EDRI's Statement at WIPO SCCR on limitations and exceptions

European Digital Rights, EDRI, represents 28 privacy and civil rights organisations from 17 different countries in Europe. As this is the first time EDRI takes the floor, we’d like to congratulate you and your vice chairs on your election.

Not surprisingly, we are strongly in favour of starting the work that would hopefully lead to new international instrument on limitations and exceptions of copyright. EDRI therefore warmly supports the proposal presented by honourable delegate of Chile.

However, EDRI firmly believes that any new instrument should have also a strong focus – for example as a part of best practices - on the rights of totally ordinary citizens --- in addition to the professional or institutional users that traditionally occupy the center stage during these discussions of limitations and exceptions.

One of the key reason for this is that value of all kinds of consumer goods is based nowadays increasingly on the software and content and not so much on hardware. As a concequence copyright has to learn to live with consumer protection regulation. From our perspective, it would make
most sense to address this challenge inside the copyright system at the international level. In practice this means that the proposed research should also seek to answer questions like “is it ok to hack your iPhone even if that requires making a derivate copy of the software ” and “is it legal to create tools that help consumer to transfer maps from his old navigator to a new one even if the license agreements forbid it”. As far as we know, answers to this kind of questions are not yet firmly established at any jurisdictions and therefore task at hand would be forward-looking global harmonization..

Finally, EDRI would like to see very much such limitations and exceptions those aim is to protect free speech – for example parody and satire, quotations for criticism, usage of works in news - included extensively to the process. Copyright has a dark history for being a tool for censorship and oppression of controversial opinions – hopefully the possible new instrument could be a tool for redeeming this black past.