On the 20th of June, the Legal Committee of the European Parliament will decide on a new copyright-reform.
This could radically change copyright laws throughout the EU.
Instead of supporting creators as originally intended, said reform could eventually backfire and impose a burden on them.

Especially Article 11 and Article 13 of the reform would entail tremendous restrictions, not only for the consumers.
Even the creators themselves would suffer under these new regulations:

Article 11 of the proposal of the European Commission is mainly focussing on the Ancillary Copyright of information providers.
More specific press rights are going to protect the contents of these providers and will need a purchased license to be able to be used by others.
Especially big blog pages are affected since cited texts could be seen as a copyright infringement under these new laws.

The problem is simple: A big portion of news providers on the internet are financed by page impressions and the resulting ad income, which is generated by
users visiting their site via external links.
If a platform is not willing or able to pay these licensing fees, they would lose those page views.
The proposed law, originally supposed to support these providers, will now take away their means of existence.

Implementation of Article 13 results in a total real-time filtering of every piece of content that will be uploaded to the internet.
What this means: Every data package will be automatically scanned by a potentially error-prone algorithm.
This is comparable to the erroneous algorithm deployed by YouTube, which often mistakenly deletes content that is not protected by copyright law.

If you think about the prospect of an algorithm that pre-analyses all the content that is uploaded to the internet, we take a further step towards the Orwellian dystopia of "1984".
We are on the verge of a drastic reform that could change internet culture forever.

We demand that the Committee on Legal Affairs should not make the same mistake as the European Parliament did two years ago. On 20th June 2018, vote against the reform of copyright law in the digital internal market, in particular Articles 11 and 13.

Through your position in Parliament, you have a duty to represent the opinions and values of your country's citizens and to uphold their freedom.