It requires a lot of knowledge of the context and some pretty hard work of crossreferencing several legislative texts to really get to what's going on here, although I think that the text by Julia Reda does it justice pretty well.

https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/

In what follows, I'll say a bit about Article 11, because it's the part of the debate that I have been following more closely, and the one that I actually care about.

There is some context to this. This is a change that media corporations have been pushing for for many many years. When they did so at the level of national law in several European countries, they weren't quite as good as they are this time around at concealing their dark design. They basically came straight out and said: "We want to create an organization representing all of us in collective bargaining against the likes of Google. We want that organization to collect money from Google, compensating us for displaying headlines, webpage titles, and automatically generated summaries in search results and on Google news. And we want to change copyright so as to make it so."

Some of the legislative text that was passed around on the national level in several European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Spain, actually made explicit mention of automatically generated summaries of copyrighted material, or use of copyrighted material by search engines and content aggregators etc.

In Germany, such a law actually entered into effect. Here is some more reading on that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...
http://www.taz.de/!5064771/ (in German)

Then Google set up an online platform that press publishers can use to declare that they are okay with Google continuing to use their stuff for free. Content by any press publisher that's covered by this ancillary copyright who has not entered into this agreement with Google then disappeared from the index.

Guess what happened next? Everyone signed the agreement.

So, it's essentially dead law now. It doesn't affect Google, as everyone signed the agreement. So far, the media aren't going after the smaller content aggregators, stepping lightly around the touchy subject, but it's certainly creating a lot of legal uncertainty for search engines and content aggregators who aren't Google.

But they're still hard at work, trying to make this into a "world revolution", the hope being that, one day, enough material will be subject to this ancillary copyright that Google will no longer be willing to lose all that content and therefore the threat of just taking it out of the index will have lost its sting.

Now about what's going on in Brussels: Back in September 2016, the Commission set up a draft for this new Copyright directive, which read pretty innocuously. It had an Article 11 that basically just said: "We want press publishers to be able to have some kind of a copyright in their material." From a U.S.-perspective, you probably wouldn't understand what this is even about, as, in the U.S., this has always been the way copyright worked. An employee would routinely say, in their employment contract, something along the lines of "for copyright purposes, my employer is the creator of any work I create" and that's that. In Europe, copyright is non-transferable. The only way you can be the creator of work is if you actually created it, e.g. an individual journalist or programmer, not a media or tech company. So, the way this article actually read was so as to imply that, for the special case of press publications, the Commission wants Member states to implement copyright to allow for stuff to happen that already routinely happens in the U.S. So it was fairly technical, uninteresting lawmaking.

Then, between September 2016 and now, secretive, intransparent, corrupt bullshit took place behind closed doors. A committee was formed. The committee voted in changes to the proposal of a Directive to be voted on in parliament. Nobody friggin new what the changes actually were, as a text wasn't published at the time the vote was taken. Then, on June 29th, leaving only three full workdays to when the draft directive was supposed to be voted on in parliament, they published the text, and did so in a completely unreadable format.

You have to read it as a meta-meta-meta-level document. The document wasn't law. It was changes to be made to a proposal about things that the Commission was going to force Memberstates to implement into law.

Where it previously said:

"Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the digital use of their press publications [i.e. with an ancillary copyright].""

It was now going to say:

"Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC [i.e. with an ancillary copyright] so that they may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers."

So, previously, you could have read it like this: Well, publishers are now going to have copyrights, but copyright is already pretty clear on hosting exceptions, quoting exception, etc., so nothing will change for search engines and content aggregators. Now that reading was definitely out! Now, the directive made it clear that this was going to be an ancillary copyright, an additional right that should have the effect that search engines, content aggregators etc should pay press publishers for something extra, something not already provided for under current copyright.

And Julia Reda makes the point, which, I believe, is very valid, that, since the proposal made it clear that this was going to be a new/extra right, it was not clear at all, that certain limitations that apply to copyright also apply to this ancillary copyright. In particular, Reda notes that, to be the creator of a copyrightable work, you need to create work that crosses some threshold of originality. But in order to enjoy this ancillary right, all you need to do is to be a press publisher. So this is the way, that, this time around, they snuck back in the idea of "A headline is not too short to enjoy protection", or "If Google shows the bits about our content that have the search term in it, with dots in between, that doesn't mean the content doesn't still enjoy protection" etc. etc.

Hope this was helpful in clarifying a few things.