tl;dr
The European Parliament, Commission and Council are negotiating the final
version of the copyright reform, including text and data mining, public
domain safeguards and upload filters. Meanwhile, the recast of the Public
Sector Information Directive is picking up pace and the Terrorism
Regulation is becoming yet another legislative proposal that could
introduce upload filtering.
This and past reports:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
===
Trilogues on Copyright Reform
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The first rounds of negotiations between the three main institutions are
already taking place. It was decided to discuss Articles 11 (ancillary
copyright) and 13 (platform liability) on the political level. This means
that the negotiating teams do not believe they can find a workable
compromise on the expert level (at attaché meetings) since the positions
are too far apart. It also means that, in the end, a Minister or Deputy
Minister level decision might need to break the deadlock in Council. Italy
has confirmed its opposition to both articles. And since Germany didn’t
vote for the current Council mandate, there is, at least theoretically a
blocking minority. This means that the file is stuck. However, Germany only
wants some improvements (namely the exclusion of small and medium sized
enterprises from Article 13).
Meanwhile the expert level meetings are dealing with text and data mining
and safeguarding the public domain. There is talk about what to do with the
additional, optional (and broad) TDM exception that the Parliament mandate
includes. The European Commission would like to see more mandatory and less
optional exceptions, as harmonisation is a stated goal of this reform. A
public domain safeguard is supported by the European Parliament and not
dislike by the Commission, but some Member States are raising many issues -
around the necessity of it and museum revenues. Wikimedia groups across
Europe are working on reaching out to their national governments on that.
Further reading: [1][2][3]
===
Public Sector Information Directive recast
As already explained last month, this Directive asks public bodies across
Europe to open up their content for re-use. Currently, the Directive
doesn’t really define “open” and stops short of covering public services
when they are performed by a private company. The European Commission
proposes to fix the latter, Wikimedia is working on fixing the former.
There is also an idea to extend “public services” to also cover charities
that receive a tax-free status and/or taxpayer money for pursuing a public
interest mission.
Further reading: [4][5][6]
===
Terrorism Regulation
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The work on that file is not progressing very fast in EP. The Shadows at
the Civil Liberties Committee got appointed (Rapporteur Helga Stevens,
ECR/NL; ALDE Shadow Maite Pagazaurtundúa, ES; EPP Shadow Rashida Dati, FR;
S&D Shadow Josef Weidenholzer, AT; Greens Shadow Eva Joly, FR) and we are
holding meetings with them to find out about their positions. So far it
seems that there is a will to “do something” about the imminent terrorism
threat and spreading radicalisation. Sadly, the proposal for the regulation
displays lack of understanding how social media platforms work including
that boosting controversial content is part of their business model. Would
that be an obstacle to proceeding fast with this file? Perhaps, since there
is no meeting schedule for it yet at LIBE, and the other Committees, ITRE
and IMCO (where Greens’ Julia Reda is the Rapporteur), still haven’t
appointed all their Shadows.
Further reading: [7][8]
===
[1]
https://cdt.org/insight/article-13-dsm-copyright-directive-cdts-recommendat…
[2]
https://www.communia-association.org/2018/10/12/eu-copyright-reform-grinds-…
[3]https://juliareda.eu/2018/10/copyright-trilogue-positions/
[4]
https://discuss.okfn.org/t/psi-directive-review-your-opinion-on-the-propose…
[5]
http://onepolicyplace.com/2018/06/19/opp-meeting-summary-ep-imco-committee-…
[6]
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/european-legislation-reuse-publi…
[7]
https://edri.org/press-release-eu-terrorism-regulation-an-eu-election-tacti…
[8]
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-area-of-justice-and-f…