Keep your MEPs on their toes!

During the weeks leading up to the UK General Election — and during the exciting aftermath — our focus has very much been on UK parliamentary politics, and since the election, we've been dealing with our internal elections and getting our paperwork done. But what's been going on at the European Parliament in Strasbourg in that time? Yesterday morning, my attention was drawn to our fraternal Pirate colleague Christian Engström's blog, and in particular two issues that need your action as soon as possible.

Since Christian is the only Pirate MEP, his blog is highly recommended reading!

Gallo Report on stricter IP enforcement

As reported by Christian, the EP's committee for legal affairs (JURI) voted on 1st June to adopt the controversial "Gallo report" on copyright enforcement. This was a blow for the Pirate/Green/Social Democrat group of MEPs, who had been campaigning hard for JURI to recommend to the Commission that copyright legislation should be evaluated in a way that used unfamiliar things like "facts" and "evidence". The "Gallo report" (the brainchild of Marielle Gallo, a French member of the Christian Democrat group) demands that the Commission focus on stricter enforcement of copyright — regardless of the fact that very little data is available on the alleged economic impact of non-commercial filesharing. Although the report [MS Word Document] suggests that more such data should be gathered, it recommends more and stricter enforcement immediately without any consideration of the outcome of the investigation. You know it's going to be bad when the report starts off by making the unsubstantiated statement that:

…infringements of intellectual property rights (IPR) constitute a genuine threat not only to consumer health and safety but also to our economies and societies, …

The European digital rights organisation EDR has been highly critical of the report, saying:

The Committee report takes some quite extreme, apocalyptic and sometimes almost comically absurd views of intellectual property infringements, claiming that they "constitute a danger" for health and safety and even endanger "our economies and societies", before making dire warnings about the "fade-out of innovation in the EU" and demands for criminal sanctions for infringements.

…

Having rejected the concept that citizens should be able to use and share data that they have obtained legally, the Committee then went on to adopt a text saying that consumers should be "educated" so that they could better understand intellectual property and how to respect it.

The next step for the report will be a vote in a plenary session of the EP, which is currently scheduled to take place in the week beginning 14th June. Christian will be proposing an alternative resolution during the plenary session; he says that:

If we can get in particular the liberal Members of the European Parliament to think about the issue before the final vote in plenary, we have a quite realistic chance of actually winning in the end.

There's still time to write to your MEPs to encourage them to vote against the plenary resolution — and hopefully we'll post an update this weekend with some suggestions about specific points to make to them.

Written Declaration 29

Written Declaration 29 has been heavily marketed to MEPs in a highly emotionally charged advertising campaign within the EP, using the usual tactics (black and white pictures of children, bold capitalised text, block primary colours), and purports to be about setting up an "early warning system" to combat child sex abuse.

Beneath the misleading "think of the children" veneer, the declaration is really about demanding that the European Data Retention Directive be extended to cover search engines, who will then be forced to record all Internet searches carried out (yes, all of them, not just searches for keywords related to child pornography).

But what exactly is a "written declaration"? Basically, any MEP (or group of MEPs) can propose a short text (at most 200 words) as the EP's official position on particular matter. Once again, two Christian Democrat MEPs are behind this. Once the declaration has been submitted, it's given a number, and other MEPs can add their signatures to it. If more than half of the MEPs sign the declaration, it gets adopted as the official declaration of the European Parliament. As of the last update on the EP website, the declaration has 324 signatories — and it only needs to achieve a total of 369.

It's really important that you write to your MEPs and let them know how they've been mislead. One MEP, Cecilia Wikström, has already published an open letter to all fellow MEPs explaining how she was deceived and encouraging them to withdraw their signatures. Please draw your MEPs' attention to it!

The Written Declaration is supposed to be about an early-warning system for the protection of children. Long-term storage of citizens' data has clearly nothing to do with "early warning" for any purpose. The "data preservation" system established by the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention was designed specifically for cases requiring urgent preservation of data in relation to ongoing investigations.

Both of the two e-mails sent to MEPs focused on the early warning system and neither mentioned the data retention Directive. The website set up to support the written declaration also does not mention data retention, at least not in an obvious way. Even the written declaration itself does not mention the Directive by name, but only refers to its reference number.

Pirate Party UK members have already got good results from e-mailing their MEPs on this issue. If you want to find out who your MEPs are and get in touch with them easily, I as always recommend a visit to Write To Them.