Alone in Germany, 40 rallies were due Saturday involving critics of an EU copyright reform bill, with protests also expected in Denmark, Poland, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal.
In Berlin (pictured above) thousands walked past the center of Germany’s collaborative Wikipedia online encyclopedia. In Potsdam, banners included the phrase “We are not bots,” a reference to robotic-like social media posts.
Backers of the reform bill include a thousand artists and creatives who in a manifesto on Friday warned of a “total selloff” of their copyright entitlements if it did not pass.
“Authors must be paid … Copyright law has to be clarified for today’s digital world, but not weakened or abolished,” they said.
The bill to modernize the EU’s 2001 copyright law within the Single Digital Market, adopted mid-February as a compromise between EU heads of state and the European Commission, reaches its legislative finale on Tuesday in the 751-seat European Parliament.
If passed — just weeks before Europe’s May 26 election and after three years of wrangling — member states will have two years to transpose the resulting EU directive into national law.
But deep rifts prevail among voters across Europe over the bill, especially Article 13, now Article 17 in the revised draft, which critics say will prompt high-earning platforms such as Google’s YouTube to use upload filters to block copyright-infringing texts, music and images to avoid expensive lawsuits from copyright-holders.