The most questionable "meme ban" part of the new EU copyright law was mistakenly voted in favour of by some MEPs, The Independent reported.
The directive was adopted on 26 March with 348 votes in favour, 274 against and 36 abstentions, following a heated debate and previous unsuccessful attempts to pass it through the parliament.
According to The Independent, MEPs voted down an amendment that would have enabled them to specifically reject the most controversial parts of the law, albeit by a very thin margin, ahead of the main vote. But now some of those politicians who voted in favour have reportedly said that they accidentally chose the wrong option.
The records have been adjusted in accordance with the new results, The Independent reported, saying that despite this, the original outcome remains unchanged.
The controversy mostly revolves around Article 11 and Article 13 (later changed to Article 17) of the proposed directive. The former, also called the "link tax", envisions requiring large tech giants such as Facebook and Google to pay authors, composers, filmmakers and other creators for using snippets of their copyrighted materials. The latter, aka the "upload filter", would make them legally responsible for the content posted by users.
