[Update on 5 July: Total of 167 signatories]

With a crucial vote taking place on 5 July in the European Parliament, over 145 organisations representing human, privacy, civil rights and media freedom organisations, start-ups, software developers, publishers, creators, journalists, radios, libraries, higher education and research institutions call upon the European Parliament to vote against the Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee mandate to negotiate on the copyright reform with the Council.

On 2 July, over 145 organisations sent this open letter [PDF] on the EU copyright reform to the Members of the European Parliament ahead of the 5 July plenary vote on the JURI mandate which was granted on 20 June. During this vote, the European Parliament plenary will have to endorse or not the mandate granted to Rapporteur MEP Axel Voss by the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) to enter into trilogue negotiations on the copyright reform with the Council. They repeat and amplify the voices raised previously to express their deep concerns about the artificial sense of urgency created by certain stakeholders to quickly come to an agreement on a very sensitive and controversial dossier. As aptly summarized by Wikimedia in a 29 June blog post, ‘We oppose this EU copyright package because of its detrimental effects on [I]nternet freedom, access to knowledge, and collaboration online’.

This rush is especially harmful as:

The collateral damage inherent to the vague and poorly drafted provisions adopted in the JURI Committee have been highlighted by a broad spectrum of European stakeholders and experts, including academics, educators, NGOs representing human rights and media freedom, software developers and startups (see, amongst others, the Statement of 29 June 2018 by academics: ‘The copyright Directive: Misinformation and Independent Enquiry’, the Open Letter of 11 June 2018 by 70+ Internet Luminaries, the blog post of 19 June 2018 by French privacy-friendly search engine Qwant ‘Protecting copyright with robots: a risk for fundamental rights and freedoms’ and the blog post of 12 June 2018 by Paul Sieminski from Automattic, the company that created WordPress: ‘We’re Against Bots, Filtering, and the EU’s New Copyright Directive’); and,

The JURI vote has completely disregarded the much more balanced compromises reached in other Committees especially on the highly controversial Article 13, for which the Internal Market and Consumer Committee (IMCO) held a joint competence.

As pointed out previously, the draft on the table represents a huge gap between stated intentions and the damage that the text will actually achieve: