I'm staunchly pro-EU. I firmly believe that Brexit will be a disaster. And yet the European Parliament just keeps on doing things that force me to sympathise with my Brexiteer neighbours. This week they voted in favour of another example of ridiculous overkill legislation in the form of the new copyright directive . As it currently stands it could mean an almost blanket ban on user generated content ranging from critiques, parodies, reviews, memes, reaction gifs, etc. Article 13 insists upload filters will now automatically search databases of copyrighted material and delete infringements. How these filters will be able to distinguish between 'fair dealing' and outright content theft is anyone's guess. Once you factor in the complexities of local copyright law across all EU member states #13 goes from ambitious to laughable. You only have to look at the problems with YouTube's Content ID to understand some of the difficulties an even larger scale filter wil