Why is the European Parliament still pursuing copyright law despite its implementation issues?

Question

According to this article, the European Parliament is considering rolling out taxation of news aggregators:

(..) large European newspaper publishers have dreamed of charging news aggregators such as Google News for the privilege of sending readers to the publishers’ online articles.

However, according to the same source this measure was already enforced in Spain and Germany and did not generate the expected results:

The problem is, ancillary copyright proved to be a complete disaster in both Germany and Spain, failing to put a penny into the pockets of those press publishers — and in the Spanish case, causing losses of millions of euros.

Also several important organizations heavily criticized this law (e.g. Wikipedia):

Why is the European Parliament still pursuing copyright law despite its implementation issues?

Answer 1

The question should be: who is supporting this legislation through lobbying. And a bit searching finds a partial answer:

Some groups are opposed to the proposed Copyright Directive on the grounds it will ‘shut down the internet’, ‘ban memes’ or even hamper creativity itself.

PRS for Music, a non-profit organisation which represents thousands of songwriters and composers in the UK and beyond, has been campaigning for this new copyright legislation – fit for the internet age – for more than four years.

Likewise:

Of course, support for the directive remains. Crispin Hunt, Chair of the British Association of Composers, Songwriters & Authors, is in favor of the legislation, calling some of the criticism reliant on “an ability to weave a narrative that has no relationship to fact.”

Hunt is in support of Article 13, suggesting that it could “restore fairness to a broken market.” But even he admits that the articles remain vague, using this as a reason to dismiss criticism as “unconstrained hyperbole.”

And the Centre for the Picture Industry blog says:

Image creators could be thrown a lifeline by the EU if Article 13 is passed. However, many are keen to brand the much needed new proposal as creating limitations for Internet users. Somehow in a bid to close the online value gap for creators, some are so distressed that hashtags such as #SaveYourInternet are being brought to arms. But before getting wild with the retweet fearing the Internet is about die – let’s look how this new proposal could save photographers and other creators, and how all this scaremongering is misconceived.

I'm pretty sure there are similar organisations in other EU countries, although the info is probably not going to be in English. It would be hilarious if a UK-based lobby was the only force pushing this through given Brexit.

Answer 2

Question: Why is European Parliament still pursuing copyright law despite its implementation issues?

Because there have not yet been any implementation issues, as the law has not been implemented. There are various potential issues, the likelihood of which are often disputed. Presumably those in favour of the law believe these can be avoided, or do not outweigh the benefits they expect.

Also, please note the potential law is much broader than just impacting news aggregators. Regarding this small part, I will note that the quote from the article

The problem is, ancillary copyright proved to be a complete disaster in both Germany and Spain, failing to put a penny into the pockets of those press publishers — and in the Spanish case, causing losses of millions of euros.

clearly shows that the German and Spanish laws had different effects, thus showing that the implementation of the law does not always have to be identical even if the issues are addressed are the same. As such previous attempts to address an issue are only useful if the approach is intended to be the same as that which failed.

Answer 3

This law is not intended to be used to protect copyright holders. Copyright holders are already protected by treaties passed by the European Union:

The first judgments of the European Court of Justice covering copyright were made under the non-discrimination provision of Article 6 EC (formerly Art. 7), and under the provisions of Article 36 which allows for restrictions on trade between Member States if justified by the protection of industrial and commercial property (including copyright). The directives were made under the internal market provisions of the treaties, notably Article 95 EC (formerly Art. 100a)

As well as each individual member state having it's own copyright law. This new Article 13 law is intended to be used to deter citizens of Europe from criticizing main stream media news articles, because simply sharing a link to a news article and explaining why it's inaccurate, misrepresentative, etc, will effectively become outlawed.

To believe that this legislation has anything to do with copyright law is naive.

Answer 4

Ok, this law is basically removing net neutrality and creating a tax for every consumer in case you steal some intellectual property.

You can read the proposition; wikipedia has linked it in the main page now. This proposition has clear purposes to benefit certain economic lobbies and not the people.

First this proposition aims to reduce intellectual property piracy of digitalized works. It aims to do this attacking the populace instead of the stealers. This proposition is based just in big companies claiming they are losing their money thanks to piracy. This proposition COMPLETELY ignored several studies, even one financed by the EU that demonstrated how piracy and the possibility of having some cultural work for free isn't affecting a bit those sales, and even this possibility can raise sales as it happens with video games, according with that study made by the EU they are ignoring.

We can conclude that we are talking about a law, made by conservative parties, to benefit those big economical powers that aren't unable to adapt their business to the internet. Think about big newspapers that are partial towards some parties, big discographics or TV broadcasters that are big enough to affect the public image of some parties. All of them are losing money because they couldn't effectively adapt themselves to the internet, and some new companies are doing it better than them. So this proposition is, apart from a tool to benefit political interests that aren't the same ones of the population ones, a tool to eliminate competence for big companies.

In Spain, the measures were extremely focused on destroying new blogs and digital newspapers that were mostly against the government policies. It was a way to shut down the new companies and to let the big media which has a lot of connections with big parties rule over the competence.

The measure heavily backfired, because big companies didn't see any improvement on their profits, that's because people are accustomed to new ways of consuming news, TV shows, music and movies. The people kept on focusing in consuming these products in the same way as before, so the big companies kept losing money for the same reason as before, because they don't know how to adapt the company to the new conditions of the market. Spain closed all piracy websites? People will find other ones from other countries, or buy Netflix or HBO, newspapers won't let them link news or read news? Ok, people won't enter and will find other news sources, making even worse the fake news effect and the social media news plague.

So what's the next step? Cutting the way out. Erasing net neutrality to force the users to enter that webs that the ISP wants you to enter, probably economic allies, and other big companies. ISP could reduce your bandwidth making it almost impossible to access a web, creating this way a hellish trap for the internet users.

This is not a conspiracy, is just old people not knowing what internet is or what it means, trying to bring benefit to the companies that "always were there" just to benefit themselves under the false believe that if these companies fall because they cannot adapt to todays world the country will fall too.