Hello everyone,
Yesterday afternoon I attended a workshop run by our friends at Open Rights Group. The attendees were a diverse bunch, including some copyright experts, lawyers, a librarians' group, Mozilla and others, including a group that I hadn't heard of called Article 39.
Much of the discussion was highly technical and slightly out of scope with what we are doing in that area but there were some interesting takeaways.
Julia Reda's paper (https://pub.juliareda.eu/copyright_evaluation_report.pdf - she's an MEP from the PIrate Party) received a lot of attention and there were some concerns over the wording around the open norm. It's complicated but the feeling was it needs to be rewritten slightly.
There was a great deal of surprise about the situation as it relates to Freedom of Panorama, especially when I gave the example of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
One really interesting point - Mozilla are going to be viewing copyright reform as an important area for them over the coming year. They are currently analysing the current situation to work out where best to focus their energy to get outcomes favourable to their aims. I don't think they are yet sure what are is most important to them. Will be interesting to keep an eye on in the coming months.
The latter points of the workshop were given over to Digital Rights Management. At this point it became extremely technical and I didn't understand much of it. I will keep an eye out for the notes from ORG and circulate when they are published.
Thank you,
Stevie