For example, the “snippet tax” would require commercial sites that quote even tiny portions of online press publications to pay a licensing fee for each one. Given the way social networks constantly quote and cross-link information, that’s clearly absurd. And yet the Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) committee of the European Parliament has come up with a cunning plan to make it even worse. It wants the snippet tax to apply to physical publications as well as digital ones. (…)
Just as the ITRE committee wants to make the snippet tax even worse, so the Culture and Education (CULT) committee of EU politicians has come up with a way to make the upload filter dramatically more ridiculous. If the CULT committee’s amendments are adopted in the final law, EU citizens will no longer be able to upload copies of copyright material to the cloud, even if they have acquired them legally.
Glyn Moody @ PNI: EU copyright reform goes from bad to worse »
EFF: Do Last Week’s European Copyright Votes Show Publishers Have Captured European Politics? »