The UK had plenty of opportunities to veto the controversial EU copyright legislation, so why did it wait so long to torpedo Article 13?
The move amounts to a somewhat bizarre U-turn, as the UK was among the 19 nations that initially supported the law, back in a European Council vote in April 2019. It had every opportunity to stop the directive at the time, says Julia Reda. “As has quite often happened in the Brexit debate, you get the impression that EU legislation just falls from the sky and is imposed on the British people,” she says. “But that's not the case – the UK has always been a very powerful player in the EU, due to its size, and it would have been able to simply block the adoption of the copyright directive.”