After the event in Brussels “Addressing consumers needs in the digital age”

The interesting whole day and two parts event at Brussels has been the first step of many to follow to try to adapt the copyright regime to  digital today’s facts and challenges.

Moderated by Nick Ashton-Hart from the Computer and Communications Industry Association, Mario Pena, from Safe Creative, Liv Vaisberg from the Federation of European Publishers, Paul Keller from Creative Commons and Kelvin  Smits from Younison, Europe’s association of independent musicians, debated about the following proposal: “Users and creators must be able to use copyrighted material to produce a new compound work for non-commercial purposes without needing a licence” not being all in total disagreement at all, but some putting some conditions such as the following:

1) The need of correctly crediting all original creators,

2) for non-commercial purposes, meaning direct commercial use when first published,

3) to use simplified, convenient and affordable technology to inform the original creator about the usage and

4) should the work become commercial, to allow the authors of the parts of the works being used, to decide if they want that and/or to be remunerated by a percentage of the revenue and if so, making the revenue sharing automatic and transparent.

As a matter of fact, authors already use other’s artist works for the purpose of learning and for private training, but the conflict might arise when the work goes public even for a small group of contacts or friends, specially in user generated content projects under social network schemes.

There’s a clear need for artists to access others’ works, and the result will be published whether they like or not, so the best solution is to bring technology into play together with clear common sense quotation rules. It is specially sensible, and we all agreed, when the work goes viral and starts to generate revenue, it makes sense that the original author of the work partly used is able to decide to get some revenue or not.

Other consideration relates to moral rights. Again we all agreed, moral rights should prevail but therefore we need a flexible harmonization, together with quotation rules, with all existing legal jurisdictions.

Of course we will keep on working together with the organizators and participants to help improve whatever is necessary to help all creators and users of contents to achieve the best technologies and good practices.

If you want to know more about the event and all that was said,  clic here.