Update: The EU Parliament has voted against the controversial reform which will now be reopened to debates. A 318-278 majority of MEPs in the European Parliament voted to reopen debate around the digital copyright reform proposal — meaning it will now face further debate and scrutiny, rather than be fast-tracked towards becoming law via the standard EU negotiation process. This is a major victory for internet platforms in the EU. Wikipedia has temporarily shut its Italian, Polish and Spanish language sites to protest against the copyright reform which goes into vote at the European Union Parliament on Thursday. The protest is against the vote by EU parliament’s legal affairs committee which supported the reforms to the copyright laws. The reforms consist of two major hiccups that pose a threat to free online expression and open internet. Article 11 ‘Neighbouring Rights’, under which websites producing journalistic content can charge other websites to use snippets of their content. This attacks online news aggregators which includes a lot of startups. The reform also fails to explain what exactly is a snippet. Google was really upset with this reform after already having to shut down Google news service in Spain due to a similar law. Google wrote in a blog post: It would hurt anyone who writes, reads or shares the news—including the many European startups working with the news sector to build sustainable business models online. Article 13, under which websites hosting user-generated content have to monitor the content for any kind of copyright or…
