The EU’s bid to police the internet is going badly wrong

The copyright in the single digital market directive combines the deadliest ingredients in public policy: it is important, boringly complicated, and its effects are a long way off. This week, it was supposed to take a major step towards becoming law, but it has foundered – for now. The directive is largely technical tweaks to European copyright, which were last revised in 2001. But two clauses are so controversial that they’ve spurred more than four million Europeans to write to the Parliament to object to them and ‘save the internet!’. The changes have also been denounced by copyright experts, Tim Berners-Lee, the UN, movie companies and football leagues. At issue is Article 11, which makes online platforms obtain paid licenses before they may link to news sites; and Article 13, which forces online platforms to filter their users’ words, audio, pictures and videos to block anything that appears in open, crowdsourced databases of supposedly copyrighted works.