Julia Reda
Julia Reda is a German researcher and politician and was Member of the European Parliament from Germany. She was a member of the Pirate Party Germany until 27 March 2019, part of The Greens–European Free Alliance. She has been Vice-President of the Greens/EFA group since 2014. She was also previously the president of Young Pirates of Europe. After the 2019 European Parliament election Reda was succeeded by Dr. Patrick Breyer and three pirate MEPs from the Czech Pirate Party.
In 2019 Reda became a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.Political career
Reda became a member of the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany when she was 16 years old. She studied politics and publicity sciences at the University of Mainz. In 2009, Reda started to become active for the national Pirate Party and from 2010 to 2012 she was chairperson of the Young Pirates. In 2013, she was one of the co-founders of the Young Pirates of Europe. In January 2014, she was chosen to top the list of the candidates for the European Elections for the Pirate Party Germany, who subsequently won one seat.
In the European Parliament, Reda joined the Greens/EFA group. She is a member of the Legal Affairs committee as well as a substitute member of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and Petitions committees. She is on the Steering Committee of the Digital Agenda intergroup, a forum of MEPs interested in digital issues.
On 27 March 2019, she announced in an online video that she had left the Pirate Party, protesting the fact that Gilles Bordelais had been admitted as a candidate in the European elections while being under investigation for sexual harassment.Copyright reform
She has declared that copyright reform will be her focus for the legislative term.
In November 2014, Reda was named rapporteur of the Parliament's review of 2001's Copyright Directive. Her draft report recommended the EU-wide harmonisation of copyright exceptions, a reduction in term length, broad exceptions for educational purposes and a strengthening of authors' negotiating position in relation to publishers, among other measures.
Stakeholder reaction varied as the German artist coalition Initiative Urheberrecht generally welcomed the draft while the French collecting society Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques said it was "unacceptable"; author and copyright activist Cory Doctorow called the proposals "amazingly sensible", while former Swedish Pirate MEP Amelia Andersdotter criticised them as too conservative.
In 2015, Reda's report was passed by the legal affairs committee, but with an amendment that recommended restricting freedom of panorama in Europe. Reda strongly opposed this amendment and campaigned against it. The amendment was later voted down by the plenary of the European Parliament.
