My email was as follows:
Sent: Thursday 23 February 2017 03:56
Subject: Save the Link: No #linktax or mandatory censorship
Dear Member of the European Parliament,
I am writing to express my concern about the Commission’s proposal on Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, announced on September 14.
I am worried about the proposals in Article 11 and 13 which amount to a link tax, and mandatory censorship.
The “Link Tax” proposal creates a new ancillary copyright for press publishers. This new right would create unprecedented new monopolies for publishing giants to charge fees for snippets of text that automatically accompany hyperlinks.
The Link Tax will act as a brake to innovative EU digital startups that will never be able to get off the ground if forced to pay these fees. This proposal has failed everywhere it has been previously tried, including Germany and Spain.
I draw your attention to a briefing on this issue produced by the Save The Link campaign (https://SaveTheLink.org), which I support. You can download the briefing here: https://openmedia.org/sites/default/files/documents/mepbriefing-singlepgsinteractive_0.pdf
I am also very concerned about the new proposal for content filtering and increased liability of Internet companies. The proposal at Article 13 includes requirements for monitoring Internet users, demanding that tech companies produce filtering robots to detect the copyright status of user-generated content. This filtering would not be done on the basis on what is legal, but on whether uploads contain content that has been "identified" by rightsholders. This would overturn existing rights for quotation, parody and other public-interest copyright exceptions.
The European Commission pushed this idea forward despite overwhelming opposition in its consultation from over 120,000 Internet users and dozens of civil society groups.
The Commission has failed to defend the interests of citizens – we need you to stand up and act as our voice.
We ask you to pay close attention to Article 11 which proposes an ancillary copyright for press publishers as well as Article 13 and recitals 38 and 39 which propose mandated content filtering technologies.
Please, stand up for my rights and challenge these proposals which will seriously harm the Internet, and the citizens you represent.
I look forward to hearing your response.
In the North West there are eight MEPs: 3 Labour, 1 LibDem, 1 Tory, and 3 UKIP. To date I have had a reply from just one MEP, UKIP's Paul Nuttall (the man who failed to gain the Stoke on Trent seat for UKIP in the recent parliamentary by-election). His response was risible:
Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive
Now we are leaving the European Union we will not be bound by their rules, it will be up to member states to decide such legislation for themselves.
Fortunately, once we have left the EU we can again decide our own legislation, via our democratically elected U.K. Parliament.
Thus, even if the EU Parliament votes through this Directive, we can later chose to delete it from our Statutes.Apart from not even having the courtesy of a personalised response - what I have copied above is exactly what was in his emailed reply - it appears to be the sort of basic stock response that any UKIP MEP might send out to any query about any piece of EU legislation.
A British MEP's final take-home pay (which varies from month to month based on the exchange rate) is roughly £3,900 per month, a sum for which I expect a darn-sight better response than a canned "when we leave the EU all will be well"!
