tl;dr
Actions against upload filters going on in several countries as the Council and Parliament discussions enter decisive phase.
This and past reports: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
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Copyright Reform - Red Hot Upload Filters
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State of play in the Council: The upload filtering in Article 13 of the copyright reform, an idea that automatic upload filters for online platforms can solve copyright infringement issues, remains the talk of town. Wikimedia strongly opposes this idea as such filters cannot account for exceptions and fair use provisions. On the other hand, the content industries (music and film) would like to use this proposal to force user-generated content platforms into compulsory licensing deals. In the Council, the Bulgarian Presidency compromise pitch [1] that was floated in February doesn’t really address our issues and, at least according to some [2], basically just reiterates the very copyright-industry-friendly French position. It really looks like the blocking minority against the general monitoring of uploads is shaky and a lot of will depend on the new German government's behaviour, the Presidencies of Bulgaria (until end of June) and Austria (from beginning of July).
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State of play in the Parliament: In the European Parliament’s lead Legal Affairs committee the rapporteur Axel Voss proposed a Article 13 compromise not worthy of this name. [3] Although the upload filtering technology is not explicitly mentioned, this version would ask online platforms to prevent the availability of copyright infringing works (i.e. before they even appear), meaning that every new upload would have to be checked before it goes live. Apart from public criticism [4] and disagreement for a number of political groups, this also sparked ridicule. [5]
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Campaign in Bulgaria: As the handling of the Bulgarian Presidency of this file is currently pivotal, an Article 13 campaign was kicked off in Sofia last week [6] with a press conference. [7] The Wikimedians of Bulgaria UG, a local digital rights organisation, the National Library, a photo forum and a law repository platform are among the supporting organisations. Next steps are media participations, an event in Sofia that will discuss the technical aspects of upload filters on 23 March and a public discussion between the campaign's supporters and the collecting societies.
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Campaign in Germany: Meanwhile in Germany, the EU country with the greatest voting power, Wikimedia Deutschland, the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, Bitkom (Germany’s digital business association) and many others came out with an open letter against upload filters today. [8][9]
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Campaign in Austria: Wikimedia Austria has already positioned itself publicly against the upload filters for UGC sites. [10] As the civil rights groups and digital organisations in Vienna are preparing for the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the EU, we can expect more events and public statements later this year.
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Copyright Reform - Education & Cultural Heritage
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Education Exception: The discussions among the rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs in the Parliament seem to be progressing. We are getting signals that a good compromise has been made in order to allow this exception to be valid independent of venue. A “non-commercial” restriction is, however, almost certainly going to be kept.
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Cultural Heritage Digitisation: Article 5 of the copyright reform aims to improve the preservation of cultural heritage of which digitisation is a main part. We have explained to all the advisors and MEPs working on this that Wikimedia is involved in GLAM digitisation collaborations and safeguarding the public domain would remove a major risk factor. There is understanding of our plea across political groups but the exact text of the compromise is still being puzzled together. Ideally, we would like to see a “no new copyright or related rights on faithful reproductions of works with expired copyright” sentence in there.
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Tackling Illegal Content Online
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Tomorrow morning the European Commission will present its Recommendation on Measures to Effectively Tackle Illegal Content Online. A few weeks ago a draft version of the document was leaked, so we will be able to compare and see the last minute changes. [11] In September 2017, the European Commission already published a set of guidelines pushing online platforms to “voluntarily” install automated filtering. [12] Wikimedia is very critical of this approach for exactly the same reasons we oppose Article 13. It seems dishonest of the Commission to be pushing platforms into implementing such a technology "voluntarily" while a legislation containing this measure is being deliberated.
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Wikimedia and the “Fake News” Debate
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The public policy discussions about “fake news”, or, better said, the spread of disinformation will continue for the foreseeable future. As Wikipedia is a top site and we do seem to understand ourselves as the knowledge&facts folks [13], we are expected to be part of it. We are members of the EU’s High Level Expert Group on Fake News [14] and have been receiving invitations to speak on this subject. [15] This being said, it would be great to come together as a community and talk about this and we believe could or should be done in more detail. The policy team is planning a relevant submission to Wikimania. Perhaps we can also touch upon the topic during this year’s Big Fat Brussels Meeting (date in April to be announced in the coming days). In the meanwhile a mailing list discussion could outline the major issues.
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[1]http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5902-2018-INIT/en/pdf
[3]https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/20180221-Draft-CA-on-Article-13_v1.pdf
[8]https://www.vzbv.de/sites/default/files/downloads/2018/02/27/20180228_offenerbrief_uploadfilter.pdf
[9]https://twitter.com/WikimediaDE/status/968810691590262786
[10]https://futurezone.at/netzpolitik/mit-upload-filtern-funktioniert-wikipedia-nicht-mehr/296.811.609
[11]https://edri.org/files/illegal_content_ec_draft_recommendation_201802.pdf
[13]https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/17/misinformation-fake-news-censorship/
[15]https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/875704749810733056