A European parliament committee has voted in favour of the Copyright Directive, leaving tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon in the lurch over publication rights.The directive will force online publications to pay a portion of their revenues to publishers, and take on full responsibility for any copyright infringement on the internet.
As a result, any service that allows users to post text, sound, or video for public consumption must also implement an automatic filter to scan for similarities to known copyrighted works, censoring those that match. In the weeks leading up to the vote, internet luminaries like the creator of the worldwide web Tim Berners Lee, and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, led protests against the directive.