A report proposing major changes to copyright laws in the EU has been adopted by the European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee (JURI) ... [An] amendment was adopted that stated "commercial use of recordings of works in public spaces should require express permission from the rightsholders." [German Pirate Party rapporteur Julia] Reda said this "could threaten the work of documentary filmmakers and the legality of commercial photo-sharing platforms."
The EU may soon require stricter permissions be met for any visual representation of public art and architecture. So-called "Freedom of Panorama" refers to a set of provisions in copyright law, that allows someone to create and publish images of a piece of art or architecture that's permanently located in the public space, regardless of its existing copyright provisions. The provisions are adopted to varying degrees in different countries – in the US, only buildings are protected under FOP, and in the EU, FOP provisions depend on whether the image is for commercial use or not, as well as the kind of object being photographed.
The report as adopted includes a call for at least some copyright exceptions—which are designed to safeguard important rights such as quotation, parody, or research and education—to be made uniform across the EU. Currently, each member state has adopted a different set of exceptions for its national laws. The report also calls for these exceptions to be safeguarded against override by contractual or technical means—DRM, for example.
As well as measures that would strengthen protection of authors in contract negotiations, the newly adopted report hopes to make it easier for libraries to lend e-books and to digitise their analogue collections, as well as for scientists to conduct text and data mining to extract new information from academic papers available online.
An important victory was the rejection of text that would have granted publishers a so-called "ancillary" (extra) copyright, which would have required online search engines to pay for the use of even small snippets. German publishers have already experienced first-hand what happens under such systems: when Google stopped using snippets from publications in order to avoid paying licence fees that publishers had demanded, German newspapers and magazines found that the number of visitors to their sites dropped precipitously. German publishers ended up offering Google a free licence to their content so that the search engine would once more display snippets in its results and thus drive traffic to the publishers' site.
One defeat for Reda is that her proposal to protect the freedom of panorama was not accepted.