European Parliament passes a copyright law that will change the internet forever and not for good -

Lately, the European Parliament has passed a new copyright law which will aim to protect the work of the content creators to be unusable for unauthorized use. However, with this new copyright reform, there will be huge changes as to how the internet functions.

The reform law which is officially named as the “The Copyright Directive” at one point was dubbed as the “Meme Killer” was passed after 348 votes in favor of passing with 278 against its favor.

This directive went through a lot of revision before it was passed in its current form. However, still many of the clauses for this law are controversial to an extreme extent.

Danger Clauses:-

The clauses that actually made a huge commotion among the protestors of this new law are the articles 11 and 13.

Article 11:-

Article 11 states that from here on, the search engines, as well as the news aggregators, will now be paying the news websites a sum of money for using parts of their news content.

Article 13:-

As for Article 13, it states that major tech companies like Google and Facebook will now be held responsible for any kind of copyrighted material posted on their service if there is no proper license with the content.

Exemptions in the Directive:-

Despite these major copyright clauses, the Directive clearly has made some exemptions as well related to certain contents. The European Commission states as follows,

“The use of existing works for purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature as well as parody are explicitly allowed”.

This exemption list means that the memes, as well as Funny GIFs, will still be allowed for posting.

As for the points of Article 11, the European Commission states that this new rule still won’t be a hindrance to the individual users from posting links of not only newspapers but also of other websites.

Thoughts of Critics:-

As for the Critics for this new Copyright Directive, they state that the wording in Article 11 is vague as well as ambiguous. As for Article 13, they claim that this will be opening a Pandora box of censorship which is going to damage the smaller businesses.

The Copyright Directive, as of now is subjected for approval by the EU member states. Those who will approve of this law will need to implement this after 2 years of the official publication.