COPYRIGHT DIRECTIVE APPROVED: Only 5 Votes from Introducing Amendments

Emanuel Karlsten
2 min readMar 26, 2019

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Rapporteur Axel Voss stands to applause after the Directive was approved. Photo: Herman Caroan CC BY

The Copyright Directive has been adopted in its entirety, with Articles 13 and 11 unchanged. It was a quick vote, and by a margin of only five, the proposal to introduce amendments to the Directive was rejected.

The drama de-escalated thereafter. The entire directive was adopted by a wide margin, 348 for, 274 against.

This means that from now on, EU Member States will have two years to implement the Directive as law. It also means copyright owners get the chance to negotiate with online giants, who in turn must filter all users’ content and stop all copyright infringements.

That the Directive would be approved was far from unexpected. The real focal point was whether or not amendments to delete Articles 11 and 13 would pass. We won’t even get to find out whether there was a chance of this happening, as with a margin of five votes, the 751 MPs declined to even vote on the amendments themselves.

How MEPs voted has yet to be published. Previously, we’ve reported that the Swedish Social Democrats were split on the issue, and that some would be voting to approve the Directive. These were the only Swedish MEPs to say in advance that they’d be voting yes — all others were to vote no.

If three Swedish members voted yes, then it would have been enough for them to change sides in order for the amendments on Articles 11 and 13 to have a chance to be voted through.

Comment from some Swedish MEPs:

Christofer Fjellner, Swedish Moderate Party MEP: “Article 11, the ‘link tax’, and Article 13, the ‘upload filter’ approved by 5 votes! Now people are going to blame and yell at the EU. BUT it’s the fault of the Swedish socialists! If three of the Swedish socialists voted no instead of yes, we’d have won! It matters how you vote — remember that on May 26!’”

Fredrick Federley, Swedish Centre Party MEP: “Copyright approved. Chance to vote on amendments voted down by just a few votes. Possibly Swedish Social Democrats who decided the whole thing (based on how they voted).”

Max Andersson, former Swedish Green Party MEP (now a member of newly-established ‘Turning Point’ Party: “A dark day for the internet. Now the link tax and upload filter are both a reality. Now we need to take the fight to ensure no more filters.”

Updates to follow.

This piece is funded by a Kickstarter campaign to monitor the European Parliament’s Copyright Directive proposal during its final stage of voting. Text and images are supplied under CC BY, a license that makes it free to share and redistribute wherever you want, provided you link back here with appropriate credit.

Read the original post in Swedish.

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Emanuel Karlsten

Swedish journalist travelling to the European parliament to cover the final copyright directive vote. Everything published on this site is under cc-by-license.