Thanks for the responses, Luis! It always helps to have several people look at something, as one can always miss a few points. I might rework some of the answers from the European perspective. Otherwise all the points seem relevant.

I will see what other civil society orgs have prepared as notes and report back here.

As to commenting on this report: It does not have to be "official", as this document is not public and this version in particular never will be (only on this mailing list :D). Hence, our comments on it won't be public either (except for this mailing list).

Dimi

 

2014-02-18 11:12 GMT+01:00 Michael Maggs <Michael@maggs.name>:

These are all very important points and it would be great if someone could work something up this week, so that we can respond.  I'm not myself around, unfortunately, but I hope that somebody might be able to pick this up in the next few days. Shouldn't need too much work, as Luis has done most of the thinking.

Michael

On 18 Feb 2014, at 02:31, Luis Villa wrote:

It is an interesting document. Some notes:

1. The framing is wrong - it should be "production models", or "sustainability models", not "business models" - the assumption that production of copyrighted works has to happen through "business" is a harmful and anti-democratic in an age where every citizen has access to tools that can publish to the entire world.
   
2. Ditto use of "the industry", as if "the industry" is the only meaningful producer of content. (Really, these two points alone could make for a great blog post; this paper is far from the only one that makes these two mistakes but is particularly blatant in use of the framing.)
3. In part as a result of this framing, it is sad but not surprising that no citizen/public interest groups were consulted in the creation of the material. Not sure we'd want to say that to them publicly, but if we decide not to offer informal comment I'd want to say that publicly in a blog post when this is published.
   
4. If the purpose of the observatory is to study infringement, then clearly peer production should be listed as a "business model" and the infringement of peer-produced material should be treated on a par with material produced through the other production models. I'm sure this group can come up with examples of infringement of our material and of other peer-produced content.
5. Music: no mention of tools like Soundcloud (.de-based!) that are intended to democratize music creation and publication.
6. Video: no mention of how Youtube/Vimeo has created a vast amount of non-industry video content creation, or of regular traditional media industry infringement of citizen-created video without penalty or concern. (If we wanted to write this up formally for them, we'd want to find some examples of this.)
7. Sports: I can't speak to the EU, but in the US, fan-created commentary (such as sbnation.com) is now a huge source of reporting on sports news, often delivering better quality than the traditional news sources. Probably not directly relevant to this section, though (unless there have been legal threats in the EU around fan-provided live-streaming commentary).
   
8. Press content: at least in the US, donor-supported/non-profit media is an increasingly important source of news; lots of detail here: http://www.journalism.org/2013/06/10/nonprofit-journalism/ Don't know if there are EU-based examples of this.
   
9. Social media: with regards to 4.7 (news/social media), it should be noted that social media probably disproportionately *helps* peer-produced media, since that historically has very few resources to use for marketing/distribution, and so must rely on word-of-mouth.
10. Sec. 4 and 5 consider "news" and "books"; amazingly, neither consider new text-centric methods of production of copyrighted works, like wikis or blogs. Again shows how blind this is to the actual innovation happening in the content space.
11. Books: no mention that technical protection measures have encouraged monopolization of the distribution channels, to the detriment of traditional distribution channels and to blossoming antitrust problems in the US (and presumably soon in the EU). 
12. 6.2: a mention of communities! But on cue, statement that these authors may not be being remunerated, as if remuneration was the only potential goal for creators. Youtube gets mentioned here, but not in Sec. 1 (Music) or Sec. 2 (Audiovisual), which is insane.
13. Sec. 7, Business Software: doesn't mention open source. Completely nuts.
14. Sec. 8, video games: no mention that this is a golden era for independently-produced games. Not sure that fits our narrative very well, at least not without a lot of explanation.
    
15. B2B Services: this feels overly focused on remuneration/commercial licensing; I suppose that is inevitable to some extent, but it seems like it would be worth noting the increased options for free, high-quality content that business can use (e.g., Flickr photos and Commons for stock photography).
    
16. "The fact that the legal offers is at least as diverse as the illegal one" - ahhahahhahahhahaha. Really, it is quite amazing that they think that providing a "portal" will increase awareness of legal content. The best way to increase awareness of legal content is to provide it legally online and advertise it as such...

So, these were not brief. I am unlikely to have time this week to select the most important points here and craft them into something - but I think at least a brief statement to them to the effect of "we think this completely ignores many legal sources of non-industry content and many sustainability models, such as focus on non-remunerative incentives and voluntary contributions" would be worth making.

HTH-

Luis

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