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A new Publishers’ Intellectual Property (PIP)?

Note: For the 24 April 2018 Academics letter against the press publishers’ right, see Academics Against Press Publishers’ Right: 169 European Academics Warn Against It

This project takes a critical look at the proposed introduction of a new intellectual property right for publishers of ‘press publications’.

That the EC’s plan for reform of the copyright acquis would include measures for the benefit of press publishers already became clear during the public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’, held from 23 March until 15 June 2016. It was still unclear though what regulatory intervention the EC had in mind.

During  the consultation IViR hosted a conference on Copyright, related rights and the news in the EU: Assessing potential new laws, as part of a research project ran by the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) at the University of Cambridge (PI professor Lionel Bently, researcher Dr. Richard Danbury)) and University of Cardiff (PI professor Ian Hargreaves). See below for the programme and video streams of the sessions.

In September 2016 the EC made public its proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on copyright in the Digital Single Market (COM/2016/0593). See also the EC Communication – Promoting a fair, efficient and competitive European copyright-based economy in the Digital Single Market. The European Parliament and Council deliberate on it in 2017.

The proposal would introduce a 20 year intellectual property right in periodical publications. Publishers would have the exclusive right to authorize any reproduction (i.e. copying in any shape or form, permanent or temporary)  or making available of the content of press publications, or any part of it down to the smallest quote. The right would be limited to digital uses, and be subject to the same exceptions and limitations that apply to copyright works. PIP comes on top of existing copyright, related rights and database rights that also protect the content of newspapers, magazines, blogs, journals and other periodicals.

For Open Forum Europe, Mireille van Eechoud wrote the study A publisher’s intellectual property right: implications for freedom of expression, authors and open content policies. This was presented at the hearing on copyright reform hosted  by Therese Comodini Cachia (EPP), European Parliament Rapporteur for the Copyright directive. You can find the executive summary of the report here.

Videos from the hearing:

In October 2016, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) requested responses to draft legislation published by the European Commission with the aim of modernising the European copyright framework. Professor Lionel Bently led a group of 37 academics from a variety of UK institutions, who signed a response to the IPO’s request. The letter contains criticism of the part of the proposed package entitled ‘Protection of press publications concerning digital uses’.

Presentations:

FutureTDM

Opdrachtgever: Horizon 2020
Looptijd: 2015-2017
Website: FutureTDM

The partners in the FutureTDM consortium share the ambition behind the EC’s call to develop policy and legal frameworks to reduce the barriers of text and data mining (TDM) uptake and with it, promote the awareness of TDM opportunities across Europe. As a result, the consortium offers a concept that not only focuses on the required identification, assessment and analysis of current TDM obstacles, but also creates a practitioner-driven emphasis through engagement workshops and discussions. An outcome of the FutureTDM project will include, guidelines that offer informed recommendations to practitioners from various disciplines, and propose solutions to overcome legal and policy barriers impeding TDM opportunities. Additionally, the project will create an online Collaborative Knowledge Base and Open Information Hub that will facilitate data-driven innovation through creative knowledge exchange and repositories of tools to address the gap in TDM skills across different areas.

 

EU-US Privacy Bridges

The EU and US share a common commitment to privacy protection as a cornerstone of democracy. Following the Treaty of Lisbon, data privacy is a fundamental right that the European Union must proactively guarantee. In the United States, data privacy derives from constitutional protections in the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment as well as federal and state statute, consumer protection law and common law. The ultimate goal of effective privacy protection is shared. However, current friction between the two legal systems poses challenges to realizing privacy and the free flow of information across the Atlantic. Recent expansion of online surveillance practices underline these challenges.

Over the next nine months, the group will prepare a consensus report outlining a menu of privacy “bridges” that can be built to bring the European Union and the United States closer together. The efforts are aimed at providing a framework of practical options that advance strong, globally-accepted privacy values in a manner that respects the substantive and procedural differences between the two jurisdictions.

The report will be presented at the 2015 International Conference of Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners, which the Dutch Data Protection Authority will host in Amsterdam on 28-29 October 2015.

See also this website: https://privacybridges.mit.edu/

 

Personalised News – Implications for the democratic role of the digital media, user rights and public information policy

On the web, news media are profiling and targeting news users in order to serve users with news stories and advertisements that match their individual interests. For example, the New York Times has a section on its homepage titled  “Recommended for you”. The section contains an automatically created selection of articles that are presumed to be of particular relevance for you. Elsewhere on its website, the publisher explains that “recommendations are based on the NYTimes content you have viewed recently. This information is available only to you.” This recommendation system is a form of news personalisation. Other news outlet, such as BBC News online in the UK, de Volkskrant in the Netherlands, or newer players like Facebook, are experimenting with the personalisation of news content as well.

News personalisation helps media companies to survive in a competitive digital environment and it may help individual media users to manage the information overload. But this development also raises questions among media professionals, media users, and researchers from all disciplines. During a discussion organised by the Guardian, an editor remarked the importance of transparency about news personalisation, even though another discussant questioned whether algorithms can be explained in a meaningful way. A reader commented that he or she saw personalisation as holding potential benefits for the users, but also found that the debate regarding user data, objectivity, and filter bubbles not properly firmed up yet. And on a panel that we organised during the  Amsterdam Privacy Conference 2015, leading thinkers in this area, such as Neil Thurman, Neil Richards and Maurits Kaptein, highlighted the various trade-offs involved, between user orientation, the mission and editorial standards of the news-media and users’  rights and fundamental freedoms.

From a legal perspective, the development towards more and more personalised news raises questions about the implications for individual rights, the democratic role of the digital media, and information law and policy. Natali Helberger raises some of them in her inaugural speech “Media, users and algorithms: towards a new balance”: How does the personalisation of news affects media users’ trust in the integrity of editorial content, and their ability to distinguish editorial content from advertising? Is the collection of personal data relating to users’ reading behaviour lawful in all cases, and can readers still exercise their right to freely receive information and ideas? Can we envision a new public role for the media in which they actively serve news users with diverse and important content, to prevent users from just reading about entertainment, sports, and the weather?

In order to answer such questions, this research project combines legal research with empirical research by communication scientists and political theory. For one part of the project communication science postdocs research user attitudes towards news personalisation, as well as economic and ethical considerations on part of the media themselves. Informed by these findings, in another part of the project two legal PhD candidates investigate rules on editorial integrity, and users’ rights of freedom of expression and privacy in the context of personalised news. Finally, the projects formulates a new normative framework through which news personalisation can be assed, and explores  to what extent government could stimulate new media strategies for personalised, public interest content.

The project team collaborates with partners in and outside of academia. For the empirical research we closely work with the Personalised Communication project, a joint initiative by the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and the Institute for Information Law. Next to that we work together with media companies to gather data and better understand the decisions that are made in the newsroom when personalising news.

 

HERA – Of Authorship and Originality (OOR)

OOR is a multi-disciplinary collaboration of IViR (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Infomedia (University of Bergen, Norway) and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom). The project queries how insights from literary theory, music studies, film/visual studies and other Humanities’ disciplines can help articulate copyright norms that enable sustainable creative practices in the digital environment. Our focus is on two interrelated, key concepts in copyright law: the author and the work, which are addressed in three interrelated projects.

At the University of Bergen, prof. Jostein Gripsrud is principal investigator of the project ‘Authorship in Collective Arts’, with post-doc Dr. Erlend Lavik as researcher. In Cambridge, prof. Lionel Bently is principal investigator for the project ‘Multiplicity of Authors’, in which Dr Laura Biron and Dr Elena Cooper take part as post-doctoral researcher. Van Eechoud is overall project lead and principal investigator for the project ‘The Work as Creative Expression”, on which Dr. Stef van Gompel is post-doctoral researcher.

The individual projects:

Authorship in Collective Arts
Department of Information Science and Media Studies (Infomedia)
University of Bergen
Prof. Jostein Gripsrud, principal investigator
Dr. Erlend Lavik, post-doc researcher

This project’s theoretical challenge lies in finding a way to modify the traditional Romanticist notion of authorship that still inform today’s copyright laws, particularly in view of the characteristics of collaborative production of artworks in different media and genres, without giving up on the idea that creators or authors of such works must retain a right to certain forms of control of the subsequent use of their works. In collaboration with our partners in the field of law, we wish to identify ways in which a renewed understanding could and should impact on the making and the interpretation of copyright law. While exploring theoretical contributions in several disciplines, our empirical focus will be creative processes in audiovisual production and popular music. Both cultural forms are heavily dependent on digital technologies and are thoroughly marked by collaborative forms of production. The Bergen project will study these two media and genres using well-proven ethnographic methodologies (participant observation and semi-structured interviews).

Multiplicity of Authors
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL)
Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge
Prof. Lionel Bently, principal investigator
Dr. Laura Biron, post-doc researcher
Dr. Elena Cooper, post-doc researcher

At present, by and large, national rules on authorship and copyright ownership are still based on the author as an individual autonomous agent operating in isolation. Within the overall theme of the research proposal on creative collaboration in the digital environment and copyright’s response to facilitate such creative expression (or rather lack of it), the project by CIPIL will focus on problems of multiple authorship. Central in this stream are the relations between contributors: how roles are perceived within creative communities, and the status that copyright law attaches to the various roles, notably the allocation of authorial control both as regards economic rights and immaterial interests (the ’moral rights’ of the author). Drawing upon the authorship theories explored in the initial phase of the CRP, and incorporating the results of the case studies by the Infomedia, the CIPIL project will re-evaluate notions of co-authorship and develop approaches that are conducive to collaborative creative production.

The Work as Creative Expression
Institute for Information Law (IViR)
Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam
Dr. Mireille van Eechoud, principal investigator and overall project leader
Stef van Gompel, post-doc researcher
Prof. dr. Bernt Hugenholtz, advisor

This project queries the continued viability of the ’original work of authorship’ as a legal object. From an economic perspective, the delineation of copyright subject-matter is ofcourse necessary in order to make it a marketable entity. Copyright law thus has a natural tendency to view creative expression as a ’thing’, to which rights are attached. At the same time, the law in many jurisdictions now seems to have evolved to the point where ’original’ and ’creative’ seem to be synonymous terms, both meaning little more than ’not directly copied’ or ’resulting from a modicum of freedom of choice’. In this stream the focus is on insights humanities scholarship can provide to critically rethink the concept of ‘work of authorship’. We are particularly interested in how it may inform a copyright policy that better facilitates the needs of creators to engage with existing works and materials without having to seek prior authorisation. Such a rethink also needs to consider the current harmonised right of reproduction, which is essentially a very broad technical concept, lacking normative meaning. We are also particularly interested in how copyright theory can better recognise art forms and practices where the creative value is in the processes as much (or even more so) as in the final product or artefact.

iLINC: the European Network of ICT Law Incubators

Summary:

The main objective of iLINC is to establish an open European Network of law incubators that supports the provision of legal services to ICT start-ups and entrepreneurs. The services are delivered by postgraduate students from leading university-based law institutions at Queen Mary University of London and the Universities of Amsterdam (IViR), Leuven and Hamburg.
iLINC is achieving this objective by focussing on:

– Understanding the legal requirements of start-ups;
– Developing and exchanging best-practices for service delivery from law incubators across a European (and  extensions to a US network);
– Developing and sharing best practices for linking student project engagement with learning programmes; and
– Establishing a platform for collaboration with focussed events and an online portal.
Prof. Van Eechoud is lead on Work Package 3 ‘Links to learning’. Dr. Ronan Fahy is project-researcher on that WP.

See also the news item (in Dutch) on our website.

 

Copyright in an Age of Access: Alternatives to Copyright Enforcement

Principal investigator:
Prof. dr. P.B. Hugenholtz
Co-Applicants:
Prof. dr. Natali Helberger
Dr. Lucie Guibault
Drs. Joost Poort
Summary:
In the digital networked environment the exclusive right (i.e. the right to restrict use of a work) that has always been considered an essential feature of copyright has become practically unenforceable and is rapidly losing moral support among the general public. Nevertheless, the rights of creators to fair remuneration appear to be generally supported. The questions thus arise: how to (re)construct a legal system that reconciles this new social reality? Is a legal system that allows unfettered access to copyright works while guaranteeing fair remuneration for authors legally and economically conceivable, and socially acceptable? Among the several reform proposals debated to answer these questions are Alternative Compensations Systems (ACS). Put simply, these are legal mechanisms that forsake the need for direct authorization of end-user acts (downloading, uploading, sharing, modifying), while simultaneously ensuring some level of economic consideration to creators or all rights holders. Since the early twenty-first century legal and economics scholars, advocacy groups and even political parties have come forward with ACS proposals under different labels: tax-and-royalty systems, license globale, content/culture flat-rate, creative contribution, file-sharing levy, sharing license or alternative reward systems. The project will consider several possible models of remuneration that underlie ACS: levy schemes (i.e. private taxes), state funding, voluntary collective licensing, statutory licensing with government-set tariffs, and variants or combinations of these models.

The main scientific aim of the project is to examine possible compensation schemes as alternatives to copyright, and assess their legal, social and economic viability. The project thus requires interdisciplinary cooperation between scientists from the fields of law, economics and social sciences. It comprises three interrelated parts: (1) a legal study (PhD, 3 years) that describes, compares and normatively assesses possible models of alternative compensation; (2) an economic study (postdoc, 1.5 years) that assesses the welfare effects of various models, and estimates possible remuneration rate(s); and (3) a sociological part (postdoc, 1,5 years), which conducts survey research to establish the level of public support for different policy alternatives and understand the value of different policy components.
The project is financially supported by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
See also:

Additional Project Information:

– Public communication of TOP grant award to IViR (09.03.2012) in Dutch;
– NWO project webpage (Project number 407-11-050);
– Excerpts from the TOP grant application submitted in 2011 to The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).