Hello all,
The White Paper on copyright, that was supposed to be published this month, is now postponed at least until September. The reason for this is that DG Connect and DG Research found the paper "not ambitious enough" and are pushing for a clear exception on text and data mining. DG Markt (the one's that are writing it) generally believe that everything should be licensed, as a matter of principle.
Interestingly enough, according to this newspaper article (The European Voice is something like a village news tabloid for Brussels' EU folks) [1], one of the debating points is Freedom of Panorama. Barnier, the current Commissioner for the Internal Market, apparently doesn't see the need to harmonise this exception, as "it can be resolved if member states apply existing rules and exemptions."
It is interesting to see this reply to FoP problems. While this might be legally true, my usual counter-argument in such situations is that different implementations of the current Directive result in an unmanageable maze of rules across the EU leading to legal insecurity for individuals and projects alike. (And if it needs to be spelled out: legal insecurity=bad for business and creativity.)
We have two studies on Freedom of Panorama across the EU - one by a German law firm and the other one by a Bulgarian university - and the they interpret current implementation of the Directive in sometimes very different ways. This is really helpful in supporting our "legal insecurity" argument, whenever someone counters the Atomium/EP building example. It would be good to publish them officially soon. One of them needs to be translated from German to English [2] The other one [3] needs some editing to finalise the wikification (especially adding the footnotes). If you can help me with either, please do!
Cheers, Dimi
[1] http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/barnier-forced-to-delay-copyright-roadm... [2]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Studies/FoP1/ [3]http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=EU_policy/Studies/FoP2/