[2] The Council of the European Union describes their key goals with the Directive as protecting press publications; reducing the "value gap" between the profits made by Internet platforms and by content creators; encouraging collaboration between these two groups, and creating copyright exceptions for text- and data-mining.

[9] The directive has generally been opposed by major tech companies and a vocal number of Internet users, as well as human rights advocates, but supported by media groups and conglomerates, including newspapers and publishers.

[14] In his campaign position, Juncker saw the potential to "improve" the EU's financial status by harmonising the various digital marketplaces among member nations to create job opportunities and drive a knowledge-based society.

[46] The version of the directive voted on by the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs contained explicit exemptions for the act of hyperlinking and "legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users".

[21] The article directs member states to consider the size of the provider, the amount of content uploaded, and the effectiveness of the measures imposed "in light of technological developments".

[49] Draft Article 13's provisions target commercial web hosts which "store and give the public access to a large number of works or other subject-matter uploaded by its users which [they] organise and promote for profit-making purposes".

[21] Draft Article 13b requires websites which "automatically reproduce or refer to significant amounts of copyright-protected visual works" to "conclude fair and balanced licensing agreements with any requesting rightholders [sic]".

[64] Tom Watson, a member of Parliament of the United Kingdom and the deputy leader of the Labour Party, said, "we have got to secure for the workers [...] the full fruits of their industry.

[68] Batten further noted that an international agreement, and not an EU directive, was needed to protect "the legitimate rights of creators, authors and innovators", whilst not stifling "free speech and information dissemination".

[59] German politician Kevin Kühnert, federal chairperson of the Social Democratic Party's youth organisation, has voiced opposition to Article 13, claiming that it violates the coalition agreement between the SPD and the CDU/CSU.

[70] Petra Sitte, vice-chair of the democratic socialist party The Left, also stated that the effective endorsement of upload filters violates the coalition agreement, calling this copyright directive a "compromise between the interests of different large corporations" ("Kompromiss zwischen den Interessen verschiedener Großkonzerne") and "a grave threat to freedom of expression" ("eine ernsthafte Gefahr für die Meinungsfreiheit").

[71] The day before the Parliament vote, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that Germany may have caved in to support the Directive at the last minute in exchange for France's approval of the controversial Nord Stream 2 project, a natural gas pipeline from Russia.

[74] 145 organisations from the areas of human and digital rights, media freedom, publishing, libraries, educational institutions, software developers, and Internet service providers signed a letter opposing the proposed legislation on 26 April 2018.

[106] The European Council for Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers opposes the proposal on the grounds that Article 13's exemption for non-commercial groups does not cover all scientific repositories, and cites the Horizon 2020 project as an example of commercial work in the sector.

[105] A campaign organised by the European Grouping of Societies of Authors and Composers collected over 32,000 signatures in 2018 from creators including David Guetta, Ennio Morricone, Jean-Michel Jarre, and the band Air.

[98] The publishers argue that licensed content providers such as Spotify and Netflix are also negatively affected by the current copyright regime, which they say benefits user-driven platforms such as YouTube (owned by the parent company of Google) and Facebook.

In the letter, they cite existing state support for struggling news media and argue that it should instead be provided by the "internet giants" which have been "siphoning off" advertising revenue.

[137] A representative from a company that makes content filters states that their wide introduction as while result from article 13 will likely hurt new music artists by limiting their ability to share what they create.

[89] Individuals who have publicly opposed the law include comedian Stephen Fry; author Neil Gaiman;[138] Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; and Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet protocol suite.

In a public letter, special rapporteur, David Kaye, argued that the proposal's reluctance to pin down precise obligations on content hosts created "significant legal uncertainty" inconsistent with the covenant's requirement that any restrictions on freedom of expression be "provided by law".

[21] After the European Commission analysed the implementation of similar laws in Germany and Spain, they found that newspapers actually benefited financially from the increased exposure to their online articles.

[142][46][143][144] Germany (with the ancillary copyright for press publishers law) and Spain tested a link tax: it was considered a "complete disaster" which cost them millions of euros.

[147] Although the article requires only "best efforts" from providers, larger companies would need to use expensive content-matching technology similar to YouTube's Content ID system, which cost Google about $100 million to develop.

[148][149][62] Others are concerned that due to the cost of filtering, only major U.S. technology firms would have sufficient resources to develop them, and that outsourcing the task by EU companies would then have privacy and data protection implications.

The media lawyers Christian Solmecke and Anne-Christine Herr reported in their analysis of the negotiated compromise that it inherits the duty to use an upload filter because no other technique exists to fulfil the requirements of the law.

[155] Critics have also noted the issue of false positives within such systems, and their inability to account for copyright limitations such as fair dealing and parody (leading, they state, to a "meme ban").

[182] The Times reported that "Google is helping to fund a website that encourages people to spam politicians and newspapers with automated messages backing its policy goals".

[187] Some commentators stated years of intense lobbying served to "crowd out other voices and successfully distort the public debate", and that "toxic" discussions were harming "healthy dialogue".

[37] Deputy Foreign Minister of Poland Konrad Szymański said the directive "may result in adopting regulations that are analogous to preventive censorship, which is forbidden not only in the Polish constitution but also in the EU treaties" on public broadcaster TVP Info.

As of 26 July 2021, only 4 out of 27 member states have implemented respective laws, those being Germany, Hungary, Malta and Netherlands, with those missing out being Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.