More than 130 European businesses tell the European Parliament: Reject the CopyrightDirective

The EU's Copyright Directive will be voted on in the week of March 25 (our sources suggest the vote will take place on March 27th, but that could change); the Directive has been controversial all along, but it took a turn for the catastrophic during the late stages of the negotiation, which yielded a final text that is alarming in its potential consequences for all internet activity in Europe and around the world.

More than 5,000,000 Europeans have signed a petition against Article 13 of the Directive, and there has been outcry from eminent technical experts, the United Nations' special rapporteur on free expression, and many other quarters.

Now, a coalition of more than 130 EU businesses have entered the fray, led by file storage service NextCloud. Their letter to the European Parliament calls Article 13which will lead to mass adoption of copyright filters for online services that will monitor and block user-submitted text, audio, video and imagesa "dangerous experiment with the core foundation of the Internets ecosystem." They also condemn Article 11, which will allow news publishers to decide who can quote and link to news stories and charge for the right to do so.

Importantly, they identify a key risk of the Directive, which is that it will end up advantaging US Big Tech firms that can afford monitoring duties, and that will collect "massive amounts of data" sent by Europeans.

March 21st is an EU-wide day of action on the Copyright Directive, with large site blackouts planned (including German Wikipedia), and on March 23, there will be mass demonstrations across the EU. Read the rest “More than 130 European businesses tell the European Parliament: Reject the #CopyrightDirective”