On 12 September, the European Parliament debated and voted on Article 13 .
Click on your country to access tools to contact your MEPs with sample texts in your national language(s). [Tools disabled on 12/09 - More coming soon]
Hover over a country to see how its MEPs voted on 12 September when the disastrous #Censorshipmachine version of Article 13 was adopted by the full European Parliament.
*Percentages are based on the plenary vote on 12 September by the Members of the European Parliament as regards the Article 13 Voss amendment.
This vote took place on Wednesday 12 September at 12h00 CEST.
All Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) must be targeted. They are under extremely heavy pressure from the entertainment industries and publishers' lobbies.
In particular, effort should be focused on:
- ALDE (liberals) Members. They are key to swing a vote between the two major groups.
- EPP (conservatives) Members. They may be hard to convince, as rapporteur Voss is from their political group, and as they historically were on a more repressive line. On the other hand, in a previous legislature many of them voted along the 88% of the European Parliament on the amendment 138of the Telecoms Package (saying that restrictions to fundamental rights should only be ordered by the judicial authority), which goes against the notion of "extra-judicial means" of combating copyright infringements. Also EPP Members from Poland and Sweden, may be easier to convince.
- S&D (socialists) Members from UK, Spain and Italy, under heavy influence by the producers, publishers and authors' lobbies may have trouble supporting the alternative proposal
E-mail and call Members of the European Parliament
- MEPs receive hundreds of mails per day, so sending an email -- even if is important -- is often not enough to convince them.
- If you do not sign your email with your name, there is no point sending it: MEPs will consider you are a bot and ignore you.
- A phone call has much more impact. Most of the time you will talk to assistants who are young and intelligent people.
- The best is to send an email, then call. You can start by asking "(Hello my name is XY and I live in Z) I just sent you an email, have you read it? No? Let me tell you about it... ".
- Always be polite. Your interlocutor is working under a lot of pressure. He or she has probably only little knowledge of what is at stake with the Copyright Directive, but has a good capacity of understanding.
- Make sure to be concise -the phone call may last only 1 or 2 minutes, or just a few seconds- and to include relevant documents and references.
- Always follow-up a phone call by email (to send documents and references discussed over the phone, to answer to unanswered question, to go further). Rinse and repeat. 😉
