Information Commons Between Enclosure and Exposure: Regulating Piracy and Privacy in the EU

Martin Fredriksson

doi:10.5334/ijc.1034

Abstract

In the first decade of the 21s century, copyright was high on the political agenda as activists and academics criticised how stricter implementations of copyright laws limited the public access to culture and knowledge and enclosed the information commons. A decade later, streaming media and data mining have changed the information-political agenda, shifting the focus from piracy to privacy, giving concepts such as access to knowledge and information commons new meanings. This article relates the copyfights of the early 2000nds to more recent copyright discussions. It relies on a series of interviews with members of the Pirate Party, conducted between 2011 and 2015 and connects them to more recent debates about the European Union Directive on Copyright for the Digital Single Market (COM/2016/0593) that was passed in march 2019. The article asks if and how the information commons movement and the international political agenda about intellectual property rights and access to information have changed with the rise of a digital economy build around streaming media and data mining.

Highlights

In 2015 and 2016 this study was complemented with three additional interviews with two digital rights activists and one member of the European parliament, which offer reflections on a more recent development when the information commons movement is faced with a changing information political agenda
When the openness industry emerged as a counterweight to the copyright industry, this changed the agenda of information politics
The criticism against the copyright industry had largely focused on how copyright limits public access to culture and information

Summary

Introduction

The Information Commons MovementThe copyright debates of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium were structured around two opposing narratives about intellectual property and information commons. The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market that was passed by the European Union in March 2019, changed that, and put copyright back onto the political agenda by imposing new limitations to the circulation of content online.

Results

Conclusion