tl;dr
The most important European Parliament vote for the copyright reform will take place in the Legal Affairs committee on 10 October. So far, we have had one rather forward-looking opinion from the Internal Market committee and two backwards oriented opinions from the Culture and Industry committees.
This and past reports: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
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Copyright reform
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The Legal Affairs committee (JURI) is the lead committee on this dossier and is scheduled to vote on 10 October. We are expecting to see the rapporteur, Mr. Axel Voss (DE EPP), propose compromise amendments to the shadow rapporteurs in September. The issues for which no compromise is reached, will be voted on by the MEPs by going through all tabled amendments. We are primarily focusing on preventing compulsory upload filtering for user-generated projects (Art. 13), on safeguarding the public domain and on freedom of panorama. Efforts on German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Bulgarian MEPs are a priority right now. The only way to get a majority is to have the Socialists&Democrats group cast a united vote with the smaller groups on a number of issues. Anyone who wants to join the frontline action is welcome! [1]
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The opinion giving committees have produced very contradictory proposals. The Internal Market committee (IMCO) largely solved the main issues surrounding the “upload filtering” provision in an all-group compromise, while also endorsing “safeguard the public domain”, a user-generated content exception and Freedom of Panorama. [2] The Culture (CULT) and Industry (ITRE) committees failed to do any of this and even worsened the Commission proposal form our perspective. The CULT committee compromise on Freedom of Panorama was withdrawn by the rapporteur Marc Joulaud (FR EPP) after the EVA (European Visual Artists) and the French collecting society ADAGP staunchly attacked him personally over this in several meetings following the IMCO vote. The text & data mining exception and ancillary copyright are also going in worrisome direction in the CULT and ITRE opinions. If their wordings make it through, the new law might threaten open access and open data. [3][4]
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One small silver lining from the CULT opinion is that our worries about a proposed unwaivable right for music performers [5][6] have been heard and a so-called “linux clause” [7] was included. This means that the new rights would be unwaivable, except in the case of free licenses.
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In parallel to the European Parliament, the Council is also looking to find a common position of all its members (i.e. the Member States). The Maltese Presidency made some timid compromise proposals which don’t depart much from the Commission text. These are to be discussed by the Member States after the summer break. The Austrian Ministry of Justice has invited Wikimedia Austria to submit a written statement and to participate in a stakeholder meeting on 13 September. We have drafted a letter to that effect [8]. A draft of this letter is also available in English [9] and presents a great opportunity for other chapters and user-groups to get in touch with their Ministries once again.
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We have drafted our responses to the Database Directive Consultation. [10] Feel free to read through and edit. As the Database Directive is a top priority of ours (next to copyright), we are trying to generate additional input in the process. Our draft answers are coordinated with he draft answers of EDRi and Copyright4Creativity. We have drafted an answering guide that is supposed to help organisations and individuals participate in the consultation. [11]
Furthermore, we have had yet another meeting with the responsible unit at DG Connect in Brussels during which we presented Wikidata (together with Jens Ohlig from WMDE). We were asked by the Commission to provide examples where data donations have been impeded by the sui generis database right. We are preparing such a letter, but if you happen to have additional examples, please share!
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Latvia: Our Latvian user-group reports, that there are now some additional restrictions when photographing "critical infrastructure". [12] This is a bit confusing, as high voltage electricity lines also fall under the definition of "critical infrastructure". These seemingly unreasonable restrictions were intorduced because of fears of foreign intelligence services operating on Latvian territory. An employee of the national railway company was arrested for spying. [13]
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Public Policy at Wikimania: If you are attending Wikimedia, we would love to meet & work with you! No matter if you can spare some time to draft a letter or you just want to catch the latest gossip, here are some dates you should note:
->Thursday (10 August), 13:00–14:30: “Next Steps in EU Advocacy”, workshop [14]
->Friday (11 August), 14:30-15:30: “New Wikimedian Order - How to represent Wikimedia's values in international organisations?”, roundtable discussion [15]
->Saturday (12 August), 12.30-14: “Public Policy Lunch”, global meet-up over lunch [16]
->Sunday (13 August), 11:30-12: “It's alive! The EU copyright reform is coming and will affect Wikipedia.”, talk [17]
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[1]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dutuqAeZUTtSTrW-O-fzYqWD2ptwLhG-8bC2WFpLekA/edit?usp=sharing
[7]http://ifosslawbook.org/germany/ (search for “Linux Clause”)
[8]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jm5YgRhTjC7-TIh6A5zEed3OH0YpRFq8aeM6aoyCCaA/edit?usp=sharing
[9]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_zPX0taE3Og2JJl3FxnBCFfzIpRtHxoMDKXGTAj0aMw/edit?usp=sharing
[11]https://docs.google.com/document/d/14GXlIAo6mSUzf4kpSMIo4ckxLIj1AIx6XdCse0m0DO8/edit?usp=sharing
[14]https://wikimania2017.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMCON_Follow-Up_Day#
[16]https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/publicpolicy/2017-July/001671.html