FSFE’s evaluation of the EU Parliament copyright report

On July 6th, the European Parliament voted on a report with a number of recommendations for copyright reform. We present today our evaluation of how this could impact Free Software.

A first draft of the report was written by MEP Julia Reda (Pirate Party) and consisted of a number of very sensible proposals to adapt copyright law to the challenges of today. At the time we contacted the Members of the European Parliament to highlight the best features and suggest some improvements.

After going through a considerable amount of opposition and amendments, the European Parliament approved the final version of this document. Even if the report proposes some improvements to the current legislative framework, it presents various setbacks from the original draft and does not manage to completely solve the major problems with the current copyright legislation. In particular:

the long overdue reform of copyright exceptions and limitations is now limited to private copying Digital Restriction Management (DRM) can still unjustly keep exceptions from operating publicly funded works are not contributed to the public domain, nor published under free licences

You can also read the full text of the report. For further information please visit Julia Reda’s website or copywrongs.eu.

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