On 14/07/2015 08:35, Marius Jammes wrote:
Dear Tom,
On 10/07/15 01:06, Tom Blecher wrote:
-So even if ones (mine) picture of the legislation system of the EU is not that
detailed, one understands that
they are updating the copy-right law once again on a original request of MEP
Julia Reda, who is supposed to be from our own people, to say from german
pirates-party. Right?
The European Commission plans indeed to reform the copyright directive
of 2001 [1] as part of the Digital Single Market strategy [2]. If I'm
correct, that's the Commission which asked for the opinion of the
European Parliament and made Reda responsible of the report.
Almost right. The Commission has announced that it is aiming to bring
forward legislation on the Digital Single Market this autumn.
The Reda report was created on Parliament's own initiative, to review
the existing legislation, and give Parliament a chance to express an
opinion for the Commission to consider.
By most accounts, the Commission is actually expected to propose rather
little in the area of copyright reform -- its main focus is likely to be
geoblocking / subscribed content portability; it would like to make a
market for continent-wide licences of content more of a reality, but has
had a lot of push-back from film-makers in particular who are used to
selling a patchwork of territorial rights.
There may be possibility of moves towards harmonisation of some
copyright exception from the Commission -- something on text & data
mining is probably the most likely; but it may not go much further than
that. On the other hand, it does seem that there may now be little
chance of the Commission proposing a "snippet tax" for news content,
after such thoughts were strongly resisted by the Parliament, even
though Oettinger had previously seemed quite responsive to some of the
German media barons on this.
Question: Where is this report to be read? In the article they speak of each
point of it but I can reach the text itself. Is that intended somehow, I ask. ?
You can find the different versions of the report (draft presented by
Reda, text as voted by the Committee and final version) on the European
Parliament's website [3]. The final vote in plenary session took place
on last July 9th.
Reda has a good presentation of the full text on her own website,
https://juliareda.eu/copyright-evaluation-report/full/
The report is not a legislative document, so more important than the
detailed textual wording is the sense of where the parliament placed
itself on various issues. See Reda's summary here after the vote at the
committee stage,
https://juliareda.eu/2015/06/reda-report-adopted-a-turning-point-in-the-copyright-debate/
It's possible that there might be a bit more support for reform in the
parliament as a whole rather than in the legal affairs committee --
which is the committee that most attracts MEPs with an interest in
'defending' intellectual property, and whose MEPs are the most courted
on by rightsholder lobbyists.
But on the other hand Parliament can't vote legislatively on anything
that has not first been proposed by the Commission. (Reda's report was
an opinion, not a legislative proposal).
Reda's most significant achievement, beyond the list of what did &
didn't get into her report, was simply getting issues of copyright
reform into public discussion over the last six months, while her report
was on the agenda. But going forward, the policy agenda will now be
focussed on whatever propositions are in the Commission legislative
proposal.
All best,
James.
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