https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmkbxy/eu-votes-down-internet-wrecking-copyright-proposal > The European Union has voted against a controversial copyright reform proposal that would have severely hampered internet freedom—while driving up operating costs for many of your favorite websites. The effort was derailed thanks to a 318-278 vote by members of the European Parliament, after numerous critics complained that the highly-flawed proposal was being fast-tracked behind closed doors. For months, members of European Parliament (MEPs) had been bombarded with comments by opponents and activists warning about the problematic rule changes. > An online petition opposing the plan had gathered nearly 850,000 signatures at the time of the EU vote. Wikipedia's Spanish, Italian, and Polish language versions were also blacked out this week in the hopes of raising user awareness ahead of the EU vote. As noted previously, the terrible wording of the law opened the door to numerous, significant problems. Article 13 of the plan demanded that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code (read: most of them) be forced to implement automated copyright filters on their own dime. Such systems often either don’t work, or wind up filtering legitimate internet content, stifling free speech and user expression. Worse, the EU’s proposal provided users whose content was falsely flagged and removed for copyright violations little to no recourse to false claims, opening the door to rampant abuse of the system by rights holders. Groups like the Wikimedia Foundation had come out firing against such filters, noting they’d not only undermine the work of websites like Wikipedia, but unnecessarily drive up costs for startups forced to comply with the requirements.