This is the year when Julia Reda discovers if it was all worth it.
Since her election to the European Parliament in 2014 as the only representative of the German Pirate Party, the 30-year-old MEP has made weakening copyright protections her single-issue crusade.
Unlike other members of her political and social circles, Reda has put pragmatism ahead of purity. She has exchanged jeans and T-shirts for ill-fitting suits, ditched internet chatrooms to attend parliamentary committees and dropped slogans in favor of wonky technical briefings.
Doing so has earned her grudging respect from those on the other side of the debate, but scorn and sneers from colleagues who dismiss her as a sell-out for the concessions she has made on a once-in-a-decade reform of European copyright law.
Reda has accepted that the final version of the legislation winding its way through the Brussels will fall short of her ideals. But as a European Commission proposal moves through the European Parliament, she’s holding out hope of pushing through at least a few of her key changes.
Over the next few months, Reda will discover whether her shift to the center will yield the incremental alterations for which she has shown herself willing to settle — or leave her with nothing to show for her efforts.
Already, she has helped push through important concessions in the proposed legislation, such as allowing scientists to use computers to comb through large amounts of published research without breaching copyright law. She has also set her eyes on overturning a controversial bit of the Commission’s proposal that would allow news publishers to charge companies like Google when they display parts of their articles, including headlines and snippets.
“At the end of the day, the proposal is going to make some really modest steps in the right direction,” she said.
In a town teeming with slightly overweight, middle-aged men, Reda — bookish, fresh-faced, sporting black-rimmed glasses and a boyish haircut — broke the mold. With her social media savvy, encyclopedic knowledge and ear for a concise quote, she quickly became the most prominent Brussels talking head for all things copyright.
Every few months Brussels holds a public event on copyright and invariably Reda is on the panel opposite Commission functionaries and powerful lobbyists from the media and entertainment industry.
At one POLITICO event in the fall, Reda filled in for a last-minute cancellation. The debate was intended to focus on sharing data on platforms like Facebook, but Reda repeatedly brought the discussion back to copyright, eliciting nods of agreement from some audience members.
“She manages to use 140 characters on Twitter to get her message across,” said Wout van Wijk, a media lobbyist at News Media Europe who’s regularly tussled with Reda. Her social media missives — punchy, wonky, provocative — are amplified by a following of students, activists and residents of social media platforms. “She kicks against the establishment,” he said. “That’s something people like to see.”
Her team once attacked van Wijk’s organization on a Friday evening “because it would linger over the internet,” he added. “They are very savvy.”
Geekdom
While most in Brussels spend Sunday with their families or shopping in local markets, Reda can be spotted rambling through one of the city’s neighborhoods trying to find clues posted by internet users. “It’s a street game. It’s an urban game,” she said of the pastime called “800 years story,” a Brussels-based treasure hunt in which users compete to crack codes hidden on buildings to progress to the next level.
Like many of her supporters, Reda grew up in the age of Napster — a file-sharing platform that allowed anybody with a modem and a PC to illegally download music.
The daughter of civil servant translators, Reda fed on a rich diet of pirated content. When she left home for the University of Mainz to study political science and communication, she became a digital activist. Unlike some of her more freewheeling peers, Reda’s outrage wasn’t directed at the costs of CDs, movies or video games. She was, she said, “kind of angry” with academic publishers.
“We are paying a lot of public money to produce scientific studies and are giving them away for free to a small number of private publishers,” she said. Her professors, she added, were struggling to comply with German copyright rules. The profits made by academic publishers are “extremely immoral” because they are “essentially bleeding universities dry,” she said.
Reda joined the Chaos Computer Club, one of Europe’s largest hacking organizations, but took a different approach than some of her friends, who were risking arrest by protesting. In 2014, she co-authored with a group of scientists an academic paper that tried to encourage people with rare diseases to share their genetic code. Reda designed a questionnaire asking participants why they wanted to share their personal information and what, if any, were their privacy fears.
The resulting database of genetic test results, called openSNP, is publicly available to download. The research paper was published on an open source platform, beyond the reach of academic publishers.
“She’s a geek,” said Bastian Greshake, who co-wrote the paper with Reda. “There are levels of geekdom, being into science. She fits the geek description very well.” The two were friends online long before they met in person; when they did so, at a party, they recognized each other from their Twitter profiles.
It was during her studies that Reda became interested in politics. Unlike many of her classmates, she had little interest in trying to use campus campaigns to spring into regional governments. This, said Kai Arzheimer, one of her political science professors, was “too small-scale and self-centered.” Instead, she spent her master’s degree studying how pollsters collect public opinion data.
“She could have excelled in any subject. She is in the top 5 percent of all students I’ve ever taught,” said Arzheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Mainz. “She never bubbled in class or shouted when she disagreed. She thinks before she communicates. Julia has original ideas that she can pursue in a systematic way.”
Public persona
A little poking around on Instagram will uncover a picture of Reda cradling two cats in her arms under the title “crazy cat lady.” Another photo shows her pointing a brightly colored toy gun, tilted like a gangster, down the lens of the photographer.
But, like many in the internet age, she’s had to tone down her online persona. Her tweets are opinionated, but not aggressive. And if her Facebook feed is a call to arms, it’s a decidedly wonky one.
Reda joined the Pirate Party in 2009, becoming the chairperson of the party’s youth wing, first in Germany then in Europe. During the 2014 European parliamentary elections, she was chosen to top her party’s list in Germany, campaigning on an overhaul of copyright laws and becoming its only MEP.
Shortly after arriving in Brussels, she joined the Greens–European Free Alliance, a hodgepodge of environmentalists and independents, becoming one of the group’s five vice presidents.
The party Reda represents is part of once-rapidly-rising movement dedicated to reforming copyright and patent law. The first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden on New Year’s Day in 2006. Just a few months later, in May, Swedish police raided the Pirate Bay, an illegal file-sharing service that allowed users to share movies and music, spawning a generation of copyright purists and copycat parties across the Continent.
If the movement grew quickly, it declined even faster, as its adherents struggled to turn their principles — of direct democracy and the unrestricted flow of information — into legislative proposals, or even to get elected to office. If Reda is one of the movement’s most high-profile representatives, it’s because there are so few.
“She learned from the mistakes of previous Pirate Party MEPs,” said one digital lobbyist. “They were too aggressive, dogmatic and confrontational. She couched the language in a much more ‘aw shucks, doesn’t this make sense’ way, which helps deliver it to the middle ground.”
Since arriving in Brussels, Reda has applied the same moderating approach to her physical presentation, grudgingly accommodating what she describes as “classism in the European institutions.”
“I wear a suit because it makes it easier to be heard in the discussions,” she said. “When I got here, being a young woman, if you turn up in jeans and a T-shirt, everybody would think that you’re the intern.”
It’s a philosophy that would be common sense among most of the people she comes into contact with in Brussels. But among parts of her cohort it’s a sign that she’s abandoned her principles.
“Julia once mocked people for wearing a suit, and now she wears one,” said Amelia Andersdotter, a former Pirate Party MEP who hired Reda as an intern for four months in 2012. “Being in the European Parliament has a way of changing people.”
Andersdotter, a Swedish 29-year-old who once said culture shouldn’t have “monetary value,” was once nearly escorted from the Parliament for looking too scruffy to be a politician. She was only spared expulsion when her staff produced her credentials.
“I’m disappointed in a lot of ways,” she said. “She’s become more pragmatic. She has nothing to lose by being more gutsy … If I went to Belgium, she would not be the first person I would have a beer with.”
Brussels or bust
Reda is one of the few people in the European Parliament who can claim to have directly influenced the issues she campaigned on.
Shortly after her arrival three years ago, she was selected by Parliament to write a report proposing a reform of Europe’s copyright laws, which had last been updated in 2001 — long before Netflix, Spotify, or social media upended the way people consume content.
“There was a strategic move by some of the parties to give me that initiative report,” she said. “People have a lot of misconceptions about what the Pirate Party is and what we want. So they probably expected that I would present something really radical.”
Reda packed her report with what looked like sensible proposals — allowing people to take photos of buildings or statues in public spaces without breaching the rights of the architect, or permitting people to parody popular videos.
Some of her more radical ideas were removed during a parliamentary debate, including a proposal that would have extend the right to take a photograph of a trademarked building from public soil across the European Union.
But on July 9, a little more than a year after she was elected, her report was approved by Parliament by 445 votes to 65.
It was an important victory, but it was also short-lived. She voted for Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission because during his campaign he had declared he was going to “break down national silos … in copyright.” But when the Commission published its copyright package in September, the proposed legislation incorporated few of her suggestions.
Reda’s proposals fell far shy of her Pirate Party principles; but her report tilted the field toward the consumers — rather than the owners — of copyrighted information. The Commission’s proposal took the opposite tack, extending the existing copyright landscape to internet platforms — an outcome widely seen as a victory for publishers and entertainment companies.
All that remained of Reda’s ambitious proposals were a few slight changes, only partially included, such as allowing cultural heritage institutions to make copies of artworks for preservation purposes, and allowing Europeans to buy movies that are available in other EU countries.
Many in Parliament were pleased by the Commission’s proposal. Even after they were amended, Reda’s proposals failed to strike the right balance, overly weakening businesses and other copyright holders, according to Therese Comodini Cachia, a European People’s Party MEP from Malta, who is now leading the Parliament’s copyright reform effort. Mary Honeyball, a British Socialists & Democrats MEP, called Reda’s suggestions “dangerous.”
Reda is one of seven shadow rapporteurs on the file, giving her a platform to shape the outcome as the reforms are debated in the Parliament, where Comodini Cachia hopes to be able to hold a vote before the end of the year. Though she acknowledges she has had to repeatedly lower her expectations, she hopes to maintain her small gains and perhaps push through another victory.
She said if the final proposal includes changes allowing legacy news publishers to seek payment from news aggregators, she will consider the reform a failure and vote against it.
In the meantime, words like “dangerous” and “radical” have begun to weigh on Reda, according to her friend and academic collaborator Greshake. She feels she’s been pragmatic, even conceding half-way into her mandate that the best she can hope for is “some really modest” changes to the Commission’s proposal.
“It’s going to be nowhere near what [Juncker] originally promised, which was huge,” she said. “It will not be seen as a great success.”
Last summer, she was in London to watch a show when she bumped into Greshake. Over a few beers, Reda vented her frustrations about life inside the Brussels bubble and her critics.
Reda has said she doesn’t want to become a career politician and will only run for reelection if the copyright reform isn’t completed before the next election in 2019. “She was discussing how difficult it was,” said Greshake. “She definitely talked about how many conservative forces painted her as this left-wing radical. She finds it ridiculous.”
This article is part of a series on Digital Rules.
This article has been updated to add additional hyperlinks.