While the debate on democracy in the European decision making has become a priority in many political public discourses, the very legitimacy of the European project is raised by many as a scapegoat for social policy failures due to austerity measures.

In this context, the quest for democracy in the public sphere does not reflect the reality of workers’ everyday workplace environment, where workers’ voice and representation is ever more threatened.

Worker and social cooperatives, by bringing democracy into the workplace, practice and foster a model where workers are protagonists. When we engage for the benefit of local communities, when we pursue the general interest, when we preserve the industrial heritage of our regions, when we inject economic democracy in enterprise decision-making, we actively fight social exclusion, and counter populism and anti-democratic sentiments.

Our economic model is resilient and future-proof, we take up the challenges of the future of work and we fight for social justice in Europe.

The Europe we have in mind gives voice to its citizens, cherishes entrepreneurial diversity and leaves no one behind.

In the end of May 2019, European citizens will elect the new European Parliament, and here is what cooperatives in the industry and services want for the next parliamentary mandate.
Read our Election manifesto !

The post A Cooperative Manifesto for the 2019 Elections appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Spanish-language cartoon Tiranía (Tyranny). Superstition sits on the throne, advised by a priest and a devil by Claudio Linati, 1826. Wikicommons. Public domain.

Xnet (https://xnet-x.net/en/), an activist group working for civil rights in the Internet, is the founder member in Spain of the #SaveYourInternet coalition, which has among its participants groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), European Digital Rights (EDRi) and others. We have come together to organise a campaign to inform the public about the hidden dangers of the new European Copyright Directive.

With the approval in the European Parliament of the final text of the Copyright Directive, which will be definitely put to the vote in a very few months’, the European Union has lost a historic opportunity to produce copyright legislation adapted for the Internet in the twenty-first century. What the European Parliament will finally vote on is a technophobic text, tailor-made for the interests of the copyright monopolies which, moreover, doesn’t guarantee the right of authors to have a reasonable standard of living as a result of their work.

If the law is eventually passed, it will be used for wholesale curtailment of freedoms and more censorship, in keeping with the bizarre idea that anything that doesn’t produce hard cash for the major players – which doesn’t mean authors! – has to be prohibited and eliminated.The amount of money the real authors receive in the end is zero or almost zero.

This is a tragedy for workers in the domain of culture who (with a few, brave, and praiseworthy exceptions) have once again been frivolously incapable of informing themselves about the real state of affairs. They have passively swallowed the version fed to them by their masters and, avidly playing the victim, have become the chief mouthpiece of freedom-killing propaganda without the slightest understanding that this is not going to enhance their rights but will do away with the rights of everyone.

Alarm bells started ringing almost two years ago when we discovered that, rather than being a proposal for an obsolete copyright law, the directive is being used as a Trojan horse to introduce surveillance, automatic data processing, government by opaque algorithms, and censorship without court orders, etc.

This threat to such basic rights as freedom of expression and access to culture and information lurks in ruses which are mainly hidden in two articles of the Directive:

Article 11: no link without a licence

Article 11, otherwise known as the “Linktax” article, has created a new economic “right” for magnates of the written press. This ‘right’, moreover, implies indefinitely restricting the possibility of citing the press online.

If this seems absurd, arbitrary and counterproductive, we invite you to read the proposal itself. This is an ambiguous text, described by the jurist Andrej Savin as “One of the worst texts I have ever seen in my 23-year-long career as a law scholar.” Given its muzzy formulation, the safest response for any platform will be not to link to any media publication without explicit permission.“One of the worst texts I have ever seen in my 23-year-long career as a law scholar.”

This perverse measure will be the equivalent, on a European scale, to the “Google tax”, which is already in force in Spain and Germany. Even its promoters were soon to regret it, when Google shut down Google News in Spain after it was approved. The Google tax is paradoxical and those responsible for initiating it know very well it won’t work in Europe. For example, Xnet revealed that the big German publishing company Alex Springer was paying itself – having linked up to pay itself – in an outlandish pretence that “everything’s fine”.

Where are they trying to go with this? What sense is there in this move by the press barons to push laws which prevent you from linking up to their content, disseminating it, and commenting on them? Is this just a mix of ignorance and greed, or something like shooting yourself in the foot?

There is certainly something of this involved, but we believe that this is a mix of ignorance and greed which, in the end, means cutting off your nose to spite your face (when you’re trying to damage someone else’s face). With laws like this, the press barons can engage in legal harassment to the point of closing down social aggregators and communities like Meneame or Reddit, eliminating any new competitor, consolidating their monopoly, and thus becoming the lone voice on the Internet, the only ones who speak. In short, they are aspiring to become a new kind of television.

Article 13: no uploading content without a licence

Platforms – from medium-sized providers of services storing subject material through to the giants of the Internet – will be considered responsible for any copyright infringement committed by their users, and they are bulldozed into taking preventive measures. In other words, this isn’t a matter of eliminating content but directly preventing people from uploading it.

Of course, nobody is forcing them to do anything. They are simply being made responsible for material uploaded by their users. It’s like a car salesman being held responsible for crimes committed by people who buy his cars. This can only end up with algorithmic upload filters being applied to absolutely everything or, in other words, prior, automatic, and massive Internet censorship.This can only end up with algorithmic upload filters being applied to absolutely everything or, in other words, prior, automatic, and massive Internet censorship.

Recently, YouTube prevented the pianist James Rhodes from uploading one of his own videos in which he is playing Bach. This kind of “error”, which always favours privatisation of the public domain, is the everyday reality for all authors who use YouTube.

And this isn’t just about the “errors” that lead to the privatisation of the public domain. It is about the difficulty or impossibility of uploading on the Internet any kind of derivative work: parodies, memes, remixes, fandom, satires, and so on or, in other words, the very essence of culture, political freedom and freedom of expression.

Repeating the medieval experience of the invention of the printing press

This whole setup, which looks like a science-fiction dystopia, an impossible attempt to lock the doors when the horse has bolted, or an exaggeratedly grim prophecy being spread by concerned activists, is already being implemented today on big platforms.

At present, there are two options:

The Spotify model

 In this case, the platform would acquire all national and international licences and then make all contents available unidirectionally in such a way that users can’t upload content. Even so, in the case of Spotify, one of the few giants with the resources to do this today, paying the copyright monopolies has raised its overheads so much that, despite its commercial success, its medium-term sustainability isn’t guaranteed. If this is the situation of Spotify, it’s not difficult to imagine what will happen to medium-sized Internet companies.

This model has another defect which is obvious to most artists. The amount of money the real authors receive in the end is zero or almost zero.

The Facebook/Google model

These new Internet monopolies refuse to share the cake with the old copyright monopolies and therefore opt for large-scale, automatic filtering of all content. They will find it easier to adapt to Article 13 since now they will only need to apply the filtering mechanisms before uploading takes place.

This technology, besides being opaque and exclusive, is very expensive. Since it will be obligatory, it will also mean that these giants are very unlikely to have competitors that have any chance of prospering.

Google has spent approximately 100 million dollars to create the technology that has so far enabled it to respond to copyright claims coming in from only 1% of its users.

The effect which these arbitrary regulations will have on free Internet conversation, on diffusion of culture and information, and access to them will be devastating.

Whose rights are at stake?

Authors’ rights (Droits des auteurs→ copyright) are important. But what are these rights? And which authors have them?

Any democratic proposal seeking widespread consensus and aspiring to guarantee the decent employment of authors without jeopardising the basic rights of citizens would need, finally, to take a bold stand against the copyright monopolies and management entities which are suspected of abuse when not directly investigated, tried, and condemned, as we succeeding in doing with SGAE (the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers).

It should also take as given the fact that the concept of the author or medium has changed in the last twenty years. Since the earliest days of Web 2.0, the content generated by users has evolved from being an interesting social experiment to the digital reality in which we are immersed day in day out.

In a society like that of Spain, for example, content generated by entities which were once “big” media now account for less than 5% of Internet traffic. The EU must respect citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal content generated by the elite.The EU must respect citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal content generated by the elite.

No single company, medium, or author has written Wikipedia, or turned the Web into the repository of gazillions of videos, or generated hundreds of millions of tweets per day. We – the people – did this. The Internet doesn’t belong to them.

The threats skulking behind the Copyright Directive are part of an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle and embark on an inquisition that would allow the oligarchs to take control of the Internet. Our politicians and big company bosses are envious of the Chinese model.

Open architecture

The initial idea of the fathers and mothers of the World Wide Web and the Internet, as we know it, this idea of an open architecture for sharing links without restriction, was crucial to its success. And it would be radically undermined if the directive is approved.

Now the EU wants to create an Internet with a licence. And since we are a civilised society, they can’t call it censorship so they say “copyright”.

In the final vote, all the power and wealth will be on one side. We, the people, who are on the other side ­– in favour of freedom of expression, an open Internet, and copyright laws adapted to the twenty-first century, which will enable authors to make a decent living and not have to scrabble for crumbs dropped from the table of the Internet moguls ­ – will be vilified, slandered as thieves, hackers and pirates, and absurd allegations will be made against us.

This situation has happened before. And what it most clearly evokes is the relationship between the invention of the printing press and the censorship of the Holy Inquisition.

Inscribed in pen and ink. “Spanish Inquisition” by Thomas Rowlandson (1756 – 1827). Wikicommons/ Google Cultural Institute. Some rights reserved.

What is the responsibility of artists and (left) political parties?

The vote has not yet been cast. We have a few months to get everyone to understand the magnitude of the danger. We can win this battle. We have already won in extremis in other situations like the fight for net neutrality and ACTA, and we can do it again.

What would help:

• –  Artists who will step forward and say, “NOT in my name”.

• –  A clear, effective, and non-opportunist stance from the left in favour of an open Internet and freedom of expression.

The left instead tends all too often to cultivate a technophobic position which contributes towards censoring narratives. The case of Spain is paradigmatic. The PP (right-wing party) and PSOE (“socialist” party) voted and will vote in block for whatever the Copyright Monopolies and the SGAE tells them to vote for, which is to say what most favours control and censorship.

But the example of the left-wing electoral alliance Unidos Podemos is also instructive. They joined the SaveYourInternet campaign at the last moment in order to coopt these citizen-activists. The next day, one Anova and two Izquierda Unida members of parliament abstained from voting and nobody in either party as much as batted an eyelid. It would seem that none of our politicians take these basic rights very seriously.

We citizens who are active in battling for civil rights on the Internet will meet our obligation and fight the good fight. We’ll stop this attack on the Internet and democracy sooner or later, with or without the help of the “artists” or the “parliamentary left”, but not without bitterly calling attention to the dangerous future that is looming for freedom of expression and information, and our other freedoms in the new context of the digital age in which, again and again, the tool is being destroyed and the messenger killed in order to preserve a status quo that must not continue.

Heretics brought before the tribunal of the Inquisition, Seville by F.Moyse, 1870. Wikicommons. Public domain.

Photo by Madame Etepetete

The post The EU call it copyright, but it is massive Internet censorship and must be stopped appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Julia Reda: Free software development as we know it is under threat by the EU copyright reform plans.

The battle on the EU copyright reform proposal continues, centering on the plan to introduce upload filters. In short, online platforms would be required to monitor their users’ uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering. As most communication online consists of uploads onto different platforms, such “censorship machines” have broad consequences, including for free and open source software (FOSS) repositories.

On these platforms, developers from across the world collaborate on software projects that anyone can freely use and adapt. Automated filters would be guaranteed to throw up many false positives. Automatic deletion means uploaders are presumed guilty until proven innocent: Legitimate contributions would be blocked.

The recent outcry about this in the FOSS community is showing some results: Our concerns are getting lawmakers’ attention. Unfortunately, though, most are misunderstanding the issue and drawing the wrong conclusions. Now that we know how powerful the community’s voice is, it is all the more important to keep speaking up!

Why is this happening?

The starting point for this legislation was a fight between big corporations, the music industry and YouTube, over money. The music industry complained that they receive less each time one of their music videos is played on a video platform like YouTube than they do when their tracks are listened to on subscription services like Spotify, calling the difference the “value gap”. They started a successful lobbying effort: The upload filter law is primarily intended to give them a bargaining chip to demand more money from Google in negotiations. Meanwhile, all other platforms are caught in the middle of that fight, including code sharing communities.

The lobbying has engrained in many legislators’ minds the false idea that platforms which host uploads for profit are necessarily exploiting creators.

Code sharing

There are, however, many examples where there is a symbiotic relationship between platform and creators. Developers use and upload to software repositories voluntarily, because the platforms add value. While Github is a for-profit company, it supports not-for-profit projects – it finances its free hosting of open source projects by charging for the commercial use of the site’s services. Thus open source activities will be affected by a law designed to regulate a fight between giant corporations.

In a recent blog post, Github sounded the alarm, citing three reasons why upload filters are a terrible fit for software projects:

1. Code needs to be filtered under this law because it is copyrightable – but many developers intend for their code to be shared under an open source license.
2. The risk for false positives is very high because different parts of a software project may be covered under different license terms, which is very hard for automated technology to adequately handle.
3. Automatically having to remove code suspected of infringing copyright may have devastating consequences for software developers who have built on common resources that they may find suddenly vanishing.

Concerns are being heard

In their latest draft, the Council of the European Union seeks to exclude “non-for profit open source software developing platforms” from the obligation to filter uploads. This amendment is a direct result of the FOSS community’s outcry. However, this exception would not cover for-profit platforms like Github and many others, even if only a branch of their operations is for-profit.

Rather than questioning the basic principle of the law, politicians are trying to quell criticism by proposing more and more specific exceptions for those who can credibly demonstrate that the law would adversely affect them. Creating such a list of exceptions is a Sisyphean task sure to remain incomplete. Rather, upload filters should be rejected as a whole as a disproportional measure that endangers the fundamental right to free expression online.

We can do it!

To achieve this, we need your help. The FOSS community can’t just solve problems with code: It has political clout, strength in numbers and allies in the Parliament. We have already started to effect change. Here’s how you can take action right now:

1. Sign the open letter at SaveCodeshare.
2. Use Mozilla’s free tool to call MEPs.
3. Tweet at the key players in the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee via FixCopyright.

Technical Sidenote:

• Fundamentally, three players are involved in the legislative process. The Commission drafted an initial legal proposal, which the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union can propose changes to. Within the Parliament, this legislation is first discussed in the Legal Affairs Committee, with each political group nominating a negotiator. Once the Committee has voted to approve the compromise established by the negotiators, it will be put to vote in the plenary of the Parliament, before negotiations begin with the other institutions. The exact legislative path so far can be found here.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

The post Censorship machines are coming: It’s time for the free software community to discover its political clout appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will seriously harm creativity in Europe. That’s why artists are joining together to speak out against it.

Continuing our coverage of the European Parliament’s heinous proposition for filtering uploaded content, Ruth Coustick-Deal consults with the artistic community. Republished from OpenMedia.org.

Ruth Coustick-Deal: Last week we asked our community to let us know how people in their profession will be harmed by content filtering (Article 13) and the link tax (Article 11).^[1]We’ve heard from more than 1000 people already, and more responses are still coming in every day.

Now it’s time to take the message to the person at the front of this decision. Axel Voss MEP is both in charge of the key committee and a leader in his party.

Axel Voss MEP today published his “compromise” (in name only) today. Essentially he kept Oettinger’s original flawed proposal. Despite public voices. Despite tens of thousands of people speaking up against. Despite robust academic critique. We are still faced with unaccountable censorship machines.

Axel Voss MEP needs to directly hear why the public are so opposed to automated censorship machines. He has the most influence on this law. He has all this power, and is still clinging on to broken, unpopular proposals.^[2]

If MEPs like Voss want to the web to work for artists, they need to start listening to the individuals, not just the big industry groups.

They try to tell us that automated content filtering, bots scanning for copyrighted content and then blocking what they find, will help creativity flourish. We know that it won’t. Consider Adam Neely.^[3] A YouTube-based jazz teacher couldn’t play short snippets of music to analyse them. Because the music was owned by Universal Music Group; they got it blocked and taken down. We will see more and more of this kind of censorship, which will take place across Europe, if these filters are legally demanded.

That’s why we are working with the Create/Refresh coalition.^[4] They are a network of artists from across Europe who are opposed to Article 13. These creators produced a video which illustrates all of their talents, and their unity against these rules. Watch the video to find out more.

We need Axel Voss to see this! Let’s make sure he can’t ignore it, and knows that the very people he claims to be speaking for, oppose him.

This is just a small sample of art made possible because we don’t have these excessive restrictions that do nothing for creators.

Please give them a voice. Share the video with Axel Voss on Facebook and Twitter demanding he rejects content blocking and the link tax.

We know that tweeting at MEPs can be hugely effective if we raise a chorus too loud to ignore – MEPs pay attention to what people are saying on social media. Lets show Axel Voss that artists are not asking for his “protection”, what they want is freedom to create.

Footnotes

[1] Help our censorship impact research AND speak to your MEPs. Source: OpenMedia
[2] Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament’s copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate. Source: Julia Reda
[3] When I want to teach but can’t, thanks to Universal Music Group. Source: Adam Neely
[4] Create Refresh Coalition website.

The post Article 13 will set back creativity. We let the artists speak for themselves. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Julia Reda: Ever since the European Commission presented its hugely controversial proposal to force internet platforms to employ censorship machines, the copyright world has been eagerly awaiting the position of the European Parliament. Today, the person tasked with steering the copyright reform through Parliament, rapporteur Axel Voss, has finally issued the text he wants the Parliament to go forward with.

It’s a green light for censorship machines: Mr. Voss has kept the proposal originally penned by his German party colleague, former Digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger, almost completely intact.

In doing so, he is dismissing calls from across the political spectrum to stop the censorship machines. He is ignoring one and a half years of intense academic and political debate pointing out the proposal’s many glaring flaws. He is discarding the work of several committees of the Parliament which came out against upload filters, and of his predecessor and party colleague MEP Comodini, who had correctly identified the problems almost a year ago. He is brushing off the concerns about the proposal’s legality several national governments have voiced in Council. And he is going against the recently published coalition agreement of the new German government – which is going to include Voss’ own Christian Democratic Party – where filtering obligations are rejected as disproportionate.

Photo © European Union (used with permission)

[Read Axel Voss’ compromise proposal PDF]

This is a “compromise” in name only. Mr. Voss’ proposal contains all the problematic elements of the original censorship machines idea, and adds several new ones. Here’s the proposal in detail:

1. Obligatory impossible-to-get licenses

The proposal says: All apps and websites where users can upload and publish media are required to get copyright licenses for all content. These platforms are considered to “communicate to the public” all those user uploads, which means that the platforms would be directly responsible for copyright infringements committed by their users, as if it were the platform’s employees themselves uploading these works.

This is a bizarre addition to the Commission proposal, which would be impossible to implement in practice: Who exactly are the platforms supposed to get those license agreements from? While there may be collecting societies representing professional authors in a few areas such as music or film, which may be able to issue a license covering the works of many individual authors, other sectors do not have collecting societies at all.

Imagine a platform dedicated to hosting software, such as GitHub. There is no collecting society for software developers and nobody has so far seen the need to found one. So where will GitHub, which undoubtedly hosts and gives access to (copyright-protected) software uploaded by users, get their copyright license from? They can’t enter into license negotiations with every single software developer out there, just because somebody might someday upload their software to GitHub without permission. And without that impossible-to-get license, this law says they will be directly liable as soon as somebody does upload copyrighted works. That’s a sure-fire way to kill the platforms economy in Europe.

And these impossible-to-get licenses cover only non-commercial use: If the platform acquires a license as prescribed, then non-commercial uploaders won’t be liable. Uploaders acting for commercial purposes however, such as companies with social media accounts, can still be sued by rightsholders.

2. The censorship machine is here to stay

The proposal says: All platforms hosting and providing public access to “significant amounts” of user-uploaded content have to prevent copyrighted content that rightsholders have identified from being uploaded in the first place.

There are only two ways to do this: (a) hire an army of trained monkeys to look at every individual user upload and compare it manually to the rightsholder information or (b) install upload filters. The article that creates this obligation no longer mentions content recognition technologies explicitly, but they are still mentioned in other parts of the text, making it clear that filters are what Voss has in mind.

There is no definition what “significant amounts” are supposed to be. The Commission was widely criticised for requiring censorship machines on platforms with “large amounts” of content, following the misguided idea that only large companies with significant resources available to dedicate to the development of upload filters host large amounts of content, completely ignoring the wide diversity of popular specialised platforms out there: Community-run platforms like Wikipedia, niche platforms like MuseScore (for sheet music) and many startups host millions of uploads, but would struggle to implement or license expensive filtering technology.

Why Voss believes replacing the word “large” with the potentially even broader “significant” is supposed to improve anything remains completely unclear.

3. A tiny problem with fundamental rights

The proposal says: The filtering measures must not entail any processing of personal data, in order to protect users’ privacy

The only indication that Mr. Voss has paid attention to any of the public criticism at all is that he acknowledges there may a tiny problem with fundamental rights. Indeed, the European Court of Justice has in the past ruled that an obligation to filter all user uploads violates the fundamental rights to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom to conduct a business. Voss picks one of those fundamental rights seemingly at random and adds a provision aimed at protecting it. Admirable as this may be, it is also in direct contradiction to what comes next:

Because filters will invariably delete content that is legal, for example under a copyright exception, users are supposed to have access to a redress mechanism to complain about overblocking. But how exactly is the platform supposed to offer the user that redress if it is not allowed to process any personal data? Simply recording which user’s uploads have fallen victim to the filter already requires processing of personal data. How can a user complain about a wrongful takedown if the platform is not allowed to keep records of what the filter deleted in the first place?

It gets better: Guess who should decide about what happens with the users’ complaints about wrongful takedowns? The rightsholders who asked for the content to be blocked in the first place. Surely they will turn out to be an impartial arbiter.

At least, users are supposed to be able to go to a court if the redress mechanism fails. However, this may end up being ineffective, because copyright exceptions do not constitute legal rights against the rightsholders, so a court may decide not to require a platform to reinstate previously deleted uploads, even if they were legal under a copyright exception.

What users need is a clear legal rule that the copyright exceptions constitute users’ rights – just like the previous copyright rapporteur Therese Comodini had suggested.

4. Very specific general monitoring

The proposal says: Checking all user uploads for whether they are identical to a particular rightsholder’s copyrighted work does not constitute forbidden “general“ monitoring, but is “specific“.

EU law forbids any laws that force hosting providers to do “general monitoring”, such as checking every single file uploaded by every user all of the time. Voss simply postulates that upload filters would not break that rule and writes that only “abstract monitoring” should be forbidden, which presumably means randomly looking at uploaded files without looking for anything in particular.

This argument has already been dismissed by the European Court of Justice: The European Commission tried making it in defense of upload filters in the past – and lost (Paragraph 58 of this French-language Commission contribution to the European Court of Justice case Scarlet vs. SABAM).

5. Few exceptions

The proposal says: The filtering obligation should not apply to Internet access services, online marketplaces such as ebay, research repositories where rightsholders mainly upload their own works such as arXiv, or cloud service providers where the uploads cannot be accessed publicly, such as Dropbox.

In a last-ditch attempt to redeem himself, Voss provides a welcome clarification that the obligation to filter does not extend to certain businesses. But this exception, not legally binding since it is in a recital rather than an article, does not apply to the obligation to license.

The listed platforms would still have to get licenses from rightsholders provided that the user uploads are publicly accessible, because they would still be considered to be communicating to the public. But how are these platforms supposed to shield themselves from lawsuits by rightsholders if they can’t get a license for all possible content that may be uploaded? They will have to resort to a filter anyway.

6. Critical parts remain unchanged

Large parts of the most widely criticised elements of the Commission proposal were left completely unchanged by rapporteur Voss, such as the infamous Recital 38 (2), where the Commission misrepresents the limited liability regime of the e-commerce directive, essentially stating that any platform that so much as uses an algorithm to sort the uploaded works alphabetically or provides a search function should be considered as “active” and therefore liable for its users’ actions. The only change that Mr. Voss has made to this section is cosmetic in nature.

* * *

It’s not too late to stop the Censorship Machines!

Fortunately, Axel Voss does not get to decide the Parliament position on his own. He will need to secure a majority in the Legal Affairs (JURI) committee, which will vote in late March or April. Two other committees have already come out strongly against filtering obligations, and several JURI members have tabled amendments to delete or significantly improve the Article.

Now it’s time to call upon your MEPs to reject Mr. Voss’ proposal! You can use tools such as SaveTheMeme.net by Digital Rights NGO Bits of Freedom or ChangeCopyright.org by Mozilla to call the Members of the Legal Affairs Committee free of charge. Or look for MEPs from your country and send them an email.

But most importantly, spread the word! Ask you local media to report on this law.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

The post Green light for upload filters: EU Parliament’s copyright rapporteur has learned nothing from year-long debate appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1/ The current legislation under review by the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy regarding “neighboring rights”, to be voted on by the European Parliament in late March 2018, has little if anything to do with author rights

2/ All arguments about protecting revenue streams for publishers indicate that the true purpose is to fortify the rights of publishers (who have arrogated to themselves the rights of authors)

3/ The arguments from the public domain side against this legislation are equally problematic and suspect for the same reason that author rights are not part of the rationale for propping up the knowledge commons against the disputed proprietary rights of publishers

4/ The central issue, which is also hidden in plain sight, is – after all – the moral rights of authors (“Lockean natural rights”) as established in the Enlightenment and as enshrined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886)

5/ Both the EC and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have shown no interest in addressing this set of rights, given the inherent abstract nature of such rights and given that both are operating on behalf of industry in a global IP campaign that resembles the “weaponizing” of IP rights

6/ Given that economic data (or any empirical proof) confirming that free copying of works or appropriation by platform cultures benefits the author is impossible to produce, whether justified through the murky term “transformative use” or “discoverability”, all such arguments, as used on both sides of the debate (by publishers to e-license copyrighted works and by advocates of Open Access to justify authors giving their works away for nothing) devolve to mere speculation based on the bias of the beneficiaries

7/ Given the origin of copyright in the Venetian Renaissance, via the granting of privilegio to authors for books published in the Republic of Venice, and given the almost immediate arrogation of privilegio by printer-publishers in the Republic of Venice, the arguments associated with “neighboring rights” today merely revisit historic arguments waged then against the damage done to authors and presses through illegal copying

8/ What has not advanced, and what needs to be fully disclosed, is how mass digitalization from both sides of this battleground has forced the lion’s share of authors today into a class conveniently labeled the “precariat” by critics of capitalism for the benefit of a global “vectorial class”

9/ What is less obvious regarding this widening chasm between the precariat and the vectorial class is that almost all academic proponents of fortifying the knowledge commons through an enforced neoliberalized open-access regime for scholarly works are part of the global vectorial class by virtue of participation in the production of platform cultures that decimate author rights from the so-called non-profit side, while “Capital” takes care of the destruction of author rights on the for-profit side

Photo by Spongehoe

The post A Few Points About Author Rights appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Julia Reda: For months now I’ve been raising the alarm about the plan to limit the freedom to link that has been slowly but surely making its way through the EU legislative process.

The European Commission and the publishing lobby have accused those of us fighting to save the link of exaggerating the danger that the planned extra copyright for news sites poses.

The link wasn’t under attack, they assured us. But it has now become undeniable that it is.

Breaking the web

Today, a new lobby joined the fray – but apparently didn’t get the memo about sugar-coating the game plan. In an open letter published in Le Monde – but, fittingly, behind a paywall – large news agencies including Germany’s DPA und France’s AFP call for the extra copyright to also extend to their products. They mince no words describing what they demand politicians crack down on:

They offer internet users the work done by others, the news media, by freely publishing hypertext links to their stories. […] Solutions must be found. […] We strongly urge our governments, the European parliament and the commission to proceed with this directive.

There it is, black on white: They fully expect and intend for this law to break the core functionality of the web. They want to outlaw pointing to their articles without their permission. They want to charge for incoming links.

The letter suggests their concern is primarily with links from two particular sources: Facebook users and Google. But the law doesn’t discriminate – all links to news websites on the web would be affected by it in the same catastrophic way.

Killing innovation

Prof. Höppner, a professor of commercial law and IT law, and the lawyer for German publishers in a case against Facebook and Google, was similarly forthright at a hearing at the European Parliament last week:

This is a prohibition right. It is a right that makes sure there are not platforms coming up everywhere and anywhere that take advantage of content that has been published and make their business out of it. The first and foremost goal is to prevent these exploiting businesses – simply not have them.
(Watch the video recording )

This exposes the other goal the big publishing conglomerates hope to achieve: Killing off competition in the news sector. They don’t even want to give innovative startups the chance to pay their link ransom – they want to stamp them out.

Big publishers want to turn back time to an era in which people were loyal to a single newspaper they had a subscription to. They want visiting the front pages of their brands’ websites to be the only way we can find out what’s happening in the world. That requires eliminating apps and sites that provide what many readers prefer: A selection of links to news from multiple sources tailored to one’s personal interests.

Big publishers vs. everyone else

The fault line here does not run between journalism and online platforms, as lobbyists like to paint it: It’s between a few giant publishing houses and everyone else. Aggregators and social networks have created a level playing field that has allowed smaller, independent and special-interest news sources to grow. These sites reach the majority of their readership via links on social media and search engines, rather than through direct visits to their websites.

Unsurprisingly, innovative publishers and startups are up in arms, warning that the planned law, promoted as ensuring media diversity, would end up achieving the exact opposite: media concentration.

Requiring permission for links and suppressing new ways to stay informed: The extra copyright for news sites is nothing short of an attack on the open and decentralized web – in concert with the plan to force online platforms to install censorship machines.

It’s true that the news industry is in financial trouble. We need to think creatively about how uncompromising, in-depth journalism can be funded in the future – we certainly need it more than ever. But breaking the web and killing innovation is unacceptable, and would actually backfire on quality journalism and reduce media pluralism.

There is an alternative

The European Parliament and the Council will make a decision soon – between this law and a sensible alternative. Called the “presumption rule”, it would help publishers enforce existing copyrights without restricting linking.

The presumption rule fulfills what the European Commission has all along claimed to be the purpose of the law. Now that no doubt remains that the publishing lobby’s intentions go much further, the Commission needs to put its cards on the table: If it continues to push for the neighbouring right, it confirms that it too wants a “link tax”. If the goal is merely to allow publishers to enforce copyright, like they say, they should support the presumption rule.

The crucial vote is coming up in the Legal Affairs Committee (see the schedule here). In that committee, the conservative EPP group, the spokesperson for the liberal ALDE group and French S&D group members support the extra copyright. In the Council, the governments of France, Germany, Spain and Portugal are pushing for it.

If you are against this plan, the SaveTheLink campaign has a tool to contact your representatives – and spreading this article via links is and will stay free.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

The post Breaking the web and killing innovation: Now even lobbyists admit that’s the plan behind the extra EU copyright for news appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Frankenstein reproduction right

With the original objective of “protecting equality, press and informed news”, the proposed “publishers right”, or “ancilliary copyright” could very well turn into an unbounded and unrestricted ‘frankenstein reproduction right’ that goes far beyond existing copyright’s “orginality requirements”. The proposed “reproduction right” is radically different from existing copyright law where the originality requirement prevents the appropriation of facts, ideas and non-original expression which are usually not considered to be protected by copyright. Many amendments on the table today before the Legal Affairs Committee aim at prohibiting the use of even the smallest bit or snippet of any text, image or sound from a press article, from public information or from an academic text without the prior permission of the publisher. The negative impact on access to information, access to knowledge and scientific scholarship could be devastating. We are facing a clear attack on our democratic rights as European citizens.

It should be noted that this new layer of copyright does not exist in the US nor in international copyright law.

“Closed science”, “Closed access” and “Closed data”

Many elements of articles 11 and 13 constitute a frontal attack on open science programmes as supported by the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament.

New filtering, policing, monitoring and payment obligations would significantly weaken access to valuable research content produced through public funding by creating extra costs, bureaucratical burdens and legal uncertainty for the academical community. These new legal obligations of intermediary liability would enter into direct conflict with the open science and open access policies that are being widely adopted in Europe and around the world. The aim of these policies is to increase access to research results in order to maximize the use and benefits of science across all sectors. To support open access and open science, universities, libraries and research organisations manage repositories in which researchers upload scientific articles, publications and research data so that everyone can benefit and use the results of research, including other researchers, industry and the public. A new filtering and payment obligations would significantly inhibit through legal uncertainty access to valuable research content produced through public funding, and greatly slow the progress of open science.

Crippling academic “open access” repositories

This new attempt at the enclosure of knowledge threatens the movement towards widespread availability of scientific results for the good of all, and the existence of over 1250 repositories that non-profit European institutions and academic communities use to disseminate academic output. It is important to note that, in the context of academic research, the creators of the content -the scientists- do not receive any financial compensation for their articles, yet publishers often demand that researchers sign over their copyright to the publishers.

Many universities maintain that a new intellectual property right for academic publishers would do “untold damage to the ability of researchers to share their findings and reference the world of scholarship in their published works” (LERU 2016).

Building walls around open data

Open data means that there are no legal restrictions to access to or use, modification and sharing of information for any purpose, subject at most to an obligation to attribute the source. ‘Open’ also means there are no technical restrictions to access and use, e.g. the data is offered in machine readable formats, and in open format rather than in a proprietary format. In contrast, Articles 11 and 13 directly and indirectly restrict the use of open data as well as difficulting open access which are flagship strategies of the EU and its Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework.

Restricting freedom of information

A key rationale that underpins freedom of expression is that the free flow of information is indispensable as it helps ensure that the best democratic decisions are taken. The right protects not just the imparting of ideas and information, but all phases of the communication process, from the gathering of information including a right to access sources, to the communication and reception of it. The legal implications of articles 11 and 13 could mean barriers to the access of citizens to news, public interest information and institutional data, all necessary for informed democratic debate. The public sector might very well automatically own a great deal of publishers intellectual property within its own publicly owned publications. To create exclusive rights in information for publishers will necessarily interfere with the freedom of expression of others. It should be noted that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights upholds a strict standard of scrutiny in the case of news and other public interest information.

In general the EU’s copyright reform has been hijacked by the publishing industry lobby and has been turned into copyright counter-reform that aims at further enclosing knowledge at the expense of our scientific, academic and cultural commons.

Photo by Mark Deckers

The post EU “copyright reform” threatens freedom of information, open access and open science appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cooperatives Europe commends the ’s recognition of the growing interest for the cooperative model in the collaborative economy. This positioning sends a positive signal towards actors shaping a more diverse and inclusive collaborative economy.

On 15th of June 2017, the European Parliament adopted its resolution on the “European Agenda for the collaborative economy”, following the European Commission guidance released on 2 June 2016. The document, which includes proposals from Cooperatives Europe, recognizes the potential of the collaborative economy which, “if developed in a responsible manner”, may contribute to the creation of new opportunities for citizens, consumers and workers.

Cooperatives Europe welcomes the acknowledgement of “a growing interest in the collaborative economy based on cooperative business models”, as well as “the importance of identifying and addressing barriers to the emergence of collaborative businesses, especially start-ups”. It also recognizes the development of a community-based collaborative economy “in which knowledge and education sharing models are strong, thereby catalyzing and consolidating a culture of open innovation.”

The aim to make the collaborative economy a leverage for an economic system “not only more efficient, but also socially and environmentally sustainable” echoes a growing entrepreneurial dynamic across Europe. Cooperative examples include business models enabling democratic control over collaborative services (platform cooperatives) and anticipating the mutation of work (freelancer cooperatives). Cooperatives Europe’s paper “Cooperative Platforms in a European Landscape: An Exploratory Study,” explores potentials, barriers and diversity of such initiatives.

Agnès Mathis, Director of Cooperatives Europe, commented: “Thanks to a long tradition of solidarity and social innovation, the European continent has seen the emergence of a patchwork of cooperative start-ups, which together shape a collaborative economy empowering its users and generating benefits for local communities. We look forward to work further with EU institutions and policy-makers to create an ambitious enabling environment for a people-centered, responsible collaborative economy.”

Related content

• Cooperative Platforms in a European Landscape: An Exploratory Study
• Video: Collaborative economy… what is it?
• European Commission: A European Agenda for the collaborative economy
• Nesta: More than profit: a collaborative economy with a social purpose

Photo by Michal Sänger

The post Cooperatives recognised in EU’s future on collaborative economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

In May 2016 the European Parliament voted on an amendment for the “recognition of energy as a common good” as part of a report about decentralised local production, the “New Deal for Energy Consumers”. While the amendment was voted down by 298 votes to 345 votes, this vote reflects the support of almost half of Europe´s democratic representatives for seeing energy as a common good. The amendment was proposed by the “Commons Intergroup” which is part of the European Parliament´s Intergroup on “Common goods and public services” and is made up of Members of the European Parliament from different parliamentary groups, mainly Greens, the United Left (GUE/NGL), and several Socialists & Democrats Group (S&D) members.

In mid-November of this year, the European Commons Assembly was held in cooperation with that same Commons Intergroup in the European Parliament to promote the establishment of creative institutions and political alternatives, from the local to the European level. In the call for the Assembly, ‘commoners’ from around Europe stated: “We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation, and to prioritise the common good in all policies.”

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability.

Today, however, the predominant discourses that permeate political discussions in the EU and trump all others are economic growth, competitiveness, and efficiency. The majority of EU policy is focused on macro-economic indicators and the promotion of large commercial actors. Citizens are often uni-dimensionally viewed as entrepreneurs or consumers. For many Europeans and for many global citizens the business of the EU is big business and big member states. There is a growing concern among citizens that decisions affecting the well-being of local communities are often driven by distant centralised institutions with other priorities. In fact, the growing feeling of lack of control is eroding confidence in our political institutions on all levels, often sparking xenophobic and nationalistic movements.

The Commons across Europe

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability. The commons discourse considers people as actors deeply embedded in social relationships, communities, and ecosystems. This holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms and to consider human activity as a part of the larger living bio-physical commons.

Across Europe, more and more people are co-governing and co-creating resources. Whether in small local initiatives or in larger networks, new civic and economic structures are moving beyond the rigid dichotomies of producer and consumer, commercial and non-commercial, state and market, public and private, to construct successful new hybrid projects. The commons use voluntary social collaboration in open networks to generate social-environmental value, in ways that large markets and exclusive private property rights do not and cannot. This enormous value, though it may not be monetised, nonetheless constitutes a significant part of societal well-being in academic research, energy production, nature protection, health, creative sectors, drug development, and digital innovation. However it is largely ignored by EU policymakers and institutions, resulting in the atrophy of such social value-creation or, even worse, its appropriation by large investors and corporations.

Notable examples are community renewable energy, Wikipedia, permaculture, the peer-to-peer collaborative economy, distributed solidarity structures, and open source software. Sometimes local commons initiatives are sparked by the scarcity created by economic crisis, or in response to political powerlessness, or just fuelled by the need for social-ecological connectedness.

The European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production.

Building the commons encourages EU institutions to take a more holistic ecosystemic approach by combining collaborative, participatory, and egalitarian principles with concrete conditionality in favour of social cohesion and environmental objectives. The moral notion of common goods refers to goods that benefit society as a whole, and are fundamental to people’s lives, regardless of how they are governed. Certain matters will need to be claimed as common goods politically in order to manage them as commons, sustainably, and equitably in terms of participation, access, or use. For instance, natural resources, health services, or useful knowledge, or – like the above example in the European Parliament – decentralised renewable energy.

The European Union’s Responsibility

Due to its central role in policy-making for all the Member States, and its significant funding budget, the European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production. These initiatives and practices demand more flexible institutional and legal frameworks that at once prevent centralisation of market-power and promote dynamic, collaborative, self-governed civic networking. This includes orienting policy to enhance the blossoming of vibrant and caring local communities. To some degree this also implies stimulating new economic identities, where an individual or group orients their economic activity towards caring for the common good of community and their natural, social, and cultural surroundings, instead of solely towards maximising material interests.

According to a 2015 report published by the European Committee of the Regions, a “commons-based approach means that the actors do not just share a resource but are collaborating to create, produce or regenerate a common resource for a wider public, the community. They are cooperating, they are pooling for the commons”. This means helping people and communities to generate and regenerate urban, cultural, and natural commons as active citizens, producers, designers, creators, care-takers, local organic farmers, and renewable energy promotors. It also means embracing an open knowledge economy while promoting the Internet as a digital commons based on open standards, universal access, flexible copyright rules, decentralised internet infrastructures, and democratic governance.

Knowledge Policies

With regards to policies on knowledge management, the EU puts great emphasis on what one could call the ‘enclosure of knowledge’. This enclosure happens through the expansion of intellectual property protection, both within and outside of Europe by means of trade policies. Aside from potentially spurring innovation and helping European industries, this also results in, for instance, long patent monopolies on medicines and long copyright terms.

The copyright reform discussed in 2016 is of crucial importance to the online information commons. It will determine the boundaries of innovative social value-creation through sharing and collaboration online. Sufficient exceptions and limitations to copyright are essential. For example, allowing for text and data mining would support scientific and academic research. Moreover, assuring the right to link information from one web to another is one of the key characteristics of sharing online.

On the global level, through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the EU tends to defend the enclosure of knowledge, promoting further expansion of intellectual property rights of all kinds, from medicines and broadcast signals, to education materials and climate technologies. To allow for a collaborative knowledge sharing economy, the EU will have to be more open to socially inclusive and flexible business models that are more compatible with both the digital era and the urgent needs of people, in both the North and South.

The EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives.

The European Commission has made some efforts that recognise the need to share knowledge and embrace the possibilities of the digital age. This is for example reflected in commitments on open access publishing mandate in the context of Research and Development funding, open data in some of its policies, and the exploration of open science. Recently, Members States called for a review of monopoly-extending rules on biomedical knowledge in the area of pharmaceuticals due to concerns over increasingly high medicines prices.

However, these moves towards knowledge sharing remain timid and are not at the centre of EU policy strategies as it remains mostly conformist to the interests of the cultural industries, the pharmaceutical industry, or agribusiness.

The Internet and the Collaborative Economy

The recent establishment of net neutrality in the EU, an essential prerequisite for a free and open internet, marks an important victory. Yet truly promoting an “internet commons” would include supporting a universal infrastructure based on public and community-controlled digital infrastructures. It would need to be structurally disengaged from dominant market positions and include broad non-commercial access to bandwidth in spectrum, and open source software.

In its “Digital Single Market” strategy, the EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives. This is accompanied by the violation of our personal data for indiscriminate political-economic control, and the general extraction of profit from social interactions and peer to peer activity.

As part of the Digital Single Market strategy the European Commission released its “European Agenda for the Collaborative economy” in June 2016. The Agenda deals with issues of taxation, market liability, contractual agreements, and consumer clarity. However it fails to pay attention to democratic structures, social equity, and ecological health – the cornerstones of community-based peer-to-peer collaborative initiatives that regenerate the commons. In contrast, the EU Agenda seems to welcome – with just a few technical caveats – multinational “collaborative” platforms such as Uber and AirBnB despite their extractive, non-embedded nature and their tendency to undermine national laws that ensure fair competition and protect workers. The motor of a commons-based collaborative economy is not just a consumer seeking to possess or purchase a service. Instead the user is often also a producer and/or is involved in the governance of a collaborative platform that is serving social and environmental needs. The promotion of local platform economies requires a different regulatory approach than that currently taken by the European Commission. It requires an approach that understands and acknowledges the value of localised social relations and self-governed technologies, as well as having clear indicators that frame policy within high social equity and environmental sustainability objectives.

Energy

The EU can be an enlightened voice and a leader on global climate and energy commitments. Yet, while large energy companies are starting to invest in renewable sources, they may not be best suited for alleviating our social-ecological dilemma, primarily because they have little incentive to reduce overall energy consumption or to prioritise the social engagement of local communities in their commercial operations. At the same time, some climate technologies that can play an important role in energy transition are often not shared as quickly with developing countries as they could be. This is again partly due to intellectual property protections and a resistance to sharing know-how. In this conflict, the EU fights to enclose climate technology knowledge within UN forums.

In general, the EU’s energy strategy promotes large gas pipelines, giant energy infrastructures, and modest CO2 reductions. Despite more and more Europeans producing their energy locally or at home, most proposed European market regulations do not promote community controlled or self-produced renewable energy, do not offer financial risk facilities for community based energy, nor do they defend the right to sell electricity to the grid. While EU policy proposals are often unsupportive of feed-in tariffs or flexible grid infrastructures to support local renewables, little is being done to eliminate massive direct or indirect subsidies to large gas, coal, and nuclear projects.

A large part of the EU energy budget could be earmarked for community renewable projects and compatible infrastructures, with broad citizen participation. This would help optimise resilient energy supply costs through more efficient, short, and visible distribution loops while promoting flexible local energy autonomy. With this approach the EU could “commonify” energy as opposed to the current principal strategy of “commodifying” it.

Research & Development and Financing

EU research and innovation policy, such as Horizon 2020, the European Research Council, or public-private partnerships such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative, sadly also continue to allow the privatisation of knowledge generated by EU-financed scientific, technological, and academic projects. Instead, they could try to ensure a fair public return on public investments by mandating conditions such as social licensing, open source research, and open data.

To support the commons in the EU’s funding policies would include earmarking significant parts of EU funding programmes with criteria and indicators that give preference to commons-based economic, environmental, cultural, and research activities.

However, through its Horizon 2020 Research & Development programme the EU already funds important projects: Initiatives working on decentralisation of internet infrastructure, such as ‘DCent’ and ‘Netcoms’, as well as networks of renewable community energy cooperatives, such as RESCOOPS, and urban commons projects like Barcelona’s community wifi, guifi.net. This funding is hugely important and the expansion of such programmes could have a structural impact on our societies. The requirements and procedures for EU financing and grants could be especially adapted to commons-based projects to accommodate matching funds for peer to peer crowdfunding, municipal or community-based risk-sharing, small-scale, self-governed projects, and sliding-scale administrative demands.

Democracy for the Commons

The deep crisis of the EU and the lack of confidence of its citizens in the European project is to a large extent due to the lack of democracy in all its different forms, whether the lack of transparency, the power of corporate lobbies, the unaccountable role of national politicians vis-a-vis Brussels, or the lack of public debate on policies. People need to feel much more connected and have opportunities to engage with EU policy making.

The defence and regeneration of the commons depends on meaningful strengthening of EU participative policy processes, greater institutional and legal responsiveness to local civic communities, and concrete advances in creating transnational citizen collaborative instruments to influence EU policy. This means, for instance, wider political support for new digital tools that render visible EU political decisions and empower citizen opinions on concrete legislation, such as a recent Green pilot programme proposal in the European Parliament.

The European Parliament´s Petitions Committee should be a very important channel for citizen power in favour of the application of EU law in defence of environmental or social standards. Unfortunately, it sorely lacks political backing, visibility, and sufficient resources to respond diligently and responsibly to citizen concerns. The European Citizens Initiative petition process, which was instituted as an instrument for grass-roots transnational citizen legislative proposals has been a near total failure due to a series of byzantine processes, and the lack of political will to take it seriously. These institutions need more support, and at the same time the EU has to significantly invest in the creation of additional and innovative tools & institutions for participatory democracy while supporting civic decision-making on local issues.

Allowing the Potential of the Commons to Flourish

Pivotal choices about the commons are also being made today in EU decisions about agriculture, climate, fishing, transport, international trade, and financial markets, amongst other areas.

The crisis of the EU begs for new, unifying, and constructive narratives that will crowd out the xenophobic populist right with its demands for democracy and sovereignty. The commons narrative with its emphasis on participative democracy, community, ecology, and stewardship could reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a better, socially and ecologically sustainable Europe. The logic of the commons is able to give clear guidance on policy, and does not sit within one ideological framework of left or right. It does not pretend to be an answer to all our problems. Yet it gives a clear ethical perspective and helps us to understand what happens when people collectively manage and steward resources without the dominant, centralised roles of either the state or the market.

Overall, EU policy objectives and standpoints contrast strongly with the commons approach. The alignment we do see is in some funding programmes and in the knowledge realm where the dynamics of scientific discovery and knowledge creation make this almost unavoidable. What is needed to favour this shift, in addition to strong social pressure from civil society, is a pro-commons shift in the discourses and political proposals of political forces of change such as the greens, and left and social liberal parties.

Due to the general political and economic power relationship within the EU today one cannot expect a major strategic shift toward commons-based EU policies anytime soon. What can be achieved is a significant enlargement of favourable EU policy environments where commoning activities can more easily take root and flourish.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 7th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Shohei Hanazaki

The post Finding Common Ground 7: How the Commons can Revitalise Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.