This week will be full of committee meetings, so Amelia and the whole office will have to work extensively on them. However, this does not mean that they will be the only duties that Amelia will have during this week. You can see her schedule here:

Every year loads of European artistic works enter into the public domain, that is, the copyright protection granted to the work expires and the material becomes free for use (with or without attribution depending on jurisdiction). In 2013 te works from all over Europe passing into the public domain are works for which the author died in 1942 will enter into the public domain, except in Spain where the author must have died in 1932.

An ‘interest group’, most commonly known as ‘lobby’, is any organization or individual who develops activities with the aim of influencing the policy and decision-making processes in an institution. Among these activities it is included contacting MEPs and/or officials of the EU institutions; circulate communicating letters, information materials or position papers; organising events, meetings or promotional activities, etc.

Report: A parliamentary report is a document that formulates Parliament’s position about a specific topic. It contains amendments suggested by the committee who created it, and also explanations for them.

Rapporteur: Is the MEP who is in charge of preparing a report.

Amelia is back from Azerbaijan but this does not mean that she will stay in Brussels during the whole week. She will go to Cambridge on Thursday to speak about intellectual property rights in this famous university. During this week, she is also hosting an event organized by her office about movies under Creative Commons licenses. As for her schedule, here you can find her most relevant meetings:

A delegation is created with the aim of maintaining relations and exchange information with parliaments in non-EU countries. Meetings between both parliaments are held once or twice a year, alternately in the EU and in the non-EU country that is in the delegation.

There are four types of delegation:

Last month, Amelia published an article in Research Media about Horizon 2020 and open access. The article is attached as a pdf to this post, and a brief part of it is published below.

The aim of the committees of the European Parliament is to help the European Commission in initiating legislation. They are formed by MEPs from every political group in the Parliament and each Committee has a chairperson and four Vice-Chairpersons.

Memberships in a Committee can be of two kinds:

With this post, we start a series of articles about EU vocabulary. With this we aim to help to better understand the language used by the EU institutions, especially the European Parliament. Please, feel free to give us ideas and ask about a specific topic or expression!

As today is the first time, I will go for something easy: What a political group is.

This week I have had the chance to presence my first parliamentary committee meeting. Concretely, I have been in the one dealing with the reform of the EU data protection framework. It has been very interesting and exciting to presence how things work in the European Parliament. Due to the importance of this regulation the room was crowded, and participation during the slot for questions and remarks was very high.