / @ow : it is not an exaggeration to say that building a startup in europe just got 100x less appealing, let alone making services available here @eff : But the battle is not over yet. Here's our breakdown on what happens next in Europe, and how important it will be to fight similar provisions when lobbyists push for them across the world. http://www.eff.org/... @clementj64 : Article 13 passed. This'll affect the internet badly. I feel so bad for a lot of the European content creators I follow. Not that it won't affect the rest of the world too. Good lord. http://twitter.com/... James Vincent / @jjvincent : The EU has approved the Copyright Directive in a final vote. Both Articles 11 (the 'link tax') and 13 (the 'upload filter') have been passed intact. Final vote was 348 in favor and 274 against. http://www.theverge.com/... Max Schrems / @maxschrems : Article13: Whenever a European political fight is lost, the national political fight (implementation) and the legal fight is only starting (especially with such a wacky law)... Support your local NGO in this fight (e.g. the @edri members - http://t.co/...)! http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This vote closes a two-year fight over the EU's copyright overhaul. In July 2018 the Parliament rejected the initial Article 11 and Article 13 proposals, sending them back for amendments; when trilogue negotiations wrapped up in February 2019 both articles survived largely intact, leaving today's plenary vote as the last real chance to stop them.
It passed anyway, 348-274, over protests from rights advocates including the EFF, who argue the directive restricts how internet users share, quote, and critique news. Member-state sign-off followed within weeks, with final approval coming after 19 of the 28 countries voted in favor, so the directive now moves from political battle to implementation.
First-order effects
- Platforms operating in the EU must build or license upload-filtering systems under Article 13, and negotiate licensing payments to publishers for news snippets under Article 11 — compliance costs land on them immediately.
- European users face new friction linking, quoting, and sharing press content, the outcome EFF and other critics warned would chill commentary on the news.
Second-order effects
- Filtering at scale is expensive, so the burden falls hardest on smaller platforms and startups while incumbents with existing content-ID infrastructure absorb it — critics like Motherboard flagged exactly this costly-and-likely-ineffective dynamic before the vote.
- Publishers gain a statutory lever to demand payment for links and excerpts, forcing every aggregator and news app serving EU audiences into licensing negotiations rather than fair-use-style defaults.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the directive becomes a regulatory template exported beyond Europe, extending the precedent set by GDPR — cited in the coverage as the world's toughest privacy regime — of EU rules becoming de facto global standards.
- Platform governance shifts structurally from reactive takedown toward proactive, automated filtering as the legal default, embedding distribution-layer liability into how user-generated content platforms are built.
The trend: The EU is consolidating its role as the world's de facto internet regulator, with the Copyright Directive joining GDPR as a rulebook other jurisdictions and global platforms adopt by necessity.