[Advocacy Advisors] EU to tackle copyright reform

[James Forrester]

On 6 December 2012 18:49, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> My hunch is that public domain would be the easiest to convey, i.e.
> "government works should be exempt from copyright". It also has the
> advantage that you can point to U.S. law as an example. Wikimedia Israel
> pursued the free-license route, but of course someone threw in the
> non-commercial clause at the last minute, effectively undercutting the
> entire effort.
>

The primary governing EU law in this area is Directive 2003/98/EC "on the
re-use of public sector information"[*], which (strongly) encourages EU
member states to provide government information (implicitly including data)
for free/marginal cost for use and re-use, including commercial re-use;
there are strong exception classes for public-sector information that is
commercially sold. It doesn't go anything like as far as I imagine many of
this list would like, but it does provide a common framework so that EU
citizens can understand and make direct comparisons of the differences
between member states' rules.

When I was still involved in this stuff for the UK Government
(albeit tangentially, and not since this time last year) I understand that
there was extensive discussion in the Commission and with member states
about replacing the PSI Directive with one that was a great deal stronger
(it was discussed alongside more widespread copyright reforms, which I
suppose is the above material), but I don't know what the status is of that
part of their work. Note also the INSPIRE directive (2007/2/EC) makes
rather more extensive and specific rules about releasing *geo-spatially
referenced* data held by EU member states' governmental entities, though
again, not necessarily for free and open re-use. If people / organisations
in the Wikimedia orbit want to apply pressure, that would be the right
direction - i.e., via the InfoSoc DG of the EC.

[*] -
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:345:0090:0096:EN:PDF(PDF,
English version)

-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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