It happens that I have written before on Encrypted Media Extension in HTML5 - a digitial rights management (DRM) standard developed for the totality of the world's browsers inside World Wide Web Consortium (W3), a prominent privately ran standardisation consortium based in Paris.

Also I somewhat ironically note that 1,5 weeks after I presented my concerns with this particular standardisation process at the European Commission, the Swedish government proposes to create the legal base and support I felt was missing for the Netflix business model.

Copyright and content control is a messy legal field. In the EU we have 7 different directives that define various forms of legal control over how information can be distributed after it is publicized. They take the shape of broadcasting rights, copyrights, related rights, rental rights, resale rights, software copyrights, and a bunch of other rights.

For the online streaming sector, it is likely broadcast rights that apply. But private retransmission of broadcasts (non-commercial retransmission) is entirely legal. In the EU, sometimes even commercial retransmissions are legal, as was established by the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Murphy v Premier League C-408/05 case. This is because we have a free movement of services, that is one of the four founding principles of the European Union. In the case of C-408/05, one pub owner in London was within her right to retransmit a broadcast which Premier League had licensed for Greece.

Netflix, an American online streaming company, is launching ambitiously in many member states of the European Union. In Sweden, despite our domestic streaming industry also being quite ambitious, Netflix is the only online streaming company to have successfully entered into news media celebrating their one year anniversary of activities.

Netflix and online streaming present interesting challenges to the legislator, because their activities are not based on copyrights but broadcasting rights, that is - the right to control or have a monopoly on copyrighted works that someone makes accessible to the public through transmission. Broadcasting rights, therefore, do not cover the piece of art itself, but the transmission of the film, music or whatever the piece of art it might be. Sort of like giving a logistics company or a trucker a specific right protecting them while they ship a painting from one location to the other.

Broadcasting rights are regulated in the European Union and in Sweden in different ways. Satellite broadcasting and cable broadcasting is covered by a directive from 1993. Television without Frontiers and the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) similarly regulate television content and one-to-many transmission of audio-visual content (thereby excluding for instance radio, which clearly is not audio-visual).

I was honored by a fact that I could be present at a seminar devoted to the future of data mining and text mining in the European Union. The seminar was a formal one, but otherwise - after few formal speeches it turned into a nice discussion. It's name was quite a long one, but that's the way how practically every event related to EU is named: Pathways for Text and Data Mining – Balancing users’ and owners’ needs.

Most of the people present at the event were either the representatives of the Publishers or the European Comission. One could speculate, that such an event would be of the very same kind, as the Private Copying Levies that took place last week. But the difference between these two events when it comes to standpoints was more than surprising.

Most of the people present in the room were in favor of so-called "open access". They see that text mining and data mining are useful tools for many reasons. The one thing that are the publishers acutally afraid is a situation, when metadata will be treated by some of their colleagues as intellectual property and thus these will be unaccessible. To be honest, I do not remember a simple voice speaking in favor of this approach during the meeting. Almost everyone in the room however agreed how dangerous this might be.

The other issue was also a legal point of view which simply turned into a copyright-related discussion. Considering a fact that the Pirate point of view on this issue is quite certain, I did not feel myself in a need to enlighten everybody. The conclusion from the stakeholders seemed for me to be quite Pirate-friendly. A question however remains; how much the open access will be actually "opened" and what the licencing policies that were suggested by several of the participants will look like. 

It was a normal day here in Brussels. But not for Amelia and the Pirate community. As the people were going to work and children went to school, we were getting ready for a demonstration, speeches and handing a petition. The topic was: Internet survelliance and endangered online privacy.

 

Tempora – perhaps a strange latin word, but in reality a British government-run initiative that monitors e-mails, web pages, Facebook, Twitter or any other mean of on-line communication, as well as phone calls. Such an idea might be seen as noble for those who always talk about stopping the terrorism. Needles to say, European treaties were violated. To be more exact – The treaty on Functioning of the European Union was. This treaty states that every individual that is a citizen of EU has a right for privacy. This right is indisputable.

Yesterday we had another meeting related to the copyright reform policy in the European Parliament. The name of the event was "Private Copying Levies and the main idea was: How to reform copyright and what should be done with the copyright levies that are payed when empty media is purchased. It was a meeting of the Committee of Legal Affairs and the main rapporteur for this issue was Françoise Castex.

At least that was the original premise. In reality, the discussion began with the speeches of representatives from the recording industry defending their positions utterly.