We launched a new website, dedicated to reviewing the implementation of these policy recommendations. 10 years on, it is possible to see that half of our recommendations have been implemented – fully or partially -, and the other half remains unfulfilled. Most importantly, almost all of the recommendations are still relevant.

Where victory can be claimed: freeing digital reproductions of public domain works and giving access to orphan works

One of COMMUNIA’s main objectives since its foundation has been to promote and protect the digital public domain. Therefore, when the EU Parliament decided to follow our Recommendation #5 and proposed the introduction of a provision in the new Copyright Directive, preventing Member States from protecting non original reproductions of works of visual arts in the public domain with copyright or related rights, we were exhilarated. Article 14 not only reconfirms the principle that no one should be able to claim exclusive control over works that are in the public domain; it’s also the first EU piece of legislation to expressly refer to the concept of “public domain”.

Getting the “public domain” to enter the EU acquis lexicon was a major victory for user rights, but for sure more measures are needed to effectively protect the Public Domain. Our Recommendation #6, which called for sanctioning false or misleading attempts to misappropriate or claim exclusive rights over public domain material, has not been implemented and is more relevant than ever, particularly on online content sharing platforms. Here, a false ownership claim can easily lead to the false blocking of public domain material, as a result of the use of automated content recognition systems combined with the lack of public databases of ownership rights (that’s why the German legislator has recently adopted measures against this type of abuse, setting a new standard for the protection of the Public Domain).

Another victory coming out from the recent EU copyright reform relates to the creation of an efficient pan European system that grants users full access to orphan works (Recommendation #9). The first attempt of the EU legislator to address this issue, through the Orphan Works Directive, is widely considered a failure, since the Directive only works for a small number of cinematographic works. However, the provisions on the use of out of commerce works in the DSM Directive provide a comprehensive solution for the problem of orphan works (by definition orphan works are also out of commerce and so these provisions also apply to them) (cf. Articles 8-11).

Where major advances have been made: mandatory exceptions to copyright and open access to publicly funded resources

Recommendations #3, #9, #10, #12 all asked for the creation and harmonization of exceptions and limitations to copyright, and we have seen major advances on this topic in recent years. Cultural heritage institutions now benefit from a set of mandatory exceptions regarding uses of orphan works and of out-of-commerce works, and for preservation purposes. There is a new exception for the benefit of persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print-disabled, and the Commission has recently concluded a consultation on the availability of works for persons with other disabilities, which might lead to further developments in this field. The fields of education and research were also considered in the recent EU copyright reform, with the approval of new exceptions for text and data mining, and for digital and cross-border teaching activities. New mandatory exceptions for quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody or pastiche on certain online content-sharing platforms are also part of the Article 17 package. Finally, the CJEU has recently indicated that the exceptions and limitations of the Copyright Directive that are aimed to observe fundamental freedoms might be mandatory for Member States (cf. the judgments of 29 July 2019 Funke Medien, C-469/17, para. 58; Pelham, C-476/17, para. 60; and Spiegel Online, C‐516/17, para. 43), which means that there is a possibility of further harmonization of exceptions in the coming years through judicial development.

Certainly, more progress is needed in the area of exceptions and limitations, particularly after the massive shift of education, research and cultural activities to the online environment, following the pandemic closure of institutions. Not only do we need a higher level of harmonization among Member States, but also flexibility to adapt this legal framework to rapid societal and technological changes. Therefore, our recommendation #3 to harmonize exceptions and open up the exhaustive list of user prerogatives is still highly relevant.

In the past decade, we have also seen great advancements on the issue of open access to public funded resources. Recommendations #11, #12 and #13 asked for publicly funded digitized content, research output, educational resources and public sector information to be made publicly available free from restrictions. Over the past years the idea that publicly funded resources need to be available to the public has gained traction not only among policy makers but also within the vast majority of cultural heritage and research institutions. Initiatives from public research funders have led to the increasing adoption of open access policies within the academic research sector. In 2013 the scope of application of the PSI Directive was extended to libraries, museums and archives. Also, Member States are required to ensure that documents on which those institutions hold intellectual property rights shall be re-usable for commercial or non-commercial purposes  under the Open Data Directive. This means that this set of recommendations has been partially implemented; the principle that public money should result in public access has not, however, yet been universally accepted.

Where nothing has changed: terms of protection, registration, technical protection measures, and alternative reward systems 

The excessive length of copyright protection combined with an absence of formalities is highly detrimental to the accessibility of our shared knowledge and culture. Therefore, a decade ago, we recommended reducing the terms of copyright protection (Recommendation #1). Unfortunately the trends in the past decade have gone in the opposite direction. The proposed term extension for performers and sound recordings, which we had recommended not to be adopted (Recommendation #2), was approved by Directive 2011/77/EU. Furthermore, the rules for establishing the duration of the term of protection of individual works remain fragmented and highly complex, contrary to our Recommendation #4.

On the issue of formalities, while our Recommendation #8 to grant full copyright protection only to works that have been registered by their authors has not been implemented, it has become increasingly clear that, for the copyright system to continue to function, registration of works will become ever more important. Over the past year the EU legislator has been making a number of baby steps towards systems to reserve or claim rights. These have been mostly as a condition to expand exceptions and limitations further, with rightholders being given the right to opt out from certain permitted uses of their works if they express such intention by specific means: this is the case of some text and data mining activities, where rightholders have the right to prevent those activities provided that they expressly do so “in an appropriate manner” (cf. Article 4(4) of the DSM Directive), and it is also the case in the context of the use of out-of-commerce works by cultural heritage institutions (cf. Article 8(3) of the DSM Directive), where rightholders are allowed to opt-out through the EUIPO Out of Commerce Works Portal. Yet, the new Commission’s Intellectual Property Action Plan reveals the intention to look deeper into how “to promote the quality of copyright data and achieve a well-functioning “copyright infrastructure” (e.g. improve authoritative and updated information on right holders, terms and conditions and licensing opportunities)”.

Another area where there were barely any changes to the EU policy is the area of technological overrides of exceptions and limitations. The only improvement we have seen in the new Copyright Directive is that the beneficiaries of the new exceptions have the right to require the technical means necessary to use TPM-protected works even when the work was acquired under contract and made available across the internet (something that was not the case under the InfoSoc legislation). However, the vast majority of EU Member States do not have mechanisms in place to grant users access to TPM-protected works. This means that technical protection measures can still significantly inhibit the use of works under exceptions and limitations. In other words, it is about time for the EU lawmaker to recognize this problem and implement our Recommendation #7, allowing users to circumvent TPMs when exercising rights under exceptions or when using public domain works.

Finally, our last Recommendation (#14), advising lawmakers to switch the focus of their policies from extension of copyright protection and enforcement of rights to alternative rewards systems and cultural flat rate models has also not been implemented.  Since we have issued this recommendation we have seen massive changes in the way cultural expression and exchange are taking place online, with the emergence of subscription services for creative content and new creator cultures that rely on advertising driven platforms. Copyright plays an important role in these business models but any real solution to ensure a fairer distribution of the economic benefits of these models likely requires intervention way beyond copyright alone.

The post 10 years of COMMUNIA, a decade of copyright reform: how far did we get? appeared first on COMMUNIA Association.

But establishing a single framework, which enables the cross-border offer of products and services is not an easy thing. According to the last report of the PSI Group, Member States are struggling with many challenges while implementing the Directive into domestic law. As might be expected, the correct choice of licensing, charging and redress mechanisms are especially hard to solve.

In the recent Communia policy paper on the re­use of public sector information in cultural heritage institutions, we were  concerned that if Member States are not careful, the implementation of the changes required by the new Directive could do more harm than good when it comes to access to digitized cultural heritage in Europe. Work on the implementation of the Directive into Polish law shows that this scenario can happen in Poland.

In November 2014, Poland has published a draft proposal of the new bill, which assumes that documents held by cultural heritage institutions are within the scope of the Directive only if they are in the public domain, either because they were never protected by copyright or because copyright has expired.

The problem, therefore, lies in the fact that the remaining resources, even if the institution owns the copyright, have been excluded from the scope of the proposed law. The Ministry of Culture and Digital Heritage, which has been in favour of this very narrow reading of the Directive, believes that it should not apply either to works created by employees of institutions or to works, for which third parties have transferred rights to cultural institutions. What does this mean in practice?

Most importantly, re-use rules will not apply to such important information as descriptive metadata, bibliographic and catalog data. Without metadata and descriptions heritage resources will become useless for those wanting to re-use digital cultural resources. Similarly, public cultural institutions – for example modern art galleries – will still be able to restrict access to the information that they hold, even though it has been produced with public funds.

And such an implementation is in our opinion [see our policy paper p. 4-6]  contrary to the very principle that inspired both the 2003 and 2013 Directives and could lead to the creation of unnecessary hurdles to the re­use of public sector information.

What is maybe even worse, Polish cultural institutions will also be able to impose additional conditions – restricting commercial use (promotion or advertising) or allowing only certain forms and scope of reuse. Even for works that are in the public domain.

This implementation has the combined support of collective management organizations, museums (which in general are much more conservative than libraries in their approach towards digitization and sharing of cultural objects) and the Polish Ministry of Culture and Digital Heritage. One of the concerns raised is that the private sector will be able to build competitive services, museum catalogues or images banks, to those provided by the museums. But wasn’t it the idea of new PSI Directive? In general, it is surprising to see these organizations favour an approach that limits as much as possible reuse of cultural works – since such sharing is explicitly defined as part of their public mission.

All around the world, public domain is treated as the information that is free from intellectual property barriers. Anyone can use and reuse it, remix, combine and translate without obtaining permission. For commercial and non-commercial purposes. But no one can ever own it. In theory. Observing the legislative process in Poland, it becomes clear that in some countries the implementation of the new PSI Directive can indeed not only do more harm than good with regard to access to cultural heritage, but even threaten the idea of the public domain.

We hope that ultimately the Ministry of Administration and Digital Affairs – which is responsible for drafting the bill – will propose a law that supports a modern approach to digital cultural heritage and protects the Public Domain.  And that with time the Ministry of Culture and Digital Heritage will adapt Poland’s cultural policy as well so that allowing access and reuse is seen as part of the public mission, and not as threat to culture.

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The directive attempts for the first time to define a general framework for sharing cultural heritage information all around Europe. Under the amended directive, libraries, museums and archives are now asked to make parts of their collections available for reuse. In particular, documents in the Public Domain (either because never protected or because the protection expired) are under the general re-use rule of Art. 3(1), while documents in which libraries, museums and archives hold intellectual property rights are under the derogatory rule of Art. 3(2): only when institutions allow re-use are they under the obligation to ensure that the general re-use conditions are respected. Accordingly, the re-use requirements of the directive only apply to works that are not covered by third-party intellectual property rights.

While laudable in principle, the inclusion of cultural heritage institutions in the scope of the directive raises a number of questions related to how Member States should implement the new PSI directive. If Member States are not careful, the implementation of the changes required by the new directive could do more harm than good to cultural heritage institutions. In order for the directive to meet its overall objective, i.e. to contribute to opening up the resources held by Europe’s cultural heritage institutions, three main recommendations for member states can be formulated:

1. Member States should implement the Directive in line with the principles established by Article 3 and ensure that all documents that are not currently covered by third party intellectual property rights fall within the scope of the Directive.
2. Member States must not implement the Directive in such a way that encourages or requires institutions to charge for the reuse of works that they make available for reuse. The decision to charge for reuse must be up to the individual institutions. If this is not the case the Directive will limit access and reuse of the public domain.
3. For documents that are still protected by intellectual property rights but where these rights are held by the cultural heritage institutions, Member States should encourage the use of Open Definition-compliant licenses, such as the Creative Commons licenses or the Creative Commons Zero mechanism. This applies in particular to metadata produced by cultural heritage institutions, in the limited cases where these metadata can attract copyright (such as long form descriptions of cultural heritage objects).

For a deeper analysis of these issues see the full policy paper on the re-use of public sector information in cultural heritage institutions.

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We have been providing feedback to the Commission during this process. We last wrote about the Directive in June, and questioned why the Commission had not yet clarified what should be considered a “standard license” for re-use (Article 8). The dangers of license proliferation–which potentially leads to incompatible PSI–is still present. But it’s positive that the Commission is using this consultation to ask specific questions regarding legal aspects of re-use.

Part 3 of the questionnaire deals with licensing issues. One question asks what should be the default option for communicating re-use rights. We believe that there should be no conditions attached to the re-use of public sector information. The best case scenario would be for public sector information to be in the public domain. If it’s not possible to pass laws granting positive re-use rights to PSI without copyright attached, public sector bodies should use the CC0 Public Domain Dedication (CC0) to place public data into as close as possible to the public domain to ensure unrestricted re-use.

Communia calls on the Commission and Member States to ensure that core datasets are released for maximum re-use, either by exempting PSI from copyright and sui generis database rights altogether, or by requiring that these rights are waived under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

Another question first states that the Commission prefers the least restrictive re-use regime possible, and asks respondents to choose which condition(s) would be aligned with this goal. Again, we think that every condition would be deemed restrictive, since the best case scenario would be for PSI to be removed from the purview of copyright protection through law or complete dedication of the PSI to the public domain using CC0.

Some conditions would be particularly detrimental to interoperability of PSI. An obligation not to distort the original meaning or message of public sector data should be deemed unacceptable. Such an obligation destroys compatibility with standard public licenses that uniformly do not contain such a condition. The UK’s Open Government License has already removed this problematic provision when it upgraded from OGL 1.0 to OGL 2.0. Any condition that attempts to discriminate based on the type of use or user, or imposes additional requirements on the re-user, should be avoided. Examples include: 1) fees for cost recovery, 2) prohibitions on commercial use, modifications, distortion, or redistribution, and 3) unreasonable attribution requirements. Copyleft conditions can threaten interoperability with existing “attribution-only” standard licenses.

In addition to mentioning CC licensing as a common solution, the questionnaire notes, “several Member States have developed national licenses for re-use of public sector data. In parallel, public sector bodies at all levels sometimes resort to homegrown licensing conditions.” In order to achieve the goals of the Directive and “to promote interoperable conditions for crossborder re-use,” the Commission should consider options that minimize incompatibilities between pools of PSI, which in turn maximize re-use. As far as we are concerned that means that governments should be actively discouraged from developing their own licenses. They should consider removing copyright protection for PSI by amending copyright and/or PSI law or waive copyright and related rights using CC0.

Part 4 of the questionnaire addresses charging options for PSI re-use. While the Communia Association did not provide an opinion on this matter, Federico Morando, Raimondo Iemma, and Simone Basso have provided an in-depth analysis on the Internet Policy Review website.

The post Responding to the European Commission consultation on PSI: Minimizing restrictions maximizes re-use appeared first on COMMUNIA Association.

• libraries, museums, and archives are now be covered under the directive

• all legally public documents are subject to reuse under the directive

• any charges are be limited to marginal costs of reproduction, provision and dissemination

• documents and metadata are to be made available for reuse under open standards and using machine readable formats

European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes praised the adoption of the new rules on open data:

[T]o make a real difference you need a few things. You need prices for the data to be reasonable if not free – given that the marginal cost of your using the data is pretty low. You need to be able to not just use the data: but re-use it, without dealing with complex conditions […] We are giving you new rights for how you can access their public data for re-use, but also extending rules to include museums and galleries. That could open up whole new areas of cultural content, with applications from education to tourism. Indeed, Europeana already has over 25 million cultural items digitised and available for all to see – with metadata under an open, CC0 licence.

The Communia Association has been keenly interested and involved in seeing public sector data freed for widespread use by making it broadly available in the public domain. In January 2012 we released a policy paper with suggested changes to the PSI directive. Communia is pleased to see that cultural heritage institutions are included under the scope of the amended directive. Another positive aspect of the new reuse directive is the narrowing of the language around acceptable licensing for public sector information through the removal of text encouraging the development of additional open government licenses. At the same time, the Commission has not clarified what should be considered a “standard license,” thus there is an ongoing concern potential for Member states to create diverging and potentially incompatible license implementations. And, the EU lawmakers chose not to address the Communia recommendation of explicitly including public domain content held by libraries, museums and archives under the reuse obligation of the amended directive. But all in all, the updated directive is a step in the right direction.

The new directive will be implemented by Member states over the next two years. In the interim, the Commission will be looking for guidance on licensing issues (among other things) from EU-funded projects such as LAPSI 2.0. Communia is an active member in the LAPSI group. LAPSI will be developing PSI licensing guidelines and good practices as a deliverable to the Commission.

The post European Parliament Approves Updated PSI Directive appeared first on COMMUNIA Association.

Dear Neelie Kroes,

We sincerely admire the courage and innovacion [sic] spirit shown by the European Commission in the revision of the ReUse of Public Sector Information Directive. However, as a member of the Opendata community I think the new Directive will be incomplete without the definition of an Opendata Licence shared by all the Member States Public Administration.

We encourage the European Commission to propose the Member States an Opendata Licence, badly needed to create a ReUse of PSI single market. The alternative to a shared opendata licence in the European Union would be a fragmented market similar to the current intellectual property rights landscape in Europe.

Let’s build a single opendata market with a single opendata licence.

Of course a open data space with fragmented licensing conditions cannot never be as bad as the overall intellectual property rights landscape in Europe, but the overall argument is very solid. If the Commission wants to unlock the potential of open data for all of Europe then the best instrument to do so is a single, standardized open data license for all of Europe.

The post Petition in support of a single European Data License appeared first on COMMUNIA Association.

COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested changes to the PSI Directive — most notably the decision to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of public sector information (PSI) has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. The EC proposal to amend the PSI Directive is aligned with one of COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendations (#13), which states, “The PSI Directive needs to be broadened, by increasing its scope to include publicly funded memory organisations – such as museums or galleries – and strengthened by mandating that Public Sector Information will be made freely available for all to use and re-use without restriction.”

The policy paper draws attention to two issues where the proposal to amend the Directive should be improved. The first one concerns the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive and the second one deals with public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.

Conditions for re-use of public sector information 

From the perspective of COMMUNIA the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states. The article of the amended Directive dealing with licensing mentions “standard licenses,” but does not sufficiently clarify what should be considered to be a standard license, and encourages the development of open government licenses. Instead of recommending the use and creation of more licenses, COMMUNIA suggests that the Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied across the entire European Union. Such licenses (stewarded by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons) already exist and are widely used by a broad spectrum of data and content providers.

Public Domain Content held by libraries, museums and archives

COMMUNIA supports the decision to include cultural heritage institutions under the purview of the PSI Directive, as such a move will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture and should increase the amount of digitized cultural heritage that is available online. While the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights shall be re-usable for  commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights because they are in the public domain. COMMUNIA thinks that explicitly including public domain content held by libraries, museums and archives in the re-use obligation of the amended PSI Directive will strengthen the Commission’s position with regard to access and re-use of public domain content.

The full COMMUNIA association reaction to the EC’s proposal to amend Directive 2003/98/EC on re-use of public sector information can be downloaded here. For further information about the paper please contact the COMMUNIA Association at communia DOT association AT gmail DOT com.

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