Massive protest against planned reform of EU copyright law

Tens of thousands of predominantly young people have taken to the streets in Germany to protest against the planned reform of EU copyright law. Three days before the decisive vote in the EU Parliament, they demanded above all the deletion of Article 13.

In future, platforms such as YouTube are to check whether content contains copyrighted material as soon as it is uploaded. Critics fear that this will only be possible via automated filters, which could be tantamount to censorship.

There were protests against this in numerous countries across Europe on Saturday - and by far the largest in Germany. According to the police, around 40,000 people took to the streets in Munich alone under the slogan "Save your Internet", while the organizers said there were more than 50,000. "Don't destroy our Internet" and "The Internet stays as it is" were the slogans on the posters.

In Berlin, the demonstrators marched past the German Wikipedia headquarters to the Brandenburg Gate, chanting "Stop censorship" and waving banners. The police spoke of more than 10,000 participants, the organizers of 30,000. Thousands were also on their feet in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Leipzig and other cities. The "Save your Internet" campaign had called for the protests.

The EU Parliament is to vote on the copyright reform on Tuesday. It is intended to adapt the outdated copyright law in the EU to the Internet age.

Negotiators from the EU Parliament and the EU member states agreed on a compromise in mid-February. Among other things, it provides for an ancillary copyright for press publishers and - in Article 13, which is now Article 17 in the current version of the legal text - significantly more copyright protection obligations for platforms such as YouTube.

Critics fear that platforms such as YouTube can only comply with the requirements if they use upload filters to check whether images, videos or music are protected by copyright when they are uploaded. This leads to censorship because the filters also block legal content such as quotes, parodies or satire.

Supporters of the reform believe these concerns are unfounded. CDU European politician Axel Voss, who was in charge of negotiating the compromise with the EU member states on behalf of the Parliament, emphasized that it was ultimately up to the companies to decide how to implement the directive.

"This is about the hard-nosed economic interests of the large platforms, which convey to individual citizens that the freedom of the internet is in danger," he told the Rhenish Post. "But that's not true. Nothing is taken away from the individual." (SDA)

The demonstrators in Germany, on the other hand, received support from the SPD: a European convention of the party in Berlin decided to oppose the controversial filters. With one vote against, the delegates voted in favor of supporting motions by the SPD group in the EU Parliament aimed at preventing upload filters.

Although the SPD is on the side of authors, creatives and artists, it is also committed to freedom rights in the digital age. Instead of filtering out videos and music, they should be paid in accordance with copyright law.

The Greens consider new negotiations to be a possible way out. Authors must be given an appropriate share of the added value of their works in the digital world, but there should be no barriers to the free exchange of opinions and flow of information, said parliamentary group leader Anton Hofreiter to the news agency DPA.

Around 260 publishers, newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, production companies and media professionals, including the DPA, had called for support for the reform. They demand "a fair share in the content business in order to ensure a rich and diverse Internet in which information and culture have a firm place".

Photo: Henning Schlottmann - CC BY-SA 4.0