The likelihood of Article 13 being adopted across Europe has sharply risen again, following the breakdown of negotiations two weeks ago. The trialogue negotiations meeting, where final wording on EU law is confirmed, is now set to take place in the coming weeks after it was cancelled for its initial date on 18 January. The meeting was cancelled as there was too much disagreement on the what the final wording of the law should be, but to remedy that - France and Germany, two of the major players in disagreement, had to reach a compromise. And that's exactly what they've done. The Franco-German deal was leaked yesterday and the compromise seems to have been made more by France than Germany. The previous stance of the French was that Article 13 should apply to all platforms, regardless of size while the Germans were in favour of it being applied to just the biggest of online companies. The agreement, which is now enabling the trialogue negotiations to go ahead, will apply to every website unless it meets all of the following three conditions: A startup that has been active for less than three years A Website with an annual turnover below 10 million A website with less than 5 million monthly unique visitors

Upload filters will have to be applied for every website that fails to meet the narrow exclusions above which are many of the mainstream sites and apps used today. If the notoriously erroneous upload filters were to became mandatory, sites such as YouTube have said that they will cease to allow uploads completely from the EU. Furthermore, adding to the already strict rules around exemption from the law, even if a web service does fit all three criteria, it must still prove that it has undertaken "best efforts" to obtain licenses from rightsholders such as record labels, book publishers and stock photo databases for anything its users might upload. This, as Julia Reda MEP puts it, is "an impossible task". "In practice, all sites and apps where users may share content will likely be forced to accept any license a rightholder offers them, no matter how bad the terms, and no matter whether they actually want that rightholder's copyrighted material to be available on their platform, to avoid the massive legal risk of coming in conflict with Article 13," Reda adds. The public opposition to Article 13 has mounted exponentially as the talks have passed through the legislative process, especially in the past year. The pressure placed on member states had worked; just six member states opposed the new law last year but that has risen to 11 now. Regardless, this isn't enough to stop the legislation in its tracks and in its new revised state, it's just as damaging to the internet as it was in its previous wording. Reda says that this agreement will likely be rubber-stamped by the European Council on Friday so the final vote will hinge on the big Parliamentary vote which is due to take place in April/May. Update: 08/02/2019 - Google weighs in on how businesses will suffer Google has weighed in on the Article 13 and Article 11 debacle which threatens the internet as we know it in a new blog post. The tech company joined many in the global conversation calling for a drastic rewording of the law.