User blog comment:TOR/Join us in protecting the freedom of user-generated content/@comment-30071057-20180906220441/@comment-20644-20180907032823

There’s a bit more nuance to it than "other countries have their own laws." The European Union can pass a law that they may only intend to have apply within its own borders, but the practical impacts can expand far beyond that. We don’t know whether or not a contribution comes from Europe or elsewhere, so in order to ensure we’re complying with the EU law, we’d have to proactively police all content to ensure that we're not violating EU law.

A point of comparison would be PIPA and SOPA, similar yet failed attempts at US laws that aimed to enforce stronger copyright measures against online content creators. At the time, users who lived outside of the United States asked, why might those laws have applied to them if they're not an American citizen? The answer is that not only do we have a business entity in the United States, where we're headquartered (and we have business entities in the European Union), but that the country/region is so large that in order to effectively follow its laws we have to apply our Terms of Use and processes to everyone in order to ensure compliance.

Article 13 strikes at the very heart of free and open content creation online, regardless of what country you live in.