Dirk Visser: Trying to understand article 13

Article 13 is the most important and most controversial provision of the proposed EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market on which the EU member states and institutions have reached agreement in principle in February 2019. The final vote will be in the European Parliament in late March 2019. 

This paper aims at analysing what the idea of article 13 is and how it might work out in practice. Which legal issues will arise, which preliminary questions will be put to the CJEU? It is not meant to argue for or against article 13. The article itself is taken as a given. This paper is merely a first attempt to look ahead and find out what could happen in practice.

It is obvious that article 13 is a compromise between many interests and wishes and that is quite contradictory at some points. But that in itself is nothing new. Much of the EU legislation consist of partly contradictory or incomprehensible clauses, because compromise apparently was the only option for reaching consensus. Consequently, it is often up to commentators, practitioners and judges to make the best of it. 

The directive contains a large number of recitals on the issue article 13 addresses, and article 13 itself contains many subsections.

Lees het hele artikel hier (pdf) of hier (online).