There is now an appointment for the decisive round of copyright reform: The vote in the EU Parliament will take place on Tuesday at 12 noon. This is the controversial reform on the home stretch - but far from decided.
"The debate will be held next week on Tuesday morning in Strasbourg again," said SPD MEP Tiemo Wölken on Thursday in a press conference in Berlin. In response to a Spiegel demand, Wölken also said that there would be amendments to the reform "aimed in particular at deleting Article 13".
"For Article 13, there was only a slim majority of 64 votes in the last vote in parliament," said Wölken. "Given the growing concerns, it is quite realistic that Article 13 will be deleted, leaving the Member States in the Council in the palm of the hand to approve the reform as amended or to reject it for further consideration."
Articles 11 and 13 are highly controversial
In February, negotiators from the EU Parliament and the EU Member States agreed on a proposal for a new copyright law to be adapted to the digital age. Particularly controversial are two parts of the new rulebook: Article 11, which regulates European-wide ancillary copyright for press publishers, and, even more, Article 13, which provides for the liability of platform operators such as YouTube for their users' copyright infringement.
Even smaller platforms could be forced by the planned reform, the unauthorized upload of copyrighted material with so-called upload filters to prevent - such software, however, is considered unreliable and could actually ban legitimate content from the platforms, such as parodies.
The pirate politician Julia Reda, the most well-known opponent of the controversial articles, criticizes the plans as "attack on the free Internet" and as "danger for small publishers, authors and netizens". On Twitter, she calls on her followers to protest against copyright reform: "It's time to show up massively in the protests on Saturday."
Europe-wide protests on Saturday
For Saturday, the initiative "Safe the Internet" has announced a "Europe-wide demo day". "We call on the Members of the European Parliament not to agree to Articles 11 and 13," said the initiative. "We also appeal to the federal government to abide by its coalition agreement, which explicitly rejects the use of upload filters as disproportionate." An online petition of the initiative against the copyright reform has just cracked the five million mark.
The German Wikipedia had ushered in the expected wave of protests with a black screen - as a sign against the copyright reform, the online lexicon this Thursday is offline for 24 hours.
"This is our last chance, help us modernize copyright in Europe," it says on the Wikipedia home page. "Although at least Wikipedia is explicitly excluded from Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive (but not from Article 11), Free Knowledge will suffer even if Wikipedia remains an oasis in the filtered desert of the Internet."
Other sites are protesting against Article 13 with online banners, the Twitch streaming platform talks about a "bad copyright reform". Even YouTube creators have been mobilizing against EU plans for weeks, and once again call on their fans to attend the Saturday protests. "We all have to go out on the streets, we have to go out to make a loud and strong commitment that on 26 March, the members of the European Parliament vote against copyright reform," says "Mr.Newstime" in a video call, which he posted on Twitter has published.
Meanwhile, organizations like GEMA are trying to mobilize supporters for the controversial reform - including the campaign # Yes2Copyright, which also supports well-known German musicians such as Lena Meyer-Landrut and Mark Forster.