Communia’s Open Letter for protection of the users’ fundamental rights
On 20 April, Communia and 20 other users’ rights organisations published an open letter, calling upon the European Commission to maintain its commitment to the users’ fundamental rights in its anticipated guidance on the implementation of Article 17 of the DSM Directive.
The open letter is a reaction to the CJEU’s notice that the date for the Advocate General’s opinion in the case C-401/19, which regards Article 17 of DSM Directive and compliance with users’ fundamental rights, will be postponed by almost three months. This can crucially affect the highly-anticipated Commission guidance for Article 17 implementation that are supposed to include strong user rights safeguards. The latest development, however, can indicate that there are strong political pressures in the background, attempting to reduce users’ rights in the upcoming guidance.
Thus, Communia addressed the open letter to the Commission, urging it “not to weaken its guidance through open ended exception clauses that seem to benefit particular rightsholders at the expense of users’ fundamental rights” and not to diverge from its stance previously taken before the CJEU.
As the DSM Directive implementation deadline looms, it will be interesting to see which stans the Commission will take in its highly-anticipated guidance.
The Communia’s open letter in full is available here, for more information, see here.
The 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (hereinafter SCCR) made substantial progress on the issues advocated by the A2K Coalition (Access to Knowledge Coalition), which IPI is a member of. This year’s session was the most productive on the issues of exceptions and limitations. James Love (Knowledge Ecology International), a long-time observer at WIPO, described the outcome and the impact of the public interest community as the strongest since the conclusion of the Marrakech Treaty, which brought global copyright exceptions for the benefit of the blind and visually impaired.
Today, March 17, 2023, a symposium on law in the information society is taking place in the golden lecture hall of the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič will present copyright aspects of artificial intelligence at the symposium.
The third day of the 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is intended for discussion on the topic of exceptions and limitations to copyright, especially in connection with the right to research.
The 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/43) is being held in Geneva from March 13 to 17, 2023. The Intellectual Property Institute has a permanent observer status at WIPO since 2022 and is also a member of the Access to Knowledge Coalition (A2K coalition).