The Italian Libraries Association (AIB) endorses the new EU Copyright Directive

The AIB declared itself in favor of the new EU copyright directive in its final version issued by the “trilogue” negotiation, with Italy, Poland, Finland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands voting against it. Furthermore, along with the Italian publishers and booksellers associations, it undersigned  an open letter to the Italian members of the EU parliament encouraging them to adopt the whole directive, as the outcome of a “compromise in its noblest political meaning”.

By endorsing the whole copyright directive, the AIB’s  position statement appears quite different both from the opinion of the international library association IFLA and from the concerns expressed by the European library associations EBLIDA and LIBER.

The IFLA, while recognizing that some forward steps have been made on text and data mining, education, preservation and use of works which are no longer commercially available, warns that the key problems of article 11 (“link tax”) and 13 (“upload filters”) remain unsolved:

While we await a final version of the agreed text, it appears clear that if the Directive is passed in its current form, Europe’s governments and representatives will be guilty of consolidating the power of major players and harming freedom of access to information.

The EBLIDA, which provides an article-by-article critical analysis of the directive, is also among the undersigners of an open letter on article 11 and 13 whose title is “EU copyright reform threatens Open Access and Open Science“.  And, finally, the association of European research library LIBER, while appreciating the articles 3-3a, 5 and 7-9, is worried by the political disagreements about the controversial articles 11 and 13 but, instead of endorsing them as well, urges the EU institutions “to let the rest of the Directive progress to adoption unhindered“.