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Yesterday, the European Parliament passed the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, also known as EU Copyright Directive. The directive passed in a vote with 348 votes in favor, 274 against, and 36 abstentions.

The directive has gone through several amendments before it has reached its final form. It is aimed to provide copyright holders more control over their work. But, critics believe that this could instead give the tech giants more power and will kill the internet freedom.

Now, member states have to take the next step of approving the legislation. If they approve it, they will have to implement the law within two years of the legislation getting officially published.

The controversial Articles 11 and 13

The directive includes the two controversial articles, Article 11 and Article 13. Article 11, also known as the “link tax”, requires news aggregating sites to obtain a license before linking or using snippet of news articles. This article was introduced to help original content creators to gain a portion of revenue from services like Google News and Apple News.

Article 13 has been labelled as “meme ban” or the “upload filter”. According to this article, online content sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud need to put in place “effective and proportionate measures” to prevent copyright infringement by their users. It makes these platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement by their users.

As Article 13 seems to be pretty vague about what “best efforts” these platforms should make, critics believe that it means implementing upload filters. So, platforms like YouTube and Facebook will may have to scan every piece of content users upload and check it against a database of copyrighted material.

In the current version of Article 13, the European Parliament said that memes are “specifically excluded”. Confirming this, a MEP for London Mary Honeyball said, “There’s no problem with memes at all. This directive was never intended to stop memes and mashups.”

Swedish MEPs accidentally pushing the wrong voting button

Amid all the controversies and protest, a group of Swedish MEPs have added “fuel to the fire” by sharing that they accidentally voted for passing Articles 11 and 13. They thought that the vote they were casting was in the favour of voting down a plan to pass the article.

Though these members can get the record amended, the vote will still stand. They have now issued a statement saying that they intended to “open a debate” on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13. Emanuel Karlsten, a Swedish journalist said, “Thus, Parliament was stopped by only a single vote from voting on the decision to delete Articles 11 and 13 of the Directive. One wrongly-pushed button fewer, and the result for all of Europe could’ve been very different”.

Sweden Democrats issued a comment on the vote, “Today we had three push-button votes on the Copyright Directive. On one of the votes, we pressed the wrong button: the vote on the order in which we would vote. If it had gone through we could’ve voted on deleting Article 13, which we wanted. The vote should have ended up 314–315.”

This final decision got a mixed reaction. While Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s vice president for the digital single market, called this a step ahead, Julia Reda, a member of European Parliament, said this was a “dark day for internet freedom.”

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Bhagyashree R