Brexit means the UK will shelve the EU Copyright Directive (for now)

Last year, the EU adopted the incredibly controversial Copyright Directive (it passed by only five votes, and afterwards 10 MEPs said they'd got confused and pushed the wrong buttons!): now, EU member states have to create rules that require online platforms to filter all user-generated content and block it if it matches a secret, unaccountable blacklist of supposedly copyrighted works; and to allow news sites to veto or charge for links to their articles.

But Chris Skidmore, the UK Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, has publicly announced that the UK government has no plans implement the directive, citing time pressure in the runup to and aftermath of Brexit.

This doesn't mean that Britons will be spared the ill-considered effects of the directive, though. Much of the pressure to pass the directive came from the UK, with support from giant media monopolies like EMI, well-known performers like Paul McCartney and Debbie Harry, trade unions like the National Union of Journalists (of which I'm a member; when I told their policy person that the rules would allow fraudsters to claim the works of Shakespeare, they told me that their job wasn't to protect Shakespeare, it was to protect news photographers whose images were misappropriated by clickbait sites), and even prominent Labour politicians, who cheered the directive's passage as giving a black eye to US Big Tech companies (and Big Tech will have to pay out a few hundred million euros to comply with the rules, but in exchange, they can be assured that all their smaller EU-based competitors will not be able to afford this and thus be neutralised as competitive threats). Read the rest