tl;dr

A new consultation focusing exclusively on Freedom of Panorama and a rebranded ancillary copyright proposal.

This and past reports: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
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New consultation: After a stakeholder dialogue, a consultation, a communication and several postponements the copyright reform proposal is again… postponed. From July to September. The reason? Another consultation! [1] The exciting part for us is that the Commission is zeroing in on two subjects: Freedom of Panorama and Ancillary Copyright (which they claim is not actually ancillary copyright). Sadly, these two should have been the issues getting less attention in an ambitious reform approach. The lack of courage was even been criticised by the upper house of the German parliament. [2]

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Freedom of Panorama: On the bright side I have to praise the Copyright Unit for producing a very straightforward and well-structured consultation. The questions are clear and designed to sample the entire scale of opinions from “don’t touch anything” over “NC is enough” to “we need the full exception everywhere”. We will work on our own answers that chapters and volunteers are invited to re-mix and re-use. The trick will be to provide concrete examples of problems we’ve experienced. [3] We will also join forces with like-minded organisations to prepare a full answering guide for the general public. [4] Other than that it would be very helpful to get industry groups and authors (think photographers, architects) to answer the survey supporting a full exception. This is something the national groups can be of great help with.

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Ancillary copyright: The second part of the new consultation is about a “neighbouring right to publishers”, or as the publishers themselves prefer to call it now, a “publishers’ right in the digital age”. [5] Interestingly, their not-ancillary-copyright-ancillary-copyright campaign site went live hours after the Commission published the consultation. Which is pretty fast for designing an entire campaign. Or did they already know what's coming?!?

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IPRED Consultation: Since the “Platforms Consultation” [6] apparently wasn’t enough, we have until mid-April to participate in another consultation dealing with the liability of internet platforms. [7] Still, compared to the first one, this time around the questions are much more coherent, so another HT to the units. Our answers will be of the same tenor: liability protection is a condicio sine qua non for online collaborative projects.

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Portability: ALDE’s digital superstar and our favourite MEP Jean-Marie Cavada has been appointed as rapporteur on portability by the Legal Affairs committee. [8] I for one prefer to focus on two positive aspects: 1. Mr. Cavada is less likely to be rapporteur on another dossier coming soon. 2. We didn’t have to call him out ourselves on his past positioning. [9]

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EU-Ukraine Treaty: The EU and Ukraine are about to go ahead with their Association agreement [10], which is something like a free trade agreement ++. Before it can be ratified, the Netherlands (but strangely this time not Ireland) have to approve of it in a referendum next week. [11] The full text of the agreement can be a rather boring read [12] , but the IPR provisions include fixing copyright term lengths to lifelong plus 70 (Article 162), exporting copyright for software and database rights (Article 158). [13] These are not new to EU law, but including them in international agreements means, that the EU is limiting its freedom to reform that part of the acquis.

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CH Copyright: It appears Switzerland will not wait for others to update their copyright frameworks first. There is a open consultation by their Federal IP Institute. [14] As Freedom of Panorama is already a given, Wikimedia CH is focusing on open data and orphan works.

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Freedom of Panorama and “Picture Tax” in France: Similar to the EC's realpolitik gamble, in France FoP was also attached to a type of neighbouring right for publishers and collecting societies. This had parts of the industry really worried for a while [15] but was finally dropped during the second reading in the Assemblée nationale. Wikimédia France is meanwhile running a campaign site [16] and a petition [17] in an attempt to punch a full FoP exception into the Sénat’s ammendements.

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In-house news

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Open Science Policy Platform: The European Commission is establishing an expert group on open science policies. [18] Daniel Mietchen has applied to participate in order to bring the Free Knowledge point of view to the meetings. [19]

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Workshop Prague: Wikimedia (me and WMCZ), the Czech open education organisation Eduin [20] and Communia [21] are organising a “Schoof of Rock(ing) EU Copyright” workshop in Prague on the 7th. [22] We are expecting to train 15-20 volunteer activists in effective free knowledge advocacy.

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WMBGUG: Wikimedians of Bulgaria have now signed the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU’s (we really need to rebrand, you guys) Statement of Intent. [22] We now have 19 European Wikimedia groups on board.

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[1]https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/commission-seeks-views-neighbouring-rights-and-panorama-exception-eu-copyright

[2]http://www.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/drucksachen/2016/0001-0100/15-16%28B%29.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=1

[3]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/FoP_Consultation

[4]http://youcan.fixcopyright.eu/

[5]http://www.publishersright.eu/

[6]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Platforms_Consultation

[7]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/IPRED_Consultation

[8]https://twitter.com/JeanMarieCAVADA/status/709754761524936704

[9]https://twitter.com/zoyashef/status/709781163951439872

[10]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93European_Union_Association_Agreement

[11]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93European_Union_Association_Agreement