[Advocacy Advisors] White Paper on Copyright postponed

[Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov]

Hello all,

The White Paper on copyright, that was supposed to be published this month,
is now postponed at least until September. The reason for this is that DG
Connect and DG Research found the paper "not ambitious enough" and are
pushing for a clear exception on text and data mining. DG Markt (the one's
that are writing it) generally believe that everything should be licensed,
as a matter of principle.

Interestingly enough, according to this newspaper article (The European
Voice is something like a village news tabloid for Brussels' EU folks) [1],
one of the debating points is Freedom of Panorama. Barnier, the current
Commissioner for the Internal Market, apparently doesn't see the need to
harmonise this exception, as "it  can be
resolved if member states apply existing rules and exemptions."

It is interesting to see this reply to FoP problems. While this might be
legally true, my usual counter-argument in such situations is that
different implementations of the current Directive result in an
unmanageable maze of rules across the EU leading to legal insecurity for
individuals and projects alike. (And if it needs to be spelled out: legal
insecurity=bad for business and creativity.)

We have two studies on Freedom of Panorama across the EU - one by a German
law firm and the other one by a Bulgarian university - and the they
interpret current implementation of the Directive in sometimes very
different ways. This is really helpful in supporting our "legal insecurity"
argument, whenever someone counters the Atomium/EP building example. It
would be good to publish them officially soon.
One of them needs to be translated from German to English [2] The other one
[3] needs some editing to finalise the wikification (especially adding the
footnotes). If you can help me with either, please do!

Cheers,
Dimi

[1]
http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/barnier-forced-to-delay-copyright-roadmap/
[2]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Studies/FoP1/
[3]http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=EU_policy/Studies/FoP2/
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