January 8 Creative Commons Policy Roundup

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Timothy Vollmer

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Jan 8, 2018, 6:54:57 PM1/8/18
to CC Staff, CC Affiliates, copyrigh...@creativecommons.email, iol-n...@googlegroups.com, Open Policy Network, pol...@wikimedia.de
Welcome to 2018. 


Seven ways to save the EU copyright reform effort in 2018
We're now 3 years into the copyright reform process in the EU. Here's what needs to happen in 2018 (with egregious over-use of the exclamation point): 
1. The publishers right must die!
2. Real legal certainty for Text and Data mining!
3. No censorship filters for online platforms!
4. Copyright rules for education that work!
5. Get Europe’s cultural heritage online now!
6. No new unwaivable remuneration rights!
7. Include some real pan European user rights!


How Europe's New Internet Laws Threaten Freedom of Expression
David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, writes in Foreign Affairs about law and the technology companies that are developing tools and platform regulation that affects speech online. 
 The cost of such private adjudication, at the enormous scale that search requires to be effective, in all likelihood prices out start-ups and innovators in the search field, which Google dominates with ease."


Commission to scientists: Stop ruining our copyright plans with your facts and your research!
The European Commission is suppressing research on the press publishers right that it paid for—apparently because the results do not align with its preferred support for the right. This is political corruption and flies in the face of the evidence-based policymaking it purports to uphold. 


Upload Filters are Already Broken
http://copy-me.org/2017/12/upload-filters-already-broken/
Copy Me received a grant from the Create Refresh campaign and produced a cool 3 minute video about how today’s filters censor and take down legal content without any repercussions.


Know your limit: The Canadian copyright review in the age of technological disruption
Michael Geist op-ed on Canadian copyright reform: "market disruption often drives copyright reform, the law may not always be the best tool to address the current state of technology-driven change. The ministers note that many issues fall outside the scope of the law, suggesting that efforts to use legal tools to impede changing dynamics in the marketplace may ultimately harm the very stakeholders the law is intended to assist."


Australia has made some excellent positive copyright reform progress in 2017. The Copyright Amendment Disability Access and Other Measures Act of 2017 (CADM) was introduced in June and became law last month. The new law includes a number of reforms that have been sought by the education sector for years, including: 
  • A new exception for preservation of library and archive collections that replaces the current confusing and paradoxical exceptions and removes (almost) all restrictions;
  • Much needed simplification of the statutory licence for education, making it more efficient and effective for rights holders and educational institutions alike; and
  • Ending the antiquated concept of perpetual copyright for unpublished works, and setting a fixed copyright term for works whose authors are unknown.

Facebook transparency report: intellectual property
There's likely not too much interesting information to be gleaned from this from a copyright perspective since the categories are quite general--it just notes whether content was taken down (in whole or in part) or not based on their complaint system. It shows that from Jan 2017 to July 2017 facebook took down (in whole or in part) 68% of the content after receiving a copyright complaint about it via their reporting system. 


Mercosur-EU Free Trade Agreement: a bad deal for the public domain
The EU is engaged in secret (typical) negotiations with the Mercosur trading bloc, and pushing for increased restrictions on intellectual property rights. Jorge Gemetto says the Mercosur countries shouldn't give into adopting TRIPS-plus copyright policies in exchange for a mention of supporting user rights and the public domain. 
Of course, if the Mercosur-EU FTA is signed and enters into force, it is desirable that it be as least harmful as possible for the public domain, even if it extends the terms and scope of knowledge privatization, and set new penalties. If some new mandatory exceptions to copyright are included in the FTA, the public domain activists of the Mercosur and European Union countries will take advantage of them. But it is necessary to keep in mind that it is never a good deal to exchange highly damaging TRIPS plus measures for other less comprehensive clauses which would benefit the public domain only in a minor fashion.


Governments Must Provide More Transparency In Trade Negotiations, Coalition Says At IGF
At the IGF meeting in Geneva and the end of 2017 a group of civil society organisations working together as the "Dynamic Coalition on Trade and the Internet" released a position statement calling for better transparency in how trade talks are conducted. Among its points: 
  • Countries should publish their own textual proposals on rules in ongoing international trade negotiations at the same time as these proposals are presented to their negotiating partners.
  • Countries engaged in trade negotiations should agree to publish consolidated texts after each round of ongoing negotiations.
  • Trade ministries should act transparently by publishing records of their meetings with stakeholders, and should be overseen by an independent transparency officer, subject to statutory confidentiality and non-disclosure standards.
  • Domestic consultations on textual proposals should be opened up to the public through on-the-record notice and comment, and public hearing processes at relevant points during the development of textual proposals.
  • Countries should make trade advisory bodies more balanced by taking proactive steps to include more diverse legitimate stakeholders such as representatives of Internet users, and organisations working in the areas of human rights, development, media, and consumer issues.

Open access in Germany: the best DEAL is no deal
"Researchers are, then, not price-sensitive (as they are not the ones paying the bill) and, moreover, they are typically price-ignorant. But this is not the only factor causing them to publish in overly expensive journals. Their main motivation is to publish with the journals that are most likely to advance their careers. Because of the self-reinforcing circle of journals that have existing prestige being favoured when researchers submit articles, which further inflates those journals’ prestige, the legacy subscription-based publishers have been able to steadily increase their prices, funnelling a larger and larger stream from public purses into their shareholders’ wallets."


Copyright Forms, Creative Commons and (Not So) Open Access
Leonhard Dobusch—a researcher, economist, and frequent commenter on copyright matters took a look at the publishing workflow for SAGE, and discovered that the wording, help text, and triggers in the path to publication could be affecting how researchers are publishing (or not) their works as open access. 
Why should only authors be allowed to opt for the less restrictive CC BY license “if required by funding institution”? And why should “all other funded authors […] select the CC BY NC 4.0 license”? At least, it should be the authors choice, given that open access clauses are remunerated in the respective deals."


Napster vs. Record Labels, Sci-Hub vs. Publishers, Part 2: Differences
"When people created and distributed illegal copies of music albums, it didn’t only take money out of the coffers of record labels — it also took money out of the pockets of the musicians who created the music sold by record labels, and who received royalties based on sales. (Exactly how much money it took from them is open to debate, since it has never been clear what percentage of the people who were willing to download albums for free from Napster would have bought legitimate copies of those same albums in the absence of Napster.) But the same isn’t true for authors of scholarly papers that are pirated on Sci-Hub. The authors of those papers aren’t paid by publishers, and so their pocketbooks don’t tend to be directly affected by piracy of their work. (The same is not true of scholarly books that are pirated on Libgen, Sci-Hub’s sister site. Lost book sales do have a direct financial impact on authors.)"


Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again
MPAA and RIAA don't want to retroactively extend copyright terms. 

And even some content creators aren't keen on ever-longer copyright terms. The Author's Guild, for example, "does not support extending the copyright term, especially since many of our members benefit from having access to a thriving and substantial public domain of older works," a Guild spokeswoman told Ars in an email. "If anything, we would likely support a rollback to a term of life-plus-50 if it were politically feasible."

Why? 

"There's now a broad grassroots engagement on copyright issues—something that became evident with the massive online protests against the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012. SOPA would have forced ISPs to enforce DNS-based blacklists of sites accused of promoting piracy. It was such a bad idea that Wikipedia, Google, and other major sites blacked themselves out in protest. The digital rights activist group Demand Progress emerged from the SOPA fight and has gone on to play a key role organizing protests over network neutrality and other issues. The protest against SOPA "was a big show of force," says Meredith Rose, a lawyer at Public Knowledge. The protest showed that "the public really cares about this stuff."


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