Author Archives: Communia Association

As Council & Parliament edge towards finalizing positions, Article 13 remains a mess

Closeup of Art 13 flowchart
Art.13 in 3 flowcharts
Licentie
—

As the summer break draws closer both the European Parliament and the Council are intensifying their efforts to wrap up their positions on the proposed Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive. In both legislative bodies Article 13 (the upload filters for online platforms) remains the main stumbling block and both the Bulgarian Council presidency and the EPs rapporteur (MEP Voss) have have set deadlines this week to wrap up the discussion on Article 13.

Last week (after yet another inconclusive meeting on Article 13) MEP Voss has asked the political groups to provide him their final written comments “on the MAIN and MOST IMPORTANT open issues” by Wednesday the 23rd. On the same date the Bulgarian Council presidency has scheduled an attaché meeting to discuss the latest compromise proposal.

In the light of these (final?) attempts to wrap up the discussion it is important to take another look at how the discussion has evolved since the Commission published its proposal and how the 3 different versions of Article 13 compare to each other. In order to do so we have analysed the internal logic of the Commission proposal, the last Bulgarian compromise proposal and version 6 of the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee compromise text and depicted the most important elements in a series of flowcharts (see below). Even a casual glance at these makes it clear that both the Council’s and the Parliament’s changes to the text have resulted in vastly more complex versions.

Commission proposal: Simple language that creates a legal mess with lots of uncertainties.

Compared to the other two versions the Commission’s proposal is a thing of beauty. The article consists of three relatively concise paragraphs which results in a relatively straightforward flowchart: Continue reading →

Council: Member States close to adopting a copyright maximalist position

Twee tijgers sluipend door het gras
Danger looming in the Council
Licentie
—

It is still unclear if the Bulgarian Council presidency will manage to get the member states in line to agree on a general negotiation position at the COREPER meeting scheduled for this Thursday. Under pressure from the Bulgarian presidency (or rather those who put pressure on them), the member states seem to be moving towards a common position. Last week’s working group meeting appears to have resolved most of the controversies around Article 3a (optional text and data mining exception) and Article 11 (press publishers rights). Article 13 remains the main sticking point, preventing the member states from agreeing on a negotiation mandate.

So what’s the status with regards to these 3 articles and where do the member states stand on them?

Article 13: Continued divisions over the scope of #censorshipfilters

In spite of the significant doubts that many member states expressed last year regarding measures targeting open online platforms contained in Article 13, the article has survived the subsequent rounds of discussions in the Council nearly intact. This seems mainly due to a pivot by the German government which is now backing censorship filters – even though the coalition agreement that underpins the current government is highly critical of such measures.

While there is agreement in principle, the Member States are still spit on the scope of the article. The maximalist axis of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy is backing a broad implementation of the article, while most other member states (including Germany) seem to be favouring a narrowing down of the scope of the services that would be required to filter. Lack of consensus on the scope of Article 13 seems to be the main obstacle that prevents the Bulgarian presidency from closing the file.

Article 11 map (April 2018)
Member States (in red) supporting the introduction of censorship filters for online platforms (own research)

As we have argued before, rushing Article 13 across the finish line carries substantial risks to the European internet economy and to our freedom of creative expression. Continue reading →

Now even the rightsholders agree: Article 13 is dangerous and (and should be deleted)

Aanval van de Giganten op de godenwereld
Article 13 will hurt both users and creators
Licentie
—

Now that the Bulgarian Council presidency seems to have decided that it is time to wrap up the discussions on the DSM proposal and push for a political decision on a negotiation mandate, people are getting nervous. Late last week a whole assortment of organisations representing rights holders from the AV industry (organised in the creativity works! coalition) have sent a letter to Member State ministers and representatives, outlining their concerns with the latest Bulgarian compromise text. The document mainly focuses on Article 13, and what they have to say about that article is rather interesting (and surprisingly in line with positions that we have been arguing all along).

The overriding concern expressed by the rightsholders in their letter is that some of the more recent changes introduced in the council would turn Article 13 from a magic weapon against a few online platforms into a mechanism that threatens to further empower these very platforms in a way that does not benefit rights holders. In response to this, Creativity Works! (CW!) argues for further strengthening some of the most problematic aspects of Article 13.

We have long argued that Article 13 seems to be designed to benefit the big dominant online platforms, as it will entrench their market position. For smaller companies compliance with the filtering obligations will be difficult and costly while the main targets of Article 13 already have filtering systems in place (such as YouTube’s Content ID), and it is a welcome sign to see rights holders waking up to this reality.

For us it has been clear from the start that Article 13 will not achieve its stated goals. Instead the filtering obligations will cause tremendous harm to the freedom of expression and to open platforms that operate in fields that have nothing to do with the distribution of entertainment products. For this reason we think that the only responsible way to deal with Article 13 is to delete it and start over with a discussion about how we can best ensure that creators can be fairly compensated for their work. (Note that in this discussion most of the members of CW! are likely to be part of the problem rather than the solution as CW! has very little representation from actual creators.)

And while CW! is not joining us in our call to delete Article 13, their letter does illustrate our argument that adjusting general concepts of copyright law in order to address the concerns of specific groups of stakeholders is utterly irresponsible in the light of the big (and often unintended) consequences such an intervention can have.

Case in point: the re-definition of right of communication to the public. We and others critical of Article 13 have long argued that Article 13 would expand the right of communication to the public. Within the Commission’s proposal this aspect of Article 13 was hidden away in a recital, but over the successive drafts it has become more explicit. This seems to have led to the sudden realisation by rights holders that such a re-definition of this important right can also negatively affect them. In their letter they wrote on the last Bulgarian compromise proposal:

It would limit the scope of the right of communication to the public by incompletely applying Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case law and setting into stone in Article 13 only certain criteria developed by the Court. This approach would roll-back the CJEU’s case law, which has repeatedly confirmed that a broad interpretation of the right of communication to the public (CTTP) is necessary to achieve the main objective of the Copyright Directive, which is to establish a high level of protection for authors and rights holders. CW! recalls that the exclusive right of communication to the public, including the making available right, as enshrined in EU law (and further clarified by the Court), has emerged as the bedrock for the financing, licencing and protection of content, as well as its ultimate delivery to consumers in the online environment. The Court has also emphasised, in its recent judgments, that in order to determine whether there has been a CTTP, several complementary criteria must be taken into account, which are not autonomous, but are interdependent. Any proposals that entail a selective application of the Court’s jurisprudence, or that imply a narrowing of the scope of the right of CTTP, would be contrary to the protection required by current EU and international law.

While we do not agree that the current draft would limit the scope of the CTTP right, this passage illustrates the dangers of carelessly fiddling around with core legal concepts that underpin the EU copyright framework. Continue reading →

This is not how you make copyright reform! Report from the Copyright Action Days

—

Last week more than a hundred of copyright reform activists got together in Brussels for the the European Copyright Action Days to make it clear to EU lawmakers that the copyright reform effort that is currently being discussed in the European Parliament and the European Council is not good enough. In a series of events organized by Copyright 4 Creativity, Create.Refresh, Communia and others, activists and other stakeholders discussed the shortcomings of the current reform proposal as well as ideas for a more future-proof overhaul of the outdated EU copyright system.

As part of the Copyright Action Days we organized a a roundtable on the future of education in the European Parliament, our first ever COMMUNIA Salon on the future of copyright in the Museum of Natural Sciences and two workshops for copyright reform activists.

Video documentation by Sebastiaan ter Burg.

Roundtable on the future of education

The roundtable on the the future of education hosted by Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake was a full room event at the European Parliament, with over 40 policymakers and stakeholders attending. We discussed the intersection of educational policy, technology, copyright reform and open licensing policies. Irish school teacher Leanne Lynch talked about the use of technology, social media platforms and digital copyrighted materials in the classroom. Mitja Jermol – UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Education – talked about how new technologies can support educational goals. Andreia Inamorato dos Santos from EC’s Institute for Prospective Technology Studies  presented results of their latest report on open education policies in Europe. Finally, Damjan Harisch from the Slovenian Ministry of Education and Maja Bogataj Jančič, Director of the Slovenian Intellectual Property Institute, presented the position of Slovenian Ministry of Education on the copyright reform  During the event, Teresa Nobre also presented our latest research on licences for educational uses. We are happy that we had the opportunity to exchange views on the matter with representatives of publishers and CMOs.

The Future of Technology in Education roundtable
The Future of Technology in Education roundtable, photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg. More photos here.

COMMUNIA salon

The COMMUNIA salon in the Museum of Natural Sciences brought together more than 70 activists, academics and policy makers to discuss challenges on the intersection of creativity, value creation and copyright in the online environment. Under the title “Copyright for the future” the discussions attempted to draw up a perspective that looks beyond the current legislative proposal. Continue reading →

Article 13: still too broken to fix

Aanval van de Giganten op de godenwereld
Article 13 is an attack on open online platforms
Licentie
—

As we are heading into the final phases of the discussion on article 13 in both the European Parliament and the Council the issue that article 13 has the potential to do substantial damage to the European digital economy is getting more attention from lawmakers. So far the answer to this problem by the proponents of Article 13 is to exempt more and more types of online platforms from the filtering and or licensing requirements established by Article 13. By now the list of services to be excluded contains “Non-for profit online encyclopaedia“, “educational or scientific repositories, where the content is uploaded by the rightholder“, “providers of cloud services for individual use which do not provide access to the public“, “online market places whose main activity is online retail of physical goods” (European Parliament draft), “non-for-profit open source software developing platforms” and “internet access service providers” (Council compromise proposal).

Generally speaking it is a good indication that a policy is bad if there is a need to make a large number of exceptions to prevent it from doing lots of unintended harm. This principle is on full display in the discussion about article 13. As we (and many others) have argued before, article 13 is broken so badly that it cannot be fixed and should be deleted. The key problem with article 13 is that the music industry is employing its old weapon of choice (copyright law) in an attempt to reign in behaviour of a very small group of online platforms that is perceived as problematic by the music industry. By using copyright law as a trigger for the licensing and filtering obligations contained in article 13, the article inevitably effects every other online platform that deals with copyrighted contents (i.e pretty much all online platforms).

It is not surprising that other platforms that operate in completely different markets (like GitHub which has nothing to do with uploading music) have started to realise that article 13 is a threat to their businesses and are demanding to be excluded from the scope of article 13. While excluding such platforms seems like an obvious choice to prevent some of the worst side effects of the provisions contained in article 13, it will not fix the underlying problem: In an age where copyright touches almost every online business model, copyright law is not a suitable regulatory instrument to adjust the bargaining positions of specific industries anymore. In order to make sure that article 13 has no negative side effects it would need to come with a list of exceptions that excludes every single business model that it is not targeted at. Continue reading →

Is the new education exception in Germany geared towards the 21st century?

Anatomische les van professor Paaw
New law already scheduled for review
Licentie
—
This is a guest post by Bernd Fiedler, policy manager at Wikimedia Deutschland. Bernd previously worked as a teacher and is aiming at improving the framework for free education. WMDE is a Communia member organisation.

In the “Urheberrechts-Wissensgesellschafts-Gesetz” (engl. roughly: Copyright Knowledge-Society Act), the German legislator tries to improve the legal framework for educators and scientists in Germany, as part of a general clean-up of the exceptions section of the Copyright Code. In general, 15% of a protected work can be used for educational and scientific purposes without permission until 2023.

The law, introduced last minute at the end of the legislative period in 2017, was long overdue. It was heavily lobbied, it is limited to five years, and it is already scheduled for review. Still, as Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas put it, because it is bundled into a single document, it somewhat clarifies regulation for educators, coming into effect on March 1, 2018.

In Germany, legislation on education and research is fragmented due to the federal constitution. So far, with the exception of the Copyright Code, which is federal law, the state-level executive and legislative bodies have full responsibility for education in their Länder (states). This includes the details on how copyright exceptions and limitations for education are handled in practice, which is regulated very granularly in treaties between the states’ culture ministers on one side and rightsholder representatives on the other. In practice, there were 16 different ways of handling copyright in education and some federal-level treaties that had to be considered.

From March onwards, educational institutions can use up to 15% of any single work (e.g. Book, Film etc.) in order to supply their courses and staff, and use that amount even for third-party presentations, as long as this serves to present the teaching outcome or similar at the institution itself. Single images, “a few” scientific articles from the same academic journal issue, out-of-distribution works and “works of smaller proportions” can be used in their entirety.

Before, the federal law only contained vague legal terms such as “shorter extracts”, “works of smaller proportions”, the meaning of which had to be negotiated into the abovementioned treaties at state level, leading in practice to different extent limitations in each state.

Shortcomings of the new exception

Continue reading →

New policy paper on the 2017 review of PSI Directive

1200px-PSM_V43_D075_Chemical_laboratory
chance to improve reuse in Europe
Licentie
—

Today COMMUNIA published a policy paper on the 2017 review of the Directive on Public Sector Information (PSI Directive). The Directive first came into effect in 2003, and was amended in 2013 to clarify that 1) PSI should be presumed to be “reusable by default,” 2) museums, archives, and libraries were subject to the Directive provision, 3) acquisition fees were limited to marginal costs of reproduction, and 4) documents were to be made available for reuse using open standards and machine readable formats.

The Commission’s 2017 review could lead to further changes to improve reuse of public sector information. We made several recommendations to strengthen access and reuse of PSI.

First, we recommend that scientific research results resulting from public funding should be made available under a permissive reuse rights regime as PSI. The Commission should ensure that policy efforts to improve access to publicly funded scientific research are complementary—and not in conflict with—each other.

Second, we suggest that a revised Directive should ensure that all documents that are not currently covered by third party intellectual property rights fall within the scope of PSI national legislations.

Third, we recommend the Commission codify their earlier guidelines on recommended standard licences for PSI, and also ensure accurate licensing metadata across PSI and open data portals that reflects these licensing options.

Finally, we suggest that a revised Directive should ensure that CHIs and public sector bodies that are alike in their aims and funding structure must only be permitted to charge fees for costs directly incurred in providing access. We emphasise the importance of suitable state funding for CHI which will also enable them to make as many resources reusable as possible.

Continue reading →

Stop the #censorshipmachine now!

—

Today the Copyright working group of the Council is meeting for the first time under the new Bulgarian presidency. The agenda consist of discussions about articles 11 (press publishers right) and article 13 (upload filters for online platforms) and it appears that the Bulgarian Presidency is planning to push ahead on both of them in line with the one sided approach taken by the Estonian presidency. In the light of this meeting Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda has released a video featuring a number of MEPs from across the political spectrum speaking out against mandatory filtering of user uploaded content:

In the video the MEPs make it clear that filtering technology that would be mandated under article 13 will be used to limit the free expression of internet users in the EU. They also point out that it is highly problematic to require large corporations to install filtering technology that they will then operate outside of any public oversight and without any ability for meaningful recurse by normal users.

The examples provided by the MEPs in the video are a welcome reminder that it will not be enough to prevent upload filters from becoming mandatory by deleting article 13 from the proposed DSM directive, but that we we need to regulate the application of existing filtering technology and that that we finally need to positively define what rights users have when it comes to re-using existing works to express themselves online.

The time to stop the #censorshipmachine is now and you can contribute to this by sharing Julia Reda’s video or the excellent explainer video produced by the Create.Refresh campaign.

Seven ways to save the EU copyright reform effort in 2018

Vuurwerk ter ere van de kroning van Willem III en Maria II tot koning en koningin van Groot-Brittannië
Its 2018! Time to finally #fixcopyright
Licentie
—

With the arrival of 2018 the discussions of the Proposed Copyright in the Digital single Market Directive enters into its third year. After more than a year of discussions in both the Parliament and the Council, it is likely that 2018 will at the minimum see final positions from both institutions. Depending on how quickly these positions will be established we may even see the adoption of the directive in 2018. To get everybody up to speed here is a quick refresher of what is at stake in 2018:

1. The publishers right must die!

Form the start the idea of granting press publishers a neighbouring right (an extra layer of copyright) in their publications has been one of the most controversial parts of the Commission’s proposal. The idea, based on laws that have failed in both Germany and Spain, is so deeply flawed that there is almost no one from the academic community who is willing to argue in favor (there are of course lots of academics who oppose it). Even worse, in the course of 2017 it has become clear that both the European Parliament and the European Commission have tried to lock away self-commissioned studies that clearly show that the new right not only would be ineffective at directing views (thus, funds) back to publishers, it would also harm media pluralism and access to information.

In spite of the overwhelming amount of evidence speaking against it, and even though its original sponsor (Commissioner Oettinger) is no longer in charge of the dossier, the idea of granting press publishers more rights in order to economically strengthen them refuses to die. It is time that MEPs and the Member states realize that adopting laws based on wishful thinking is the opposite of evidence based policy making, and refuse to create additional rights for publishers. This should be easy as there is an alternative proposal that would strengthen the legal position of press publishers without threatening the freedom to link.

2. Real legal certainty for Text and Data mining!

One of the core problems of copyright systems without a flexible exception (like fair use) is that everything not specifically permitted in the text of the copyright law will be deemed an infringement. This has resulted in an unclear legal status regarding Text and Data mining (letting computers read and interpret texts and other data). Since most forms of text and data mining require the making of copies, rights holders argue that text and data mining needs to be licensed, even if the entity engaging in TDM has legal access to the text and/or data to be mined. Continue reading →

Multiple news agencies confirm: Press publishers right will be used to limit freedom to link

Karikatuur van Franse censoren
Article 11 is an attack on the freedom to link
Licentie
—

Within the new industry, news agencies fill the role of the objective gathers of facts. Agencies like DPA, AFP or ANP collect information and make them available to publishing companies who sometimes publish the information as is, but mostly use the information that they get from the agencies as an ingredient for their own reporting. Journalists rely on news agencies to confirm the accuracy of information they use in their reporting.

The heads of 8 major European news agencies have now entered the discussion about the ancillary publishers right for press publishers, via an open letter published in Wednesday’s edition of the French daily Le Monde (paywalled french language version here). They have done so taking the side of those press publishers who advocate for this right. The letter is a frontal attack on online platforms (Facebook and Google in particular) whom they accuse of profiting from hyperlinking to online new publications that are based on information gathered by the news agencies:

[The platforms] offer internet users the work done by others, the news media, by freely publishing hypertext links to their stories.

What is remarkable here is that the news agencies’ letter explicitly singles out hyperlinking as the mechanism that should be the target of the ancillary right for press publishers. While we  and others such as the eponymous Save the Link campaign have argued for a long time that an ancillary copyright would threaten the ability to freely link to online resources, and thus break one of the fundamental building blocks of the internet, the press publishers have gone to great length to pretend that this is not the case.

Publishersright.eu, the lobby platform set up by the EU press and news publishers associations contains a “mythbuster” section that proclaims that the publishers right “is not a link tax”, will “not break the internet”, and will not “be used to block access to publishers] content” (the last one stands in direct contruy7 [adiction to this statement by Prof. Höppner—one of the few academic proponents of the right). In the same vein the European Publishers Council is proclaiming (complete with animated GIF) that “the link is safe” and that the publishers right will lead to “more links”.

Unfortunately for these self appointed “mythbusters” the news agencies seem to have missed the memo and made it clear that the right is indeed an attempt to break the freedom to link. While this could be filed away as a simple communication mistake, the news agencies reveal a much deeper truth: It doesn’t really matter what the proponents of a new right claim with regards to how it will be used. Once a new right exists rights holders are incentivised to make maximum use of the new right. The statements from the news agencies and Prof Höppner make it clear that this will include attempts to charge for linking to and blocking access to content.

As we have argued before, strengthening the position of press publishers (and journalists) does not require a new separate right which would likely be abused to impede the access to information and to break the internet. Instead the position of press publishers vis a vis abusive practices could be achieved by a legal presumption that press publishers are entitled to enforce the rights over the works or other subject matter that are licensed to them. This is the approach that was proposed by former MEP Comodini in the draft report of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee and is one of the two options currently discussed among the member states in the Council.

This week’s intervention by the news agencies is a powerful reminder that handing out new rights is the wrong approach to the problem.