[Communia Association] Today, the A2K Coalition is launching its website with demands for education, research and cultural heritage... The members of the A2K Coalition represent educators, researchers, students, libraries, archives, museums, other knowledge users and creative communities around the globe. Our individual missions are varied but we all share a vision of a fair and balanced copyright system. Click here for more.
[Nanditta Batra] Abstract: ... Notwithstanding the effect of patents on access to medicines, Article 27 of the TRIPS Agreement ordained patents for inventions “in all fields of technology”. While the genie was out of the bottle in the form of patents for pharmaceuticals, the developing countries were able to extract some procedural and substantive flexibilities like transition period, parallel importation and compulsory licensing to leverage the IP system to further public health. However, there was uncertainty with respect to the interpretation of TRIPS agreement, scope of the flexibilities and Member States’ rights to use them.
This post describes the newly released Global Innovation Index and PIJIP's ongoing research into copyright exceptions for research. It then presents correlations between subsets of the Global Innovation Index data and PIJIP's categorization of copyright laws.
[Bernd Justin Jütte, Guido Noto La Diega, Giulia Priora, Guido Salza] Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant change in the types of teaching infrastructure used in higher education. This article examines how the use of commercial digital platforms for educational purposes impacted on teaching practices. At the same time, it shines a light on the experiences and (legal) perceptions of educators as an essential category of stakeholders within the EU copyright legal framework. Against the background of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the study reflects on the process of ‘platformisation’ of education and delves into copyright-related aspects of the online teaching and learning environments.
[Sanya Samtani] In a unanimous judgment, the Constitutional Court of South Africa confirmed the Pretoria High Court’s finding that the Copyright Act 1978 is unconstitutional and unfairly discriminatory to the extent that it fails to provide for for people with visual and print disabilities. This vindicates a decades-long struggle by BlindSA, the applicants, represented by SECTION27. It is also the first instance of a Constitutional Court requiring copyright legislation to provide for an accessible format shifting provision on the basis that constitutional rights are limited by overly restrictive copyright laws.
[Péter Mezei and István Harkai] Abstract: In the platform age, copyright protected contents are primarily disseminated over the internet. This model poses various challenges to the copyright regime that was mainly designed in and for the analogue age. One of these challenges is related to the fair balance between the interests of rightholders and other members of the society. Copyright norms try to guarantee this balance by granting a high level of protection for rightholders and preserving some flexibility for end-users. The present article focuses on whether platforms’ end-user license agreements contribute to the preservation of that balance, and how they allow for or diminish the exercise of user flexibilities.
[Sean Flynn] In a huge court victory that may assist human rights and IP advocacy, the SA Constitutional Court released a quite remarkable judgment today that “reads in” the copyright amendment bill’s disability provisions into the current law because of the long delay in passing the bill. The Court finds that the lack of disability exceptions in current law violates the equality right of people with disabilities. It also finds a violation of free expression rights that uses reasoning with broader import.
[Alina Trapova and João Pedro Quintais] As previously reported, between October 2021 and January 2022 the UK Intellectual Property Office held a public consultation on the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property laws... the UK government has now decided to introduce a new copyright and database right exception which allows TDM for any purpose, i.e. including commercial uses. Licensing will no longer be an issue and rightholders will not be able to opt-out or contract out of the exception. The government believes that this approach would significantly benefit a wide range of stakeholders – from researchers, AI developers, small businesses, through cultural heritage institutions, journalists, all the way to engaged citizens.
[João Pedro Quintais, Péter Mezei, István Harkai, João Vieira Magalhães, Christian Katzenbach, Sebastian Felix Schwemer, and Thomas Riis] Abstract: This report is part of the reCreating Europe project and describes the results of the research carried out in the context of Work Package 6 on the mapping of the EU legal framework and intermediaries’ practices on copyright content moderation. The Report addresses the following main research question: how can we map the impact on access to culture in the Digital Single Market of content moderation of copyright-protected content on online platforms?
[Mike Palmedo] PIJIP has been reviewing copyright laws around the world. Our detailed review is available as a PIJIP working paper in which we classify countries "based on the degree to which they have a research exception in their law that is sufficiently open to be able to permit reproduction and communications of copyrighted work needed for academic (i.e. non-commercial) text and data mining (TDM) research.” This post presents the data on copyright exceptions by restriction rather than by country. It demonstrates that wealthier countries tend to have less restrictive copyright exceptions for TDM research, relative to other countries.
[Michael Geist] ...As further discussed in an Education International policy brief "E-commerce, Education and Copyright", the merger of e-commerce and education opens the door to new, for-profit online educational service providers that may have a disruptive impact on a sector that has traditionally operated primarily on a non-commercial, public interest basis... Unfortunately, the implications for education of these e-commerce and copyright rules are frequently an afterthought as trade negotiations are primarily driven by intellectual property (IP) interests, including the cultural and publishing sectors. There is a need for greater understanding of the implications of e-commerce and IP rules within trade agreements, the retention of policy flexibility and privacy safeguards, the scope for exceptions for education and research, and the opportunity for educational stakeholders, including teachers, students, and institutions, to participate in trade policy development at the national and international levels.
[Terea Nobre] Access to knowledge is an important aspect of the right to education. In order to respond to the needs in the classroom, teachers often complement traditional teaching resources (e.g., textbooks and other curated materials) with a wide spectrum of materials from a variety of sources (e.g., short videos, images, articles). These are often protected by copyright and related rights. Recognising the essential public mission of education as well as the right of teachers to choose and adapt teaching materials without having to ask permission from the copyright owner, governments are putting in place so-called copyright exceptions and limitations for education. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive shift to remote education during school closures has highlighted, more than ever before, that those exceptions and limitations are not always fit for teaching in the digital age.