Hi,

just a quick update. EDRi and some other civil society orgs have asked the Commission for an extension of the deadline. Today, I did the same - both in writing and in person at a Christmas cocktail event at the IPR Observatory I am coming back from just now. Seen that there won't be a new Commission until the third quarter of 2014 this request is likely to be granted. I believe that having a few extra weeks might be crucial for collaboratively drafting answers. Will keep you posted.

On a side note: People from DG Markt and the rest of the Brussels crowd are really, really curious at our "user-generated" experiment. If we pull it off, this might be "big". It surely gets people's attention for now.

Dimi

2013/12/17 Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org>

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hello advocacy advisory group, 

Here is a thought: let's collaboratively draft a public response on wiki. We can use the resulting page as the Wikimedia Foundation's submission to the consultation, or as a reference point for other interested groups. To get started, Dashiell posted the EC's questions on Meta, here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_copyright_consultation 

The submission deadline is February 5, 2014, so if we intend to respond, we should start finalizing our submission on January 27, 2014. The process here is experimental, so feel free to discuss process on the list or the corresponding talk page.

This may be an important opportunity for us to influence the future of copyright law (and free knowledge), so I am interested in hearing your perspective.

I just want to second this! Three big points, for me:

1. As Mathias mentioned here, WMDE and other European chapters plan to draft an answer. We're suggesting this as a complement to those plans, not a replacement! 

2. Obviously, copyright reform could potentially be either a big positive or big negative for our work as supporters of free knowledge, so I think this proposal is in the heart of the movement's potential advocacy goals.

3. Stephen and I (as well as our intern Dash, cc'd) will be approaching this as partners in the drafting effort, working on this as time permits (in contrast with projects like the trademark and privacy policies, where LCA has done essentially all of the drafting). So this will require drafting and collaboration from other interested people if it is to succeed.

4. Hopefully this isn't a surprise, but I think collaboratively writing answers to public government requests like this one is a good thing for us to do. So I really hope we can use this not just to write the response, but to begin to work out practices that we can use together in the future.

Luis

--

Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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