In October 2004 the European Commission organised a consultation on the review of EU legislation on copyright and related rights. EDRI sent in an evaluation, together with FIPR (UK) and VOSN (NL). The paper is available at: http://www.edri.org/docs/edri_copyright_consultation.pdf

The European Commission, otherwise known as being in favour of taking rigorous action against infringers of Intellectual Property Rights, is an infringer itself. On its e-Government news site, the Brussels executive body published, on October 14, an Article about a biometrics hearing at the European Parliament that is almost entirely made up by snippets from another Article published in EDRI-gram more than a week earlier. While the Creative Commons License that the EDRI-gram Article is published under clearly allows "to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, to make derivative works" and even "to make commercial use of the work", it states one condiditon:

Just before the Commission hearing on DRM, EDRI member FIPR (Foundation for Information Policy Research) organised a 2 day workshop on the future of EU legislation on copyright in Cambridge.

In his opening remarks, FIPR chairman Ross Anderson pointed to the 'big, greedy' industry interests dominating the discussion about so-called Intellectual Property Rights at present and called for a similarly 'big, greedy counterforce' which, he said, was already emerging from an ad-hoc alliance of industries concerned about copyright extremism, of user and consumer advocates.

Teresa Hackett summed up the issues in the Commission review. She pointed to the obvious contradiction between the Commission's claims that the review was just about 'finetuning for consistency' and the origins of the review at the 2002 Santiago de Compostela revision conference, where Commission representatives had openly talked about a 'Super Directive' on copyright and related rights they wished to have. The inherent danger was, she said, that the 2001/29/EC Directive (known as the EUCD), which the Commission is proud of, but which is indeed a badly and inconsistently drafted law, would be used as a blueprint for revising also neighbouring Directives such as the ones on Software or on Rental Rights. As for the Database Directive, she said it should be repealed, because it never had any justification and allowed rightsholders to get, using some simple tricks, eternal copyright on databases.

Civil Society representatives, user and consumer advocates were not allowed to voice their concerns on social, cultural and economic consequences of a wide-spread introduction of so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology during a hearing organized by the European Commission on 11 October, in Brussels. Stopping short from actually censoring these concerns, which were voiced by a large number of advocacy groups and individuals during a recent consultation on DRM, the Commission's DG Internal Market, who organized the event, invited only a few representatives of organizations that had taken a critical stance towards DRM.

Instead, lobbyists representing industry firms hoping to make big money with the technology were given abundant speaking time, very often two to three times as much as the allowed five-minute limit. This led to time running out in the end. And only at the very end the slot was planned during which most Civil Society speakers hoped to voice their concerns or talk about the various court cases that consumers have won against producers of media made useless by DRM. Thus the theme 'Developments in case law as well as relevant economic, social or cultural or technological developments' was skipped from the agenda.

Civil Society representatives, user and consumer advocates were left almost speechless yesterday, October 11, at a hearing organised by the European Commission on Digital Rights Management. Due to the invitation policy of the Commission's DG Internal Market, the event, organized to help the Committee established under Article 12 of the EU Copyright Directive evaluate the way Article 6 of that same Directive is being transposed, was entirely dominated by the Digital Rights Management Iindustry and by representatives of collecting societies.

A new book by the US Harvard professor William W. Fisher provides the first very detailed overview on the digital music distribution and related issues that have been going on in the Internet lately. The most valuable part in the book are three scenarios, on copyright as real property rights; on copyright as a heavily regulated industry; and thirdly on alternative compensation systems. This approach opens totally new perspectives to the options for the current situation. Especially the chapter on alternative compensation systems will inevitably shape the global discussion on the future of copyright.

William W. Fisher III: The Promises to Keep. Stanford University Press 2004.
2 chapters available online
http://www.tfisher.org/PTK.htm

How does the work of WIPO - the World Intellectual Property Organisation - affect the daily lives of the world's six billion plus consumers? Is WIPO's mission and work inherently exclusive, benefiting only the richer countries and consumers and harming the poor? Does WIPO need a new mission to embrace new information technologies and to benefit poor countries and consumers? These were some of the questions asked at an international workshop organised by the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) in Geneva on 13 and 14 September 2004. The workshop consisted of nine panels, each with five or six speakers, each dealing with a separate aspect. The speakers came from a wide range of backgrounds, there were many lawyers and academic researchers, with others drawn from areas of medicine, arts and civil society, including consumer organisations. There were also government officials from the US and EU countries, while developing country delegates to WIPO were invited as guests (none wished to be panellists). Very creditably, WIPO itself recognised the validity of the issues discussed and top WIPO officials took part in the workshops and sat on several panels.

On 17 September 2004, the experimental free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia reached 1 million (approved) entries. Every internet user can write entries, and suggest improvements for any other entry. This idea has proven extremely viable in the last 4 years. Wikipedia now provides information in 100 languages, 14 of which offer more than 10.000 articles each. With 140.000 articles, Germany is the second biggest contributor to the encyclopaedia after the UK.

To improve co-ordination among all the volunteers, Wikipedia launched a quarterly newsletter in 12 languages. The first edition mentions the initiative to put the German Wikipedia on a CD, and distribute it via the publishing house Directmedia Publishing. The publisher has announced it wants to distribute 30.000 CDs for free to all involved people in Germany, packaged with promotion for the commercial software DigiBib. Under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) all third parties can reuse Wikipedia articles as long as they pass on that right to others.