2014-09-12 13:49 GMT+02:00 James Heald <j.heald(a)ucl.ac.uk>uk>:
Do the Brussels lobbyists for the likes of Springer and the press
publishers' associations BDZV and VDZ have a sense of where their orgs
stand on some of the smaller copyright issues, the ones that are so
important to us, like unified and liberal rules on FoP and other
anomalies? Presumably they might not be unfavourable to more European-wide
consistency, and greater ease for publication of images of these things,
being publishers themselves ?
No, they're against even small changes. They have no coherent arguments
against things like Freedom of Panorama. They're attacking new freedoms out
of principles. From their perspective any new or widened exceptions or
limitations could pave to way to others, which they consider too risky.
Similarly national boundaries in IP within the EU are apparently necessary
to be able to pay for translations (not kidding here, that's an actual
argument being made).