Policy Observatory

National governments are unraveling a EU data protection bill for the benefit of big business, according to leaked documents published by pro-privacy campaigners.

Raegan MacDonald, European policy manager at Access, accused the member states of “carving out so many loopholes there’ll soon be nothing left.”

The EU’s Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) has recently launched the online Orphan Works Database. The database was created and is managed by the OHIM in accordance with Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works).

The Orphan Works Database is a single EU-wide publicly accessible online database that provides information related to orphan works located in publicly accessible libraries, educational establishments and museums, as well as in archives, film or audio heritage institutions and public-service broadcasting organisations, established in all EU Member States (beneficiary organisations).

German diplomatic cables and thousands of pages of leaked classified EU documents reveal behind-the-scenes efforts by governments to weaken the EU’s data protection bill.

LobbyPlag.eu, which obtained the cables and documents, on Tuesday (10 March), found that 132 of 151 (87%) changes by member states lowered privacy protections.

Julia Reda, the MEP representative for the Pirate Party from Germany is the rapporteur for the European Union copyright reform dossier - that is the report on the implementation of the previous directive on this matter from 2001 (the so-called “Infosoc Directive”).

An obscure clause in EU copyright rules means no one can publish photos of public buildings in Belgium, like the Atomium, or France’s Eiffel tower at night without first asking permission from the rights owners.

The optional rule extends to the buildings of the European Parliament in Brussels and in Strasbourg.

“Every website of every MEP that uses [an image of] the parliament building on it is a copyright infringement in the sense of the law,” said Dimitar Dimitrov, a so-called Wikimedian or policy expert for the European Wikimedia chapters in Brussels, on Tuesday (4 November).

The European Commission will not introduce a new law requiring telecom companies to store the communications data of European Union citizens for security purposes, the EU home affairs commissioner said on Thursday.