Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market

The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is a European Union directive that sparked controversy due to two of its articles: "Article 11" (15 in the final text), which would impose a "link tax" on any independent journalist looking to quote a published news source, and "Article 13" (17 in the final text), which would make platforms allowing for user-created content, such as YouTube, liable for copyright infringement in case copyrighted content is uploaded. Despite massive public outrage, the directive was passed by the European Parliament and, as of April 15, 2019 was approved by the Council of the European Union, making it on its way to become European Union law and, in two years' time, member state law.

While not explicitly mentioned by the text of "Article 13", activists have commented that upload filters would need to be instated by content platforms, as manual review would be very impractical. While primitive technology such as Content ID by YouTube exists and is already instated as an upload filter, under the directive, filters would need to be much more aggressive, deleting many false positives in order to ensure no copyrighted material passes the filter. In addition, this sort of filtering would need to be applied to global uploads, not just those from the EU, or YouTube would need to be completely blocked in the EU. In addition, YouTube's Susan Wojcicki has noted that, even when copyrighted material is placed on the website legally, it has many claimants, and making sure they split the ad revenue fairly is a big and ongoing issue; the directive would put more issues onto that.

In Inside Out parodies
As subtitle parodies such as Downfall and Inside Out parodies are dependent on copyrighted material as their inseparable part, they are among the type of content most vulnerable to the enactment of the directive. In the past, parodists have successfully argued in favor of considering parodies as "Fair Use" under the United States law; however, there is no comparable EU-wide concept, and such, parodies would essentially be considered illegal. More broadly, this concept was applied to still images of copyrighted movies and music clips, often used as memes, leading to a common name for the directive and "Article 13", the "meme ban".

Upon the European Parliament's approval of the directive, CreativityTheEmotion uploaded a parody which looks at the consequences of the directive for the subtitle parody. In particular, the copyrighted movie is completely removed, leaving a black screen with subtitles. In addition, every single parody of CreativityTheEmotion's was made private, with only the videos pertaining to Doki Doki Literature Club!, an independently produced game whose copyright owner has made it clear via the IP Guidelines as to how their content can be used. She has further noted that, if the directive were to be passed by the Council of the European Union, the parodies would be completely gone.