Posts tagged with: national policy

Copyright Collection Societies (CCSs) are organisations traditionally set up by authors, performers, and other kinds of rightholders to collectively manage their rights. Nowadays, there are more than 250 CCSs in the EU. Copyright Collection Societies collect around €6 billion in royalties in the EU every year. The vast majority of this income feeds into the […]

It is generally accepted wisdom that if you do not want something to be noticed you can best announce it on a Friday afternoon. Presenting a study right before the start of the summer holidays is a variation of this. Seen in this light, it is a bit unfortunate that the Spanish Association of Publishers […]

Soon the most valuable digital works of art and culture may be available all around Europe, free of charge, licenses, watermarks, and in open, machine-readable formats.  Together with their metadata they can be used to not only promote rich heritage of our culture, but also to build innovative applications, web services and boost the creative […]

Two weeks ago the lower chamber of the Spanish parliament approved a number of changes to Spain’s Intellectual Property Law that directly threaten the ability of Spanish internet users to contribute to the commons. The law introduces a number of modifications to copyright law that expand the scope of exclusive rights over areas that were […]

With the EU consultation on a review of the European Copyright rules still ongoing (the new extended deadline is the 5th of March) it is nice to see that some other countries are apparently making progress with their national copyright reform agendas. One of the most interesting bits of news is coming out of Australia. […]

The mission on culture at the digital era commissioned by the French government and supervised by Pierre Lescure, rather pompously entitled ‘Acte II de l’exception culturelle’, released its report this week in Paris: ‘Rapport sur la politique culturelle à l’ère des contenus numériques’, downloadable in two volumes on the website of the Ministry of Culture […]

This post by Creative Commons’ Timothy Vollmer was originally posted on the 20th of march on the Creative Commons blog (‘Pallante’s Push for U.S. Copyright Reform‘) and is reposted here with permission from the author. Today, U.S. Register of Copyright Maria Pallante stood before Congress to say: we need a new copyright law. Pallante’s prepared […]

Messenger boy / The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions Last week the Communia Association submitted comments (PDF) to the United States Library of Congress’ Request for Information on the topic of Third Party Digitization Initiatives. To give a little bit of context, the Library of Congress is looking for contractors to digitize some […]

The UK Government has published a Government Policy Statement based on the recent Consultation on modernising Copyright held in the UK. The document summarizes the findings of the consultation and outlines policy actions that the UK government intends to take. The policy statement (pdf) covers three fields where the government intends to legislate: ‘Improvements to […]

It is well known that sometimes you need to be an outsider to be able to analyze complex problems in a meaningful way. In the ongoing discussions about copyright in the digital environment Russian president Dmitry Medvedev might turn out to be the much-needed outsider. In the past Russia has not had a very strong […]