The European Union’s controversial copyright reform today cleared a final vote before member states and is now on track to become law.

The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, as the bill is officially known, passed with 19 countries in favor and six against. Estonia, Belgium and Slovenia abstained. The approval concludes a two-year legislative saga marked by strong pushback from critics in the tech industry and beyond, who argued that the law could curtail some internet freedoms.

Most of the controversy revolved around two sections. The first, originally known as Article 13 and since renamed Article 17, will make tech giants such as Facebook Inc. responsible for removing copyright-violating content from their platforms.

Critics have said that the only way for companies to uphold this requirement is by implementing powerful filtering systems capable of blocking infringing materials before they’re posted. Such a mechanism, it was argued, could potentially be abused for censorship. Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were among the prominent figures who voiced their concerns about Article 17.

The other contentious section is Article 15, previously known as Article 11. It requires companies that operate news aggregation services, most notably Google LLC, to pay publishers for posting links to their articles and displaying text excerpts.

The EU softened the language of the legislation late last year, but critics have said the changes didn’t go far enough. Google, Facebook and other major tech firms publicly opposed the legislation, which creative industry bodies such as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers supported it.

The Copyright Directive will be signed on Wednesday. It will go on to be published in the Official Journal of the EU later this year, at which point the EU’s 28 member states will have two years to integrate the legislation into their legal systems.

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