A Summary Of International CopyCamp 2016

Summary of one of the coolest annual conferences in Europe, provided by Krzysztof Siewicz, Modern Poland Foundation

CopyCamp 2016 summary

This year, the conference took place during Thursday 27th and and Friday 28th of October in Warsaw, Poland. It was the 5th time and this year the organiser, the Modern Poland Foundation proudly managed to gather the largest number of foreign conference speakers to date. They represented the countries of the European Union, including the countries of the Visegrad Group, as well as representatives of Belarus, Colombia, Canada and the United States. Around 250 people who attended the conference, as well as viewers online streaming via google hangouts, heard from a total of 70 speakers. In addition, dozens of people took part in the five workshops that accompanied the conference.

The audience gave its particular attention to Ms. Therese Comodini Cachia, Member of the European Parliament and the rapporteur for the proposed Directive on copyright in the Single Digital Market. In her speech, Dr. Comodini Cachia emphasized that the purpose of ongoing plans to reform the EU copyright law is to increase access to culture in a way that is user-friendly while ensuring that right holders maintain a sense of confidence necessary to upload their content to the Internet. The MEP also referred to the need to strengthen the position of authors in relation to publishers, but stressed that freedom of contract is an important element of the copyright system. In her speech, she pointed to the need for discussion around issues such as whether text and data mining should be allowed for startup companies, whether filtering obligations should be narrowed and how to specify the scope of ancillary rights for publishers.

The conference opened on Thursday with parallel sessions by Dr. Olga Goriunova, Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture from the University of London, addressing the idea of ownership in the age of machine learning, in regard to data, profiles and digital subjects. Dr. Rufus Pollock, an economist and founder of the Open Knowledge, then spoke about the need to build an open information era.

Also among special guests were Michal Dubovan, a senior adviser at the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic responsible for copyright legislation and supervision of collective management organizations, Konrad Gliściński, author of the book “All rights reserved. The history of disputes over copyright. 1469 – 1928,” which had its premiere during the conference, Jonas Holm legal advisor, working with LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), Mikołaj Iwański, economist (Academy of Art in Szczecin), and Agustin Reyna (senior lawyer for consumer organization BEUC).

Apart from speaker sessions, the “Maker Party” event took place at the conference, which is a Mozilla Foundation’s campaign initiative for better copyright reform, which is in sync with the digital age.

All of the presentations from this year’s event will be available to watch online on our YouTube channel in the near future. Meanwhile it is possible to watch presentations recorded from previous CopyCamps (http://copycamp.pl/en/info/past/).

Image Credits: Modern Poland Foundation