Gallo report vote campaign

5 minutes to help the JURI committee vote for the amendments of the Gallo report

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What?

The Gallo report (on IPR enforcement) will be voted in JURI committee of the European Parliament next Tuesday, June 1st in the morning. It is pivotal into either paving the way for ACTA (the original report encourages the ACTA negociations!) and the revival of IPRED2 and its criminal sanctions for "inciting and aiding infringement"... or opposing them and calling for something else (while the digital agenda calls for impact assesment of IPRED and serene reflexion).

Opposing the rapporteur's (French Sarkozyst, EPP, Marielle Gallo) dogmatic vision based on trying to control copies, therefore filesharing (because it's illegal, you know), some radically positive amendments were tabled by French Socialist Françoise Castex, and many of her Socialist, Liberals and Greens colleagues: they call for stopping repression on non-for-profit filesharing and starting a reflexion on alternative funding schemes for creation, based on accompanying new usages rather than combatting them.

Françoise Castex, as a shadow rapporteur (person responsible for the dossier) for the S&D group, went last week to a negociation round with Gallo and the other shadows to try to reach "compromise amendments". She defended the position of the S&D group (stop repression + find new funding schemes), but Gallo clashed and no compromise was reached. It means that all the tabled amendments will be voted one by one instead of the compromise ones (sounds like a regular, democratic process, but is, sadly, very rare in committee votes).

There is a chance that some dissident members of S&D group (including the Italian Luigi Berlinguer who should be subjected to extra pressure!) try to bypass Castex and make compromise anyway, so the more pressure we put on the whole, the better: this clash between two visions is useful for a public debate, whatever the outcome of the vote will be, and must not be diluted into compromise..

We must make some noise about Gallo report now, so that pressure increases, and that everyone is aware that they need to call JURI MEPs offices. We can try to call this week, but the most efficient will be on monday May 31st and Tuesday Jun 1st. If we pressure properly, we have a small chance to win the vote in JURI

Who?

The members of the JURI committee. http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/MEPs_JURI

When?

This week is "green week" when most MEPs are in their Member States, so some assistants will be in Brussels, but MEPs will be hard to reach. I don't know about Castex, Gallo and other JURI Members...

Monday 31st and Tuesday 1st will be key for us.

Resources

http://www.laquadrature.net/en/gallo-report-on-the-future-of-eu-copyright-repression-or-reflexion