Article 13: A guide to the new EU copyright rules and the ban on memes

To comply with Article 13, platforms such as YouTube and Soundcloud will need to ensure that any copyrighted material on their sites is licensed, guaranteeing the original artist receives payment for its use.Certain services are exempted, including non-profit encyclopaedias like Wikipedia, software development platforms like Github, and cloud storage services.Why do we need it?Rightsholders say that the rules will put an end to the days of pirating music and video online, and ensure artists receive a fair payment for their work. And the legal status of streamers, who post videos of themselves playing video games online, is in question.Website owners aren’t required to install content monitoring software to detect copyright material, but practically it will be impossible to guarantee a site isn’t infringing the rules without this software.“It’s very hard to make these tools identifying content, because they can’t identify context, and so they make decisions that are likely to be bad,” says Jim Killock at the Open Rights Group, a UK digital rights campaign group.