The battle must now be won in the European Parliament plenary on 12 September.
Click on your country to access tools to contact your MEPs with illustrative texts in your relevant language.
Hover over a country to check the voting statistics of the MEPs representing that country, as reflected by the 5 July vote on the JURI mandate.
*Votes in favour of that mandate can be interpreted as indicating a support for the Article 13 Censorship Machine, whilst a vote against the mandate is more difficult to interpret in direct relation with Article 13, as other reasons can have motivated such a vote (legal text not clear enough, dislike of other provisions such as Article 11 giving a new right to press publishers and referred to as the ‘link tax’, etc.).
This vote is currently scheduled for Wednesday 12 September at 12h00 CEST (provisional date), and the deadline for Amendments is set to Wednesday 5 September at 13h00 CEST.
You can call Members of the European Parliament in their Brussels office Monday 27 August after 2 pm CET until Thursday 6 September 2 pm CET. You can call them in their Strasbourg office from Monday 10 August after 2 pm CET until Wednesday 12 September 10 am CET (the vote is scheduled on that day at noon CET).
All Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) must be targeted. They are under extremely heavy pressure from the entertainment industries and publishers' lobbies.
In particular, effort should be focused on:
- ALDE (liberals) Members. They are key to swing a vote between the two major groups.
- EPP (conservatives) Members. They may be hard to convince, as rapporteur Voss is from their political group, and as they historically were on a more repressive line. On the other hand, in a previous legislature many of them voted along the 88% of the European Parliament on the amendment 138of the Telecoms Package (saying that restrictions to fundamental rights should only be ordered by the judicial authority), which goes against the notion of "extra-judicial means" of combating copyright infringements. Also EPP Members from Poland and Sweden, may be easier to convince.
- S&D (socialists) Members from UK, Spain and Italy, under heavy influence by the producers, publishers and authors' lobbies may have trouble supporting the alternative proposal
E-mail and call Members of the European Parliament
- MEPs receive hundreds of mails per day, so sending an email -- even if is important -- is often not enough to convince them.
- If you do not sign your email with your name, there is no point sending it: MEPs will consider you are a bot and ignore you.
- A phone call has much more impact. Most of the time you will talk to assistants who are young and intelligent people.
- The best is to send an email, then call. You can start by asking "(Hello my name is XY and I live in Z) I just sent you an email, have you read it? No? Let me tell you about it... ".
- Always be polite. Your interlocutor is working under a lot of pressure. He or she has probably only little knowledge of what is at stake with the Copyright Directive, but has a good capacity of understanding.
- Make sure to be concise -the phone call may last only 1 or 2 minutes, or just a few seconds- and to include relevant documents and references.
- Always follow-up a phone call by email (to send documents and references discussed over the phone, to answer to unanswered question, to go further). Rinse and repeat. 😉
