The Filter That Would Have Swallowed Everything
The EU last reformed its copyright law in 2001, before YouTube existed, before the concept of a social media platform had a name, before anyone had reason to think carefully about what happened when millions of people started uploading things to the same place at the same time. For nearly two decades that gap just sat there, and then the film industry, the music industry, and newspaper publishers decided they’d had enough of it.
The result was Articles 11 and 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive—Article 11 being a so-called link tax that would require platforms to pay publishers when linking to their content, and Article 13 being the provision that required platforms to filter uploads for copyright violations before they went live. Upload filters. Automated systems that would catch infringing content before anyone could see it, and in doing so would inevitably catch a huge amount of perfectly legal content too—commentary, parody, criticism, news coverage—because filters don’t understand context.
The irony was that Germany’s own coalition agreement, signed in 2018 between the CDU/CSU and SPD, explicitly rejected upload filters as inappropriate. That position got quietly ignored at the European level, where German CDU MEP Axel Voss pushed the directive forward anyway, bundled with the link tax. The democratic signal from Berlin landed nowhere.
What followed was one of the larger moments of actual internet-driven political mobilization I can remember. Protests broke out across Germany in March 2019—Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, and dozens of other cities. People took to the streets not over an abstraction but over something they used every day: the ability to post things, make things, respond to things, without a corporate algorithm deciding in advance whether you were allowed to. The crowds were young and genuine and, for once, not organized by any party.
The directive passed anyway. Article 13 became Article 17 in the final text, because renumbering something apparently makes it feel like a different idea. Implementation has been messy and contested ever since, with different member states interpreting it differently and the expected filtering catastrophe not quite arriving in the form critics predicted—though whether that’s because the fears were overblown or because platforms have quietly built the infrastructure and normalized it without fanfare is a question I don’t think anyone has cleanly answered.
What I remember most from those weeks is the feeling of watching something important be decided by people who either didn’t understand what they were deciding, or understood perfectly well and didn’t care. Both possibilities were depressing in their own way.