Only a few hours are left until the debates in the European Parliament, which are scheduled to take place on 23-24 March, to reach out to members of the JURI Committee and ask them to reject the amendments aiming to salvage digital handcuffs (DRM).
As explained in our press release “Reda Report: A Pitiful Shower of Amendments to Salvage DRM (digital handcuffs)” [3], many MEPs proposed amendments in the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI), with the intention of destroying any advances from the Reda Report. Should these amendments be adopted, digital handcuffs (DRM) would get a free pass and continue to exert their harmful restrictive measures.
By linking the legal protection of DRMs to the publication of their source code or interface specifications, Julia Reda's intention is to create an effective right to technical measures interoperability (paragraph 24 of her report). To be sure this proposition must be pushed further but first it must be supported.
It is sad to note that the set of amendments [4] contains ten amendments deleting paragraph 241, proposed by 22 MEPs, and three amendments which modify this paragraph2 by weakening it or simply gutting it of any substance.
April calls on all citizens to reach out to members of the JURI Committee, inform them of the problems raised by DRM, and ask them to reject amendments which delete paragraph 24 of the Reda Report or render it useless.
Don't hesitate to use the “piphone” of our friends at La Quadrature du Net [5].
For more information on the other points of the Reda report, please read La Quadrature du Net's call to action [6].