On 15 April the Council (= EU Member States) are likely to approve the text of the copyright Directive at the Ministerial level, which will happen at the Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting – more details here. The adoption of the EU copyright reform will force upload filters onto the Internet, as Article 17 (ex Art. 13) was not deleted during the European Parliament Plenary vote on 26 March 2019. Check your country page here for more information about how your MEPs voted on 26 March.
Over 130 MEPs from across the EU pledged in advance to vote in favour of deleting Article 17 (ex Art. 13) and against the final text of the new EU Copyright Directive if Article 17 (ex Art. 13) would remain in it. Check who pledged and how they voted here:
If you want to check out a more in-depth overview of MEPs’ voting behaviour, covering all EU Member States, please see our spreadsheet in Excel format (with graphics) or in OpenDocument format (without graphics). The official voting records provided by the European Parliament can be found here, see pp. 50-51 for the procedural vote on the possibility to change the final text and pp. 52-53 for the final vote on the Copyright Directive.
Don’t forget to follow @FixIt_EU for updates on copyright & to follow @edri for more general updates on digital and fundamental rights issues.
YOUR GOVERNMENTS ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN STILL OVERTURN THE EU COPYRIGHT REFORM
Background
In September 2018, MEPs voted for a version of the copyright Directive which will indirectly lead to implementing upload filters on most of the services you use online. The European Parliament’s (EP) Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee Rapporteur, MEP Axel Voss, then started the ‘trilogue negotiations’ – closed-door ‘informal’ negations with the representatives of the EU Member States (Council) and the European Commission (EC). These negotiations resulted in a trilogue agreement on 13 February, 2019. Despite massive criticism, the text has been made even worse than the EP’s proposal. On 20 February 2019, the EU Member State Deputy Ambassadors approved the provisional copyright trilogue agreement during the meeting of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER 1), and on 26 February, the European Parliament’s lead Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee ‘rubber-stamped’ the agreement allowing it to be voted on 26 March in the EP Plenary session. More details here.
See EDRi’s short summary of the most important developments in the Copyright Reform.