Hi James:
I haven't given too much about the potential negative impact of ancillary
copyright specifically in relation to Wikimedia projects, but there are
major negative consequences for users, and businesses too.
Spain and Germany experimented with ancillary copyrights for press
publishers, and both seem to have failed miserably [1]. The Spanish law
ended in Google News shuttering its operation there because it would have
been too costly to have to pay license fees to news publishers for
snippets/links provided through their aggregation service. And surely this
harmed users, who would then have a harder time finding the news and
information they were looking for. Simultaneously, the publishers were
shooting themselves in the foot because they eventually realized that
Google News (and possibly other aggregators) was sending a huge amount of
traffic their way (duh). But without it, traffic to the publishers' content
went down. The same thing happened in Germany, except the German publishers
saw what had happened in Spain and literally gave Google a free license to
their content [2].
And it's not just the big news aggregators that are affected. Check out
this story about a small business that curated links and news about
alzheimer's disease that had to remodel their entire business because of
the ancillary copyright law [3].
Even if the ancillary copyright for press publishers gets adopted, the
benefits to authors are not at all clear. On the topic of remuneration:
there's no evidence showing any connection between ancillary copyright for
press publishers and increased income for authors, i.e. publishers have no
incentive to redistribute any potential revenue back to authors. This is
probably not shocking. And under this scheme, everyday users and consumers
of news and articles would potentially face more constraints in quoting,
linking to, aggregating, or otherwise using works protected by a new
ancillary right for press publishers.
I hope this helps a bit!
timothy
[1]
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study-spains-google-…
[2]
http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/22/german-publishers-cave-grant-googl…
[3]
http://newsletterbreeze.com/european-copyright-reform-legislation
Other relevant links:
http://ancillarycopyright.eu/
http://www.communia-association.org/
On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 4:31 PM, James Heald <j.heald(a)ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've been invited to represent Wikimedia at a round-table of interested
parties with the UK Government on Wednesday, to offer thoughts on the
current EU consultations on Freedom of Panorama, and on a proposed new EU
"neighbouring right" for publishers (similar to the EU broadcasters'
right).
Dimi has already put up some good thoughts on the FoP consultation
questions,
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/FoP_Consultation
but it would be useful to pull together talking points on the proposed
Publishers' Right.
As Dimi flagged up in his report recently, the publishers' pitch for this
can be found at
http://www.publishersright.eu/
while the questions in the EU consultation can be found at:
https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/Consultation_Copyright?surveylanguage=…
& click on the button "The role of publishers in the copyright value
chain"
There is a clear attempted grab buried in the consultation, under question
4:
proposing that publishers should have the ability "to receive compensation
for uses made under an exception"
which can be contrasted with the exceptions under 5(3) of the InfoSoc
directive which do *not* require compensation.
But apart from this, it would be useful to discuss WM's take on the issues
that the Publishers' Right is being canvassed for to supposedly address,
from the standpoint of WMF as a publisher, that reserves its recourse to
copyright to defend the terms on which our material is made available.
Questions:
* Is this something (going after some entity for copyright infringement)
that we have in fact ever done ?
(Either for text or images)
* Would WMF have standing to initiate such a suit, or (if WMF only has a
nonexclusive license to the material on WP pages) would such a suit have to
be initiated by the content creator ?
* When eg the GPL has been defended in Europe, is that typically only
possible because there has been a copyright transfer agreement required to
the project from contributors ?
* Is there therefore at least some case for what the publishers are asking
for ?
Counter-issues:
* Do such neighbouring rights threaten to upset copyleft ecosystems, by
locking up PD content and/or copyleft content as part of a publication
protected as a whole ?
* What sort of damages would publishers be able to seek? What 'value'
would these be computed on, outwith the value of the copyrights?
* Implications for text & data mining, summarisation, etc. "Right to read
is the right to mine".
More thoughts ?
-- James.
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