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=E... & 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.