[Publicpolicy] EU Policy Monitoring Report - October

tl;dr The European Parliament, Commission and Council are negotiating the final version of the copyright reform, including text and data mining, public domain safeguards and upload filters. Meanwhile, the recast of the Public Sector Information Directive is picking up pace and the Terrorism Regulation is becoming yet another legislative proposal that could introduce upload filtering. This and past reports: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Monitor === Trilogues on Copyright Reform --- The first rounds of negotiations between the three main institutions are already taking place. It was decided to discuss Articles 11 (ancillary copyright) and 13 (platform liability) on the political level. This means that the negotiating teams do not believe they can find a workable compromise on the expert level (at attaché meetings) since the positions are too far apart. It also means that, in the end, a Minister or Deputy Minister level decision might need to break the deadlock in Council. Italy has confirmed its opposition to both articles. And since Germany didn’t vote for the current Council mandate, there is, at least theoretically a blocking minority. This means that the file is stuck. However, Germany only wants some improvements (namely the exclusion of small and medium sized enterprises from Article 13). Meanwhile the expert level meetings are dealing with text and data mining and safeguarding the public domain. There is talk about what to do with the additional, optional (and broad) TDM exception that the Parliament mandate includes. The European Commission would like to see more mandatory and less optional exceptions, as harmonisation is a stated goal of this reform. A public domain safeguard is supported by the European Parliament and not dislike by the Commission, but some Member States are raising many issues - around the necessity of it and museum revenues. Wikimedia groups across Europe are working on reaching out to their national governments on that. Further reading: [1][2][3] === Public Sector Information Directive recast As already explained last month, this Directive asks public bodies across Europe to open up their content for re-use. Currently, the Directive doesn’t really define “open” and stops short of covering public services when they are performed by a private company. The European Commission proposes to fix the latter, Wikimedia is working on fixing the former. There is also an idea to extend “public services” to also cover charities that receive a tax-free status and/or taxpayer money for pursuing a public interest mission. Further reading: [4][5][6] === Terrorism Regulation --- The work on that file is not progressing very fast in EP. The Shadows at the Civil Liberties Committee got appointed (Rapporteur Helga Stevens, ECR/NL; ALDE Shadow Maite Pagazaurtundúa, ES; EPP Shadow Rashida Dati, FR; S&D Shadow Josef Weidenholzer, AT; Greens Shadow Eva Joly, FR) and we are holding meetings with them to find out about their positions. So far it seems that there is a will to “do something” about the imminent terrorism threat and spreading radicalisation. Sadly, the proposal for the regulation displays lack of understanding how social media platforms work including that boosting controversial content is part of their business model. Would that be an obstacle to proceeding fast with this file? Perhaps, since there is no meeting schedule for it yet at LIBE, and the other Committees, ITRE and IMCO (where Greens’ Julia Reda is the Rapporteur), still haven’t appointed all their Shadows. Further reading: [7][8] === [1] https://cdt.org/insight/article-13-dsm-copyright-directive-cdts-recommendat… [2] https://www.communia-association.org/2018/10/12/eu-copyright-reform-grinds-… [3]https://juliareda.eu/2018/10/copyright-trilogue-positions/ [4] https://discuss.okfn.org/t/psi-directive-review-your-opinion-on-the-propose… [5] http://onepolicyplace.com/2018/06/19/opp-meeting-summary-ep-imco-committee-… [6] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/european-legislation-reuse-publi… [7] https://edri.org/press-release-eu-terrorism-regulation-an-eu-election-tacti… [8] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-area-of-justice-and-f…