Comments-On-Reda-Report: tackling ISO circumvention btw?

[James Heald]

On 14/07/2015 08:35, Marius Jammes wrote:
> Dear Tom,
>
> On 10/07/15 01:06, Tom Blecher wrote:
>> -So even if ones (mine) picture of the legislation system of the EU is not that detailed, one understands that
>> they are updating the copy-right law once again on a original request of MEP Julia Reda, who is supposed to be from our own people, to say from german pirates-party. Right?
>
> The European Commission plans indeed to reform the copyright directive
> of 2001 [1] as part of the Digital Single Market strategy [2]. If I'm
> correct, that's the Commission which asked for the opinion of the
> European Parliament and made Reda responsible of the report.

Almost right.  The Commission has announced that it is aiming to bring 
forward legislation on the Digital Single Market this autumn.

The Reda report was created on Parliament's own initiative, to review 
the existing legislation, and give Parliament a chance to express an 
opinion for the Commission to consider.

By most accounts, the Commission is actually expected to propose rather 
little in the area of copyright reform -- its main focus is likely to be 
geoblocking / subscribed content portability; it would like to make a 
market for continent-wide licences of content more of a reality, but has 
had a lot of push-back from film-makers in particular who are used to 
selling a patchwork of territorial rights.

There may be possibility of moves towards harmonisation of some 
copyright exception from the Commission -- something on text & data 
mining is probably the most likely; but it may not go much further than 
that.  On the other hand, it does seem that there may now be little 
chance of the Commission proposing a "snippet tax" for news content, 
after such thoughts were strongly resisted by the Parliament, even 
though Oettinger had previously seemed quite responsive to some of the 
German media barons on this.

>
>> Question: Where is this report to be read? In the article they speak of each point of it but I can reach the text itself. Is that intended somehow, I ask. ?
>
> You can find the different versions of the report (draft presented by
> Reda, text as voted by the Committee and final version) on the European
> Parliament's website [3]. The final vote in plenary session took place
> on last July 9th.
>

Reda has a good presentation of the full text on her own website,
https://juliareda.eu/copyright-evaluation-report/full/

The report is not a legislative document, so more important than the 
detailed textual wording is the sense of where the parliament placed 
itself on various issues.  See Reda's summary here after the vote at the 
committee stage,
https://juliareda.eu/2015/06/reda-report-adopted-a-turning-point-in-the-copyright-debate/

It's possible that there might be a bit more support for reform in the 
parliament as a whole rather than in the legal affairs committee -- 
which is the committee that most attracts MEPs with an interest in 
'defending' intellectual property, and whose MEPs are the most courted 
on by rightsholder lobbyists.

But on the other hand Parliament can't vote legislatively on anything 
that has not first been proposed by the Commission.  (Reda's report was 
an opinion, not a legislative proposal).

Reda's most significant achievement, beyond the list of what did & 
didn't get into her report, was simply getting issues of copyright 
reform into public discussion over the last six months, while her report 
was on the agenda.  But going forward, the policy agenda will now be 
focussed on whatever propositions are in the Commission legislative 
proposal.


All best,

    James.