Other EU Committees tend to agree with Reda's report  17/02/2015 by Tom Hirche

On January 20, Julia Reda, MEP for the German Pirate Party and Vice President of the Greens/EFA group, presented the draft report evaluating 2001's EU copyright directive (InfoSoc) to the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament. Now the other committees concerned with this subject have published their views on the report.

The Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection mostly agrees with the draft report. It also stresses "the need to ensure appropriate remuneration for right holders" und supports the view that the territorial fragmentation "creates additional legal costs and legal uncertainty". Furthermore, it emphasizes "the important role that exceptions and limitations [..] for public-interest reasons [and] [..] education and teaching, play in providing access to knowledge".

The Committee on Culture and Education also agrees with the draft report. In their opinion "embedding and linking should not be considered acts of communication to the public" and should thus not be regarded as an infringement of the rights holder's exclusive right to exploit his work by making it available online (see Article 3 of the InfoSoc-Directive).

The next step involves the Committee on Legal Affairs  voting on Reda's report and subsequently transmitting it to the plenary of the Parliament. For now, it looks like the report will have a good chance to be adopted. Should this be the case, it becomes a non-legislative and non-binding resolution representing the current opinion of the Parliament on this issue.  This, in turn, might influence the Commission's proposal for the upcoming copyright reform.

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