Copyright and the exceptions 2009-2014
Copyright exceptions are an important part of the copyright legislation of today. In the US they exist among others under the name of fair use, which allows for the use of copyrighted material without licenses in situations such that society benefits greater from the material being used than it benefits from the hunt for license money. In the European Union the exceptions are regulated in the Copyright Directive article 5, and contain everything from the possibility of interest groups for blind and deaf people to produce braille or soundbooks without having to pay ordinarily high license fees, to quotations, limited copying and use of copyrighted material for educational purposes as well as the unintentional inclusion of somebody else's copyrighted material in your own.
Unfortunately, the copyright legislation varies greatly between the member states. Few of the exceptions in the directive are obligatory for the member states, and the ways in which they have chosen to implement the directive in the national legislation also shows considerable variation. In many cases the protection for the weaker parts of license negotiations, like interest groups for disabled, is weak or non-existent. How large or small the license fees are demanded to be also varies greatly within the union.
This situation caused the European Commission to emit a greenbook, a kind of investigation on the state of union, in autumn of 2008 requesting information on how the exceptions in copyright potentially ought to be strengthened, harmonised or otherwise changed. This is a very positive initiative!
Yet more positive is the fact that greenbooks often result in whitebooks, action plans for how to go through with the changed which seemed to be the most needed according to the replies to the greenbook. In the case of copyright in the knowledge economy this will hopefully lead to a suggestion of more obligatory exceptions and a stronger protection for weaker negotiation partners.
This is, bearing in mind the release date of the greenbook, also a question which might be high on the agenda for Piratpartiet over the coming 5 years in parliament. Once the EU machinery starts chewing its way through the legislative proocess we have all the reason to be progressive and open to stronger, better and more extensive exceptions in the currrent copyright law.
In the long run, copyright exception can and should be extended to include filesharing for private use, and this is a battle we definitely need to take. The situation for the legislators today is certainly not durable, and an exception could be all that's needed to avoid future cat- and mouse games with the citizens. And if this particular goal isn't achieved within the next five years, at least we could console ourselves with an at least partly more balanced copyright.
