Hi Kay,

I wonder how did you come up with such number? Did you made a survey in your country, or in other EU countries? Is this a fact-based statement? To say that 99% of all teaching activities have no cross-border linking seems quite disconnected from the reality that I personally experience and that has been described to me by the education community.

Sure, in countries where there’s no easy access to the Internet and to modern means of communication, such a number might make some sense, but do you seriously believe that in the EU the teaching community is not using emails, cloud services, social media platforms, etc to exchange materials across borders? In how many big conferences have you been recently in the EU that were not being streamed online? Not to mention distance education, online courses, MOOCs, which can be attended by learners from different countries, with teachers from different countries…

I recommend you to read the impact assessment study commissioned by the European Commission before proposing to harmonize the education exception. It has some interesting data on the digital actions regularly carried out by educators and learners in Europe, e.g. 45.7% of educators and 56.1% of learners send digital works via email, clouds, chats, social networks etc.

The reason why we need to harmonize exceptions is because we harmonized copyright in the first place. No rights without exceptions 🙂 And you know the rationale: fundamental freedoms related to access to knowledge and education, which are as (or more) important as private property. No one wants “gifts”, no one is asking for an entire work to be used without payment, unless it’s an entire image or a short poem and does not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work. Quite a fair and balanced ask, I would say.

Best from Lisbon,
Teresa

there is no such thing as “cross border teaching activities” in reality. In 99% of all cases (schools) teaching is a national based thing in the language of each country. There ist no urgend need of harmonization.

In Germany we had this reform nationally in 2018. Since than 15% of each media can be used free and without asking anyone by teachers (Except schoolbooks and newspaper). A well-formed compromise by Heiko Maas (former minister of justice in the party SPD). It is a compromise which works fine so far for both sides teaching staff and rightholders. More than >15% must be payed.

Make your own work a gift to others but please do not force others to do the same 😉

Best from Hamburg
Kay