[Brussels, 14 February] Allied for Startups takes notice that the trilogues on the Copyright Directive has resulted in political agreement. Regretfully, we find that European startups are among the losers of the deal. Many bold and ambitious arguments for a startup and scaleup continent remained unheard by most negotiators. “Europe’s obsession of hitting foreign tech companies hard came at the expense of European innovation and competitiveness, which will suffer most from this reform.” Lenard Koschwitz comments.

Pending final assessment we welcome the agreement on Text & Data Mining. Whether startups, researchers and European companies will be able to take full advantage of machine learning and data mining will depend on the details of the requirements.  

Stavriana Kofteros, Board Member of Allied for Startups for Startup Cyprus said: “TDM is a crucial step for AI startups. If we want Europe to lead, we will have to find better ways of understanding the needs of startups and our digital economy and walk the talk.”

EU Copyright will become a major complexifier for startups in the Single Market. Rather than working towards a unified Single Market the EU is getting more complex and less attractive, especially for new companies. Adding to the picture that the largest petition in Europe’s history is against upload filters shows a disconnect between supporters of the reform and citizens.

“We’ve heard many grand plans about making Europe a scaleup continent, not just one for startups younger than 3 years. This directive kneecaps startups in Europe and this reform will be another reason for less investment and European entrepreneurs having to work harder to compete globally. Koschwitz adds.

Whereas we believe that concerns outweigh benefits of this reform we want to thank the teams within Presidencies, Council, Parliament and Commission who worked hard to strike a balance in this challenging file.

Find the PDF version of the statement here.