tl;dr
Most of Europe literally shuts down in August, but the past week has seen activities accelerate back to full swing. We are setting the stage for a decisive Legal Affairs committee vote on copyright, for which the compromises will be negotiated in September.
This and past reports: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor
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European Parliament on Copyright
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Compromise Amendments: The rapporteur and shadow-rapporteurs of the different political groups [1] in the lead Legal Affairs committee are beginning to discuss compromise amendments. This means that they will look through the tabled amendments and the opinions of the other committees and see whether they can broadly agree on a common position. If this happens, then this common position is proposed a new amendment called a compromise amendment. Compromise amendments have a very high success rate in committee votes. If there is no broad agreement between the groups, all the tabled amendments will be voted on in a row until one receives a majority. In such a case, all the amendments that are incompatible with it, fall. The rapporteur, Mr. Voss (EPP DE) alone has the power to add compromise amendments to the voting list to set the order in which the amendments will be voted on.
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Our Issues: We are hoping to get compromise amendments on “Safeguarding the Public Domain” and on “Upload Filtering” provisions. Specifically on the latter, a copy of the compromise struck in the Internal Market (IMCO) and Civil Liberties (LIBE) committees would be acceptable. [2] (Article 13) It would keep the current liability protections for information society service providers (i.e. Wikimedia hosting Wikipedia) and wouldn’t force us to sign compulsory licensing agreements. On Freedom of Panorama we will try to get a positive compromise, but we might have to work towards a direct vote on amendments, which means convincing as many MEPs as possible to vote in favour of a full, EU-wide exception.
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More Issues: Text and data mining and an ancillary copyright for press publishers are major concerns. On the former, a large coalition of libraries and civil society organisations will significantly step up their communications efforts, as some of the amendments that will be vote n on would in fact limit our current freedom of analyse text and data with technical tools. The ancillary copyright issue has taken an even more worrying spin in the Industry, Trade and Research (ITRE) committee by including academic journals in its scope. [3] (Recital 33) This would curtail open access publishing.
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Something Positive: Meanwhile the Culture Committee (CULT) has finally published the consolidated version of its opinion on the copyright reform. [4] As you may recall, there are rightful worries that a new unwaivable right demanded by music performers will make agreeing to free licenses impossible for recordings. [5][6] Our compromise with the music performers collecting societies has been proposed as a compromise amendment and adopted [4] (see Amendment 92, Paragraph 2). The efforts on this are now to make sure the same language is kept in the Legal Affairs committee.
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Council Compromises on Copyright
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Meanwhile the Estonian Presidency has leaked its draft compromises on the same file. [7] The news is that they don’t really propose a compromise on upload filtering and ancillary copyright. Instead Estonia is sharing two options with the other Member States, thereby not revealing their own position upfront.
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Ancillary Copyright: The first option for the press publishers right is outright poisonous, as it clearly includes hyperlinks in its scope. The second one is laudable, as it stays away from creating a new right and instead offers publishers a presumption of legal standing when it comes to the intellectual property rights of press publications.
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Upload Filtering: When it comes to protection of online platforms, neither of the proposed options is positive. On one hand, the Estonian Presidency adds language saying that the E-Commerce Directive, which lays down rules about intermediary liability provisions that Wikimedia benefits from, shall not be affected. At the same time these provisions are curbed in the actual articles and recitals. The language suggests that services that store and give access to user-generated content should take measures such as implementing effective technologies to prevent the appearance of rightholders content.
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Database Directive: The European Commission ran a consultation [8] on the Database Directive. This piece of legislation directly controls what we can and cannot legally add to Wikidata, which is why the entire reform process is a priority for us. We have submitted answers explaining how open data is hindered by the additional sui generis protection established in the EU. [9]
We are currently writing a letter to the relevant units in DG Connect that will outline examples of how “data donations” were hindered by the sui generis right. We are looking at cases where an organisation or institution wanted to open up their data or even directly add it to Wikidata, and where this was either stopped or slowed down by the Database Directive. If you have experienced such a situation, please do get in touch!
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News from list members: Several civil liberties organisations joined to create CLUE, the European umbrella organisation for civil liberties. [10] Their scope is different from that of Wikimedia, but there is some amount of overlap (freedom of speech, privacy). (10X Tisza)
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[1]http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2016/0280(COD)&l=FR
[8]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Database_Directive_Consultation
[9]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Database_Directive_Consultation_%28Survey%29.pdf
[10]https://www.liberties.eu/en