The Copyright Panic

Back when Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive came up for a vote in January 2018, I kept thinking about all the dumb videos and screenshots and remixes I’d thrown up online over the years. Nothing I made would have survived those upload filters. Most of what made the internet fun wouldn’t have.

The idea was straightforward: copyright holders needed protection, so the EU would require platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Reddit—to scan every upload before it went live and automatically delete anything flagged by copyright databases. Memes with licensed music. Clips from movies. Fan art. Samples. Everything.

The filter wouldn’t understand context or fair use or public domain. It would just match and delete. If some corporation claimed ownership over your work—whether they actually owned it or not—that was it. Gone. No appeal. No explanation.

Open source developers were completely exposed. Sites like GitHub and Stack Overflow would have needed these filters too. Firefox, VLC, entire libraries that industries depend on—they exist because people could share code openly. An algorithm would have destroyed that.

They justified it with terrorism and child exploitation. Real problems, sure, but the tool didn’t distinguish. It would have crushed remix culture, fan communities, most of what actually moves online. Anything built on anything that already existed.

The vote happened in late January 2018. It passed. For a few weeks it looked like the internet was about to get smaller and quieter and way more paranoid. The backlash was big enough to force compromises, water down the worst parts. Not good, but survivable.

Most of internet culture lives in this gray zone—not quite legal, not quite theft, just… shared and remixed and passed along. That vote tried to close that gap. It almost worked. We got lucky, but I think about how close it was, how easily all of this could have gone a different direction.