Re: The legal status of linking and EC consultation

In my humble opinion, our current position (i.e. that of Publishing and Linking) is weak, since at present moment intellectual property rights are mostly proclaimed as self-evidently natural rights equal to all other human rights. So referring to a right of speech is useless since you can't excercise your right (of speech in particular) beyond the point where it harms others' rights (of intellectual property in particular).

In my view we should strive for changing basics of copyright law, i.e. Article 2.6 of Berne Convention. It now states that

"This protection shall operate for the benefit of the author and his successors in title." [1]

Proper formula should state that:
(a) intellectual property right is legal, not natural[2];
(b) copyright protection shall operate for the benefit of both authors and the Society;
(c) digital millenium had made traditional forms of per-copy payment obsolete.

So new law should:
(a) find a balnce between authors and society rights; 
(b) strongly support new forms of payment (subscription services, crowdfunding, etc);
(c) protect public interests, such as filling up public domain, ensuring availability of content for educational purposes, simplifying content publishing and making easier to publish content abroad -- and protecting right of linking, of course.

I'm not a citizen of any EU member state, but I still hope that my opinion will be of some use.

--
[1] http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/text.jsp?file_id=283698#P85_10661
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaton_v._Peters

14.01.2014, 18:55, "Daniel Appelquist" <Daniel.Appelquist@telefonica.com>:
> On 14/01/2014 14:34, "Henri Sivonen" <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Konstantinov Sergey
>> <twirl@yandex-team.ru> wrote:
>>>  I don't understand purpose of this Consultations, since Berne
>>> Convention and
>>>  its later additions (notably WIPO Copyright Treaty aka WCT) contain all
>>> answers
>>>  to these questions. Do they want to change Berne Convention or mere to
>>> have
>>>  a more detailed explanations of technical terms?
>> It's not clear to me how exactly the Commission envisions their
>> actions in response to this Consultation to interact with the Berne
>> Convention, but to me it looks like the general tone is that
>> especially when it comes to the realization of the Single Market (lack
>> thereof for audiovisual works at present) and when it comes to
>> competition issues, the Commission might be willing to take steps that
>> would end up limiting how sovereignly copyright holders are allowed to
>> exercise their exclusive right under Article 8 of the Berne
>> Convention.
>
> That’s how I took it.  I understood that the consultation was more to do
> with local regulatory and enforcement regimes than with actually rewriting
> international copyright conventions.  Right now there is a patchwork of
> copyright enforcement across the EU (and in general) that does not make
> for a healthy market.  I’ve put my (personal) €.02 in by responding to the
> consultation - including my view that the right to link should be
> protected as a form of speech in accordance with the UN convention on
> human rights (cf http://www.w3.org/TR/publishing-linking/#linking).
>
> But beyond spreading awareness of the consultation I don’t think there is
> any technical work to be done here.
>
> Dan
>
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-- 
Konstantinov Sergey
Yandex Maps API Development Team Lead
http://api.yandex.com/maps/

Received on Monday, 20 January 2014 12:55:01 UTC