The European Copyright Directive has received a lot of negative feedback. It contains multiple very problematic parts for a free and open internet. Read about the directive at MEP Julia Reda’s blog, or watch the video below:

Almost 5 million European citizens have signed a petition to stop the directive.

The official channel of the European Parliament on Facebook has twice shared a video that is greatly misleading about the copyright directive:

I wrote a comment describing the problems:

Hi European Parliament. Now you re-posted this video again. Still with the misleading text “Parliament reached a new agreement”, while there still has not been a vote. And also with Axel Voss presenting the criteria for exceptions incorrectly. According to article 13 your platform need to fulfill all 3 criteria:

  1. Younger than 3 years
  2. Have an annual turnover below EUR 10 million
  3. Have an average number of monthly unique visitors of these service providers less than 5 million.

Axel Voss only mentions criteria 2 and 3, and has an OR between them instead of an AND.

To conclude: your video is NOT informative at all without clarifications. Why do you publish this video again, when the problems got pointed out the first time?

Also the European Commission wrote a medium post (now deleted, but archived here), calling peaceful protesters a mob. Update: Apparently the archive in unreliable, so I host a pdf of it.

This gives us a view of a very angry and biased European Parliament, since they promote legislation before the parliament has voted about it.

Protests are scheduled the 23rd of March all around Europe, and the vote is scheduled for the 25th of March. Now EPP (European People’s Party) are pushing for the vote to be scheduled during next week instead. It is absurd and highly undemocratic to push a vote before scheduled protests, which Julia Reda nicely explains in her vlog.

Here is a list of what you can do to stop this directive!

  1. Call a MEP and make them pledge to vote against.
  2. Sign the petition to stop article 13.
  3. Attend one of the protests the 23rd of March.
  4. Become a pirate
  5. Vote for a pirate party in the upcoming EU elections 23-26th of May.
  6. Share this blog post