Thank you!
UPDATE:
As of 15 April, 2019, the Copyright Directive was formally adopted by the European Council! Thank you to all those who took the time to sign this petition and a special thank you to everyone who spoke out on social media, attended pro-Copyright Directive events and got behind this important reform. Your voice has been heard! Thanks to your efforts, tech giants will now be forced to sit at the table with the creators whose content they have unjustly benefitted from for years.
To keep up-to-date with the transposition of the Directive into national law, we strongly encourage you to sign up to the monthly article13.org newsletter.
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Making the Copyright Directive a reality
Three institutions; the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament have been working on the issue of transfer of value (or value gap) these past months. The result of their work has been the inclusion of provisions in the Copyright Directive that provide a good basis to tackle this transfer of value that has been so damaging to the creative sector. The Institutions each provided for ways to tackle the issue, and now have to come to an agreement on a common text in a process called "trialogues"
Intense disinformation campaigns are being held by tech giants to try to stop this Directive from ever becoming law.
Artists, authors, creators, your voice is needed to defend your rights!
More than 50,000 creators from all over Europe have signed the petition already, calling on their elected officials to do the right thing.
Join them today: sign the petition!
Let them know that you want a responsible Europe that does not let tech giants dictate the future of European creation!
Dear European Union,
Please Fix the Transfer of Value
We, creators from all artistic fields and from all over Europe, call on you, EU decision makers, to put a stop to the funneling of value away from the creators to a number of online platforms.
You have rightly acknowledged that user uploaded content (UUC) platforms are now the main point of access to our works online, but unacceptably do not, or only barely remunerate us for their exploitation. The viability of cultural and creative industries, which create significant growth and jobs for the EU economy, is threatened by this transfer of value.
We want an environment that fosters growth for new and legitimate businesses, including UUC platforms, while providing legal certainty for consumers, and ensuring that this is paired with appropriate remuneration for creators. UUC platforms have built their businesses on people’s desire to access and share our works, and should not put the burden of liability on consumers or creators.
The current situation is a race to the bottom that drives down the respect for and value of creative works. We depend on copyright/authors’ right as this is our pay and the only leverage we have to negotiate fair remuneration for our works.
The forthcoming legislation on copyright is your opportunity to stop these freeriding platforms.
We therefore call on you to:
- clarify that UUC platforms like YouTube are involved in reproducing and making our works available under copyright laws;
- ensure that the safe harbour non-liability regime does not apply to them as it is meant for technical intermediaries only.
The European Commission’s fair and balanced approach on this issue was a step in the right direction. We count on the European Parliament and the European Council to build on and further develop the solution proposed by the Commission to ensure a sustainable environment for all.
Sincerely, Creators.