Article 13 and the People Who Knew Better
Axel Voss, a German CDU politician who became the face of the EU’s most damaging internet policy proposal in years, wanted to install upload filters across every major platform in Europe. The mechanism: scan everything users post before it goes live, run it through a rights database, block anything flagged for copyright or worse. The public pitch was always about stopping pirates and terrorists—which is how you get people to stop asking questions about infrastructure that would inevitably catch a lot of ordinary cultural exchange in the net too.
The actual power struggle underneath had nothing to do with protecting creators. It was a war between two industries: the old content establishment—major labels, film studios, big publishers—and the new digital one—platforms, streaming services, hosting providers. The old industry was furious about a decade of value flowing through platforms without adequate payment at the gate. Germany’s collecting societies, GEMA and VG-Wort among them, lined up on the old industry’s side. Civil society, meaning everyone who actually uses the internet, had nothing to do with this dispute until the proposed solution dragged them into it.
The existing framework worked, at least tolerably. Rights holders report an infringing upload, the platform removes it—the notice-and-takedown system. YouTube had gone further with Content ID, an automated tool that catches copyrighted material before most complaints arrive. What the old industry wanted was something stronger: platforms liable every time a previously-flagged piece of content got successfully re-uploaded, not just when they failed to respond to a notice in time. Eliminating that liability would require pre-emptive automated filtering of everything before publication. False positive rates on those systems aren’t rare—criticism, parody, commentary, news clips, all the content that legally lives in gray zones, gets swept up routinely.
The collateral damage wasn’t a bug. A filter that blocks memes and reaction GIFs and news excerpts along with actual piracy still works for the industries that lobbied for it. Small platforms and independent services, unable to afford the filtering infrastructure, would either exit the EU market or disappear. The big incumbents absorb the compliance cost and use it as a moat. Dressed up as copyright protection, it functioned as a competitive barrier and a mechanism for narrowing who could afford to operate at scale in Europe.
When the Parliament voted in July 2018, the mood had unexpectedly shifted. Austrian MEPs across parties came out against it. Conservative delegates from Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Poland reportedly broke with the push. The Parliament rejected the text—not a final no, but a mandate for revision. René at Nerdcore read it as a change in direction rather than a defeat, and he was right. The fight came back in September, then again in March 2019, when a revised version passed into law as part of the EU Copyright Directive. Article 17, as it was renumbered by then, is on the books.
What frustrated me then and still does is how legible the template was. You take a real harm—piracy genuinely affects working musicians and writers, not just major labels—and you propose a solution scaled to a different problem, one that happens to serve incumbent industry interests while also expanding the state’s ability to monitor what moves through digital infrastructure. The artists most vocal in demanding stronger copyright enforcement were rarely the ones who’d benefit from filtering systems; those systems protect catalogs owned by corporations, not the working independent musician with three releases on Bandcamp.
The internet as a space for informal culture—the clips, the remixes, the screenshots, the reaction posts—loses a little ground every time one of these proposals advances. Not all at once, never dramatically enough to feel like a breaking point. Just incrementally, one filter at a time, until the thing that made it interesting has been routed around or taxed out of existence. That’s the plan and it’s moving forward.