Salut la liste! Last month we took you through a list of all the dossiers we are working on, so we want to be more concise this time. Europe is going into summer lazy mode, which includes the EU institutions, so we will focus on the consultations we need to answer over summer, namely: Digital Services Act, Cultural Heritage & Digital Technology, and CDSM Article 17 implementation. We’d be happy if you could chip in some answers, examples or sources, else we wish you a great August!
--Your Brussels team
This and previous reports on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
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Digital Services Act - Consultation
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This legislative cornerstone of the Commission’s agenda is currently undergoing all the preparatory motions of Brussels politics before it will be announced, most likely, by the end of the year. The European Parliament is considering the proposals in a number of own initiative reports [1] that are likely to be voted on in September. Meanwhile the Commission is asking for feedback in a massive consultation [2]. We have until 8 September to submit answers and this is the main thing you can help us with over summer. Go to the Meta-Wiki page and leave comments or replies to some of the consultation questions:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Consultation_on_the_Digital_Services_Act_Package
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Cultural Heritage & Digital Technologies - Consultation
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Recommendations by the Commission rarely play an important role. But when they do, they can be crucial. Such was the case with Recommendation 2011/711/EU [3], which said that public domain works should remain in the public domain after digitisation. No one even cared about this at the time in 2011. But when the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive was negotiated and the Council opposed the Parliament on such an article during the trilogues, this recommendation allowed the Commission to support a “public domain safeguard”, which we got in the end.
The European Commission now wants to update this document and is asking for input. [4] The main aspect is how to support the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector. Needless to say that this is important to us and if you have any ideas in the field (as wild as they may be) please get in touch on or off list. Let’s feed great ideas into the policy process!
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Article 17 Guidelines - Consultation
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The Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive is a strange beast. The text pretty much admits that squaring the demands of Article 17 (i.e. preventing the appearance of illegal content without pre-filtering) isn’t likely. It therefore requires the Commission to set up a Stakeholder Dialogue to come up with transposition guidelines to help Member States.[5] Wikimedia is part of this dialogue, but the last meetings were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They have now been replaced with a public consultation. [6]
In the meantime, some countries, like Germany and France, have gone ahead and made proposals. We also, together with Communia and EDRi, managed to put some ideas on the table on how to protect user rights in this battle between platforms and rightholders. [7] Needless to say, we will push the same lines in the consultation. In case your national government runs a consultation itself, please get in touch so we can be coordinated (we know that Sweden and Germany are doing so).
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Terrorist Content Regulation - TERREG
The practicalities of the pandemics crisis completely stalled the trilogue on the matter. Last month we explained that the French Constitutional Court struck down provisions resembling those in the regulation proposal[8], which also contributed to lack of progress. How to legislate when parts of the new act are already known to be unconstitutional in one of the member States is a question that the German Presidency of the EU will grapple with. Finalising this work is high on the Presidency agenda - but so it was for the Finnish and the Croatian administration. Will the hot potato turn cold? We will know in September.
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Wikimédia France Joins Online Hate Speech Observatory
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Wikimédia France has become a member of the Online Hate Speech Observatory. [9] It is a French body established by the “Avia” law, which targets online hate speech. [10] WMFR will try to present community-based approaches successfully moderate content. This should also help them increase their network and position themselves on the French stakeholder map as an organisation speaking for community-driven projects.
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Wikimedia Austria on Austrian NetzDG
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The Austrian government is proposing new legislation on forcing platforms to combat hate speech online.[11] We have seen such laws being passed by Germany in France nationally. This is also something that the Commission will tackle with the Digital Services Act. Wikimedia Austria has, together with epicenter.works, released an open letter to the relevant Minister [12] underlining the importance of judicial oversight and pointing out that community-based moderation models exist and they must be taken into account by the lawmaker.
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Wikimedia España Works on Copyright
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We wanted to make space in this report to let you know a bit more about WMES. The chapter has dedicated some staff time to public policy activities. Virginia is doing an amazing job in coordinating a budding coalition the implementation of the Copyright Directive. She has made sure WMES participated in the government consultation and has had meetings with Ministry officials. Sadly, the person on the board of the chapter who was wholeheartedly supporting these efforts and set the public policy work on sustainable tracks, Elena Sanz, has passed. [13] We will be forever grateful for her dedication to EU affairs and relentless support for our work, whether in Spain or in the corridors of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where she went knocking the doors of Spanish MEPs to request rejection of article 13. She will be dearly missed!
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“Privacy Shield” Axed by CJEU
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It basically means that not all European user data can be freely moved to non-EU servers. More from NOYB.eu, who brough the case to court: https://noyb.eu/en/faqs-cjeu-case
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END
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[1]https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/search/search.do?searchType=0
[2]https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/digital-services-act-package
[3]https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011H0711
[5]https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=62198
[6]https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/4fd43123-6008-a214-f572-4ecd331b9e0e
[9]https://twitter.com/csaudiovisuel/status/1286226498169470978
[10]https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_contre_les_contenus_haineux_sur_internet
[12]https://www.wikimedia.at/offener-brief/
[13]https://www.wikimedia.es/2020/07/06/hasta-siempre-elena/