Re: "Creators call for action on AI copyright exceptions" - log of use and geographical scope

On 3 Aug 2023 at 12:15, "Laurent Le Meur" <Laurent Le Meur 
<laurent@edrlab.org>> wrote:

> What is sure is that I'd like to see something written by the EU
> Commission itself about the geographical scope of their work. 

This is a point on which we can agree.

On behalf of the National Writers Union (USA) and the International 
Federation of Journalists, and as a member of the board of the  
International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations, I was part 
of meetings with staff of the European Commission, as well as with MEPs 
and their staff, throughout the consideration of the CDSM Directive.

We found them, in  general, focused on the laws of the EU and its member 
states, and very reluctant to consider wider international implications of 
EU law and practice or worldwide treaties such as the Berne Convention.

(To be fair, US officials are even less interested in international law.)

Of course this is problematic. Impacts outside the EU of activities in the 
EU are inevitable.

For example, my Web site is hosted and first published in Canada but 
proxied by Cloudflare (as is a large percentage of all Web traffic 
worldwide), a US entity with proxy servers in countries around the world.

If a bot running on a server in  Germany retrieves a page of my site from 
a Cloudflare proxy server in Germany, is this subject only to German and 
EU law? Or also to Canadian (and/or US) law? Certainly the Berne 
Convention is implicated: Germany and Canada are both parties to the Berne 
Convention, so the treaty sets minimum requirements for the protection 
which Germany must provide to works first published in Canada. 

Could the bot detect that the root server from which Cloudflare retrieves 
the file is in Canada? Possibly not in any currently standardized way, 
although it is stated in text in the HTML headers.

We have continued to seek clarification since the Directive was enacted, 
but the EC has been reluctant to acknowledge these complications.

Before issuing the joint public statement I shared with this group, 
creators contacted the EC and the EU Intellectual Property Office seeking 
clarification of the scope of the exceptions in Articles 3 and 4.

We were disappointed that they provided no clarification whatsoever.

The joint statements from creator organizations followed. One of their 
explicit goals is to prompt the EU to clarify the scope of the exceptions 
in Articles 3 and 4 as they apply to generative AI -- whether through 
legislation, regulations, or authoritative interpretive guidance. Creators 
would welcome the support of participants in this group in that effort.

Sincerely,

Edward Hasbrouck




----------------
Edward Hasbrouck
<ehasbrouck@nwu.org>
+1-415-824-0214 (San Francisco)

National Writers Union
https://nwu.org
+1-212-254-0279 (New York)

Received on Thursday, 3 August 2023 17:11:35 UTC