Posts tagged with: EU policy

In the end, nothing happened. When the European parliament adopted a compromise version of MEP Reda’s evaluation report of the EU copyright directive, the attempt of MEP Jean-Marie Cavada to restrict the right to publish pictures of buildings and artworks permanently installed in public places (“freedom of panorama”) was voted down by a huge margin. […]

Yesterday the European Parliament approved MEP Felix Reda’s evaluation report of the copyright directive. With the report the European Parliament gives a clear signal that the European Copyright rules need to be modernised. This puts the ball in the court of the Commission, which needs to come up with concrete legislative proposals for a copyright […]

Tomorrow the European Parliament will vote on the Reda report on the implementation of the 2001 copyright directive, which has been approved by the legal affairs committee on the 16th of June. One of the most contentious issues during the vote in the legal affairs committee was an amendment by proposed by the German EPP MEP […]

BEUC, The European Consumer Organisation, has released an interesting fact sheet pertaining to confusion and uncertainty in consumer use of copyrighted materials. BEUC surveyed relevant stakeholders about the current copyright reform debates in the EU. These stakeholders ranged from collecting societies to academics and government ministries, and the conclusions drawn from their answers are both […]

Back in April we published our list of the 10 worst and the 5 best amendments to Felix Reda’s draft report on the implementation of the InfoSoc Directive. Tomorrow the Legal Affairs committee (JURI) of the European Parliament will vote on these amendments to the draft report. In light of the upcoming vote and given […]

Earlier this week  LIBER released a response to the STM Association’s statement about text and data mining (TDM). The STM Association asserts that legal certainty already exists for TDM via publishers’ licences, and that creating copyright exceptions for text and data mining activities would undermine the investment incentives for ensuring that high-quality content is available. […]

(Hyper)links are the fundamental building blocks of the web, but the practice of linking has come under attack over the last few years. If copyright holders are able to censor or control links to legitimate content, it could disrupt the free flow of information online and hurt access to crucial news and resources on the […]

Today COMMUNIA joins over 50 organizations in releasing the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age. The declaration is a collaboratively-created set of principles that outlines core legal and technical freedoms that are necessary for researchers. The principles would allow them to be able to take advantage of new technologies and practices in […]

Today the European Commission presented an ambitious package of reform proposals known as the Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy for Europe. Among other topics like ‘Affordable high quality parcel delivery’ and ‘Building the data economy’ the DSM strategy represents the first concrete announcement of upcoming changes to the European Union’s outdated 2001 Copyright Framework. As […]

In January MEP Felix Reda presented a draft report on the implementation of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (a.k.a the Copyright Directive). This draft report has proven to be hugely controversial […]