View source for Culture, copyright and the future of access to digital content in Europe – WS 02 2013

20 June 2013 | 14:30-16:00 <br />
[[Programme overview 2013|'''Programme overview 2013''']]<br /><br />

== People == 
'''Key Participants'''
*Sarah Kelly, The Coalition For A Digital Economy
*Marco Pancini, Google
*Olav Stokkmo, International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations
*Ben White, British Libary
*Comments by: Carlos Romero, Sociedad de la Información, de esta Secretaría de Estado

'''Moderator'''
*Stuart Hamilton, International Federation of Library Associations

'''Reporter'''
*Mike Holderness, European Federation of Journalists

== Messages == 
*Considering whether access to digital content being regulated by contractual terms and conditions of private companies instead of copyright law and the work of cultural and educational institutions.
*Publicly funded content should be licensed under sharing license & made available through central repository(ies).
*Better metadata about cultural content, including licensing details.
*More niche websites catering for niche interests and more legal offerings for paying.
*Focusing on more on large-scale ‘pirates’ than on non-commercial use.
*More studies needed on the effects of technological innovation on creativity.
*Need a better understanding how to create a copyright regime that encourages innovation, with clear boundaries between commercial and non-commercial use. 

== Session report == 
'''Subject'''

*Starting from the premise that being able to access, share and re-use cultural content is in the public interest, and that the current European copyright framework was not providing the best support, the workshop discussed what issues would need to be addressed in any reform of copyright in Europe 

'''Obstacles'''

*Policy makers don’t seem to understand that copyright also refers to scientific and educational content, not just content produced by the entertainment industry. It was suggested that this situation does not favour the public interest
*It’s important to note that in many contexts what is regulating access to digital cultural content is not copyright but contracts - contracts are overriding copyright law and cultural and educational institutions are particularly affected. 
*It was noted that Portugal is one of the few countries in the EU that ensures that limitations & exceptions cannot be overridden by private contacts
*Complex licensing agreements, as well as a lack of information on who owns the rights to what, are therefore preventing access to and re-use of content
*Conditions for some activities – such as text and data mining – are better outside of Europe, leading some tech startups to relocate. It was suggested that if Europe wants to compete with the rest of the world we can’t just look at our system and say it works for us. Many SMEs are looking at starting elsewhere for legal reasons.
*Many startups hire a lawyer before they hire an engineer. This is a demonstration of a broken system.
*DRM in eBooks – it was asked why publishers have learned nothing from the music industry’s experience?

'''Reform'''

*Address overriding of copyright by private contract 
*Private copying – the issue of copyright exceptions for private copying needs to be addressed
*Better metadata about cultural content, including licensing details
*Still too few fresh legal offerings for paying for cultural content. We need more niche websites catering for niche interests
*In terms of illegal content, enforcement approaches should change to focus more on large-scale ‘pirates’, and move away from non-commercial sharing
*More studies needed on the effects of technological innovation on creativity
*There was some support for the sorts of pay-what-you like models pioneered by Radiohead and available on Bandcamp. However, concerns were expressed that if we accepted a cultural economy based on ‘free’ then we would develop a winner-takes-all situation that suits big players such as Amazon and Apple more than European content creators
*Seemed to be an emerging consensus that all publicly funded content must be licensed under sharing license & made available through central repository(ies)

'''Conclusion:''' If we want to be pioneers we need to figure out how to create a copyright régime that encourages innovation, with clear boundaries between commercial and non-commercial use.

== Transcript ==
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''This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.''



>> STUART HAMILTON: Welcome to workshop 2. My name is Stuart Hamilton. I am the director of policy and advocacy at the International Federation of Library Associations, and you have chosen quite wisely to come to workshop 2. The title of which is Culture, Copyright and the Future of Access to Digital Content to Europe. 

And I would argue quite strongly that there is a public interest in being able to access shared and reused content. I think this is how we create more culture and content. And indeed it is how we find our identity as English, French, Irish Europeans. We know from the library community that there is an awful lot of activity in the area of access to digital content over the last ten years or so. Many libraries across Europe are involved in giant digitization projects. At the moment we are looking at issues relating to accessibility to e-books. I am sure that many people in this room are consuming fiction and nonfiction on tablets. We are also involved in a lot of Copyright discussions as librarians. That enables us to provide access to our materials which are very important to our profession. We are keen that policymakers get these frameworks right. In other sectors as well there is a huge amount of things going and our panelists today reflect these sectors. Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft are trying to understand frameworks for access that are being drawn up by our Governments. And again it is Copyright frameworks which are coming up a lot. Organisations and groups representing rightsholders are coming to terms with the new environment and attempting to discover how best to ensure that the creators, your authors, musicians, our filmmakers, how are we going to ensure that these people get paid or adequately recompensed for their efforts. 

Creators themselves are seeing a lot of new opportunities of how to provide content and develop wide audience. And then we have small and medium business enterprises, people with technical skills to make things happen who are looking for opportunities to be able to access, reuse, monetize content and then finally education. There is a lot going on in that sector as well. We know about the explosion of online courses and remote education. Today we are going to have a discussion. This morning we had some very interesting interventions from the podium. It would be great if we can have even more from the room in this workshop. We know that all the stakeholders that I just talked about are experiencing obstacles to providing content, and certainly in the community or the circles that I move in there is a feeling that we could be doing a lot for to increase access to culture, content and that goes for both material that’s already in the public domain, but also commercial material and very often these conversations are coming back around to one thing and that is Copyright. And it seems that it is actually standing in the way of us really realising our full potential in terms of increasing access to content. 

So today we are going to discuss where we are now and where we are going to go next and what alternatives do we have as we move forward in terms of policies and legal frameworks and what sort of reform to Copyright might we want to see in Europe and what policies do we need as I say to achieve this reform. 

Now I am going to do this – we are going to run our way through four questions which are also in the programme with our panelists and then we are going to open up to you, the audience at all the appropriate moments. So I would like to introduce the people that we have with us this afternoon. Ben White, if you can put your hand up. He is the head of Intellectual Property at the British Library and also the Chair of the Council of European Libraries Copyright Group. 

The CEO of International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations or IFRRO, Olav Stokkmo. So I am going to explain, IFRRO facilitates the collective management of reproduction and other rights relevant to copyrighted works through the cooperation of reproduction rights organisations at national levels. Now if you add all of these reproduction rights organisations together, then they represent the interest of tens of thousands of creators all over the world. 

Marco Pancini is a member of the Google policy team in Brussels. He was part of the startup project iBazar, was the first online auction website in Europe and he worked for eBay up until 2007 and then he joined Google. 

Hidden away is Sarah Kelly and she has worked with digital startups, small, medium enterprises in the UK and she represents their interest to the UK Government as involved in a lot of Internet policy. 

So that’s introducing the panel to you. And now I would like to introduce you to the panel. So in a classic multistakeholder sense I would like to ask how many of you here in this room would consider yourself representing Government? Okay. That’s good. How many of you would consider yourselves coming from the business sector? Okay. How many people would represent Civil Society? And how many people here are librarians? 

(Laughter). 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Actually that’s way better. That’s great. Okay. Well, let’s get in to the first question that I want to ask – you are an author. Actually that’s a good point. So let’s say creators. Perfect. Okay. Strong. Good stuff. We wanted to talk just to kick off in terms of we know that online access to culture and content is changing. And I wanted to put it to our panelists how is it changing and what are the opportunities that we are seeing right now that we should be taking advantage of. Marco, over to you. 

>> MARCO PANCINI: Thank you for the invitation. What we are seeing Internet is presenting – it is not working? Okay. Okay. So again a good opportunity for culture. We see in all the different fields, for sure in the field of culture, heritage, platforms like the one that we are developing are – that does not have any meaning without the support of the content creators. For this reason we have engaged in important partnership with libraries, with museums. In particular to two important projects; one is called the art project involving 151 art partners for 40 countries around the world on digitalizing and making available the collection of these museums for the public. Respecting in particular also the way the museums are interpreting also and leading the role in the cultural world and also the way they want to display the – their heritage. 

And another very important project we have developed is Google books project which is involving libraries, a lot of libraries across Europe and across the world. And again here the goal is to support the libraries in opening up their inventory for public consumption in a way which is respecting again their vision of the culture which is also making a way easy for public to access to the content and to – to finally use the content. For example, the Google books project is starting from the big interest from a lot of our executive access to culture. In particular I always remember the fascinating story of Nikki Shora who is the head of our team and is coming from India and he was saying starting for him to access to public libraries of getting access to books it was very difficult in India. This project a lot of people have more opportunities to get – to get access to content. But this is also true for the business models that we are seeing online. Not only for big players, for big content producers but also for users, for new creators that can really at the same time compete with the creators in using the new business model that we are offering. 

Last point is culture. We have seen the growing interests around MOOCs and all the different experiments, all the different experiments finalizing in making access to culture, access to education ubiquitous from the Cann University. So possibility to create inventory lesson and educational content on Youtube, but an opportunity to use this platform also from university and public institution to develop culture, but not only culture but also culture of, for example, companionship like we are doing in Spain in order to create digital skills and develop – the understanding on how to use this platforms, not only for culture but also for economic purpose. I can see a lot of interesting opportunities. Maybe later we can discuss also about the policies that we need around these opportunities in order to make them really effective. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Ben has mentioned a lot of things about libraries. You are involved in the British Library around the edge of providing access to digital content. What are the opportunities that are in front of you right now and perhaps what are we not quite able to take advantage of? 

>> BEN WHITE: Can you hear me okay? First of all, I’d just say I can say some more interesting things. I will be speaking from my own personal view and not the institution I work for. So personal views combined with the European Library Association leader. I suppose when we talk about Copyright, a lot of the language really kind of relates to the entertainment industries and kind of the goods, the consumer goods that they produce. I think what I will be talking to is education and I think, you know, everyone goes to school. Everyone, most people go to university nowadays and kind of that reality is a very different reality to the consumer experience. And I think, you know, the way that people in education think about entertainment, goods, the books, the CDs, et cetera, et cetera, is that, you know, they are not the physical – those are just the wrappers and what these goods actually contain is knowledge. And I think from an educational perspective we think it is quite a mixed bag in terms of the Internet and the e-revolution. So at a school – at an even younger stage when you are starting to learn, we know that kids really start to engage with reading in the context of public libraries. What does that mean for E when publishers are not selling e-books to public libraries? 

If you take it up a notch and start thinking about research, one thing that I am quite passionate on is essentially how the debates around Copyright until very recently, for example, in my country almost excluded education and scientific research. Essentially the whole debate revolved around consumers and the entertainment industries and I think it is really important that policymakers understand the Copyright affects authors and the publishing industries and the entertainment industries but science and research and learning with extremely important and fundamental public interest things that they have got to bear in mind. So one example that I would give why is it important comes from the UK. So Professor Jonathan Haskel, he is an economist at Imperial. He managed to stop our current Government from its austerity plans in regards to public investment in science by economically proving that 4 billion Euros worth investment in research to universities translated to 55 billion Euros from UK companies. This is why education and access to research and access to knowledge is important for policymakers. And I would say those two challenges that the education sector currently face in terms of the transition to E, one is that we no longer own the wrappers that hold knowledge. We rent them under license. And essentially licenses are not something when – when you say the word license, most people do not – imagine that you sit down and negotiate those licenses, in the university sector it is very rare to negotiate licenses. It is essentially how much and here are those terms and conditions. So actually what regulates in the university space access to knowledge is not Copyright Law anymore. It is those contracts and those contracts give many different rights and they actually lack many different rights. So if you look at the kinds of contracts that we are being offered they don’t allow preservation; they don’t allow text and data mining in an era of data driven innovation. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: So I am sure we are going to come back to contracts. Sarah, you work with a lot of small digital startups trying to take advantage of some of the opportunities that we have been hearing about. What sort of things are you hearing from the people that you work with about what they want to do, what opportunities exist but perhaps what’s getting in the way? 

>> SARAH KELLY: So the people that I work with are mostly lone digital entrepreneurs or one or two man or woman startups who are creating the platforms that distribute some of the culture and knowledge and help to monetize for the creators and consumers. So when I looked at how is online access to cultural knowledge changing, we saw it from three different perspectives. The first is from the creator’s perspective. They are using some of these online platforms both to, you know, promote their – what they do, sort of encourage awareness of what they do but then also taking advantage in new ways to monetize their content and to fund the initial development of it. So everyone has heard of Kick Starter, but then there is also things like pledge music there to help me write. There is all sorts of crowd funding platforms to design to help creators get as much content as they want to develop out as far as possible. But then also look at it from the consumer perspective. As was mentioned in some of the agenda we are looking at an abundance of content because that’s what consumers are seeking. They are wanting more content. They are wanting it quicker. But I know a lot of people in some circles say that they just want everything for free. But that’s not true. They – in fact, there was a news report out today that said young people are more willing to pay for online news than any other age group. We are seeing a reversal of that direction and they are just savvy consumers. They want it when they want it in what form they want it and for a reasonable price. I mean we saw a lot of the dissolution of DRM because consumers found it unacceptable and now we are looking at the dissolution of window releases as well because consumers are seeing in a global age that content is being released in different jurisdictions and are wanting it as soon as they release it. People developing those websites and apps and helping to distribute those content, from what I see working with these people we should have a lot more of these. We should have a lot more websites that are niche catering to niche interests. So I can see the demand for things like an RMB music platform or an independent movie online streaming service. But we are still seeing too few of these being built. Most of the innovation that’s happening is really plug-ins to Spotify taking data from Youtube. It is more happening around these big services that are already in existence. But that creates some problems, what people saw when the Internet came along. We want to encourage more services. And I think particularly we are seeing more in the music, but still considering how long we have had some of these online services there should be more, but there is definitely room for innovation around there. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: I think that the fact that we are talking about the consumers here and sort of what people want, driving the innovation is very important for the broader discussion and your organisation works with other organisations or very close to the creators in this sort of thing. Are the people that you work with kind of ready to take advantage of these opportunities? Because we are hearing a little bit perhaps about the slow uptake of some services. Is there a real awareness that things need to start moving slowly with the people that you work with? 

>> OLAV STOKKMO: I think I was given one extra minute. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Probably about 30 seconds. 

>> OLAV STOKKMO: Provided that you don’t know what a collective management organisation is. You want me to explain? The collective management organisations that I represent they are in the print media, print and publishing. So they are authors, writers, visual creators, book publishers, newspaper publishers, et cetera, and also such organisations in nearly 80 countries and 140 members all over the world. They are not representing tens of thousands as you said but millions of creators and publishers worldwide. Yes, I think I would like to point to two trends and hope that we can expand. Briefly introduce two trends. One there is new access models possible and they are being developed as we speak. There are, for instance, in the past you couldn’t lend out from the publisher a book but in the electronic version you may do e-lending directly from the publishers. Authors and collective management organisations offer their products and their services and works online in realtime and realtime licensing and also include them in the virtual learning environments. They are facilitating and I don’t – otherwise what Ben White just said about the digitalization, digitizing and making available cultural heritage but there are signing agreements to make available cultural heritage. And we can probably come back to examples on it and also they are facilitating through enabling technological framework the access to accessible copies. Therefore people with print disabilities. So one trend is the new access model. The others that are being developed but it could go faster. 

So this is a positive trend. The second trend that I perhaps wanted to point to is more dangerous and that is the development of a winner takes all economy. Based on the idea that everything should come for free to the end user. And this is kind of a business philosophy that the collection or data and that data should come for free and, for instance, the free translations offered by Google that is based on the work of thousands of authors and translators and works that I have done. And they are kind of – and compensated labour rendered invisible and it is not compensated for. And this stems the way I see it from a kind of hostility to the ownership or knowledge on Internet. And the – when I say it is dangerous, that author and data contributed Information Providers are not compensated for it is because this weakens the middle class, which again weakens democracy. This is something that we need to look carefully in to because it is a paradox. The creator industries are among the most important contributors to the economy and the print and publishing is among the most important. So I think that the challenge is we must change the attitude and ensure that the information and data contributors are valued. And there is a huge difference between paying nothing and paying something in this. And the politicians play an invaluable role in turning this trend around and I am going to give examples if you give me a possibility to do it. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: I am sure we can come back to examples. What was interesting when we went around who is in the room there is members of every sector represented up here. I would like to put it out to you as we finish this sort of first round do you recognize the sorts of opportunities and obstacles that are being discussed by our panelists? What are they not talking about? What are they missing here? What are you coming up against in your every day sort of work? Are you bumping in to Copyright? Is it causing you any problems? Any examples in this room or any questions to the panelists? That gentleman there and do we have a microphone? 

>> Just very simply the trouble of identifying what content is licensed under which regime. Under which creative comments license or it is Copyrighted or in public domain that it is incredibly difficult to understand what is what. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. So sort of – I think the kind of central clearinghouse idea is kind of interesting in that respect but we will hold that. Amena. 

>> So I was in the Republic of Moldova last year and it is a very small country which is located east of Romania and they are very, very poor. They don’t have a lot of infrastructure. They are not in the European Union but I was there visiting a free software event. I have tried to learn Romanian and I hear this skinny Russian guy, geek programmer and he is talking about – it is a tracker. So he is giving a long story about this, how much better the Pirate Bay is and I asked him why he is using this Pirate Bay. They are actually ugly. They have very bad cataloging of stuff. Like the categorization is horrible and many drawbacks of the Pirate Bay which means that I don’t personally use it simply because they didn’t make it user friendly. Yes, you know, when I could go to Torrance MD and get my cultural material there, but the problem is this they have a ratio system. And they only share the popular files in the ratio system. I think it is important that you have a network that allows you to share them because otherwise you can’t have a big network where all of the stuff is available to everyone all the time. And so that is very important to me to share the unpopular files. And I was so astounded by that answer and I was thinking about it for like two weeks, what does it mean to share the unpopular file in a torrent network. Because I used to share the unpopular files. And I would upload the popular files also. But I talked to a friend from Sweden who says that we used to have these moral debates in Sweden back in 2004, the merits of a closed system, the merits of a social system and how much do you enforce in a system of sharing culture with other citizens. I realize that actually I want that, a self-healing network where citizens can share cultural material with other citizens because it is socially beneficial and gave me a Russian friend in Moldova and helped me connect over borders and ages and I don’t see anything bad about that, but the Copyright Law is making me criminally liable when I engage in this behavior and this is a problem that neither of the panelists didn’t bring up and we need to address. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: We are going to get in to some of that. This gentleman. 

>> Thank you. I would like to make a couple of remarks. I am from Wikimedia. I could give a lot of remarks. I just took some notes. One question towards Google, what came to my mind is we often wonder about Google books work versus Wikisource. I would like to hear a few comments from you on that, especially as far as I understand but you might correct me, is the books you put online have to be freely licensed, right? So which is exactly what we are trying to do. We only use freely licensed material which means under creative comments mostly but yeah. I have heard something about educational material being an issue or managing the rights of this material. I want to stick to educational material because this is our mission. We don’t care so much about the entertainment but we want to educate the world, right? And it is our mission to provide everyone in this planet with free access to all kinds of knowledge. And when it comes to education material, this is mostly paid by the public anyway because it is something that comes out of universities and so on. And it is our statement that if it has been paid by the public it has to be public as a result. So I want to have this material under free license, right? Same goes for museums, archives and so on which is paid with the taxpayer’s money. 

Ms. Kelly, about the entrepreneurs, just a remark here I learned about alternative funding systems such like there is a music label, I forgot its name but you can download freely licensed music and you can give some money if you like the music and they suggest that you pay around $5 for an album or something. And a survey has shown that people actually pay for in the average. 

>> SARAH KELLY: Ryder had tried that when they first released their first album. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Sounds like band camp or something like that. 

>> SARAH KELLY: But I think that’s – the point of that is if that works for them, might not work for others. But the idea is that if we encourage licensing to these services at least people can try it and we need to have, you know, a scaling licensing regime where people can try something new like that. 

>> Yeah. My point is I want to show that free licenses work. I mean I know the problem is everyone tells me you can’t give away this stuff for free because the creators they also want to eat something. So licenses work and for new innovation maybe using Wikimedia platforms may be an option. Because we allow the free content we collect to be used commercially. 

>> SARAH KELLY: I do know a lot of startups that use Wikimedia content. 

>> Yes, and that is also for the last comment I heard about sharing cultural materials between citizens across borders yeah, I mean that reflects free licenses and then there are plenty of platforms to be used. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: We will take this question first so we can roll it all in and then go back to the panel. 

>> Yes. From the Spanish Internet User Association. Just two ideas. The first one is our approach to the Copyright is – they are not pirate. We always citizens. And then in our point of view our approach is – you make money with the work of people and then you need to pay. If you don’t make money, then you are free to change this content which is everywhere. The second one is the cost of the copy is near zero. The cost. Not the value. The cost. And each time it is easier to make copies. Then it is very difficult to protect the copy because it is something that is near zero. And it is easier to. And then we need to change to develop another kind of business model. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. Quite a few things to pick up. I am sure that everyone will want to say. We will go around. Try and keep it short, keep it snappy. 

>> MARCO PANCINI: First, this is an ecosystem. Therefore as we know today the objection about Google translator platforms, technological platform and Google translator is an example of artificial intelligence. It is not stealing the work of content translator. If you think of technological platform to empower creators to make their content available then you see in a more fair way our approach to cultural diffusion. For example, we support projects. So we don’t believe that the goal of the digitalization or the making available content, cultural content online is to close the content in the garden. It is to open up the content for diffusion. And again on the point about the business model because again it is not about free. It is about different business models that can sustain the content creation. If you think about the past there, a great example of free new business model, the radio, the libraries. So I think the Internet is providing new opportunities. It is not inventing something that is completely new. And if you look at the numbers, the cost of copies is going down. Is it changing the dynamics? For the first time they are facing not a situation where imposing the business model to the public but the public is regaining the power to make choices. We can see a study from U.S. and Europe that the content industry is doing better and better and better and there are greater opportunities that can be explored. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Ben, you want to pick up education? 

>> BEN WHITE: No. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: I would like you to pick up the education. 

>> BEN WHITE: The gentleman in the back about the licenses. The library that I work for is the legal deposit library and all analog publications need to be deposited with us. So in two years we can build a bridge of books from the white cliffs of Dover over to Calais. That’s a lot of books. In the electronic world we estimate by 2020 80% of the scholarly information will be electronic. And that means that it will be licensed. How do we as a society manage lawful access to every single book that has different terms and conditions? It is not possible. The education sector has been very vocal for many years saying that we want policymakers, cannot be overridden by private contract law. I love coming to Portugal and that’s because the food is wonderful and the second reason is because we are in one of the few countries that ensures at the moment in the European Union that limitations and exceptions, the flexibility, the good old Copyright Law gives us cannot be undermined by private contracts. I understand that point. 

>> SARAH KELLY: I think I contributed a bit when people were asking questions, but sort of comes down I think covering most of those points, that a lot of the issues that are currently arising would be helped by more services being available. And more services can only be made available if simpler, more cost reflective licensing arrangements and other examples like the Wikimedia content that you are talking about are made available for these businesses. And because, you know, essentially Copyright doesn’t have to be complicated. But it is kind of made that way with the amount of different kinds of licenses that we were talking about. So yeah. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: There is a lot there for you to do, Olav. Try to be short and snappy. 

>> OLAV STOKKMO: I want to pick up on three. First on the knowing what is licensed and what is not licensed. There is a challenge for rightsholders and that they are taking seriously and there are projects to address. First of all, there are actually mechanisms and systems developed by the collective management organisation, by my member. One of them called rights links. They are available in institutions and they inform about what you can do, what you cannot do, whether you have a license or whether you don’t have a license and if you don’t have a license, whether you can get one, how you can get one. So there are mechanisms, but the most important thing here I think is to be able to address the individual users beyond the – beyond the institutions and across all sectors. And there is an initiative involving both users because there needs to be a dialogue with users to be able to develop it. Microsoft is involved in it and rightsholders are involved in it and the European Commission is financing and demonstrating rights. It takes a little bit of time but it is not something that when I said no, it doesn’t exist; we don’t want to do it. Secondly I just wanted to say also something on the educational sector because I fully agree if an author or a publisher wants to give away something for free they should be able to do that. But at the same time this is the most important sector for the print and publishing industry. The textbook industry, the textbook sector drives the whole book publishing industry. If you don’t have money coming in from the textbook publishing industry, then you have difficulties in building a viable publishing industry at all. Just to give you a couple of examples Price Waterhouse Cooper made a study in the UK last year and also – and directed mainly towards the educational sector. It shows – this study showed that for 25% of the authors they arrived at more than 60% of older income from the secondary users mainly from education. And also 20% of that income would have the consequence of nearly 3,000 less works being created per year. For the publishers, this licensing from the – didn’t come from the secondary users in the education equals more or less what they invest in new digital platforms, in new development. That’s how important it is. 

If I could also on the very – say something to the digitization of cultural heritage, there are several tools having been developed jointly by libraries, authors, publishers collected to facilitate digitization of cultural heritage because also the authors and publishers think that this is extremely important. There are several projects, one of them being in France where there is no digitizing the works which are no longer being publicized. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: One moment. Because we are quite lucky to have with us Carlos Romero who is the deputy from the Spanish Government. You are going through a number of things at the moment in Spain. Do you have any quick comments on what you have heard so far? 

>> CARLOS ROMERO: Okay. Thank you. Yeah. I think I am going to make some comments because we are in Spain. We are now facing reform of the Intellectual Property law. So I think I can be like a practical case in this debate. In fact, we are starting with these reform in a huge debate in the European Union, France or England are I think following the same debate on Intellectual Property. In Spain we have three main pillars on this reform. I am going to go through them shortly. The first one is private copy and educational use of educational users. We want to clarify the regime of private copy in general and we are going to adapt it to the new technological era. And in the educational use we think that we are in a sensible field when you have to take, take the different interests from their education and the universities and the publishers. 

Definitely research scientifical research. We think it has to be a privileged regime in this sense because it creates at the end economical value. The second pillar of our reform is collecting societies. We think in Spain and other European countries also that we have to give collecting societies transparency and we have to intervene a little bit to try to avoid discollecting societies convert themselves short of monopolistical powers. And we have to intervene to try to balance, for example, fixing of tariffs. In this case I must say that, for example, printers collecting societies is not more problematic in Spain but music producers is more problematic and the third is piracy. We have to face in this debate because piracy in Spain is a huge problem and we really want to face this problem. 

But in this reform we have to – we have faced this problem in the way we are thinking is more efficient and I agree with Miguel. In Spain we have chose not to go against users and people who are not making money with illegal content. We think that the main problem in piracy is people who make money with illegal content. Not all linkers. Because Internet is very sensible ecosystem. You have to characterize very well who are behind the problem. 

And this kind of linkers which really make huge amount of money are under a point or point of view the main problem. And they are the people who must be prosecuted. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Well, I was going to ask our panelists the next question of what they want to do to reform the Copyright, but I will put it back to the audience. We have heard of a couple of problems. Olav has told us of a few solutions from the perspective of the rightsholders. From the perspective of the audience what would you like to see done in Europe to suit you? You have a whole Copyright Law in your back pocket. Now is the time to get it out. Can you introduce yourself? 

>> My name is Marco. I am an IP lawyer. One of the big issues that I see in the European Union is the question of the licenses regarding collective societies being territorial. It is horrible. For industry it is something very, very burden. Some time ago I dealt with that situation regarding movie that a client was producing. And we tried to obtain some licenses from Eastern European countries because they were cheaper. And in the discussions we told them because the answer was always you got to speak with Portuguese collective society and I said come on, this is a European Union free market. So you got – you have to give me the license because otherwise you are violating the free market regulations. 

The question is getting worse because the European court justice has recently, if I am not mistaken, there are so many sentences, has declared that to those licenses can be territorial and we have to get to the national collecting society to get the respective license. But as I said in a free market like the European Union is where – free capital circulates, free people circulates, et cetera, isn’t absurd that we continue to carry this burden to creative and cultural industries. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Definitely got something there about cross-border and territories. Constantine in the back. 

>> Thank you. So I will be very brief. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Please introduce yourself. 

>> I am with the Internet Society. My name is Constantine. The problem appears to be a gap between Copyright innovation. The more the discussions are taking place and the more the discussions are evolving it always goes back to how restrictive Copyright appears to be in innovation. If we want to be pioneers, we need to figure out how to create a copyright regime that takes in to consideration and encourages innovation. So look 20 years ahead and is not restrictive of the innovators that we don’t know yet. The ones that are going to come in 10, 15, 20 years the new generation that is coming. Create a culture where we try to delineate a very clear as we can boundaries between commercial and noncommercial use, limitations and exceptions and encourage creativity and creativity can take a lot of forms. Creativity doesn’t only mean content that we have to pay. Creativity also means content that we want to disseminate. Any Copyright regime that we start thinking needs to be based on incentives and we see this becoming more and more apparent. Thanks. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. So thoughts to the panel. Got two questions from around the front and I will go one to the back. I will take these two first because I saw them first. So one, two gentlemen in the back and then the gentleman there. 

>> Yeah. I am Anna, new media summer school. I am a law student. Copyright is one of my favorite topics, but what I am going to tell you now is that this – I still – I am still thinking that this Copyright discussion is not clever. I don’t see the sense of discussing it. I think that artists – I think that the whole Copyright issue should be left for the artists and users should discuss this topics, not we. Because I think that even if you Copyright it, if you send us to jail for downloading stuff, we will always find a way out of it. 

Another thing that I want to say is that the donation concept is a really good solution for this problem. There are many good examples for it. For example, I think that everyone knows Radio Hat, the band or at least some of you. So when they released their last album they put it for free. They received a huge amount of money. Maybe it was more than they would get when they would fix – put the fixed price but whatever. Wikipedia is good. They give us free content. When they need money they ask for a donation. I think the same system should apply for the Copyright, copy this stuff. I don’t know how it is called because this is how this problem can be solved. 

Yeah, I am a bit nervous. I lost my point. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: No, no. I think we have got some good information. You are talking about alternative platforms and alternative models there with donations and that sort of thing. 

>> Anna: And I will speak from my experience also. For example, there are many, many bands which I discovered from Youtube, listening to them for free and if there was no such opportunity I would like – if they held a concert in Georgia, I am from Georgia, I would definitely go there. They get money from the tickets and if they put everything for money, I would never listen to it. Why should I pay for something that I don’t know. This is a risk kind of. And another thing is that rock stars like Bob Dylan and others they put their songs like – it is not free, yes? But they have so much money. Why – they are greedy I think. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. We go to some other people that are lined up to speak. I am going to take this gentleman here and then go to the back. It is really happening now, but I think what we will do is we will take the people that I suggested and then we will go back to the panel because I would like to hear what the panel are thinking and then we will come back out again. 

>> My name is Robert and I want to propose some new ideas about platforms and thinking about Copyright. Because basically we see now that there is some other surfaces that offer data because we are talking about data and not talking about like culture works, all data and it is translated in to online material since we are talking about. So spot of advice offering data. And subscription model which is really cool because people actually found out they are willing to pay for a subscription model and Spotify is a great example of new ways we go on – we get along with data and we like sublicensed our data to consumers. And what I want to propose why are we thinking about Copyright at this one, right, or this big organisation where you like sign a contract, et cetera when you are maybe just sharing your song with 100 people or 200 people or your book or app. What I want to propose why don’t we rethink Copyright as a licensing model and come up with a surface, and I might start myself because I believe in it where you as a publisher, creator or author can create a simple system in which any other business or creative person can reuse your content and then actually can pay for the usage. So this sounds a bit vague, but right now we only have like radio and Spotify and a few other streaming services, but I am sure there are a lot of other creative entrepreneurs that are thinking of new ways to discover music, but I don’t want to hassle to host and actually buy all this music. But what if they can use just this new licensing model and then actually pay for music that their users play through their platform and also make a little money because people use their platform. The same comes for books. We should have like more e-book platforms if people can make these new ways if you work with a sublicensing model. So I am thinking about this little creativity tax that you can pay to an author and we open up a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs to create new data. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Gentleman in the back and then we will come back to the panel and we have a remote thing after that. 

>> Good afternoon. I am Meda and I belong to a body attached to the secretary of state of culture working with Copyright. You teased us by saying okay, that’s your chance to pick up your new Intellectual Property law and show us. I work in this area for more than 25 years. And what I see day-to-day is that as you were trying to put your grand, grand, grand, grandfather’s suit on you, and I can assure you it doesn’t fit, you are not going to be able to do that. There are solutions. I see them as solutions. But you do have to pick small things from small people that give their contribution. The first one would be Francis Gurry, the President of WIPO. In Beijing conference in 2010 he said and that’s a no-no because you cannot say that because since 1886 the Berne Convention, the Copyright is created, at the moment it is created. And you have the right independently of any registration or any formality. So that’s a no-no to say but Francis Gurry said it in Beijing. He said maybe we could have a sort of ISBN code attached to every – to every work that circulates in the net. 

And if you attach that or you can leave those that don’t want to be rewarded and want to give their work to us, and we are not going to surely discuss how many is an incentive for creation, we are not. I refuse to discuss that because bah, did 1,000 works and they only come up with three albums. The first one died normally and the last ones died millionaires. So the money and creation does not work for me. If you have sort of a code, sort of a watermark that you put in your work, and you make the – every time that work passes pay an ISP, you charge something and you create a flat rate that everyone pays by accessing to the Internet, let’s say 50 cents a month is nothing, but in Portugal would be three – 30,000 – 30 million Euros a year. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. Sort of like a tax or something. A flat rate. 

>> Create a flat rate. That would be charged by ISPs and it would be delivered to the societies so you don’t put them out. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. So there is remuneration there. Mike, can you do something quick with your comment? Is that possible? 

>> (Off microphone). 

>> STUART HAMILTON: There is a microphone coming and then take the quick remote question and then go back to the panel and there is a lot to pick up on this. 

>> You asked for suggestions to reform. I think the first thing we have to do is to remember in Europe we already have an alternative to Copyright. We have been discussing the American and British to Copyright. In Europe we have – we have a system that is founded on the link between the work and the original creator who takes responsibility for it on that basis and creative content does not work without a legal underpinning and I think we need also to remember that it is – it is important to society that the individual creator be able to make an independent professional living. Wikipedia is wonderful. Put up an Article that says what you think and within minutes a note will appear saying you have not cited any authoritative sources. So much of this free stuff depends on the work of people who are able to make a reasonable living dedicating themselves to whether it be reporting or researching or music even. 

But we already have an alternative and it is Derder. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Remote participants? 

>> We have a remote question which comes from Harry Smith who works at the European Commission, impact of relationships which is a project founded by the European Commission and aimed at the potential civil risk faced by children and young people. Does the panel think that the barriers to access culture and knowledge are really caused by Copyright issues or are the barriers more about social economic factors? 

>> STUART HAMILTON: That’s a pretty decent question to get back in. Who would like to go first from the panel? Carlos. 

>> CARLOS ROMERO: Regarding multi-territorial licenses I share completely your comments but the European commission is working in some kind of reform regarding overall musical. I think that the legislative effort might be more deep, deeper. Might be deeper and reach to all the licenses because I think this is one of the things which push Europe in behind the American industry. 

>> I can probably speak from this one if it works. Start with the last question. And no, I don’t think that Copyright is the barrier. Absolutely not. And what we have seen for the digitization and making available of cultural heritage and I am not talking about in Copyright, the problem has not been contracts with rights owners. The problem has been money. That Governments have not been willing to fund the projects. The second question that I would want to address is the territoriality. Because in my sector I am – so I should be careful speaking about audiovisual and music, but in my sector it is not really a major problem. Because publishers and authors sell across borders, whether from Amazon or other e-bookstores. In collective management the two that come up with multi-national company and multi-national company can have a multi-territorial licensing and educational institutions can have virtual learning environments. So they will have a multi-territorial license. To solve this problem the cost of music, the European Commission needs to be more flexible in their way of thinking about the competition laws. Because they have been so dogmatic in the competition laws. I don’t think there is a Copyright issue regarding the development of new things. I think there will be lots of ideas and they will be coming and developing. 

Spotify is from Sweden. You develop a lot of things here in Europe under the Copyright regimes. I would like to take the opportunity to explain why this donation theory is not feasible. In the past when you sold CDs or LPs or disks then the musician, composer he could go to the bank and say that listen, they are buying my CDs. I will have a stable income. That person could go to the bank and say listen, I have found this wonderful house. Very cheap. I need it for my husband and wife and children and the bank would say yes, this is really good value for money. We are going to lend you the money because we can see income coming in. If you base this on donation and not private party, if you cannot sell CDs, go on concerts, tours, gadgets, well, you cannot grow old, cannot be sick. Try to go to the bank and say that listen, I have been – many people have watched me. Millions have watched me on Youtube, whatever. And there is no income coming from it. Nothing coming from it, but I plan on going on a tour and I am going to sell a couple of T-shirts and the bank would say absolutely fantastic and this is the best project and we are going to lend you the money? Not. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: It is the rest of the people who work in the rest of the world? 

>> Yes. That is why the donation doesn’t work. So what we need to do to have a good debate is that you need to acknowledge the value of Copyright of information and data. We need to restore I would say the value or Copyright and information and data, and I think that what is important for us to develop and for rightsholders to develop is that users enter in to an active dialogue as they have done in relation to the cultural heritage, and they do not walk out of the dialogues. They need to explain to us what they want and then we can respond and then we can find good solutions. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: I know that Ben has some things to say here. I know that you have been involved in a couple of things, particularly relating to some very new developments in the area of text to data mining. Olav has given us a number of solutions based on licensing but I am interested in hearing your opinions on this in terms of reform. 

>> BEN WHITE: I think sort of one of the questions was, you know, does Copyright affect innovation and how does Copyright reform affect innovation. Copyright is not this monolithic thing that affects everything. Many factors that affect. Availability of capital, developers have nice offices almost which is where you get clusters. Lots of different reasons why you get innovation or not. There are I think a lot of studies about global innovation which conclude that high levels of Intellectual Property in the developed world are good for the developed world and lower levels of Intellectual Property in developing countries are better. I think one thing that we do lack is kind of studies around technology SMEs and what levels of IP either help or don’t help SMEs. 

Going to Stuart’s question, both Sarah and I were involved in something called Licenses for Europe and the text and data mining subgroup which is basically about data, data driven innovation. And what that group under the banner of licenses for Europe was trying to do was say actually what we need is the way that we can facilitate more data driven innovation text and data mining in the context of SMEs or in the context of scientific research is by further licensing. And essentially the technology companies, the open access publishers and the scientific community have now walked away from the table and their view is that more licensing to make the billions that studies from organisations like McKenzie can be made from big data is not to have further and further licensing and restrictions. What we actually need to do is lower barriers to reusing information. Of course, as long as that reasonable information is not substitutable for what the publishers produce or the creator produce. We live in a very complex world and essentially higher barriers and more Intellectual Property is not the answer. And I think it is very interesting that the technology markets and having that debate and have one policy recommendation that we are supposed to be saying is let’s actually have more studies looking at technology in the context of the data driven innovation.

>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. Marco, I mean Google has been very heavily involved in it. What’s ringing true for you in these discussions? What are you agreeing or not agreeing? 

>> MARCO PANCINI: This is a competitive issue for Europe. If Europe is going in the licensing of data mining and actually putting the old technological development in the field of big data, the risk is going the wrong direction, vis-a-vi the competition they will face from U.S. companies and I mean information companies. Moreover I think it is per se an issue if we think about the startup. If we think that the first person startup is likely to hire a lawyer, is a lawyer. It is not an engineer. Here we are have a problem. I think that we need to face and if the goal that we all have in mind is growth and jobs, probably we should look at a system which brings more flexibility. Then the solution that we have on the table are different but flexibility should be our main focus in order to really foster growth and innovation. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you. Sarah. 

>> SARAH KELLY: Yes, I think coming back as Ben mentioned some of the Intellectual Properties can be seen as barriers to entry, particularly for SMEs and startups and entrepreneurs. And addressing the remote participation I think it was Harriet who asked if Copyright was the reason and there is problems with cultural access. No, it is not the only reason but it is a reason. And we have to see ourselves in Europe as not just looking – we are not trying to sell within Europe. We are trying to compete for the growth of these SMEs and providers of platform for cultural content with the U.S., with Africa, with India, with China. So we can’t just look at our own Copyright system and say well, that works for us. Because if it is going to be beneficial for a company to start elsewhere, then they will do that. 

I have spoken to many startups who are looking at doing that, particularly so we are talking about text and data mining. There is a startup in the UK that has developed a technology that allows other startups. They are helping with growth of other startups to plug in their sources of data, scrape the websites for things like venues for their upcoming shows, cinema listings and upload them to their events website. And under some of these things we were talking about licenses for Europe and we need licensing to do text and data mining. They would have to license in order to be able to apply that technology. And when I spoke to them about this they said well, we will just collocate in the U.S. We have already got our investors telling us we want to go over there anyway. So if we are going to have to pay additional costs or risk coming up under heavy fines from infringing Copyright of the open web, then we are just going to move there. So I think if we are looking at trying to encourage growth in the UK and try to, you know, if we ever want to grow a homegrown business that maybe will replace Google one day, we need to make sure we have the regimes here in most regulations but particularly in Copyright. When we are talking about access to cultural information that we need to make sure that our regulation including Copyright is competitive. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: So I think that’s a really important point from the perspective of this discussion in Europe. If we don’t get it right here some of our best companies are going to go elsewhere. I did see a couple of hands from the audience. 

>> My name is David. First off I think that the Copyright, the IP system, the trademark system, all of them are majorly broken. So we don’t want to throw them out entirely. They need major reform. A couple of quick ideas. One is about sourcing. The idea of default content. We are in this age of open web and tons of content going on online. If you can’t find the source of something, the licensed – you can use and until someone claims it. There is tons of content that is impossible to find the original owner. In terms of metadata there is some efforts to make metadata more useable in terms of licensing content. But maybe some massive push campaign that have all sorts of content, you know, with some sort of standardized way of licensing included within the metadata which make it hugely more accessible. And the third is about publicly funded content. That anything that receives, you know, a substantial amount or fully funded by some public system should be automatically pushed in to the public domain. We see it all the time in Lebanon and then groups license and they hold it in the strictest way. They don’t want to share it at all but it was funded by a public source and it should be all pushed in to a public accessible repository. 

>> STUART HAMILTON: We have a gentleman over there. Take the microphone over there. 

(The captioner has to leave. Thank you and have a great day)

[[Category:2013]][[Category:Sessions 2013]][[Category:Sessions]]