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Deutsch: EU steht vor einer Flut von Gesetzesinitiativen in Sachen geistiges Ei...

In the course of the next few months, the European Commission will be launching a flood of intellectual property initiatives, some aiming at repression, some at restricting access to culture and some at feeding uncreative intermediaries.

Work is now underway on an "impact assessment" which will assess the various options available to address the problem of collective rights management. These are the bodies which collect royalties from anyone who uses music and have become a growing barrier to effective reform of European copyright. The problems in this policy area were starkly illustrated in Belgium recently, when a team of undercover reporters showed that the Belgian collecting society Sabam was collecting royalties for artists that did not actually exist. A legislative proposal is expected in June.

Another upcoming initiative is on digital libraries and orphan works. Orphan works, which are works for which the author is not readily identifiable, is an interesting phenomenon because copyright essentially serves to restrict access to culture as part of a strategy that ostensibly serves to protect culture. The likely result is an excessively complicated process of trying to identify authors (best suited to large corporations that can absorb the cost) before orphan works can be made available in digital libraries. It appears that the Commission is unwilling to require authors of digital works to embed identity information in their digital content, in apparent fear that this would be in breach of Article 5 of the Berne Convention of 1886.

The Commission is also working on several initiatives with the positive aim of reducing barriers to online content, including measures on country of origin licensing, pan-European licensing and a European database of copyright.

Separately, the Commission is working on a review of the IPR Enforcement Directive. Its Communication suggests measures such as a reduction in privacy protection for citizens, in order to increase respect for the "right to property". A concrete example of the Commission's intentions on this point is shown in its input to the European Court of Justice "Scarlet/Sabam" case where it argued that Internet providers should filter all peer-to-peer traffic, searching for what rightolders have a right to or what they claim to have a right to (paragraph 58 of the link below).

The Communication also suggests an explicit de-coupling of injunctions from ISP liability, which would expressly encourage injunctions for filtering/blocking of content, filtering of uploads and the imposition of monitoring obligations on Internet providers. However, there is still the small matter of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights as well as data protection and free speech legislation standing in the way of the European Commission turning the European Internet into Minitel / Bildschirmtext.

BASTA TV Show on Sabam (only in Flemish)
http://www.een.be/programmas/basta/sabam-en-de-makro-artiesten

Scarlet/Sabam case (only in French)
http://www.mlex.com/itm/Attachments/2011-01-13_1B8G0W13A97M04RY/C70_10...

Minitel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Bildschirmtext
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext

Commission Communication on IPR Enforcement
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0779:FI...

(contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)