Timothy Vollmer

In Lisbon from 9-11 May people will come together from around the world to participate in the Creative Commons Global Summit. The gathering is a chance for for CC network members, digital rights activists, open content creators, and commons advocates to meet together, share information, and collaborate on projects. Communia’s bread and butter over the […]

On Thursday the European Parliament voted 550-34 (with 25 abstentions) to approve the Directive on Open Data and Public Sector Information. The directive updates the rules controlling the re-use of public sector information held by public sector bodies of the Member States and also governs the re-use of documents held by public undertakings, such as […]

For the entire duration of the current EU copyright reform we have advocated that the press publishers right be deleted. Publishers already benefit greatly from the copyrights they have in their content, and don’t need an additional exclusive right to protect or exploit those rights. As is clear from past experiments with the right in […]

Yesterday the European Parliament stopped in its tracks the problematic copyright proposal put forth by the Legal Affairs committee based on the EC proposal, and voted to open up debate on the directive to the full Parliament. It’s a remarkable win for everyone advocating for progressive copyright reform in Europe. MEPs voted 318-278 to deny […]

In an incredible show of political support for a more reasonable copyright law, today 104 members of the European Parliament sent a letter to Rapporteur Voss asking him to delete the harmful press publishers right—Article 11. The signatories include MEPs from across the political spectrum. Signatories of the letter state that: While we support efforts […]

A few weeks ago the European Commission published a study on the ongoing evaluation of the Database Directive. The report was led by the Joint Institute for Innovation Policy, and contains an analysis of last year’s public consultation, as well as information from expert interviews and a stakeholders’ workshop. The Commission’s evaluation study confirms some […]

Today, Communia and 145 organisations published an open letter to the Committee of the Permanent Representatives of the Governments of the Member States to the European Union (COREPER). That group meets tomorrow, and the Bulgarian presidency will be pushing for all Member States to endorse its proposed changes to the draft Directive on Copyright in […]

We’ve already written about how the Bulgarian compromise proposal for both Article 13 and Article 11 are too broken to fix. Their proposal for Article 3 (Text and Data Mining) does little to alter the major problems standing in the way of a progressive exception for text and data mining. We’ve continued to follow Article […]

We just got done criticising how Bulgaria’s weak consolidated presidency compromise handles Article 11 of the proposed Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) directive. The Bulgarian plan doubles down on the Commission’s original bad idea and ignores most of the positive protections offered by some members of parliament. But we shouldn’t have been surprised […]

This week the Bulgarian presidency released their consolidated presidency compromise proposal for a directive on copyright in the digital single market. Instead of taking a proactive approach to fix some of the worst elements of the Commission’s beleaguered proposal, their plan backtracks on many of the most controversial aspects, which only seems to throw the public […]