[Advocacy Advisors] Open Rights Group workshop on copyright reform

[Stevie Benton]

Hello everyone,

Yesterday afternoon I attended a workshop run by our friends at Open Rights
Group. The attendees were a diverse bunch, including some copyright
experts, lawyers, a librarians' group, Mozilla and others, including a
group that I hadn't heard of called Article 39.

Much of the discussion was highly technical and slightly out of scope with
what we are doing in that area but there were some interesting takeaways.

Julia Reda's paper (https://pub.juliareda.eu/copyright_evaluation_report.pdf
- she's an MEP from the PIrate Party) received a lot of attention and there
were some concerns over the wording around the open norm. It's complicated
but the feeling was it needs to be rewritten slightly.

There was a great deal of surprise about the situation as it relates to
Freedom of Panorama, especially when I gave the example of the European
Parliament in Strasbourg.

One really interesting point - Mozilla are going to be viewing copyright
reform as an important area for them over the coming year. They are
currently analysing the current situation to work out where best to focus
their energy to get outcomes favourable to their aims. I don't think they
are yet sure what are is most important to them. Will be interesting to
keep an eye on in the coming months.

The latter points of the workshop were given over to Digital Rights
Management. At this point it became extremely technical and I didn't
understand much of it. I will keep an eye out for the notes from ORG and
circulate when they are published.

Thank you,

Stevie

-- 

Stevie Benton
Head of External Relations
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 20 7065 0993 / +44 (0) 7803 505 173
@StevieBenton

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