[dannyobrien]

I wish this was true, but I'm very doubtful it will. (I work on the Copyright Directive at the EFF).

The problem is that the supporters of Article 13 strongly feel that sharing or allowing to share any material without a license is a moral and legal failing. This is why an exception for small European services was so controversial (and the primary reason the negotiations dragged on for so long). To them, SME exceptions are the equivalent to saying that there should be an exception for punishment for robbery by people who don't profit too much from it. They've been saying that this is another conspiracy by tech companies, who will immediately set up thousands of small European businesses to continue their immoral piracy.

What that means is that the decentralised Web is going ot be immediately targeted. It will be framed as a lawless area, where the principles we "all agreed on" in the Directive -- to require licenses and auto-delete anything which might be copyrighted by somebody in the world -- are now being abused by those who create these tools to evade the law. The more successful as an alternative to US companies, the more this criticism will be expressed.

Remember also that the Directive has to be transposed into national law, and the exceptions will be heavily lobbied over in those jurisdictions. It's very unlikely that France, for instance, will build strong exceptions into its law.

I realise this sounds like a lot of predictions, but we faced a similar effect in the 2000s. Lawmakers were told that stopping commercial piracy (which was said to be funding terrorism) was the goal. But when the laws were proposed, the language they used was "commercial-scale" infringement, because the rightsholders didn't just want to stop people making and selling fake DVDs and CDs, but also Internet tools and services that could conceivably be used to make multiple copies. "Commercial-scale" just became a synonym for "a service on the open Internet".