Over 100 Postcards Tell Romanian MEPs: No to Link Tax & Internet Censorship!

In addition to calling and sending letters to Romanian MEPs to delete Articles 11 and 13 from the copyright reform proposal, EDRi member ApTI organised a series of activities to trigger more public attention regarding the damaging copyright reform proposals. Along with 57 other civil rights organisations, we also signed the Civil Liberties Union for Europe's open letter to stop the censorship machine.

Postcards to MEPs

ApTI produced a series of postcards (available in Romanian here) for anyone to be able to engage with decision-makers. This might be a somewhat archaic method of communication, but we thought regulators might get this message better since elementary understanding about how the Internet works is clearly missing from our regulator’s perspective.

More than 100 postcards were written to 9 different Romanian MEPs sitting in LIBE and JURI Committee, as well as to the European Parliament vice president. ApTI is taking care of delivery so that the postcards reach the MEPs well before the vote.

100 postcards might be a small number at European level, but it sure is a big number for Romanian citizens interested in such a niche and complex subject.

Fierce debate

For two weeks in a row, the copyright reform proposal was fiercely debated, first in a roundtable discussion focused on Article 13 and the impact for Romanian digital businesses (event details here in Romanian and here in English). Together with policy-makers, entrepreneurs and tech startups, we explained why the upload filter is illegal.

Next, we organised an informal event focusing on the overall negative implications of the proposed directive (event details available here in Romanian and here in English) and screened our copyright reform video series, as part of the copyright reform video campaign we launched in September.

ApTI and ANBPR launched a copyright reform campaign, video interviewing 10 people with different backgrounds to see how the new proposal will affect us. Find out all the different perspectives on ApTI’s YouTube channel and follow the video campaign. All videos have English subtitles.

This proposal affects you!

If you are a teacher, researcher, librarian, trainer, journalist, blogger, content aggregator, Internet user, this proposal is significantly affecting you. Besides our copyright reform campaign website available in Romanian, ApTI partnered up with other initiatives to stop this copyright absurdity.

There is still time to tell your MEPs via the SaveTheLink free call tool that the proposal does NOT fit the current digital environment. If you are a creator, check out the CreateRefresh.eu campaign for creators and sign up for the challenge to win a grant for the most creative content against Article 13. The creative brief for creators is available here.

Article by Valentina Pavel, ApTI Romania