 So I'm Dini, I am the Wikimedia European chapters, one of the two representatives in Brussels, where we follow up on everything that the EU does in order to regulate the internet. And yeah, well, Wikipedia essentially. And you might know me from previous Wikimanias where we talked about how the EU is about to pass a copyright reform and that there will be a copyright directive that is going to change what we are able to show on Wikipedia and what we might have to delete of our projects. This was a few years ago by now. So two years ago, the EU's copyright directive was passed, but as this Forbes article that I took a screenshot of here correctly points out, it does not mean that these new copyright rules that the EU adopted are our actual law yet because the way EU legislation works, any directive first needs to be transposed into national law in the EU member states and the few others that have that sort of contractual relationship with the EU. So it's a really vast topic, how to transpose this in all the countries because we decided, well, if we're going to do, you know, if we spent like five, six years on trying to influence how the EU directive looks, we can't just stop there. We need to make sure it ends up in a good form and in a good format in most of these countries. So this is what we tried to do. We are more than three years down the line and so far only four countries have fully implemented so have fully transposed the EU directive and everywhere else. So all the other countries from France and Italy to Spain and Sweden, it's still an ongoing process which means we're trying to figure out what's going on where and to give our arguments to provide input and to try to make sure that the things we really care about are transposed into each of these countries' national laws in a way that we essentially can share more knowledge, not less knowledge. So the directive is quite a big chunk of legislation. It has many topics that we care about from text and data mining to cross-border teaching activities, to use of out-of-commerce works, but for the sake of this presentation, I need to focus a little bit. So I will focus on two articles that are, well, most directly tied to our work and I'll also focus on the process of how we set up this multi-year continental-wide network that we work with and also I will give you a quick debrief of how the two articles that we most care about were transposed in the four countries that are already done with the transposition. So the one article that was basically ours and Europeana's doing and ask is basically perhaps the only article in the entire EU copyright reform from 2019 that is unequivocally good. It's a public domain safeguard. It essentially says that if a work is in the public domain, so the copyright has expired and you make an exact copy of it, then this copy, digital or non, is also public domain and you can use it. We asked for this because we just believe that that needs to happen, but also more concretely because a German courts had ruled that this century's old portrait by Richard Wagner, while being in the public domain, digital copy thereof still has some layers of protection on top of it, so we couldn't use it. So this has now been successfully overturned, which is one of our victories that we also need to celebrate. The other thing I will look in for the sake of this presentation, look at for the sake of this presentation is article 17. It was called Upload Filter or Value Gap depending of which side of the ideological debate you were on, it basically made platforms that let users upload content, liable for whatever, more liable for whatever their users upload. And the article in the end the way it was written because of course we and others complained a lot we even blacked out Wikipedia in some European countries, tries to strike a balance between the interests of a rights holder whose material might be wrongfully used, but also the rights of users who do have under exceptions and limitations in copyright law, the right to take a certain image and maybe use it to poke fun at somebody or something. So this balance how it gets transposed into national laws is actually quite important to how the internet will work in the future. So how do you try to transpose in UDirective and basically close to 30 countries? Well, the first thing you need to do is you get yourself a lot of good partners together. So Wikimedia Deutschland is the largest chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation and it is also the one that hosts Wikimedia Brussels or Brussels activities are hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland. It is also probably the only one that was able to deliver the infrastructure to do this work over several years. What it did is basically Wikimedia Deutschland make sure that I basically had as much time as I needed to work on this project and coordinate it over basically two years and more. We came together with Komunia. Komunia is the European level association that unites Wikimedia, Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and a few other NGOs. It basically is the voice for public domain and user rights in Europe. Komunia took a lead on the legislative part of it. So analyzing the directive, creating model language we'll get to that later. And Centrum Zefrowe, which is a Polish think tank, they took a lead on the educational exception which I won't go into for the sake of this presentation but it is also something important to make sure that teaching activities cross-border are illegal under the use new rules. So this is the part that Centrum Zefrowe dedicated itself to. All this was made possible by also a 300,000 euro approximately grant by the Open Society Foundations which went to Wikimedia Deutschland. Wikimedia Deutschland pitched in several, well, basically at least one FTE and the accounting and bureaucracy work. And this is how we got here. So the first thing we did, and not me, my colleague who can't be with us today, Teresa Nobre, we had the directive was passed in April, 2019. And we basically communia did this under the auspices of Teresa Nobre. She got a lot of experts together who looked into each article that is of importance to us, analyzed it, pinpointed which parts of the directive a EU member state has to implement, which parts are optional and where there is room for improvements in national laws. And not only this, the implementation guidelines also provide arguments, jurisprudence, information about past court cases that is, and model language. And we were actually able to set up these implementation guidelines is basically a couple of dozen pages per article that we care about. So it's a lot of work by October, 2019, where we came together for a, what we called a transposition bootcamp. So we tried to get community members and interested activists and maybe like-minded organizations from each one of these countries that have to transpose the copyright directive. We got them together in Warsaw to present these guidelines to them and to talk them through the details. And this is actually very quick. October, 2019, the deadline for national states to implement the directive was 7th of June, 2021. So we had model language on how to best implement the directive back in October, 2019 that we shared with like-minded organizations and activists in almost all member states and other countries, which means that I know this for a fact in quite a few countries, our friends, our partners had model language well before even the national government had even started thinking about such things. Now we of course don't have Wikimedia chapters or active groups that work on legislation in all these countries. So basically the people you see here and the people you don't see here are a come from four different networks. So the Wikimedia chapters and user groups, creative commoners. We have a lot of NGOs from the ADRI network. This is European Digital Rights. So they have some NGOs that care about digital rights and they consider user rights in copyright or digital right. And also some library associations. Covering all these countries, well of course it's not easy to do. And it's not done with getting people together for a couple of days in Warsaw and telling them what they need to look into and not. So what we continue doing for the four years for the two years to come is we set up a re-granting scheme. So a large part of the money that we received from the OSF actually went into supporting activities and the work of national communities and partners. And many grants, just to give you a little bit of an idea, it's communities and activists from somewhat over 20 countries. So I think it's 22, 23 countries got grants in the range of two to 6,000 euros. We set up something that we called the Copyright Transposition Hotline which is of course not a hotline but basically a signal channel and an email and such online ways of getting in touch where basically Teresa Nobren and myself have been answering questions. And these were all kinds of, it's basically a helpline. So it could be something like, hey, my national government has a public consultation going on the transposition. I don't know what to answer. So we help this community and in this country write this or hey, we're thinking of teaming up with another organization and writing a position papers. So we help on this or if there is an event that needed to be done, we also try to help, I mean, both with the legal legislative part of things but also with the organizational and tactical part of the work. So we try to regularly check in with the communities because of course it's basically close to 30 countries and not every country works at the same pace and then there was also of course the pandemic. So while the Dutch and the Dutch government in the Netherlands, they very well knew from the beginning what they will do and when they will do in quite a few countries there was nothing happening for a year and a half and then suddenly they got active. And of course, if you're a volunteer who wanted to work on this a year and a half ago and then so many things happened, maybe you forgot about it or maybe you don't have the time to check or to think about it all the time. So we tried to regularly talk to people and see, hey, how are you doing? Did anything new happen in your country? Was there maybe a consultation by the government that we missed? Let's see this together. And the other thing we tried to do are events. Now, this was of course cut short by the pandemic but we nevertheless managed to do a few events at the very beginning of it. Like for instance, we went to Cyprus where our partner in Cyprus, the UNESCO chair for digital cultural heritage organized a great real life event with parliamentarians and with government officials where we basically had also the opportunity to present our transposition guidelines and asks to them. So this is what's been happening. The work was supposed to be done on the 7th of June this year but of course due to the pandemic and several, well, and an ongoing court case when the court of justice, the work will actually continue in most countries for at least, well, until at least the end of this year. So now you may ask, did we really manage to find people to work with us everywhere where we are actually astonished that we managed to find people in most places? Now, I assume a lot of people are watching this. Three places where we managed to be active and we managed to produce some input but where we're still lacking community members that reliably can work with us over the years and really care about this topic are Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia. In Croatia, we had some input both in the parliamentary committee stage and in the government consultation but the person who does this does not live in Croatia any longer and he also doesn't have much time so we're really lacking people there. In Lithuania and Latvia, we are working through the library associations. The libraries are great friends of ours but still, of course, the libraries have their own very particular interests so they can't always stand up and say, hey, we also care about memes or you know about what goes on Wikipedia or not. So if you know somebody who is interested in long time working on copyright issues in these countries, please get in touch. I'll share my contacts later. So maybe to look very quickly at the four countries that already transposed what we care about. So the public domain safeguard, what happened there is Germany and Maltaum picked it up and transposed it from the directive international law and it's already valid national law so congratulations in these two countries we have on the books, not only the public domain is a term which didn't exist before but also something that says that it is safeguarded. So basically when you digitize public domain works they continue to be in the public domain. The Netherlands and Hungary, they skipped this, they didn't transpose this particular article or although they have to according to the directive. The argument of the governments and we have this in written at least was that this public domain safeguard is already the case in their national law systems and they've never had an issue with somebody claiming the opposite. This is what they say at least. So they don't need it. Now while we'll see in the follow up to this we might need to check these statements in courts but anyways it's good to have them at least in writing that they think it's already the case. The user writes in article 17 so where I told you it's like when a rights holder claims something is illegal and when a user claims something is covered and there are copyright exception who does a platform need to listen to like the details here are very important. So what happened here is Germany in our account did a very good job in transposing it. Basically introduced ex-ante user rights safeguards against blocking of content which means that if a user uploads something and then a rights holder says, hey, this is illegal and it needs to go but the user uploaded this and claimed it's under an exception, then it should be presumed that the use is authorized and the platform should not delete the content until it's proven that it's not. So which is quite a good thing. User organizations are also awarded a collective redress option for injunctive relief against platforms that repeatedly block legal uploads which is also something we welcome and we asked for. In Hungary the Hungarian implementation of article 17 is largely limited to restating what the directive says but it does include a relatively strong collective redress mechanisms which means that users can form groups or organizations and they can collectively ask for their rights if their content gets blocked and to basically change also the law which is still good. We don't know what to really say about the Netherlands and Malta because they didn't really transpose it into national law, they basically just copied whatever the directive says one to one into their books which is still not the worst because the article 17 in its final version is already trying to make some balances between user rights and rights holders rights but we have to see how this plays out and now if you're thinking why am I not seeing any frowning smiley here? Well, the frowning smiley will come at the latest when France and Italy are done with their transposition of article 17 which they're not done yet. Now, if you want to follow this process in a lot more detail which of course we don't have the time for here, you can go to tracker.communiaassociation.org. This is where we try really in detail to keep information about everything that's going on with the national copyright reforms in each country. It can be very technical and this is not for everybody. So most people just want to quickly know so what's going on? Where are they yet? And was it good or bad what they did? And for this and also to have a little bit of fun because after two years and a half you get tired of articles and paragraphs and recitals. So we built also the Eurovision.communiaassociation.org page where we decided, hey, let's play Eurovision song contest but with copyright reforms in each EU country. And once they're done, we assign points to them both for process, was it an open democratic, inclusive and transparent process? And in the end, did they implement public domain rights and user rights? And did they make education easier? Education online easier? So this is what we look at. You can see currently Germany has 10 points and it's leading, Hungary also didn't do a bad job. Like everybody else apart from Malta didn't move at all. So we'll see at the end how things end up. Make sure to visit this page every once in a while and also like if you're live on it and you click on one of these countries you also get in a few lines really the most important things in transposition for each country that are important and relevant to us. So if you want like a quick overview and also a fun overview, Eurovision.communiaassociation.org. Now from here on we of course have probably another year until all these countries end up transposing it. We'll continue working on it. And we are for to make sure this happens and to make sure that our help continues remaining available. We are already working with the partners of extending the project, maybe to get some follow-up funding. And after that, so in our mind the way European legislation works is you have the EU level legislation, so a directive. Then you have the transposition and then you have a play a time where this lives on in practice and where there is jurisprudence and litigation and you already set the agenda for the next copyright reform. So as we wrap up the current national implementations we are also looking into preparing legislation and agenda setting for the future where we hope that Wikimedia and Communia are already keen on working on this. We are now negotiating with the other partners whether they want to continue. And hey, if you want to be a part of this in the future just drop me a line or write to me on Twitter. I'm happy to talk and happy to just exchange a few ideas. So let me close this now. And with this, I'm done. And I guess I can check that. Was it the etherpad that I need to check? Yeah, just another maybe something to note. Me and Teresa were supposed to do this together. So this could not have happened without Teresa. Teresa is probably, she is a Communia member but also a expert from Creative Commons from Portugal and she's currently that person who is most knowledgeable about the copyright rules in all member states. So regardless whether you ask her about a copyright exception on education in Lithuania or how do you legislation change something in the Cyprus law, she is on top of this and she is probably the most valuable person we have in our communities working on that. And she is of course currently on a well-deserved holiday on a Portuguese island with very bad internet and she was supposed to travel to a place with better internet to do this presentation but then it got rescheduled. So I told her, hey, you've been working on this for two and a half years, just enjoy yourself. I feel so alone here like this. And yeah, for some reason the etherpad is not opening for a few minutes. So I don't know whether something's going on there that I could answer or not. Nope, still not opening. Well, anyhow, I guess thank you. And yeah, if you need anything from me, Dini at wikimedia.be for Belgium. That's cool, etherpads empty as well. So I don't know even whether somebody's looking at it or listening, maybe I'm alone in a box talking to myself in my living room.