[Advocacy Advisors] EU Policy Monitoring Report - October

[Luis Villa]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <
dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> #IPstudy #LSE #OHIM
>
> 3. Studies on Intellectual Property Released & IP Infringements
> Observatory Meeting
>
> Why is this relevant?
>
> Albeit to different extents, such studies occupy public and political
> debates and help shape the narratives of the debates. With copyright being
> seeded as one of the first major reform initiatives of the next Commission
> in 2014, the current  back and forth will set the starting points of the
> expected consultation and stakeholder dialogue.
>
> What happened?
>
>  The European Commission has founded an European Observatory on
> Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights to “understand the
> challenges” and “enhance cooperation” in the field of counterfeiting and
> piracy. [1] As part of the initiative it has commissioned a study on the
> Contribution of Intellectual Property to the Economy, that it plans to
> update every two years. This study claims that 50% of the EU economy is
> “IPR intensive”. [2] In a strange coincidence, the same week this study was
> released, the London School of Economics released their own research,
> stating that there is no proof online file-sharing is hurting the industry.
> [3]
>
> What comes next?
>
> As the Commission has been criticised for having only industry
> associations in the IPR Infringements Observatory they took the step to
> invite several civil society organisations to their yearly plenary in
> Alicante - namely European Digital Rights (EDRi), the European Consumer
> Organisation (BEUC) and us. At the two-day meeting me and Nikolas Becker
> (WMDE board member) requested that a complementary study on the
> contribution of open licensing and the public domain to the European
> economy be commissioned and that the observatory needs to start taking into
> account infringements on free licenses and the copyfraud cases. EDRi stated
> that it isn’t enough to just produce studies on how many people are
> downloading illegal content, but that future studies will need to explain
> what the motivation behind such actions is.
>

This whole update was interesting as usual, Dimi, but I just wanted to
mention here that getting open content on the agenda in this way would be a
huge win for all of us. Good luck with that effort and please keep the list
informed.

Luis


-- 
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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