European Parliament committee adopts controversial pro-user copyright reform report | Ars Technica UK

"A report proposing major changes to copyright laws in the EU has been adopted by the European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee (JURI) after it spent several hours voting on 550 amendments. The report was written by the German Pirate Party's Julia Reda, and had attracted widespread praise and criticism from different quarters. Some of the report's original ideas included: a single copyright valid across the entire EU; placing works created by employees of government, public administration, and the courts as part of their official duty in the public domain (that is, with no copyright); allowing audio-visual quotation (in online videos, for example); enshrining freedom of panorama (the ability to take pictures of public buildings and distribute them without permission of the architect); and allowing the public to circumvent DRM in order to make use of exceptions to copyright.  The report as adopted includes a call for at least some copyright exceptions—which are designed to safeguard important rights such as quotation, parody, or research and education—to be made uniform across the EU. Currently, each member state has adopted a different set of exceptions for its national laws. The report also calls for these exceptions to be safeguarded against override by contractual or technical means—DRM, for example.  As well as measures that would strengthen protection of authors in contract negotiations, the newly adopted report hopes to make it easier for libraries to lend e-books and to digitise their analogue collections, as well as for scientists to conduct text and data mining to extract new information from academic papers available online.

An important victory was the rejection of text that would have granted publishers a so-called "ancillary" (extra) copyright, which would have required online search engines to pay for the use of even small snippets. German publishers have already experienced first-hand what happens under such systems: when Google stopped using snippets from publications in order to avoid paying licence fees that publishers had demanded, German newspapers and magazines found that the number of visitors to their sites dropped precipitously ..."