Bill Mew explains the issues behind the new copyright laws that have been voted in by the European Parliament, which critics say could change the internet. The new rules, including the controversial Article 13, will hold tech firms responsible for material posted without copyright permission. Sharing memes and GIFs, however, will still be allowed under the new laws.

Many musicians and creators say the legislation will compensate artists fairly – but others argue that they will destroy user-generated content.

In principle there should be no objection to finding a way to offer fair payment to copyright owners, but the difficulties lie in how to differentiate between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material and how liberal or draconian to interpret the regulation as it is implemented in the various states across Europe.

The protesters have claimed that quotations, satire and even memes, could be eradicated if the laws are interpreted in too draconian a manner, while the copyright owners have insisted that there would still be freedom to use quotations, satire and memes within reason. Exactly where the line would be drawn in implementation, nobody knows exactly, so much of the current fear-mongering on either side is pure speculation.

At the same time the proposed upload filters would need to be effective. We have already seen that a digital fingerprint can be created for any individual video. Uploads can then be compared to a library of such digital fingerprints. The problem arises either when a fingerprint erroneously identifies non-copyrighted material as copyrighted or when minor changes are made to copyrighted material in order to avoid detection. At this time the sophistication of the detection tools is limited and protesters fear that the error rate could be exceedingly high. Meanwhile tech and social media firms not only fear that this would restrict their operations and that the upload filters would be costly to develop and manage, but they are also worried that a high initial error could lead to an un-manageable overhead in dealing with appeals and protests.