Category Reform

Last week, the European People's Party (EPP) Group in the European Parliament held an event labelled "Hearing on Copyright". One of the speakers was Giuseppe Abbamonte, the Commission's director of media policy at the DG CONNECT, who said that we might all act illegally when we share articles, as reported by Chris Spillane from POLITICO. Read more

A group of 37 professors and scholars of Intellectual Property, Information Law and Digital Economy have sent a joint letter to the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) presenting their view on the ancillary copyright for press publishers as proposed by the EU Commission. They advise the UK Government to oppose this proposal for various reasons. Read more

The three regional party associations of SPD, Die Linken and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, who will build the new government of the state of Berlin, have signed the coalition agreement for the next legislative period (2016-2021). Among many other things, the ancillary copyright for press publishers gets a mention. Read more

On November 28, the Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies (CEIPI) at the University of Strasbourg has published its opinion on the European Commission's copyright reform proposal which was introduced on September 14, 2016. The opinion was written by Professor Christophe Geiger, Oleksandr Bulayenko and Giancarlo Frosio who solely focused on the proposed introduction of neighbouring rights for press publishers in EU law. In their view, the negative effects of the proposal prevail. Read more

The ancillary copyright for press publishers is more and more often covered by German media recently. However, the choice of words differs tremendously: While conservative media worship the Holy Günther as their patron saint, the innovators identify the major risks deriving from his proposal and discuss them. Read more

Canada is infected. It took some time but now it is there. The very persistent thought that already overran Germany and Spain and is currently trying to subdue the European Union. Its name: Ancillary copyright for press publishers – or just the link tax. Read more

Yesterday, I was invited to speak at a public debate in the Press Club in Brussels. Main topic was the Commission’s proposal on the ancillary copyright. What I heard was a bunch of lies and a good measure of ignorance. Read more

It is always a great thing when politicians join the public discussion. Yesterday, EU-Commissioner Günther Oettinger tried to defend his proposal on an ancillary copyright for press publishers on Twitter. But what he let loose was enough to drive one to despair.

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EU-Commissioner Günther Oettinger gave a speech last Monday at the annual meeting of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV). There he explicitly called on the publishing houses to create more buzz in favor of his proposed ancillary copyright for press publishers/neighbouring right/link tax meaning he wants them to shush down their online magazines. Read more

Two weeks ago, Communia together with EDRi held the event "Copyright reform – unlocking copyright for users?" in the European Parliament. It was hosted by MEPs Comodini Cachia (EPP) and Carlos Zorrinho (S&D). Several represantatives of digital rights' organizations, publishers, creative industries, collecting societies and artists took part and discussed the future of copyright. Film maker Sebastiaan ter Burg asked some of the experts from civil society organizations for their view on the current copyright reform and later created this nice short video to show their answers: Read more

Today, the EU Commission has published its plans on introducing an ancillary copyright for basically any press publisher lasting a little over 20 years. Glyn Moody wrote an article published by ArsTechnika UK criticizing the draft. Read more

In late September, the EU Commission has initiated its public consultation on online platforms. To encourage everybody to speak his/her mind, there now is (another) online tool that facilitates the process of submitting your opinion to the Commission. Read more

Civil society and digital rights groups are sounding the alarm about a public consultation run by the European Commission on the role of online platforms, the result of which could be new copyright rules that would effectively shut down people’s right to freely link online. The 75,000-strong Save The Link network has created an Internet Voice Tool to send feedback to the Commission as part of their consultation. Read more

Yesterday, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament voted on the Report on the Copyright Directive by MEP Julia Reda. It was adopted with a broad majority: 23 votes in favour, only 2 against (Front National) and no abstention. Read more

On 16th June 2015, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee will vote on the report on the review of EU copyright rules. The report's author, MEP Julia Reda, calls on everybody to support her (good) work. Read more

Last week, Markus Keßler from Futurezone.at interviewed EU-Commissioner Günther Oettinger. Besides geoblocking, net neutrality and data preservation, the ancillary copyright for press publishers was also a topic on the list. Read more

Last week, several signatories sent an open letter to the coordinator of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright Reform at the European Parliament Jean-Marie Cavada. It calls for an inclusion of the civil society in the process to ensure a balanced representation of views. Read more

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. Read more

In her article published on The Digital Post, Caroline de Cock, Coordinator of the Copyright4Creativity (C4C) Coalition, claims that now is the time to fix European copyright law. And she is right. Read more