This seems quite alarmist...
From the BBC article you linked, the summation of the article is as thus.
Article 13 says content-sharing services must license copyright-protected material from the rights holders.
If that is not possible and material is posted on the service, the company may be held liable unless it can demonstrate:
- it made "best efforts" to get permission from the copyright holder
- it made "best efforts" to ensure that material specified by rights holders was not made available
- it acted quickly to remove any infringing material of which it was made aware
These rules apply to services that have been available in the EU for more than three years, or have an annual turnover of more than €10m (£8.8m, $11.2m).
Article 13 says it shall "in no way affect legitimate uses" and people will be allowed to use bits of copyright-protected material for the purpose of criticism, review, parody and pastiche.
Effectively today, when you are posting content on Stack Overflow, you post it under the CC-By-SA license, which appears to be somewhat guarded against this.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
That'll have to be a matter which is settled by the EU courts, which Stack Overflow is beholden to (provided that Britain leaves the EU with a deal in place on the 29th, or if they don't leave at all - don't listen to an American talk about Brexit, read up on how it'll make laws like this weird for yourself).
Stack Overflow already removes content via DMCA request, so if you're not the copyright holder of a piece of work, the person who is can still take action against the content.
So I think this'll be a wait and see approach from the perspective of the layman. It's an excellent legal question, but I don't think it's really too pertinent to worry about until after it's been voted and ratified in the EU.
