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For years, a significant chunk of YouTube’s music library was blacked out for users in Germany. A licensing dispute between Google and GEMA—the German performing rights organization—dragged on without resolution, and the practical outcome was that you’d click on a music video and get an error page instead. The rest of the world watched. You got a message. This ran from roughly 2009 until 2016, and it was a long, boring demonstration of what copyright maximalism looks like when it reaches its logical end: nobody wins, the content disappears, and the people it was meant to protect don’t see a cent more than they would have otherwise.
Which is why the proposed EU copyright reform—specifically Article 13 of the EU copyright directive—felt so familiar when it surfaced. The measure would end the "provider privilege," the arrangement where platforms respond to reported infringement rather than actively policing all uploaded content. YouTube’s response, delivered by CEO Susan Wojcicki in a carefully worded blog post, was essentially: we can’t do this without blocking everything preemptively. Rights on any given video can involve dozens of parties, many of them unidentifiable. The legal exposure is unbounded. The easiest path to compliance is geoblocking—cutting EU users off from content wholesale, which satisfies the letter of the law while gutting the point of the platform.
Wojcicki pointed out that YouTube already handles most of this through Content ID, its rights management system, which had paid out over €2.5 billion to rights holders for third-party use of their work. The system isn’t perfect—nothing that operates at YouTube’s scale is—but it functions. The new directive, she argued, doesn’t improve on it; it just shifts liability in ways that make operating in Europe financially untenable. Whether that argument is self-serving is a reasonable question. Whether the outcome she described was a plausible consequence was less debatable. We’d already lived through a smaller version of it. The bigger version was just more of the same, applied everywhere at once, with "Despacito" and cat videos caught in the crossfire alongside everything else.