[Osmf-talk] Copyright in the Digital Single Market

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 12 September 2018, Manfred A. Reiter wrote:
> [...]
>
> Why doesn't the official representation of the community comment on
> these eminently important things?
> No tweets, no press release, nothing! - Or did I miss something?
>
> Is the OSMF aware that politicians may not understand what their
> decisions mean for OSM?
> May I know, what OSMF did to defend our data and our project like
> Wikimedia does?
> Or are tweets like this
> https://twitter.com/WikimediaDE/status/1039873938598363136 nonsens?
> Ortter.com/WikimediaDE/status/1039873938598363136
> https://twitter.com/WikimediaDE/status/103987393859836313
> cheers

I think the explanation is probably mostly that the EU plans perfectly 
dovetail with the interests of the big corporate OSM data users.  As 
you could hear at SotM most of them do not want to use the user 
generated content in unfiltered form anyway and are actively developing 
their own filtering framework.  There are two scenarios for the future 
EU legislation on this matter:

* there will be an exception from the upload filter requirement that 
covers OSM.  In that case corporate data users might be required to 
filter but they do this anyway so this is perfectly fine (and it might 
help against competition that does not have a filtering 
infrastructure).

* OSM will be required to filter user contributions.  That scenario is 
fine for corporate data users as well because it would mean OSM already 
does at least some of the filtering they would want or need to do.

Side note:  It is my impression that the campaign agaist this project in 
Europe suffered from many people still fundamentally misunderstanding 
the EU.  The EU is primarily a business support organization (with a 
distinct preference for large businesses obviously).  All this talk 
about free internet, remix culture etc. that dominated the process was 
destined to overwhelmingly fall on deaf ears.  The only argument that 
really counts in Brussels is if it is bad for the European economy.  
You can find plenty of arguments for that and if the campaign had 
focussed on that it would have had a much better chance i think (and 
still does).

Also keep in mind that what has been decided today is not an actual 
piece of legislation, it is a draft that is to go into the negotiation 
process between parliament, commission and council.  What comes out of 
this as actual legislation can be and likely will be very different 
from what has been discussed now.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/