: The European Parliament on Tuesday adopted controversial copyright reforms championed by news publishers and the music business, delivering a blow to the tech giants that lobbied furiously against it.
Launched in 2016, the revamp to European copyright legislation was seen as urgently needed, not having been updated since 2001, before the birth of YouTube or Facebook. There were similar protests in Austria, Poland and Portugal, while major Polish newspapers on Monday printed blank front pages in an appeal that MEPs adopt the reform.
Reda said the vote marked a “dark day for internet freedom” and decried that MEPs refused, albeit narrowly, to modify the text before the final vote. Backers of the law, led by its rapporteur MEP Axel Voss, answered that filters are not a requirement but they do not explain how companies can comply with Article 13 without them.It should enable news companies to be better paid when their output is used by information aggregators like Google News or social networks such as Facebook.
But opponents have called it a “link tax” that will stifle discourse on the internet and pay only big media companies, with no real benefits for journalists or news gatherers.