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For those of you who don't know me, yes,
I'm Julia, and yes, I am a politician.
I was elected earlier this year
for the German Pirate Party to the
European Parliament, and it's really
a great honor to be able to speak here,
especially because I know that my
profession does not always have the
greatest reputation among
hackers.
I think there is good reason for that.
Our democratic institutions all
across the world are facing
a legitimacy crisis.
And I have great respect for everybody
who chooses to try to bring about
societal change through direct,
uh, through direct action, through
hacking. But I'm hoping that with
my talk, I can show you that at least
in some areas like copyright, there
really is good reason and there is hope
to try to engage in the more
traditional political institutions
like parliaments and really get involved
in the political process to try
and change things for the better.
I'm not going to talk a lot
about file sharing and about the reasons
that the Pirate Party came about and
what's wrong with copyright
in general. I think a lot of you have
heard quite a lot about this.
What I really want to focus on in this
talk is what in particular is wrong
with the EU copyright system that we
have today,
because you see there
are two legal traditions
underlying the European copyright.
On the one hand, we have the
Anglo American tradition of copyright,
which includes the fair
use clause, which means that
the exceptions from copyright are
interpreted by judges
who are weighing the protection of rights
holders against the interests of the
public in court rulings.
There's the other legal tradition
underlying the EU copyright system, which
is the continental European tradition
of what auteur or
authors rights in this system.
The authors of cultural works
have certain inalienable rights that
they cannot sell to right Holder
and importantly, the exceptions
to copyright.
The interests of the public are written
into the law, and
both of these systems have some problems
and some critics are.
Critics of the American value system
argue that it is
kind of intransparent because when
you are using a cultural work, sometimes
you cannot be exactly sure whether what
you are doing is actually lawful
or not. And some people say that
it's biased in favor of people who can
afford to go to the courts
if there really is a disagreement about
the interpretation of free use.
On the other hand.
The problem with the continental system
is that it is quite inflexible because
every time and you use a new
technological development comes about,
you actually have to go and change the
law if you want to allow this
type of use without
a copyright infringement.
So everything new that every
new way of dealing with culture is
forbidden by default and you actually
have to change the law to make
it legal.
So what the European Union
has done in its copyright directive
of 2001 is really to
create the worst of both worlds, to take
the bad parts of both of these systems.
In the European Union.
We have a system that is
inflexible because we don't have a fair
use exception that would allow us to
adapt quickly to new technological
developments and new types of using
culture.
But it is also intransparent because
the European Union has managed to
only harmonize the interests of the
right holders and to create minimum
standards for the protection of copyright
in every European country.
But they have failed to harmonize
the rights of the public, and they have
not created minimum standards
of users rights.
Instead, what you have in the European
Copyright Directive is a list of 20
optional exceptions to copyright.
So, for example, for educational
use or for citation, for
parody, every single member state
gets to decide themselves whether they
actually want to implement this
copyright exception into that national
law or not.
So if you can calculate, like Samari
McCarthy has done in a paper,
there are actually over two million
different ways of combining these 20
optional exceptions.
And therefore it's extremely unlikely
to find two European countries that
actually have exactly the same copyright
rules. And now if you're dealing with
cultural content on the Internet and
trying to communicate across borders or
even offer a service in more than one
country, it's you really have to
be a copyright lawyer to understand
what is actually legal and what is not.
All of this sounds a little bit abstract.
So I want to give you just five
examples of how this.
System is really to the detriment
of regular people who are dealing with
culture on the Internet.
The first is the case
of an exception to copyright
called freedom of Panorama that
has not been implemented
in the majority of European states.
Freedom of Panorama simply means that
if you are standing in a public place and
taking a picture of a building, you can
do anything with this picture, regardless
of the copyright of the architect
who actually built this place.
A lot of European countries actually the
majority don't have this copyright
exception, which means that if you travel
to France, you take a picture of the
European Parliament building in
Strasbourg and want to put it on the
Internet. You actually need permission
for that.
So this is clearly kind
of counterintuitive because the
parliament should be a public building
that is everybody is able
to see and to take pictures off.
And so Wikipedia actually
approached the parliament administration
and said, hey, we want to show the people
what the parliament looks like.
Can we use a picture?
And the parliament administration
said, sure.
The problem is it turned out that the
European Parliament administration
actually didn't have the rights to
allow this.
So.
So when they found this out, what
Wikipedia did was this.
This is one of the pictures used
in the article about the parliament
and what you can see here are the flags
in front of the parliament and
the parliament building just happens to
be in the background, but
it's not the object of this picture.
So therefore, it does not violate
the copyright of the architect.
Whether this interpretation would
actually hold up in court
is kind of open to question,
but the thing is,
it's extremely unlikely that anybody
is ever actually going to take this to
court. And this is an example
that really shows kind of the core
problem that we have with copyright in
the EU, that the system is
so complicated and so archaic
that everybody from
people to companies to public
institutions like the European Parliament
itself, everybody is violating
copyright on a regular basis,
often without even knowing it.
And the only reason that the system
hasn't collapsed is that the vast
majority of creators actually don't
enforce their rights.
So.
This is just one example of such a
copyright exception that is often not
implemented, and you would think
that you have a better situation
with the copyright exception that exists
more or less everywhere, like the
exception for parody.
Most countries have some sort of
copyright exception to parody because
it's really important for free speech
to be able to show, for example, a public
figure and make fun of them.
This is a picture that I used when
the new digital commissioner, Günter
Etlinger, was speaking in
front of the parliament.
And this was a hearing
that was live streamed.
And I was using this on social media to
draw attention to it and to get
people to suggest good questions
to him. So in this picture,
I'm making a reference, of course,
to the slogan Winter is coming
from Game of Thrones.
And depending on which European
country you are, there are different
definitions of what parody actually is.
So in some member states, they argue
that a parody
is only exempt from copyright
if the copyright holder
is actually the person that you are
making fun of.
So here I am parodying Gunter
Etinger, but I'm using material from
the HBO show Game of Thrones
and therefore it would not be covered by
the copyright exception for parody in
some countries, but in others it is.
So if I share this on my Twitter account
and people from different European
countries are sharing it, which would
be my ideal scenario for a
European public, some of them would be
violating copyright laws.
Others of them wouldn't.
Sorry to everybody who retweeted this.
Another area where
the European system is particularly
vested against the interests of the
public is the copyright terms, as
you can see on this map.
This is not a problem exclusive to
the EU at all.
Pretty much all over the world.
We have relatively long copyright
terms in the EU.
It was lengthened to 70 years after death
back in the 90s before it was 50
years after death.
But once again, the European Union has
only set a minimum standard, but not
a maximum. So the rights of the right
holders are protected.
The rights of the public to have access
to information are not so.
One country like Spain can
simply choose to have an even higher
copyright term length.
This problem is particularly
difficult because we are trying to get
kind of a European common cultural
heritage and have institutions
that are actively working on this.
So take, for example, Europeana,
which is an online archive of
digitized cultural heritage
from the European Union.
And when you look at the material
that they have digitized and put in their
archive, you see something that is
referred to as the 20th century black
hole, which means that there
are significantly less
works from the mid to late
20th century than before and
after it.
This is because with pretty
old works, you can be relatively sure
that they are in the public domain and
then you can digitize them.
And with the new works, you usually know
who made them. And it's relatively easy
to contact the rights holders and to
come to some sort of agreement with them.
But in the space between,
there is a huge number of works
that are no longer commercially
exploited.
There is no way of reaching the rights
holder and actually paying them for using
this work.
But it's still covered by copyright.
So a public institution cannot simply
use these works.
And this problem is
once again exacerbated by the
complicated system that we have in the EU
because every single member state still
insists on having their own copyright
terms and having own specific
rules for that.
So what you see here is about
one fourth of the decision
tree that you have to go to
to determine whether a European
work is in the public domain or not.
Um.
This is clearly not something
that an average person can can navigate
through, and it's not
enough in a lot of cases to know
who the right order is and to know when
they died.
In some countries like Romania,
you have to know how old the children
of the author were at the time of his or
her death.
You also have to know whether
the author died in the first or Second
World War for the country of France
to be able to to find out how long
the copyright term is.
So another example
where the European Union is not
protecting the rights of the public,
in 2009, the Charter
of Fundamental Rights of the EU came into
force and one of those fundamental rights
is access to information.
However, the European Union has
so far made no attempts
to actually enforce this against
our member states. So, for example,
there is no requirement to actually
put official works that are created by
the state into the public domain.
This is different in the US.
The picture you can see here is called
Earthrise is and is from an
mission. And because Naza
is a public agency in the United
States, this kind of work automatically
enters the public domain.
There's no copyright on it.
Everybody can use it.
And I think that's probably also one of
the reasons why this picture has become
such an iconic picture of our
common cultural history.
In my home country of Germany,
there has been some analysis of
whether the country actually
benefits commercially from having this
copyright.
And it turns out that it doesn't.
Actually, the bureaucracy of licensing
such public works is
as big as kind of the revenue that they
get from it.
And in a lot of cases,
it's simply one public agency licensing
pictures or other works to another
agency.
And it's just creates kind
of a bureaucratic overhead
and you're shuffling public money from
one pocket to another.
So if there is no
financial benefit of having
this copyright on
public works, there may be other reasons.
And one of the speakers
here, Stephane Valmir, recently
put a Freedom of Information request to
the German government requesting
access to an internal document
where the government
was asking the lawyers of the ministry
to determine whether a certain proposal
for a law would be constitutional or not.
And because the lawyer
said it's probably unconstitutional,
actually having this public is quite
embarrassing for the government.
So when he made this Freedom of
Information request, they were required
by law to give him this information.
But they also said that he cannot put it
on the line for everybody to see
because that would violate the copyright
of the lawyers who wrote it.
I don't think this is a case of securing
an artist's livelihood or anything
like this. I think the lawyers are very
well compensated for the work by
the state in the first place.
So clearly, this is
an example of the state trying
to exercise control over
uncomfortable information and using
copyright as a censorship tool.
I think in the end, Stephane won
in court and the court decided that he
had every right to publish this document
online.
But still, if we didn't have
copyright on official works, we wouldn't
have this problem in the first place.
Just one last example of blatant
copyright infringement on this slide,
even though the Copyright Directive
of 2001 claims to be
bringing copyright to the digital age,
harmonizing everything
to make it possible to exchange cultural
online, it actually has nothing
dealing with kind of modern forms
of using creative content
on the Internet.
So if you use a reaction give from
a public, from a popular
movie or something like that, you're
committing a copyright infringement,
even though it's really hard to believe
that there is any economic
damage to the actual authoress because
nobody decides to no longer
go to the movie because they saw a
reaction gif and now they feel like they
know the gist of the movie.
And on the contrary, actually,
the sports industry in particular
has made it a business model to build
trackers and look for gifts from
from football games and then to
systematically find their friends.
So the reason that
we haven't seen a change in this area is
probably more that it's beneficial to the
rights holders to be able to criminalize
people then that it's actually kind
of that there is a good reason to give
creators this right.
So overall, the
European situation for copyright looks
relatively bleak.
But when I
ran for the European Parliament, changing
this 2001 copyright directive
was actually one of my biggest
goals. And I feel like I have actually
been elected at exactly the right time
to do something about that.
And the reason for that
is actually mostly thanks to
you.
Back in 2012, people
in the European institutions really
started noticing that something
must be wrong with a copyright system.
If all of a sudden tens of thousands
of people are taking to the streets
against the anti counterfeiting trade
agreement ACTA and.
Yeah, it was really the combination of
like minded people working inside the
parliament to defeat ACTA and
the protests on the street that made
sure that in the end the European
Parliament voted against ACTA and
made sure that it never came into force.
So some people in the European
institutions have really started
realizing that
now that we have managed to kind of
make things stop getting worse for a
while, that we may actually
have a chance to change things for the
better. So one of the old
commissioners from the commission that
was in office until
November of this year, Neelie
Kroes, said in a speech
that the
current copyright system, as I was
explaining, is so fragmented
and inflexible that it has
become completely irrelevant to people's
lives.
Nobody is able to follow it.
Nobody cares whether they follow it.
And of course, this quote was immediately
turned around by copyright lobbyists who
said that Neelie Kroes had said that
the cultural work of creators was
irrelevant and were attacking her for
this.
She wasn't actually directly in charge of
the area of copyright, but even
the people in the commission who were
working on this issue were starting
to to move a bit.
So last year, around this time,
the European Commission was doing a
public consultation on copyright, asking
everybody who is affected by copyright
to give them their opinions about
what is wrong with the current rules.
So the way this worked is they
put online, worked a word
document with 80 questions,
and you could download it, fill
in the answers to the question and send
it back to them by email.
By the way, questions only available in
English.
So the EU expected that this
is kind of a very academic exercise.
Maybe there would get a few hundred
responses, mostly from professional
organizations.
Here is what they got instead.
Um, this is
the number of participants in several
public consultations.
And you can see that there is a huge
relationship between whether or not
such a consultation can be
filled up in online
and is aimed at the general public
or whether it's just such a document.
So out of all the public consultations
ever done that we're just kind of a
document put on the website.
The copyright consultation by far
was the one that received the most
responses.
And it all in all, it was over
9000 and
incidentally
and about half of them actually
came from end users of
the Internet.
One of the reasons.
One of the reasons this came about is
because developers started
building free software that you could
use to make it easier to reply to this
consultation, and
it was actually at a workshop at the 30
C3 where the project copy wrongs
that you were started, which was
using such a free software architecture
to build an online forum that would
really guide you through the questions,
like if you want YouTube videos
to stop being blocked, go to question
number 20 or whatever and
really explain kind of the technical
terms behind it and make it really easy
for average people to reply to this
consultation.
This exercise was actually so successful
that the free software that was built
and and released on GitHub
was actually used by collecting societies
to then mobilize their members to also
reply to the consultation.
So I think this is a very great example
of kind of collaborating and using
access to free knowledge to be able
to amplify the public debate about
politics.
And the European Commission has
also noted that this has really improved
kind of the general participation
in this debate and really added to
the results that they have received.
Because in a lot of copyright debates,
what you usually have is that the users
of the Internet, the file shares are
being blamed.
The artists are being used as kind
of the reason for a lot of
demands and in
but usually not by the people who are
actually the object of these
discussions.
So in the answers to the consultation, we
have a great
opportunity because the two groups that
actually replied the most were users
and artists.
So exactly the ones that are always
invoked in these discussions, but where
we never hear what they actually are
thinking, what their actual problems are.
So what we found is
that on the one hand, you have
users that is mostly
regular Internet users, but it also
includes libraries, public
archives, universities and so on that
have to deal with copyright.
They are all pretty much across
the board saying that European copyright
needs to be reformed and it needs to
be reformed by law.
On the other end of the spectrum,
you have rights holders like publishers,
public broadcasters, private broadcasters
and collecting societies that
are all saying that everything is fine
with the current system and they don't
want a legal reform.
And interestingly, the artists are
actually caught in the middle.
They do see some areas where they
have problems with the current copyright
law. Sometimes they agree with the users,
sometimes they agree with the rights
holders.
And if the commission
actually wants to go and do a reform,
it's quite clear in which direction this
reform would have to go, because one side
of the debate, the rights holders,
actually doesn't want to change pretty
much anything at all.
So it's quite encouraging
to see that the new commission actually
does want reform.
I was quite surprised to see when
the new commission president, Jean-Claude
Juncker, was running for a commission
president. He had a five point plan
in his election campaign.
And it was actually in point one
that he mentioned copyright reform.
If you look at this quote from when
he appeared in front of the European
Parliament a couple of years ago,
this kind of statement would have been
revolutionary, that a conservative
politician comes out and admits
that under certain circumstances,
copyright can actually be harmful.
And now if you look at the commission
work program for next year,
they have said that they are going to
come out with a new proposal in 2015.
So we're expecting to see something quite
soon.
And what Juncker
also did is he moved the responsibility
for copyright from the economic
department of the commission to the
digital department.
So this can also give you a bit of an
idea of which direction this reform
is supposed to take.
Of course, we were all quite curious to
see who in the commission would be
responsible for this.
So when Jean-Claude Juncker
revealed his new cabinet, we were really
kind of, well, scared or disappointed.
We saw that the Vice-President
responsible for digital affairs
was Andrus Ansip, the former
prime ministers of Estonia.
Honestly, I didn't know much about him at
the time, except that
he was a huge supporter of ACTA
back in 2012 and had called the people
who were protesting it tinfoil hats.
But we were really surprised that when he
actually came to the European Parliament
for his hearing, he said stuff
like this, I'm against geo blocking.
It just isn't fair.
He also said that all the
software funded by the.
Union should be open source, he also
said that people should have access to
any cultural content that they paid for,
either directly or through taxes.
So really quite some revolutionary
statements there and.
I was sitting there with one of
my colleagues and when he was kind
of giving a short history of
one to five, do you roll out
in the European Union?
He turned to me and said he is actually
kind of a nerd.
And it was kind of
yeah, like in his statement
to the parliament, where he was asked
whether he is qualified to the for the
job he kind of listed.
Yeah, I'm not really a programmer
or anything, but I've learned these
languages in school.
And so kind of he's
he seems to be at least aware of
of what this topic is about.
So at the same time,
the European Parliament has now started
looking at the old copyright directive,
and they have actually put me in charge
of writing their report about what
is wrong with current copyright laws.
So that means I'm the rapporteur
for the review of the copyright directive
from 2001, I will
be publishing my draft report
in a few weeks, and then it will be my
job to negotiate with
the shadow rapporteurs of the other
groups in the European Parliament to
hopefully come to a consensus text.
That one will then be adopted later
this year and will go into
the new proposal for a European
copyright reform.
And I think we really have a unique
opportunity here to shift the focus
from a copyright that has
ever been expanding its scope and ever
having more zealous enforcement
of copyright rules to
actually getting the European Union to
to enforce and to put into law
a minimum rights of users, minimum
rights of the public about what we
should have a right to do with cultural
works.
And so I think for the
first time, we really have the chance to
turn things around and not just stop kind
of bad laws from being adopted,
but actually change things for the
better.
So how could something like this look
like? Well, one way
of achieving this shift is actually to
replace the 28 national
copyright system with the European
copyright title.
This may sound pretty crazy
or a bit scary at first, but
I think we all have a lot of experience
with how difficult it is to reform
a very complex, already existing
system and to apply patches
to it when really the fundamental
problems with it lie in
its structure. So if we actually went
this direction and go for a European
copyright, we have the chance to start
with a blank slate.
And at least I think we would not
end up with the very
crazy parts
of the current copyright law that say,
for example, that, yeah, you can
look at an e-book from a public library,
but you actually have to go to the
library and go to a special reading
terminal. And only as many people
can look at the e-book as there are
physical copies in the library
and so on. So I think if you actually
start from scratch and write something
new, it would probably be a lot
more adapted to the Internet
and to the digital world we live in right
now. And also what they cannot do with
the European copyright is kind of
harmonize the rights of the right
holders, but leave the
rights of the public completely optional.
So either you have a right to
parody or to freedom of Panorama
or you don't.
But it would be more well,
it would be easier to exchange culture
across borders.
So definitely
a European copyright could put an end to
geo blocking based on European IP
addresses. So no more.
This video is not available in your
country if you travel from Germany to
Austria and we can
actually enshrine into law a user's
right to access culture across
national borders, we
have the chance to stop the ever
infinite increase in the length of
copyright terms and for the first time
in history, actually turn things around
and reduce them.
We can put an end
to to digital
restrictions on works that
we have actually bought legally.
Um.
Under the current copyright
directive of the European Union,
it is illegal to circumvent
digital protections even if you actually
have a right through a copyright
exception to use this work.
So, for example, a lot of European
countries have a right to private
copy, which is connected
to an author's right to get some money
for it. So a lot of European countries
have something where, OK, you're allowed
to make private copies, but you have to
pay a levy on every hard disk
you buy. But actually, we have a crazy
situation right now where everybody is
forced to pay these levies.
But if you actually want to make a
private copy and there is a technological
protection measure on this work, you
are breaking the law if you're actually
circumventing this.
So this is something that really needs to
change. And I think it's not
too much to ask that if you have a
copyright exception, it's a user's right
to actually exercise this exception
and you cannot use technical protections
to keep people from doing that.
I think we can use this copyright
reform to include some sort
of a flexible norm, like the fair use
clause in the United States to make
the European copyright more flexible, to
react to technological changes.
This is especially important because
European legislation is really slow.
The 2001 directive that we are working
with now was passed at a time
when there was no YouTube, no Facebook,
and it actually talks in its text
about CD-ROMs.
So you can see how these kinds of things
can really get outdated quite quickly.
So we can use
this reform to achieve a shift
from a read only culture that looks
at the Internet as a distribution
medium of offers that are
professional creators to read
and write a culture where every
participant in the Internet is both
a creator and a consumer at the same
time, and create
copyright laws that no longer
try to protect existing business
models, but actually foster new
creation, including
the right to remix.
So I think now is really our best chance
to make these changes, because the
European Commission has committed
to putting something out next year,
but there is just one little
problem.
I in in the European Parliament
cannot actually write
such a draft law.
The proposal for the new European
copyright law will have to come out of
the European Commission.
And the commissioner, who is most likely
going to be drafting this text
is the digital gun toting,
the digital commissioner, Gunter
Attinger, who is below
the digital vice president and was
Ansip.
And everything that Uttinger has said so
far is not exactly
encouraging.
His favorite public
enemy is Google.
So in this article,
an interview with Spiegel saying
we can force Google, what he's talking
about is we can force Google to pay for
all kinds of things.
So in an interview, he said
that Google should pay for cultural
content.
And this is something that has been
tried recently in Germany and in
Spain and has really backfired
spectacularly
in Germany.
A couple of years ago, press publishers
lobbied for the so-called ancillary
copyright for press publishers, which
means that aggregators like Google
would have to pay if they want to use
parts of publicly available newspaper
articles in a service like Google News,
for example.
So Google's reaction to that, of
course, was, well, they
looked at which publishers were actually
asking for this fine.
A lot of publishers simply said
that Google can use that content for free
because they're actually getting their
visitors from Google News.
And so it would be kind of a mutually
beneficial situation.
But some large publishers, like
excerpting out, for example, were
insisting to have Google pay for this
content.
So Google simply started
listing the pictures from those articles
and snippets from them and only showed
the headlines.
And, well, not surprisingly,
the traffic to these publishers
websites plummeted.
And very quickly, they gave
Google a free license to use their
content anyway because they realized
that they were benefiting from this more
than Google was.
So then they went to the German
antitrust authority and said that Google
was abusing its dominant market position
by forcing them to give them a free
license.
And the German antitrust authority
said, well, it's not an antitrust
problem that you cannot force a company
to pay for something it doesn't want
in. In Spain, they tried to fix this
problem by introducing a similar
law as the German one.
But the only exception is that they made
this ancillary copyright an inalienable
right, which means even if a publisher
wants you to use their content for free,
they are not allowed to allow this to
you. So they have to charge a fine.
So what Google did is that they shut down
Google News in Spain and
now the Spanish publishers are facing
a decline in
visitors to their website and they are
calling on the Spanish government to
intervene to either force Google
to, uh, well, use
Google News in Spain or to actually
repeal this law.
At the same time, German publishers are
calling for the Spanish law to be
implemented in Germany.
Um, so
good at getting out when you were
speaking in front of German publishers,
has promised that he would try to
introduce something like this on a
European level because clearly Google
won't shut down Google News in all of
Europe. Or maybe they will.
We'll see.
But, yeah, this is kind of one
of the ideas that, uh, Gunter
Etinger has come up with so far.
And I think that's really quite
disconcerting because the side
effects of this are, of course,
absolutely devastating, because
a company like Google, if they really
wanted to, they could, of course, afford
to pay publishers, although I don't see
why they would.
But if you're a small aggregator, if
you're a competitor to Google or a simply
a blogger who is
doing reviews of press
articles or something like that,
you are affected by this law and it's
basically putting a price tag
on embedded linking and thereby
really is a problem
for free speech and is
endangering
the the very structure
of the Internet.
Um, but yeah.
So that makes it all the more evident
that Attinger is really in need of being
fed some good ideas about copyright
by the people who are actually affected
by it, which is you.
And, uh, right now I think.
Is mostly being approached by large
German publishing houses, and this is
probably not the best advice to get,
and it is, of course, a difficult
situation when we are we have
a copyright reform that is being reported
about by news publishers
who at the same time have a commercial
interest in this area.
And that makes it all the more important
to have alternative sources of
information and to have a public debate
about this copyright reform taking
place aside from the traditional
newspapers, and to really put
this to debate online.
So most of the voices
in the Brussels bubble, most of the
lobbyists do not want any change
at all. And they are really
not on our side on this.
So this is a letter
that's some of my colleagues from the
German Green Party and the German Social
Democrats got in the parliament,
which was complaining that they were
considering making me the rapporteur
for the copyright reform and saying
it would be a slap in the face of any
creator and it might damage
the trust in the German Social Democrats.
So but to
their credit, the Social Democrats
and the Greens were actually absolutely
unfazed by this, and they were
almost offended that a lobbyist would
actually go as far and kind of
give them advice of the internal workings
of the parliament.
So, yeah, maybe this is the first time
the spidy gets credit at a
C.C.C. Congress.
So
but the lobby group behind
this letter actually Composers' Club,
they were known as C.C.C.
Commercial Composers' Club until 1999.
And then they decided they needed a
rebranding.
Now they are called CESI.
I don't think they have a lot of luck
with names.
French copyright lobby is also quite
active. So I was a bit surprised when all
of a sudden the French minister of
culture and communication did a speech
in which she complained that I was the
rapporteur for the copyright
reform.
Out of the 751
members of the parliament, they picked
the one pirate and
that well, she didn't think that I would
be able to kind of the lead
a serious discussion about
this important topic.
And it's kind of sad
if she thinks that that so far she has
not replied to my invitation to actually
sit down with her and have a serious
discussion about copyright.
But this is still kind of one of the more
harmless attacks that
I'm getting from France.
There was an article in the French
Huffington Post in
which I was compared to a bank robber
and a fraudster.
And I guess next thing, they're going to
call me a pirate.
And well, there's this French
lobbyist who gets to write in The
Huffington Post argues that
there's a conspiracy between me and
Günther Oettinger and that
he actually made me the rapporteur for
copyright reform.
Of course, the commission has absolutely
no influence on who becomes
rapporteur, but for them, it's kind of
enough evidence of a German
conspiracy that, well, he's German.
I'm German.
We both want some sort of copyright
reform. So clearly, we
must follow a secret common agenda.
This is a breakdown of the
about 80 meeting requests I
have gotten around copyright so far.
I have broken them down into different
groups of the publishers and kormos, that
collective management organizations,
broadcasters, newspaper publishers,
producers of record labels and so
on, that really are the vast majority
of of lobbyists that contact me in
Brussels.
There are also quite a few service
providers. So ISPs
in some cases that are worried about
liability, but also
providers of online streaming services
and so on.
I got relatively,
well, at least a few requests
from actual users or their
representatives.
So that's library associations.
Some of the digital rights organizations,
the authorities is
kind of the European Commission or
the copyright office of particular member
states.
And very, very few authors
actually represent themselves as
lobbyists.
They are almost almost always represented
by collecting societies in
lobbyism. So whenever
there is a difference of opinion between
the authors and the collecting societies,
it will be the voice of the collecting
societies that is transported
to the politicians.
And I really think this is a structural
problem.
So this really shows that, well,
if we want kind of a balanced picture
of what's going on with copyright,
the digital rights organizations that
you were involved in, or you personally
really feel free to get in contact with
the various people in the commission and
in the parliament who are working on
these issues.
It's really not that difficult to
get to a meeting. I think a lot of the
challenges are more a kind of a
financial that, well,
wealthy organizations have an easier time
to employ somebody full time to go to
Brussels. But if you have a chance
to contact them or have some time to
spend on that, it's really a large help.
About half of the meetings
I have actually said yes to.
So these are the lobby meetings that I
attended. I'm trying to
really make an effort to make
this more balanced, to see about,
well, a relatively
equal number of lobbyists from the
different groups that are involved in
this. And I'm also going to publish a
detailed list of who this is exactly
that I met with and also everybody who
made a request to meet me.
But, yeah, at the end of the day, I think
a lot of the other parliamentarians
working with copyright will be confronted
with more or less the same picture.
I think they will get probably
significantly less the
lobby meetings with users,
representatives or digital rights
organizations, because a lot of them
I talked to because they know me.
And so we meet anyway.
But I include this in my transparency
report so that it's not kind
of a loophole.
So, yeah, I think for for the people
who are not actively trying to achieve
this balance, they are going to get
a lot of more voices from the rights
holders.
So what this may lead to is kind of a
typical Brussels compromise.
The European Commission does want to
reform copyright, but they are
afraid of the pressure that is coming,
especially from the collective management
organizations, from the publishers,
and they will try to please them somehow.
And what is
well, one danger of what is going to
happen is that they are just going to
apply a few patches here and there,
but not address any of the real
structural problems that we have.
So we really need to kind
of get into this debate and also give the
European Commission for once some
political support that they can
actually justify making
some more radical changes.
So what does that mean in practice?
Well, one of the most important things is
to bring this issue into the public
debate and also discuss about
the copyright system that you would want
to see. So if you find this idea
of a European copyright convincing,
there are some academics who put work
into that. Who did the copyright
code that you
which is one example
of what such a European copyright could
look like, a blog about that kind
of stuff, make films about the problems
with copyright, do theater about
them, and keep bugging your
politicians, your local politicians on
this issue.
Probably the biggest problem that we face
is that simply taking to the streets
like we did with ACTA is not going to
do anything here.
It's comparatively easy to build
a movement against something and to
stop a bad law from being
put into place.
But it is a lot.
More difficult to actually mobilize
a community, to build a movement in favor
of something, and
I think it's possible, but we really need
to not only complain, but to be willing
to actually find solutions and to
compromise with the other political
voices that are in on this
debate. And it will be my job
in the parliament to find a solution
that is acceptable for everybody.
But I really need you to be loud and to
voice the ideas of
Internet users and of the hacker
community about what the European
copyright should look like.
So this is what's going to happen in the
next couple of months.
In January, I'm going to
publish my draft report.
So right now is the time to lobby me.
I will be around here for the rest of the
Congress. So please
feel free to approach me to come to my
workshop and to give me some ideas
about what
my report should contain.
So if you have problems
that you experience in your own country
that could be solved through European
copyright and that you
haven't already submitted to the
to the consultation, please tell
me all about it.
And then in the next couple of months,
there will be discussions in several
committees in the European Parliament.
We are going to write an opinion on my
report.
All of these opinions will also have a
rapporteur probably from another party.
Well, definitely from another party.
And so please approach them, tell them
about your issues and you
will be able to follow on my website
exactly who these people are, what's
going on in the debate
in the parliament.
So in April, there's going
to be the vote in
the Legal Affairs Committee, the Uley
committee, which is responsible for
copyright there.
People from other parties are going to
try to water down my report
by tabling amendments that will
probably try to kind of change
some of the parts of my report into its
opposite. So then it will be really
important to contact people in
the Legal Affairs Committee, tell them
to vote on specific amendments or
to support some amendments, perhaps
so that we can achieve a report that
is really kind of going in
the direction of a progressive copyright
reform.
The vote the final vote on this report
would then be in May and sometime
in the summer, sometime between April
and fall. They haven't been very specific
about it.
The European Commission will publish
their proposal there.
I think the great challenge is going to
be they're probably going to be some
stuff in there that you dislike
unless it's completely horrible.
I would like to ask you to kind of take
a constructive approach to it, to really
look at what they come up with,
to discuss it, to
support it, if it's going in the right
direction and to formulate
possibilities of how it can be improved,
because then once the commission has
tabled their proposal, it will be once
again the parliament and the Council
of the National Governments that will
be able to change this proposal
for a European copyright law and that,
in the end, will be the ones that will
have to pass it.
To take kind of a bigger picture,
I think most of the politicians in the
European Union know that we
have a huge problem.
We have a rise of nationalism
all across the EU and the EU is
really in danger of losing its
legitimacy.
And they know that their future depends
on the support of the people.
So here we have kind of a unique
situation where a lot of the people
are actually asking the EU to do
something.
They see a problem and they want it to be
solved.
Usually where the EU gets
most of its support from is
what they call the Four Freedoms,
which is the freedom of movement of
capital goods and services,
which is kind of something that
you experience when you're traveling
through Europe, that you don't have to
show your I.D., that you
don't have to exchange currency and so
on. And that is really kind of making
people's lives easier.
But obviously, if you look at these four
freedoms, they're really kind of tilted
in favor of economic freedoms.
And what I want to propose is that
we should push for freedom,
so to say, of freedom of movement for
information.
And if we
call for the European Union
to to institute a right for
people in Europe to access culture across
national borders, I think the EU
politicians will have a really, really
difficult time to say no to that.
But, well, if
they don't want to look like complete
hypocrites. So I think it is our task
at this point to make the
EU more than an economic
union and really enhance
the fundamental rights and freedom
dimension of the European Union.
But it's our responsibility to actually
push for that and to make that happen.
So.
So that's it from me for now.
Thanks a lot for listening and
yeah, I will be around for questions
here or later.
Thank you so much for the great
inspirational talk.
Thank you, Yuya.
Now we have to
have like ten minutes left for questions
and answers before we come to the
questions answered. You mentioned that
you're going to give a workshop.
You want to start
today at five.
I think it's kind of really talking
about the draft report that I
am writing right now where I want to
collect some input from you.
Also, strategic advice.
You know, if you have particular things
that really should be in this report,
come to the workshop and
discuss it with me. It's from five to six
in room B..
All right. Five to six in room B.
Today. If you want to give some input to
Julia now, it's time for questions and
answers. We have six microphones in the
room. If you have a question, please line
up at the microphones.
We start with a question from the
Internet.
How does the freedom of Panorama
and Compass and Compass
taking photos of the Eiffel Tower?
That's a good question.
So, well, France does
not have a freedom of Panorama Room,
but the Eiffel Tower is
pretty old. So the design of the
Eiffel Tower is in the public domain
because the architect, thankfully, died
long ago.
I really hope for a system where I don't
have to say such things anymore.
But however. No, you can't.
Well, you can use a picture of the Eiffel
Tower that you take during the day.
You can't take one that you take during
the night because the light show that
lights up the Eiffel Tower
is made by an artist who is still
alive, I think, or at least not dead long
enough. So,
yeah, the answer is
depends.
All right.
Next question from microphone to
hello, I'm
kind of more pessimistic about the
ongoing reform for
two reasons. One reason is because
we live in a world constrained by
convention and troops treaty.
So basically we have to assume that we
cooperate is by default and
we cannot put any restrictions like maybe
registration and and similar things which
could improve our life.
So my my first concern
is that a synchronizing copyright
across the EU will basically
scicluna psychoanalyzing
exceptions down.
So what you spoke with, you will be also
down to some common level, maybe five
exceptions out of 20.
But my first concern and the second
concern is because so many MEPs
I spoke to are very fixated
about idea of of single digital market
and as an agenda for growth
and basically what is usually attached to
it. And I think this is much more
important priority growth for
the EU even than the freedoms we talk
about. So we will be
promoting exclusive rights, not
only copyright as a as a new way
forward for for Europe
and employing unemployed
people and young people in and of
itself.
So my concern is how
we control this agenda, and I'm
afraid that it may.
But the freedom idea is
good, but may not be strong enough
to control their growth
agenda. Think you?
I think they're absolutely valid
concerns. I've kind of limited myself
to actually not that radical proposals
kind of making the copyright
exceptions mandatory or reducing
the copyright terms from 70 years after
death back to 50 years after death
is kind of the maximum that we can do
in the international treaties that we
have already signed up to.
But I think we should still absolutely do
it. Some issues will be
a bit more complicated, like, for
example, some international treaties
already in place, but also the upcoming
Seeta treaty say that there has to be
some way of restricting people's
ability to circumvent
digital rights management.
But I think we can still address this
because even though
we may not be able to completely get rid
of DRM, I think what we can do with this
reform is to make it legal to
to circumvent DRM if you are using
a copyright exception.
So I don't think this would violate
international treaties.
But of course, if you have a copyright
exception for private copying,
that's pretty much anything.
So I think it would really solve,
well, 80 percent of the problem, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, with with the idea
of a European copyright, of course, this
is only viable if
the proposal that comes out of the
commission is actually any good and not
saying support it no matter what.
We don't know if it's actually going to
to be that, uh, to
to really propose this level of
harmonization.
Maybe they will go for something a lot
more careful, but really to
look at it and to kind of, uh,
make up your mind when you see it,
whether it's worth fighting for,
for improving this or whether we should
just try to to vote it down.
I think we're not going to get the chance
to reform this, uh, this
copyright system for another 10, 15
years if we don't do it now.
So I really want to take this chance and
to take whatever comes out of the
commission and try to turn it into
something good.
The digital single market thing.
I think our it's not,
uh.
Completely, uh, coincidence
that companies like
Netflix are coming from the US
and rolling out their service
one European country at a time,
because I think a European startup simply
wouldn't have the capacity to run at a
loss for several years and to
clear a copyright in 28
different systems.
It creates a lot of overhead.
And this can only be done by a company
that already has a functioning market
back in the United States.
So I think there is also an economic
argument for for going in the direction
of allowing certain ways of
dealing with copyright.
There are I think the the Accademia
are really on our side on this.
They show that people do not spend
less on culture because they have access
to the Internet.
They show that the people who do the most
file sharing are actually the people who
spend the most also on
paying for cultural works.
And
so I think, of course,
simply having the facts on your side is
not necessarily going to help you to win
the political battle.
Yeah, I think the freedom is
I think maybe one of the ideas that we
can use, particularly in this time,
where there is a lot of criticism of the
European institutions and they really
have to give us something because they
know that if they come out with a bad
proposal, they're going to have another
actor on their hands.
And nobody in the European Commission
wants that. So I think we've already laid
the groundwork to to
turn this into something good.
All right, thanks.
We'll take the very last question from
the Internet. And I hope I understanding,
since everybody else has the chance to
catch you there later and ask her and the
people who follow in the stream don't.
So sorry if you didn't have the time
now to ask your question. Last question
from the Internet.
What do you think? How long does it take
to bring an EU wide copyright?
Well, to pass it into law?
Well, it would be proposed
if we're very optimistic next
year, in 2015, it would
take maybe three or four years to be
adopted, another two years of transition
period.
And I think you
would actually kind of depending on
the level of harmonization, is it a
European copyright title that only
encompasses kind of the commercial
copyright? But or would it also
encompass the author's rights?
Um, that would depend
on on how long it would take.
But I think the fundamental thing is
you can't really shorten copyright
terms on works that already exist.
You can't really take away rights from
authors that, um,
that they already have by the European
Union. This is kind of, uh,
would probably be a fundamental rights
issue that would have to be dealt with
also on a national level.
So for a European copyright
to actually kind of take effect in the
way that everything is
run under the new European copyright
system, well, uh, take the
lifespan of the people who are alive now
plus 70 years, and
then you're probably done, I guess.
All right. Thank you so much for the talk
again. And thank you for taking
questions.
Remember to come back at five for the
workshop and runby five to six.
Thank you so much, Julia.