The EU copyright reform’s proposal – which impacts on users’ fundamental rights? – WS 07 2017

From EuroDIG Wiki
Revision as of 15:31, 29 August 2017 by Eurodigwiki-edit (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

7 June 2017 | 11:00 - 12:30 | Room Tartu, Swissotel, Tallinn, Estonia | video record
Programme overview wiki | Programme overview EuroDIG web site

Session teaser

The EU copyright reform's proposal - which impacts on users' fundamental rights?

Keywords

EU copyright reform, censorship, intermediary liability, user-generated content, blockchain

Session description

The European copyright reform proposal - published last September and currently reviewed by the EU Parliament and the Council of the EU - could dramatically alter digital services as we know them. By requiring Internet services to implement content-filtering technologies to monitor user-generated content and creating a new exclusive right for press publishers (thereby hindering the free flow of information on the Internet), this proposal raises complex questions, with significant repercussions at a global scale on users' fundamental rights, intermediaries' liability and the use of copyright-protected content by Internet users

Format

Workshop with

  1. presentation of the speakers by moderator and session's description;
  2. short remarks at the beginning from each key participants;
  3. discussion between participants following questions from moderator until 11:40;
  4. open discussion with people in the room and online (half of questions taken from the room, other half from online participants)

Further reading

Until 30 April 2017. Links to relevant websites, declarations, books, documents. Please note we cannot offer web space, so only links to external resources are possible. Example for an external link: Main page of EuroDIG

People

Focal Point:

  • Maud Sacquet, Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA)

Subject Matter Expert (SME):

  • Yrjö Länsipuro (ISOC Finland)

Key Participants

  • Jake Beaumont-Nesbitt, Policy Advisor, International Music Managers Forum
  • Samuel Laurinkari, Head of EU Affairs, eBay
  • Eva Lepik, Wikimedia

Moderator

  • Maud Sacquet, Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA)

Remote Moderator

Organising Team (Org Team)

  • Jan Gerlach
  • Christian Borggreen
  • George Hari Popescu
  • Susan Chalmers
  • Walid Al-Saqaf
  • Narine Khachatryan

Reporter

  • Maud Sacquet

Video record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY-tSuV1hWA

Messages

  1. Concerns about how technology revolutionises the commercial world and current business models being incompatible with the new obligations e.g. content-filtering technologies. Consensus that filtering obligations for intermediaries are a bad idea.
  2. Discussion about how automatic monitoring could be problematic and how they could affect other rights such as human rights.
  3. Ensuring that the reform proposal address other rights such as freedom of panorama. Possibility of harmonisation for not only non-commercial use but commercial use too.
  4. The copyfighters prepared a position paper reflecting the youth position on a modern copyright reform. They identified 7 key areas in need of reform including: territoriality, geoblocking, fair use, intermediaries, remix culture, education - open access and ancillary right for press publishers.
  5. A broad consensus that Art.13 is problematic. Discussions on the uncertainty and concerns about culture heritage.
  6. Geoblocking - consensus that there should not be geoblocking. However, there is a counterpoint that geoblocking should be allowed for promotional purposes by artists to allow for short time goals such as timed content release.
  7. An addition for a fair use exception to existing copyright exceptions that would be future proof. However, it was recognised that it would be very difficult, nearly impossible.
  8. Important to educate on copyright. However, it is remarked that this should be a simple education and that an interesting objective would be for copyright to become invisible for most internet users.

Transcript

Provided by: Caption First, Inc., P.O. Box 3066, Monument, CO 80132, Phone 800-825-5234, www.captionfirst.com


This text is being provided in a realtime format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.


>> MAUD SACQUET: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this workshop. So this workshop is titled the EU Copyright Reform’s Proposal which impacts on users’ fundamental rights which is a topic that is being quite discussed. You can see I am discussing from these posters that are set up here and I'm trying to read it -- but thank you very much for the illustrations. My name is Maud Sacquet. I'm a public policy manager for the CCIA association. I'm called the Computer and Communications Industry Association. We represent internet companies in digital sector in Brussels and Washington and we've been – well involved in company-wide reform in Brussels for several years now.

Let me introduce you to our main participants to these workshops. So we have Eva Lepik for Wikimedia in Estonia. We have also Samuel Laurinkaris who is the head of European Affairs at eBay. I know eBay is a ways away, we’ve been complaining about company-wide we never really think about eBay contacts but Samuel will explain why it’s actually relevant for his company. And we have Jake Beaumont-Nesbitt who is the executive director of INMF – it’s the International Music Managers Forum so he can explain to us the prospective about artists on that debate.

We also have (?) as co-moderator. Thank you very much for your help, as well as (?) – I hope I pronounce that correctly – for the remote moderator. And our rapporteur for the end of the workshop unfortunately is not able to make it live, so I will summarize the session at the end, and we will send it off as well to EuroDIG in the afternoon.

So before starting what can be a very long and complex debate, I want to give you a bit of background as to why we set up this workshop and the main topic on which we will try and focus because it’s such a broad and wide topic. Perhaps some background is that about two years ago all the Commission decided to try to create what's called the digital single market or DSM for short. The idea was to try to bridge the (?) video sector in the states, and so the CCommission launched quite a few proposals and initiatives over these past two years. And one of them was around copyright. The idea was to modernize it, to make it fit for the digital age. So many different proposals were actually published by the Commission. We chose to focus on one of them published last September.

The official title is the proposal for a directive on copyright in a digital single market, and this proposal is now being reviewed by the European Parliament and the Council and is actually important vote that is happening tomorrow at the Parliament if you are following those debates a little more closely. But even if you focus only on one proposal, that proposal covers quite a few different areas from text and date mining to new exclusive rights for press publishers online, from undermining the limited liability regime of platforms by making licensing or filtering requirements, to copyright exceptions such as education, for example.

So there's a lot of topics to cover and we're happy to discuss them, of course, but we will start by focusing I think at least in the important part of the debate on the issues of what we call Article 13, which is the idea of filtering of liability of intermediaries online, licensing requirements, et cetera, et cetera, but then of course we are happy to go for debate if you have any questions on publisher rights, for example, copyright exception such as freedom of panorama or freedom of education.

I’ll stop there and leave the floor first to Samuel from eBay.

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARIS: Great. Thank you very much, Maud. And thank you for introducing me as the guy in the room, no one knows why. This is a very weird room to talk to because there's no one in front of me, just people on the sides. So I'll try to sort of look around.

So I'll talk a little bit about what eBay is and what we do in 2017 and I will talk specifically about the copyright proposal and our concerns about that after that. Most of you will obviously remember eBay, the online marketplace that essentially created, invented, and pioneered e-commerce in 1995. Many people remember it as a sort of online flea market of the ‘90s where you sell old stuff that you no longer use, especially markets where you don't have a platform. But we quite strongly evolved from a consumer-to-consumer marketplace into a business-to-consumer marketplace. So around 80% of the, around 90 billion dollars of sales on our sites these days comes from sales of predominantly small businesses that leverage our platform to reach consumers beyond their sort of local communities.

So we identify ourselves as very much a small business platform and as an export platform. So what we see in terms of the small business user platform is that technology fundamentally changes, revolutionizes the nature of commerce. Whereas back in the day, a small business couldn't participate in international commerce in any other mean than tapping into the supply chain of a multi-national company, technology has changed that so distance doesn't matter. A small business can interact and transact with consumers everywhere in the world directly. So quite concretely what we see is that 93% of the small businesses that trade on our platform are actually exporting and 40% of those into more than four continents. So these are really micro multi-international companies that are embracing the digital opportunities and creating jobs and growth in their local communities while being global and serving customers everywhere in the world. And, of course, the same applies to the customers who are unable to reach a product priority and inventory that was not possible before.

Now, you may wonder what has linked to copyright here. It's that I'll do the standard blurb wherever I go and promote our platform, but the bottom line is that a platform such as eBay, an intermediary platform that essentially puts the technology that connects the people using the platform at their disposal enables economic activity and supports economic development in a society at large. And here's where the copyright proposal comes into play, because it essentially undermines the ability to do so because the platform business model that we, for example, have put in place depends very much on the fact that you are not liable as a platform provider for the infringements of your users. The technology platform, the ability to scale is what makes you competitive.

So in our case, for example, there are more than 1 billion listings on our sites at any given point in time, and then around 10 million new listings coming on the site every day. Which means that a manual review of all aspects of legality of the listings is impossible. Even if you have 100 million people reviewing those listings, there still would not be legal experts in all the areas that have an impact on, for example, the legality of a copyright.

There's copyright, product safety, consumer law, chemicals law, there’s product specific legislation, there’s age verification issues. There's a whole bulk of legislation that applies to a product being sold, hence making it impossible for an intermediary to check the legality of items being sold by the users. So it’s a principles that users are the ones that make a decision to act through the technology that is being provided. It's very important also within the copyright proposal.

So let me be concrete what exactly we're concerned about in the copyright proposal. As I mentioned, for an intermediary platform such as ours, it's absolutely critical to be able to rely on the fact that you're not being held responsible, liable, if someone abuses your platform. However, that is exactly what the copyright proposal is doing. So, essentially, our three concerns about the copyright proposal is, one, it turns all hosting service providers -- so think of any intermediary platform -- from a host that hosts information content uploaded by users into the publisher of that content. And that exactly changes the whole dynamics of the transaction and the legal liabilities related to them. So, essentially, we would be held -- we would be considered in a way, the retailer in the copyright terms, the publisher of for example pictures associated with listings.

Secondly, it reinterprets the e-commerce directive, the legal cornerstone of the internet, which establishes the very principle that you're not being held liable for the infringement of the users unless you're aware of the infringement. It reinterprets the e-commerce directive in a way that excludes any modern intermediary service provider. I still haven't been able to come up with any business that would actually be able to benefit from the e-commerce directive if the Commission's proposal would be adopted.

And, thirdly, it imposes a filtering obligation on platforms. So in addition to these first two very crucial points, the proposal, it obliges online platforms to put in place technical filters to prevent infringements from happening. You may wonder on most items being traded on eBay are rather protected by trademark than copyright or patents. Yes, but there's -- a lot of the content that we host on our site is copyright protected. So I mentioned we have about 1 billion listings live on our site at any given point in time. Usually, those listings are associated with 4 or 5 pictures of the product that people are selling. So that makes around 4 to 5 billion pictures that we host on our site that may or may not be copyright protected. In addition to that, copyright is extremely broad and vague, so it keeps evolving with case law.

It also differs by country. For example, in France and Germany, a product design, so how the product looks like, can be protected by copyright in addition to design rights. I'll give you an example. On the worst case scenario of application of law that actually exists today. So in Germany the German Supreme Court ruled that we had a state obligation on a copyright violation. And the case dealt with a children chair, a chair called Tripp Trapp manufactured by a company called Stokke. It’s a Zet-shaped chair. My daughter has one as well. Excellent chair. But Stokke claimed that a competitor, so another company that produces chairs, had produced a chair that looked too similar to the ones that they had manufactured. Filed a take down request to our service, claiming that it's a copyright infringement. We took the listings down because of the liability risk. That's what we do when we get notified. We're obliged to take things down. But listings reappeared, so the competitor kept selling these chairs that looked similar. They didn't claim they were Stokke chairs, but they looked similar to the chairs that Stokke was selling.

Imagine what an intermediary platform can do there. It puts us in a position of being a, essentially, a design right judge or copyright judge in that context. So customer service people, people that review, get these notifications, are actually at the very moment sitting in front of a desk comparing two pictures and making a judgment, is this similar or not? And is this a copyright infringement or not? Gladly, this applies to only one brand in very, very sort of specific circumstance with some traffic generation elements to it, as well. But if this would apply across the board to, for example, all the 30,000 brands that participate in our rights program, it would make the intermediary platform model impossible.

And I know I exceeded my five minutes, but one more point. What we keep hearing from both the rights owner community and the Commission is that you guys shouldn't even worry about this corporate thing. It's not about eBay. It's about YouTube, music, it’s about audio visual media content. It's about a perceived value gap discussion. But it is, essentially. As I mentioned, if you read the text, if you apply it as you would apply, then it would indeed be ridiculously broad. It will include any kind of online intermediary that hosts any kind of content, not only those that are perceived to be at the middle of these political concerns.

I'll pause here and look forward to discussion. Thank you.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you, Samuel. As you can see, just a couple of words on my side. One of the main debates we have here is whether the proposal will actually change and be most active and change reliability of platforms. The proposal says that if you, for example, have a different category of product and you should categorize the content of users and you are publishers and you're not merely a hosting provider benefiting from the e-commerce activity. So at least that is a position of eBay if I understand correctly and that's usually the position more broadly of the digital industry. That is a position being fought against by rights holder and the Commission that considers what they are doing is not changing the directive or liability regimes. So I think that’s one of the main debates we’re having right now . I think we will have the opportunity to go back to the Stokke case a bit later because I would like to have a bit more detail as to how many people actually have to review every day your platform to make sure you're not infringing the design rights of this chair.

I'll just hand over the mic to – oh. There one question?

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: Just a tiny, tiny statement. I would also like to underline that even if it wouldn't be that broad and eBay wouldn't be covered, it would still be a very, very bad idea to do that to YouTube and the other actors. We don't want to have these private judges over what is allowed content or not on the internet. That's an inherently bad idea.

>> MAUD SACQUET: I think a lot of people would agree with you on that point.

I'm going to hand over the mic to Eva from Wikimedia.

>> EVA LEPIK: I want to talk about this content filtering theme as it concerns Wikimedians. As you all know Wikimedia is a platform by volunteers who are creating free content. So, actually, we monitor ourselves. We monitor the content that is produced by volunteer editors and so it would be great waste to create automatic system for filtering the content because everything in Wikimedia should be on the free license or in public domain. So it would be quite pointless to apply technical devices for filtering.

Also, once platforms are forced to make these technical implementations, I think this will not stop there. These devices can be used other ways which are connected to human rights more directly than filtering copyright infringements. So Wikimedians are very well informed about copyright problems much more than ordinary people.

So this new system, if it will be enforced, would be detrimental for our work. There are some other concerns. The proposal by European Commission did not say anything about freedom of panorama. So this is right to disseminate images of buildings or sculptures or artworks prominently placed in public places. The system is -- well, every country has its own way. We would really like to see it harmonized because in Baltic States we have only allowed to use these images noncommercially, which means we can't use them in Wikimedia. And, actually, this form of corporate doesn't allow us to put these images in social media.

The other thing was I wanted to stress out that there have been court cases about artworks in public domainwhich some hope get copyrighted when they are digitized. So the German museum sued Wikimedia Deutschland for putting images in public domain to Wikimedia commons which is our repository, and these were old paintings which should be in public domain. But, nevertheless, the museum actually won the Court case. So we are concerned that our cultural heritage is not free for all and I know there has been made an amended proposal during the process in the European Parliament now, but we can't be sure it will be implemented.

I will continue later. Thank you.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you, Eva.

I think it's, again, just one additional comment. I think it's quite interesting in Brussels I attended a panel and I think it was a representative of Wikipedia, I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it was Wikipedia, that was asking the Commission whether there could be a new proposal. Wikipedia was included in the scope and so would have to implement in future and likely be liable for content of its users. And it was an interesting discussion with the Commission and representative of (?) arguing on a legal basis that this wasn't the case, and Wikipedia saying: well, I've got seven lawyers telling me otherwise. So who is right? It was just at the beginning of the process, but I remember thinking that is goint to last months and months until everyone was agreeing. And I’m not actually sure if anyone was actually agreeing at the end of the process of the interpretation what has been voted.

And in terms of freedom of panorama, I think we'll have a moderator get back to it a little later, but it's quite an interesting discussion. Especially for me being French and the whole idea of the Eiffel tower picture and all of that, I’d actually like to knw what I’m able to do and to post online.

I will hand the mic to Jake right now.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: Thank you.

So I'm from the International Music Managers Forum. A music manager is someone who works for the artist on their business side. The artist does the creative. We do the business for them. So we work for them. We carry out their instructions.

When we come into this discussion about copyright, we think of money. We think, this is how we get paid. This is what allows our artists to spend days in studios or out in the road, that they're getting paid from the music that a lot of people are enjoying and a lot of people are making money from. So it's really important for us to protect monetization of usage. Copyright, the right to make copies, it's kind of a redundant term and has been evolved over the years into various little sections.

As each new technology comes along, the music industry, so not the artist but the intermediaries and the people around them, has done a really good job of developing new ways of creating money from new uses. And the current reform process going through Brussels isn't really a reform. It's more tinkering at the edges and thinking from our side, from the music side: how do we make money? Sitting between two platforms, between Maud who represents a bunch of platforms and between eBay, we don't care. We're not interested in the platforms whether Samuel can scale and things like that. But the thing Samuel said at the beginning was that he's a marketplace for small businesses and he allows export.

And so although we're not particularly enamored with companies like Google, Facebook, eBay, et cetera, what we're in love with is the marketplace they've created and the powers and ability they've given us to disintermediate, to remove intermediaries by which we would mean collective management organizations, publishers, record companies. If you're just doing the sums, remove stakeholders from the pie, there’s more money left for the artists. So the music industry doesn't necessarily have a great belief in disintermediation. It’s also not something the artists are particularly aggressive about. All the people who we work with and help us, we're not particularly saying we need to get rid of them, we need to get more of the money.

But when you look at the massive disruption that's gone into intellectual property andthe way content is traded online, the consumer experience is radically transformed. The ability for a consumer instead of buying a compact disk and having it tethered to a device that they can play that on, a player that maybe they had in one room of the home, maybe they didn't have a portable version, to now they can access any music on their phone anywhere in the world at any time for a flat fee, that's an amazing form of change, disruption, whatever you want to call it. We haven't seen those changes in the B to B side, only in the B to C side of music.

The fear that we have therefore with the current copyright process is it will impact marketplaces. It will impact, to all the points eBay are making, you could apply those to platforms like SAM cloud, like YouTube. And Facebook are increasingly going to be focused on video and music and pushing that way.

So we're really concerned about our ability to reach the marketplace. A thing that I've been hearing through EuroDIG, particularly yesterday, was it was about intermediaries where intermediaries seem to refer to the platforms. We think of intermediaries as the music industry. There's -- where the music industry discusses the copyright reform, we discuss around money. When I come here, I hear concerns about freedom of expression. We don't really talk about those in the music industry. We have this phrase, “the value gap,” that was invented by the record companies to suggest that the platforms have a lot of value extracted from music and they don't pass that through.

The amount of intermediaries between the artist and the platforms and the inability of a lot of the big platforms, including platforms like Spotify, to actually make money out of music because they're retaining quite a small share compared to what the retailers used to retain on physical products, on CD and vinyl, makes it kind of hard for us to see what this value gap thing is. So value gap appears to be a simplistic phrase by the music industry to say we want more money. We're not sure that there's more money on the table. We're also convinced that having this big marketplace exports ability for small traders to get into the platforms, to get onto the space to reach audiences. That's how you grow the market.

So just asking short-term, give us cash, create rules that would reinforce our business model rather than try and find ways to grow the market and increase the total value, we think that's kind of looking at it the wrong way. But artists think about freedom of expression. They care strongly. Away from music, they care about the ability for people to put their opinions online politically, socially, culturally. This isn't just a music form of freedom of expression. Artists understand that intuitively.

With Article 13 of the copyright reform process, what would happen is platforms that host content uploaded by users would have to filter that content. And this initially from an artist perspective sounds reasonable because it sounds like what you're saying is the filter will find the stuff that an artist owns and will make sure, then, that the artist has control of how it is used online. So a platform like Spotify is 100% filtered already. Everything that's on there, they have a license for. There is an approved process through which the music has been uploaded. The problem you get when you get platforms where everything is fully licensed so they're not these open, chaotic, wide marketplaces that anyone can jump into, is the most dominant, strongest players end up with control of the market.

So we see physically offline, we see all the high streets – the high street in Tallinn is starting to look just like the one in Helsinki, the one in Brussels, the one in London, similar stores, similar shops everywhere. We're starting to see that online with the play lists that platforms like Spotify host. That you're getting global music, global singular products that are pushed worldwide. So when I speak to our Estonian member organizations and Estonian artists, they really struggle to get their music onto a platform like Spotify onto their global playlists. So in speaking to an Estonian artist yesterday who managed to get onto the new music Friday on Spotify out of Helsinki, so this is great, they should in theory start to get traction in Finland.

But their music was put on for one week on a play list that most of the subscribers are just listening to it like wall paper. It's becoming very difficult for artists to surface and reach engagement through these massive platforms. So a little tokenism, we played an Estonian artist once, we put it on a playlist for one week, up against the wall of Anglo American, US, UK, Canadian, Australian content that's being pushed, it's really not making much impact. So we're seeing a global playlist in the same way we see homogenized high streets where there's the gap. There's H & M. There's Starbucks. We've seen that online with music, and that's the unintended consequence that we're afraid of with the filter. We don't object in theory to people who host music checking to see if they've got stuff that's ours because we might want to get paid for it or we might want to take it down. We do object to a system that would hand control to the major record companies who will by threat will pull licenses to Spotify or by the fact that they have equity in a service like Spotify, and are able to control what's played, what's promoted, what's pushed.

So we see these rules that have pushed as Article 13 has pushed as the poor artist isn’t getting paid, this will help them get paid. We don't understand how it helps us get paid. We do understand how it re-entrenches the old business model that hasn't been disrupted, the B to B bit.

The consumer of music has radically changed. From our perspective, we're still stuck with the old control and system. So competition is important, freedom of expression is important, but when we discuss the copyright reform process, we just talk about money and value. And nobody in the debate from our side has come up with an explanation of how control of what is heard, what is played, helps us get more money. It's almost like we're just angry. The platforms have a lot of money. We want more money. Give us control. Because we can't pass a law that would say give us more money.

Thank you

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you, Jake.

Perhaps we'll open the debate for question. I will start with just one and then to Jake, actually. One of the platforms you quoted was Spotify. If I understand you correctly, you’re worried what you see on Spotify is going to happen to platforms such as YouTube or Facebook if filters are implemented. What would you better want for artists? I know I’ve heard a lot the word “transparency” being, you know, told again and again in debate in Brussel. I don't know if that's something that would make sense for you as well.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: The transparency thing, the artist doesn’t know who uses their music, how much money it generated, can’t really say hey you need to pay me that. The transparency thing can be done away from copyright reform. The technology is moving along so rapidly that it is easy to project micropayments to pull the data through. The thing we had in the old business model with money for you shipped 100 CDs, you had no idea how many CDs had been manufactured. And this is not like speculation on my part. This is properly proven cases, usually in the U.S., that record companies would create an extra shift. They would create more, they would manufacture more CDs, more vinyl, than they told the artist they had manufactured. So you would ship more records than you were told had been made. So more money would come back than you could ever expect.

It's very simple with a digital platform for the platform to be given a login to the artist as well as to the record company, for the platform to report, not the money. The money can keep going back as per the commercial agreements with the record company, but the data can go directly to the artist. And the artist can then use data to leverage other opportunities, to reach out to fans, to understand where they are, what they're interested in. And start to make money from other areas such as ticketing, merchandise, and just general engagement. So the transparency thing is an issue and a problem, but we can do that away from copyright.

The difference between a Spotify and a SAM cloud YouTube area is this user-generated content work. So the music industry will talk to Brussels as we are professional artists. And the problem is user-generated content is all of you guys, if you did anything creative, you're not real artists. And it's really hard to put into boxes a full-time professional artist like Bob Dillon and anyone in this room who is not an artist. Because Elvis started out by going into a studio in Memphis to make a record for his mum. He didn't think he was a global revolutionary artist. If he was doing that today, he would probably post a clip for his mum on Facebook. This is how artists start.

This is how -- this is the link to eBay is you start off doing something creative, and at some point you think: Hey, I might try this a bit further. But you don't have the revenue to give up your day job. So the user-generated content thing, which is generally used to describe everything other than music, includes a huge amount of artist. And the Beetles when they were earning their corn and learning their trade in Hamburg, if they were doing that now, fans would be filming that, putting it on YouTube, and it would be spreading rapidly. So the Beetles and Elvis can quite easily be dumped into user-generated content before they were signed. The problem with creating an ecosystem where you have to be signed to get access and exposure on a platform like Spotify is it prevents the artist from getting away from the record companies and finding alternative forms of finance.

>> AUDIENCE: Yes, so what you said earlier about we're now able to access any music from around the world to a flat fee, that's not really true. Today we have geo blocking which means the artists have to or the platforms that provide the music have to pay several different licenses for different countries, which in terms means that most of European consumers actually only get access to the American music because their platforms can actually afford these different licenses. So I hope and assume that you're against geo blocking.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: There are two systems. Geo blocking applies for the fully licensed platform and that's optional. Personally, I think it's stupid. Like, I wouldn't want to block any of my artists -- my artists, I don't think in terms of geography. So I’m not like hey we’ll launch in Estonia but we won’t do Latvia and we won’t do Croatia. You just want to go globally because you're looking for fans of that sort of music. You're not looking for Croatians or Estonians. So I would tend to go global. But there is value in rolling stuff out. If my artist is touring and they won’t get to Zagrade for two months after they’ve been in Tallinn, I might want to delay the release. So in the short run, geo blocking can be a useful tool for a promotional campaign. So we wouldn't want to say we oppose it and everything must be open all the time and immediately.

But sort of more to your point, what's happening is there are platforms, if all the music ends up as it’s only on a platform where the system runs as you described, then the geo blocking is done not because it's a strategic short-term goal of the artist around the music first being released or first heard, it it becomes a way of controlling price and content. What I would do at the moment as an artist is use a platform like Facebook or SAM cloud or YouTube, and I would control the rights and we wouldn't use geo blocking. So the two systems, the open free one, which is towards the eBay side of things, geo blocking is irrelevant. The fully licensed stuff, which is what the filtering of Article 13 would move us towards, the platforms and the big players will decide about geo blocking and the controlling choice will be removed from the artist. It's a bit nuanced, but I sort of agree with you.

>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you. I made -- I'm from the local chapter of the Internet Society. So my question is as to legislation, what would be the proposals for nowadays legislation that wouldn't be from the 20th century? What would be the key points? I mean, should it be redefining commercial use or would we need to tackle what are the commercial use cases for the legislators and for the courts to decide on the copyright infringement? What would be the legal aspects that we need to analyze first and come up with conclusions?

Thank you.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: It’s so entangled without - so music is just one form of content that's being affected by the copyright stuff. Across music, it is so confusing, and I'm quite specialized in the stuff I do and I have a reasonably good understanding of how the rights would work, for example, for the Beetles, for Lennon and McCartney as authors, or John, Paul and Ringo as performers. But the consumer, the fan, just takes it as the Beetles. And then once you go into that binary, who wrote it, who performed it, within that, there's different bits. The performing rights can go this way and other people have other bits of the performing rights. And the author rights can go this way. It all needs to come back together again into usage rights. Usage rights, we need to figure out how we monetize them and make them very easy for consumers and services, users of music to understand and to grab everything.

We should on our side of the fence be doing all the division, not saying to the rest of the world: If you want to use music, it’s a jigsaw and you've got to know all the pieces and figure them out. So there needs to be a radical massive overhaul which is really hard to put into a specific policy proposal based on what's out there now.

>> AUDIENCE: So I have question for you from the eBay. Even though you as a platform wouldn’t be liable for the copyright infringement of your users, do you still think it's right that the users themselves are like subject to copyright infringements when they're putting up just like a picture of a chair or something that they want to sell? I know that the culture committee has made a proposal about making an exception to user-generated content which would actually, as our pictures here, it would legalize a whole generation and all of internet culture. So what do you think about that?

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: It's a very good question. And currently, of course, we need to comply as in our facilitator compliance with the legal framework. So our terms and conditions would say you as a user need to make sure you have the legal rights to distribute the content you put on our side. Meaning, for example, if you plan to sell the chair, you need to have the right to use the picture associated with the listing.

However, what we see is a lot of abuse when it comes to copyright. So manufacturers, of course, want to control distribution of their products. Think of a sport shoe manufacturer who has a selective distribution system, supplies products only to retailers or middlemen as part of the selective distribution system. However, those contractual arrangements are never water tight and products get outside of the distribution system and independent retailers may get a shipment of products that they buy from a middleman and then want to sell it to end consumers. There's nothing illegal about that. It's just outside of the contractual framework of a manufacturer.

If an independent retailer goes on our site and sells those products, perfectly legal, authentic, nothing wrong with those products, then what we have to say is that the manufacturer will come to our site and notify a copyright infringement based on the seller using a catalog picture that the seller has downloaded from the manufacturer's website. So in essence what the manufacturer does there is enforcing their contractual arrangements in the selective distribution systems in an effort to keep the prices high by abusing copyright law. And so as a bottom line, in that context, we would encourage users to comply with the current law. However, we would welcome any modifications that would prevent such abuse.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Eva, I don’t know if you have anything to add regarding exceptions for user-generated content? Is it something important for Wikimedia to implement? Is it something you have seen company-wide before?

>> EVA LEPIK: All we do is user-generated content> And I've heard that there have been different proposals of amendments on user-generated content. And initially there was a proposal by Council committee which would allow this content non-commercially, but I know there is also a proposal to allow it commercially, that this content may be used commercially, which is much better because Wikipedia also, all areas must be allowed to use also commercially.

>> AUDIENCE: I would like to circle back a bit to the question what would the modern copyright reform look like? I've just spent the last five days with 25 other amazing young people here, the copyfighters. Maybe you've seen the position paper here or online, on Copfighters.eu. And we've talked about exactly that question and we think we came to the conclusion that we have to overcome territoriality because in the internet there are no borders and it is insane that we have different rules in different countries. At the very least, there should be a harmonization of the exceptions and limitations in copyright in all of the EU. But better, single European copyright, that we have to overcome geo blocking, that we have to allow fair use. And many other things that you can read in this paper.

And I think that these should form a base that this would be the common sense basis to then circle back to other questions. For example, when we're talking about can we regulate how much money we can get from the intermediaries, yes and no. Like maybe there is a monopoly situation where YouTube doesn't give you a big enough share from their incomes and maybe it’s the case and maybe we should have the discussion, as well. But we cannot have it on this basis where every day culture is criminalized and where usage patterns do not reflect -- are not reflected at all by copyright legislation.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you.

So just a quick question on my side. How do you see then the debate evolve at the European level on that topic? Are you hopeful at all? There's been a lot of proposals – I’m been working in that -- I mean, on that debate for months now. I'm a bit more discouraged on that point, to be honest, but I don't – maybe you have a perspective as to any kind of campaigning action that you’re planning to defend those issues?

>> AUDIENCE: There are a bunch of campaigns going on. Maybe not all of us agree but I think most of us agree that we are starting off from a very bad proposal and that includes insane things like ancillary rights for press publishers. And, obviously, we have to form alliances to keep them out again. But we don't have any such alliances yet to figure something out that brings us a step further, that makes copyright actually – or brings us to the promise that Choka Euker (sp) made to break up the silos of national copyright. We are nowhere close to that, and I think we should form such alliances. And that's all we're attempting to do. Check it out. Copyfighters.eu.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you. Any comment from you guys on more broad copyright reform, territoriality and all of that?

>> JAKE BEAUMONT NESBITT: I think that Julia Wrighter said make copyright invisible, and I think that's a good thing from our side and the user’s side. The excellent point this gentleman just made about detaching the money conversation, does YouTube pay enough? We know that Spotify overpays and we also think that the price they charge the consumer is too high, which is sacrilege if you say that in front of a record company or a publisher. But if you try to grow the market, make more money, I used to spend at least 50 Euros a month on CDs and vinyls. My sister didn't. My sister bought three a year. She's now being asked to pay ten Euros a month, 120 Euro a year, and she used to spend 30. So we haven’t really brought in variable pricing and things like that. So this whole thing is YouTube paying enough? They pay about 55% of the money over to all of us on the music side. Spotify pays about 80%. Spotify can't make money. YouTube can. Are YouTube selling the adverts for enough? I wouldn't think that the music industry knows better than Google how to price appetizing content inventory.

So the percentage thing, somewhere between 55% and 80% is right, but we have no economists looking at it. It's nothing to do with copyright. It's competition. It's monopolies. It's things like that. That can be removed quite easily from the conversation.

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: I fully agree. And I wanted to comment on that. And this is maybe more of a personal comment, that if you look at the conversation discussion, then as the rights owner, you obviously have the choice whether you want to monetize or whether you want the content be removed from the platform if someone else has uploaded it. Now, if you consider that you don't actually have a choice, you need to make that money, then you need to look at the competitive landscape and whether that platform has, for example, a dominant position. Maybe look at other areas. Maybe it's a competition issue. But I quite agree that this is not something that should be dealt with to copyright law.

>> EVA LEPIK: I really like the young, angry people, the Copyfighters here. But I have a question about fair use. How do you fit the concept of fair use into European copyright tradition?

>> AUDIENCE: Can I respond to that first? I think we can’t trust our copyright system with exceptions and limitations from one moment to another, but we can form an open norm, an additional exception from copyright that allows future uses of the currently already available copyrighted exceptions. And, like, have one that is future proof and lift it up for the future to see whether there are new forms of use. For example, for educational purposes. And so on. I think it's not impossible, but we don't even have this discussion unfortunately most of the time

>> EVA LEPIK: Thank you. Good luck.

>> MAUD SACQUET: There was one one question?

>> AUDIENCE: I just want to sum up or make a mental note to myself on what points exactly do the executives here agree upon? I mean, does every one of you, for example, agree upon this copyfighter seven –points? As I understood, do you think a bit too much is put on ISPs and intermediaries, so that should be, like, softened as by legislation? So that was one point.

And what other points do you agree upon and is there something here that's -- that you need to hold onto as right holders or managers?

And as to the law, the people who are making copyright claims, they do have the law backing them up as by the possibility to make the claims. So just softening legislation, just saying that it isn't right and it should be like -- it should be abolished, that doesn't seem to be your claims. So how do we balance the possibilities of copyright holders to make the claims and the use of different sites like eBay and what else? So what are the key point we do agree on here? Does everybody agree upon these and should these be implemented as by your legislation, for example?

>> MAUD SACQUET: My turn to say good luck. Who else wants to start?

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: You've got them in front of you. I’m in the privileged position to be the only one with a paper in front of them as well.

Maybe I'll just comment on a couple of these because not all of them are directly relevant for our business model. But geo blocking happens in digital content and it happens in tangible goods. So tangible goods in the retail sector, it is perfectly legal for a supplier, a manufacturer of a brand, to restrict the territory in which a retailer can sell products. Then the retailer is bound by agreement by contract to only distribute the product in that territory. However, as a consumer, you might see the retailer and blame the retailer for restricting your access to that product. But, in reality, as I mentioned, the restriction happens one step further down in the supply chain. And I think that's similar to the music sector as well. I don't know the value chains as well, but that is often that the -- the step below the consumer surface where the distribution agreements restrict that.

Now, obviously, if you make those restrictions legal, it will change business models. I mean, people have built their businesses in atangible goods context, manufacturers and suppliers have built their business models around the ability to restrict distribution in territories. And by doing that, essentially maximizing the money they're making off the market.

However, Europe is a digital market. Europe is a single market and should be a digital single market. So we are a strong supporter of removing those restrictions to have – to generate authentic and real competition in a wider European market and allowing consumers to have access to products in a wider European market, but also allowing retailers to trade everywhere in Europe and reaching those consumers.

I think there's more complexities related to this in the, for example, music sector. So I'll let James comment on that a little later.

The other point out of the seven points I want to address is the one on intermediaries. I think it is spot on in identifying intermediaries play this important role in facilitating economic activity by social activity and artistic activity,and their ability to do so and innovate should be protected.

Also, welcome very much the focus on users’ rights. Again, a similar problem exists in the retail space. Think of a small business, a three-person company running an online shop out of a warehouse in Tallinn. And then if they have to get their products removed from our site because of an abuse of copyright notice, these people are without revenue for a week. Even if it's wrong, the notification is wrong, and we'll put the listings back up once we've clarified that. Seven days without a revenue for a small business retailer can be very detrimental. So it’s not necessarily a human rights issue, it’s an economic rights issue, but still very, very important to look at from the users' perspective.

>> EVA LEPIK: This is really a nice paper.

I fully support the ideas of (?) culture and education and open access. The current proposal has limited the educational exceptions only to the formal institutions of education, and this is really bad when we like to talk about lifelong learning and other things. So, yes, it should be much broader and involve informal forms of giving education.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: Point 7 on this ancillary right for press publishers. The music authors organization for Europe hate that because they see ancillary rights for press publishers which has nothing to do with music as the thin end of the wedgee. They then consider that publishers will come for more rights and encroach further and further on the artists. So it's interesting, when we first looked to that, it was like it has nothing to do with us, it’s not our problem. But increasingly our artists are saying, hey, watch that.

Territoriality, at this point tThere should be a single global understanding. That’s really important. That part of this whole “make copyright invisible” thing of you should be able to know what it is wherever you are and not worry.

The geo blocking thing brings up the term thing, the point I made earlier on. It’s in the short-term, in the first year of release of new content, you might want to use geo blocking as a short-term method to control promotion of marketing activity to help that content. In the long run, there's not really an argument for geo blocking. But what that does do is bring up this subjective term. When we're not looking at the copyright reform process, the term, the length of copyright always comes up.

One of the ways of simplifying copyright would be the term for the copyright for Lenin and McCartney is far longer than the copyright for John, Paul, Ringo, and George. The performers have shorter rights than the authors. Just harmonizing that somewhere would be simple, but when you start to talk about term, two things have come up from our move from physical products to digital. When we used to sell a CD up front, you guys would pay us 10 Euros on the day you bought it. And we would have that 10Euros whether we listen to it again. We would have it for life. What's now happening is we need to wait years sometimes until you've listened to a track on Spotify enough times for us to hit that 10 Euros from you individually. So it's taking us longer to get our investment back. So that makes us think well maybe we should extend the term. I'm not proposing that. But it's a consequence, an economic consequence of how consumer behavior’s changed. Possibly terms should be opened up and reviewed.

One of the interesting things that comes up with term is in the old model, people didn't spend that much money on CDs and physical and they would buy through fear of missing out, peer pressure. They would tend to buy new releases by what we call front line artists, current artists, things that are happening now. You would want to go into your pub, school, wherever, and say, hey, I've heard that new track by the new artist, and you'd want to talk about that. You wouldn't have much spare cash to invest in catalog artists.

What's happening on Spotify, you're in on a subscription. You can move without an economic barrier between checking out all of the big Beetles and Jimmy Hendrix and Dolly Parton without any loss, any economic cost, versus listening to the new releases. So suddenly, most of the money you've spent on new artists, it's flipped. Most of your listening is going on checking out this great back catalog of artists. So the amount of money that is coming from the consumers to the industry for new artists has collapsed. This doesn’t bother the big record companies because they own the stuff by the older artists and they have it on terms that are far more favorable for them than the new stuff. So maybe there should bow a look at the way that monetization occurs with copyright for new artists compared to old artists.

What I'm trying to do there is say that the consequences of the digital disruption change at our end and at your end – I’m treating all of you guys as users and consumers -- is quite extreme and the term thing needs to be looked at, as well. That needs to be point eight.

Thank you.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Just a final comment on my side. Yeah. Absolutely. Just on the idea that you have -- personally, I think when you see the debate going on, everybody is saying well we need to unify European copyright, and I think if I'm still working in that domain in 50 years, I will still be hearing we need to unify European copyright, just the way you see the debate every day.

My personal point would be to try to focus on things that we think are doable at this time. And in a committal way. I think arguing for unified copyright exception is clearly something we should already have today, so it's something we need to push. It could be normally, something that realistically pushed and achievable at some point. So why not do that?

And then I'm just saying like focus on a few issues that you think could be potentially reachable in 5, 10 years, and then build on that, rather than perhaps argue for a huge copyright big bang which we know is quite unlikely to happen. That's just my point.

And I think there was a question over --

>> AUDIENCE: Hello. I’m Bogdan Rolla (sp). I come from Romania, from an organisation called (?).

I will also follow up on what you said and alask for a reality check of what's happening today. So today in Europe and tomorrow in the European Parliament, we will not discuss about fake news and we will not discuss about (?). But we will discuss about the ancillary copyright. And it's close to reality as you would think. So now it is the time to act. So even if we have these discussions here and the discussion is going very much one way, because there are no collective societies involved, probably, I think it's important to look atwhat we can do tomorrow. And tomorrow, and actually today, we can do something for tomorrow and that is to call the MEPs and tell them what we think about the proposal that we have now on the table. And I think that's more important. And you can do it. There is a website talking about how you can do it, there is a website called ‘savetheMEM.net which has a tool in place where you can freely call your MEPs, or you can just send them an e-mail if you don't prefer to call them. So that's something that's really useful and that's the beat that you can do today in order to bring the discussion forward.

And I also had one question because I was impressed about your position of representing the music authors. And I think that in this European copyright debate, we often miss the position of the European artists, of the European creator. I'm not talking just about music. It can also be about film or documentary films or painters. And usually in the debate this position is always taken by the collective societies. And they always say, you know, we represent artists. We give the money to the artists. And there is no one – and we participate from a Civil Society point of view, so information and privacy and others -- but very often we do not see the European artists in this.

So my question to you is: How do we involve those persons in the copyright debate? Sometimes their views are different from the collective society's.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT:Exactly as you described. So collection society, artist has to register with the collection society because the collection society has artists’ money. Collection society does not represent artists. Collection society will turn up in Brussels and say we represent the artists. They don't.

You guys, civil society, platforms, WikiMedia, you find it very hard -- consumers, you find it very hard to say “the artists.” You would never take it upon yourselves to speak for the artists because -- but the labels, the publishers and the collection societies do it all the time. So where the artists have quite a small voice in Brussels, we have no full-time staff in there, all the collection societies, the labels, the publishers all have large lobbies in there.

You guys need to be more confident in saying we don't believe that these people do represent the artists and to push policy makers to prove that they've spoken to artists, to prove that they haven't just heard from someone who turned up with a record label. Because a lot of the artists, if your record label brings you up and says, Google are making a huge amount of money, you're really poor, it's Google's fault, come to Brussels and tell the policy maker, the artists are like, yeah, sure. What are we doing to promote the next album? And what is happening with this and when are we going on tour? It’s very easy for them to turn up with artists. You guys have the opportunity to say to policy makers: Have you heard independently from the artists when they sat on their own without big brother sat next to them with a hand up their back telling them what to say? I think that's the best you can do and then that creates more opportunity for us to get meetings

>> MAUD SACQUET: Are there questions?

>> AUDIENCE:So a couple of notes. I'm (?) from the Network of Estonian Nonprofit Organizations. So like a co-umbrealla NGO.

First of all, I think it's like a series of delayed battles, or this is how I look at the whole issue. There's a technology called change, something happens, the owners of the copyright then all sorts of intermediaries, they sort of get left behind. And then they try to protect their already ancient business models against something that happened without legal changes.

On the other hand, on the legal sense, this is where their power comes into being. They can actually control the lawmakers much more better because of the organizations that they have built up rather than the users or the artists or all sorts of other people who are on the front line of the technology called change, and just use what is already there, not really caring about the legalities.

And this is something I'm a little bit pissed about because in a kind of way, you guys have been -- I'm surely going to hurt you in a little way because I'm just pointing out that because you're speaking for the artists here and kind of getting blamed for all of this, you are trying to delay the changes just because -- delay in the sense that in that way it would be -- if the technology change could actually run the full course, it would change the reality so much that it would be forced to the legal sense. It would be forced to come into contact with the reality.

But because it's not enough because the Ubers and the Spotifys and all of them, they just barely scrape that edge. You know, they sometimes are managing to grow big and fast enough that they would be able to force the lawmakers to actually come in contact with reality. But quite often, they're already people with power, they're just able to delay, delay, delay the future coming into being.

And this is something that, when we're talking about all this ancillary rights and everything else, it does look to me as yet another battle that the NGOs are on the losing side because they would be not really able to -- they would be able to be reactive but not really proactive in the way that the collective rights organizations and the rest of them would be able to do.

And from the technological point of view, a lot of changes from the legal point, they either kill off some already past system and/or are preventing the European inventors or entrepreneurs from doing something that would actually be useful for the wider humanity

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you.

I would like to answer just one thing on my side. You have a chance to answer now that the proposal is at the Parliament. And if there is one institution where actually you can make a difference in terms of NGO end users, it's the Parliament. It’s harder to do it at the Commission and the Council. We're seeing a lot of NGOs in Brussels trying to -- (?) And e-support for all of them, I would imagine that they woulc be welcome.

I’m just saying, it's not the solution, but at least there is one moment when you can actually act. It's now. And we don't have much time, actually, because it's going quite quickly.

I don't know if anyone wants to react

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: I think you mentioned Uber. And if Uber comes along and disrupts taxi drivers, puts them all out of work and lowers the wage, and then at some point the low wage Uber drivers get replaced by self-driving cars and they're all out of work, you do have with technological processes to pause at points and to consider the consequences and outcomes.

With Article 13, the filter that we're looking at at the moment, we're not trying to -- we're trying to stop the imposition of technology that's not yet ready. The filter doesn't work, so it would be ridiculous to force platforms to use a filter to find copyrighted music because the lawyers inside the platforms would say this doesn't work, let's just not host any user-generated content.

So I don't think we as astists and artist representatives would necessarily always be against progress or for progress or blocking technology or pushing it forward. We would just look at it case by case. And the current thing before us in Article 13, the technology is not ready. So what we would rather see than policy that says how the technology should work, we would like to leave it open and see the technology evolve without really being challenged, and to consider later when we can better get a handle on what it is and what it does legislation.+

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: Generally I -- I mean, I'm in support of the narrative that technology often comes and disrupts a vested interest of vested industries and the status of sort of the old money and the oldlinks that prevent progress from happening. But I think it's sometimes a little bit of abuse, as well, by people that don't feel like they would need to play the same. They would play the game by the same rules as their competitors. I think you need to carefully look at the business model, the exact case where the narrative is being used, whether it's actually about preventing progress and preventing technology putting in place, or is it disrupting through unfair means or competing on an unlevel playing field?

>> Yes, regarding the geo blocking again, what you say about that geo blocking should be in place like, for example, during the first year of release because like you want to be in control of who gets the music or whatever, that's called marketing. It has nothing to do with legislation at all. Because what geo blocking actually does is not preventing the consumer to get access to music, but it puts -- it places the release of the music in the hands of piracy instead. Because people are going to listen to that music if they want to, and if we have geo blocking then the artists won't make any money by releasing that music just in one country because everyone else is going to also download it. So no.

And also regarding campaigning about this, I actually tried to visualize this in Sweden where actually a lot of people still believe that this is legal. But, I mean, it’s not -- like it says, one does not simply make a meme without infringing copyright. And this is a huge problem. If the European Parliament and the Commission wants to still make this illegal, then they have to present this to the citizens and actually tell them that this internet culture of yours and this whole generation is making something illegal because people are simply not aware of it. So that's like a huge point that has to be brought forth a lot more

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: You're totally right, geo blocking in the first year would be a marketing thing. And you're also right that piracy is a way around it. But different audiences have different levels of piracy or interest in it. So for some artists, it's really irrelevant. If they block in a country, the amount of users that will access the content through piracy is minimal. And what we would argue is that you need to give the control to the artist to make that choice. You or I might think that they were foolish or making a mistake in their marketing strategy, but we would like them to have the ability to do that.

>> EVA LEPIK: I also made one recently saying where is my license? And this is what European Commission has done for years now, starting from the process or site they called licenses for Europe. This is how they perceived needs for free culture or your generation who wants to live their lives in internet and communicate their ideas via memes like that.

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: And a very short comment. So outside of the exceptions discussion on memes is that your forum to publish is most likely social media that benefits from the e-commerce liability exemptions. So even if you infringe copyright, the platforms are not being reliable, which is exactly what would change with the copyright proposal. So you would have to review that, make sure you had the right to put it up and then allow it also only in 15 days later where no one could see it anymore

>> MAUD SACQUET: I think we have one last question over here. And just one comment and then we'll go on our final statement regarding the memes. Because we're all focusing on the copyright reform, but we also have an audio visual reform that is going on at the European level. At at some point it’s being now kind of reviewed. The definition of what a video is actually could cover the meme because it was a moving imagewithout sounds. With or without sounds. And we’re like hey, we actually also cover memes. So do you want to apply audio visual regulation to memes as well? And that’s when kind of the decision was made that oh, maybe we should exclude it out of the scope.

So it just gives you ideas on one big thing but actually there is other regulartion areas that could also apply to these kind of works.

So your question at the end of the table I saw there?

>> AUDIENCE: Not a question specifically but moving away from the debate of what should be included into the proposal, I would like to address the point that many users of the internet are not aware of what copyright is and what the rights on the internet are.

What do you think we should do about educating users of the internet, young people and adults alike, about what copyright is and what their rights online are and how to bring this debate more main stream?

>> EVA LEPIK: Well, I think that we should start at school, maybe for 12, 13 years old people are old enough to get the point. So elementary copyright rules should be introduced at school.

>> AUDIENCE: Why should they care?

>> EVA LEPIK: Why should they care?

>> AUDIENCE: That’s exactly my point. The main reason why we are here in this position, wanting to have more access and information, is because we want to educate ourselves. We are not receiving access to education because they have no interest in us being educated. So I don't think that's really an option. They haven't been doing much so far

>> EVA LEPIK: Who are “they?”

>> AUDIENCE: And like my colleague said before, it's not a matter of whether it's going to happen or not. It's when. So regardless of what people might think is legal or not, I am going to have access information. The question is how?

>> EVA LEPIK: I can't answer that. Of course, information wants to be free, and we all get what we need. I'm a librarian. And, you know, I send my readers to Wikimedia, because if I don't have what they need and I know they need it --

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: I think education about copyright is really a 20-minute lesson, and it's really just saying that someone created something and they should be respected in the usage of it and potentially they should be paid for the usage of it. And that's it. There doesn't need to be extensive education about all of the glitches and things. that’s the point where copyright should become invisible. People should be aware that the owner is the owner and that it’s property, but they shouldn’t have to follow all the crazy things that we try and keep track of. And so good copyright reform would make it invisible for usage.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you. We have five minutes left. I don’t know if there are any questions before – yes, over there.

>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. My name is (?) from the Civil Society Organisation in Romania.

So I think we are dealing with a lot of misunderstanding and inappropriate terms. You mentioned property. So how come if copyright is property it expires after 70 years after the author is dead?

And piracy. Are we still in oceans fighting with pirates stealing our treasures from our ships? No, we’re not.

So I think we’re not in a position to be comfortable with these terms. And a sound copyright reform will include, for example, additional empowered authors and creators to really have a choice. For example, applying open licenses on their work. So those types of licenses will not be seen as outlaws or a minority of authors doing this. It will be a modality to empower the creators.

I think this is one of the major issues with a sound copyright reform, to give actual choice to the authors.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you.

Then I will let all of you answer with your perhaps final remarks. And I was thinking that maybe with your final remarks you can tell us how you see the reform going at the EU level, or what you think is happening now, what’s going to happen, if you are optimistic, pessimistic? I think in terms of final statements, it could be nice.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: The property thing is with physical property. Leases can expire. Freeholds can expire. The duration thing doesn’t mean it’s not property. You can find any word that you want for it. It doesn’t have to be “property.” I don’t care. But if someone creates something and they’re trying to monetize it, they should be able to, however you define it.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t like the term “copyright” because the right to make copies is redundant. I would like to see the language change. So I’m stuck with using the old language.

Other people can bring up the piracy thing. For us, it’s gone. It’s finished. There’s always been a piracy thing. There was a piracy thing in the physical thing. We don’t care about it. It’s a great flag for intermediaries to use to say “We’ve got to fight the pirates.” And then the other side comes and says “We are the pirates, and this is what we want.” The artists are like: Get on with it. We don’t care. We’re trying to make our business in our space.

The point you make, in terms of summing up, about the reform process and how we move things forward, and having -- you wanted more artists can do open licenses, they can do that now. They have access to things like creative commons. The reason it's not used much is because we're still coming to terms with we have only had them for sort of like ten years or so, YouTube, sound cloud, things like that. We're trying to get away from artists wanting to sign to a record company, which takes you out of the create commons thing, into forms of finance and business where you can survive away from the record company thing. So it's a slow process for us that we're trying to evolve towards.

The Article 13 that would bring the filter in would force all the artists away from new models, from creative commons and things like that, back into the arms of the record company. I'm quite pessimistic about it, because as this gentleman here referred to earlier, the industry lobbies have done a really good job of convincing policymakers that the industry speaks for the artists. So it sounds like it's in the artists' interest to lock the shop down and not allow the artists access to these open licensing systems. We would like to see more of them.

>> AUDIENCE: Just a really tiny comment. The contracts that are with the collective society quite often don't allow them to give creative commons usage through some sort of NGO or whether -- basically, once you have given over the content, you have no control anymore.

>> AUDIENCE: And perhaps even more importantly, creative commons is not an international thing. Several countries do not allow for it. Iceland does not have creative commons. Sweden, I believe, has the right to citation.

>> JAKE BEAUMONT-NESBITT: Just because we're out of time, but yes, to both of your points, yes, I agree. But in order to -- so I'm not sitting here saying we're against that. I'm saying we would like -- we understand what's floored in it, why it's not growing. What we're worried about less at the moment is how do we incubate that, feed that, nuture that. We're more like: Hey, we're about to be dragged away from you guys in a locked room with Article 13, and that's where we're panicking about at the moment and we're quite nervous about it.

>> EVA LEPIK: Thank you. What concerns European copyright reform? I'm quite pessimistic about it because the whole process has been quite closed, and there are really few people who know what is going on.

And then, of course, we don't like the outcomes, but we haven't participated in the process. And it's mainly the voice of big companies and big publishers, which is heard and which is written down there as a law, future law for all of us.

So it will not be nice.

>> SAMUEL LAURINKARI: I would just, in terms of the process and, you know, what we hope to see as the next steps on the proposal is that, obviously, our wish is that it will be radically changed. That Recital 38 and Article 13 are essentially killed or neutralized to the extent that the very detrimental consequences on the Internet would never come into force.

I think Civil Society has as a very important role to play. Brussels is not that intransparent as you think, and people also are not as stubborn as you think. So people are very open to hearing people's views. And the more public concerns are being raised, public discussion, more communication towards policymakers, the better. So I think all of us as individuals have a role to play to talk to the people that we can and our elected politicians to make sure that they understand that this is not just fine tuning some things and making sure that YouTube pays a little more money. This is fundamental questions for the entire functioning of the Internet as we know it. And the policymakers should stand up to protect it.

Now, in terms of what I think will happen is that we will get a significantly improved text coming out of the Parliament. I think the amendments are likely to go through tomorrow, introduce significant improvements to the text. So let's hope the vote tomorrow in the European Parliament internal market committee goes well, and the Parliament's other committees adopt similar solutions, so that they can negotiate with the Member States and come out with something reasonable.

It is a missed opportunity -- even if that's going to happen, it's a missed opportunity to really reform copyright, because essentially we will be with the status quo more or less instead of a framework that would really bring copyright to the 21st century.

>> MAUD SACQUET: Thank you very much, everybody. We are out of time.

So thank you for participating and I hope it was interesting at least for everyone.

(Applause)


This text is being provided in a realtime format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.