Article 13, now rebranded as Article 17 is a law that was recently passed by the European Union covering the issue of online copyright. Article 17 will force social media websites to take responsibility for when one of their millions of users upload copyrighted content. What this means is that many social media websites such as YouTube will have no choice, but to use a kind of robot copyright filter and if robots can’t even drive yet then why should they be allowed to censor the net?

While it’s quite unlikely that article 17 will have any major effect on any country not in the EU it sets a rather poor standard for international laws on copyright, and it gets worse than article 11 also rebranded as article 15 will force sites like google news to pay a kind of link tax for linking to articles.

However, it isn’t the end of the digital world for our European brothers as these laws will take up to two-year for all 28 states to adopt, and during those two years it’s possible that both Articles 17 and 15 will see improvement and allow social media websites to have greater leeway.