Hi,

in a few hours the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) will vote on the own-initiative report (not a legal instrument, but rather a recommendation) by Julia Reda.

The full name of the document is Report on the Implementation of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. It is about the implementation of the current copyright framework and how it could be updated. It is also a very first step in the process that will continue with the Commission proposing a reform text before the end of the year.

What's in it for us?

Freedom of Panorama is looking good as it stands, but there is high chance of "non-commercial" being added to it. There was no compromise on this, so we tried everything we could in the past week.
In order for Freedom of Panorama to be preserved or even extended, following amendments need to be rejected: 414/415/417/420/422/423/424/426
Compromise Amendment 5 will call for "lowering the barriers to Public Sector Information".
Compromise Amendment 6 will say that it "urges the Commission to clarify that once a work is in the public domain, any digitisation of the work which does not constitute a new, transformative work, stays in the public domain."
Compromise Amendment 6 will also call the Commission to examine "whether rightholders may be given the right to dedicate their works to the public domain, in whole or in part".
Compromise Amendment 7 will explicitly call on the Commission to refrain from further copyright term extentions.
While very watered down, Compromise Amendments 10 and 11 call for at least some harmonisation by mentioning "minimum standards across the exceptions and limitations".
Compromise Amendments 13 and 14 try to propose introduce an "open norm" to EU copyright, but are so watered down, that the initial intention is almost gone. Still OK to have.
Compromise Amendment 18 on Text and Data Mining is rather weak, but at least it doesn't do any harm.
The paragraph on linking liability is completely off, which is to be welcomed, since it would have gone in the wrong direction.

All in all, I am very happy and excited about Compromises 6 and 7. Compromise 5 is a step in the right direction, although not as clear as we wanted it. Freedom of Panorama remains a major worry. In a worst case scenario we might just want to kill it in a later stage of the legislative process to guard the status quo if the the "non-commercial" fixation remains this sticky.

Voting should begin around 10:30.

Live stream: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/committees/video…
Voting list: https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/…/03/voting_list.pdf

Dimi