We need minimal standards of exceptions for education and research
“We believe that there is a minimum set of access and use rights that should be defined by public rules, since they are justified by public interests. If copyright laws do not grant to the education and research communities, the cultural heritage institutions, and the persons with disabilities the same level of protection that is granted to rightsholders, and defer to private agreements the regulation of all uses of copyrighted materials, they perpetuate an unbalanced power structure […]. In order to have a minimum set of rules that are applied uniformly by every Member State and have a cross-border effect we need an international law.”
This statement was given by Teresa Nobre – a representative of Communia, which is a permanent observer of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), taking place this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva.
Such international law is TERA (Treaty on Copyright Exceptions and Limitations on Education and Research Activities), that was drafted by 15 civil society organizations, amongst which also IPI, and endorsed on 25 September 2018 on the global congress “IP and the Public Interest” that took place at the American University Washington College of Law. This international instrument would ensure minimal standards of exceptions for educational and research purposes, while at the same time enabling countries flexibility in how to implement the obligations.
The French government has a new plan for Europe that could help the EU compete with the US tech giants: the digital commons.
The International Association of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), PAC Centre for digital preservation, hosted at the National Library of Poland is holding a series of 10 webinars on basic understanding of digitisation projects.
Communia, a non-governmental organisation that advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge, issued twenty new copyright policy recommendations for the next decade.
The DSM Directive entered into force in June 2019 and the deadline for implementation expired on 7 June 2021. On 23 June 2021, the Commission launched multiple infringement procedures and sent letters of formal notice to Slovenia and 22 other Member States that had failed to notify it of the full transposition of the Directive. Slovenia remains among the 14 Member States against which the Commission is continuing the infringement procedure. On 19 May 2022, the Commission sent reasoned opinions to Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, France, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden.