Widening access to knowledge and culture is typically considered through the frameworks of fair use and various exceptions and limitations (Hugenholtz et al., 2011; Band & Gerafi, 2015), public domain (Boyle, 1997, 200; Lessig, 2004) and open licenses (Lessig 2008; Nielsen, 2012). The research sponsored by Skolkovo Foundation features analysis of the existing laws in BRICS countries, France, Germany, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain, US, Australia, Canada and South Korea. The research was to identify the ways states try to introduce balance between the rights for access to information, education, knowledge and culture, and intellectual rights protection, including the interests of rights holders.
The research has shown that many nations realize the need for widening access to knowledge and finding the new balance in the times of new media by resorting to a number of strategies to achieve these goals:
- changes and amendments to local (national) legislation;
- regional and international initiatives and regulations (i.e. EU Copyright directive);
- stimulating new practice and models;
- introducing stimuli for authors and rights holders which are providing better access to their intellectual property;
- creating and implementing new instruments of registration and turnover of intellectual property.
Measures to ensure wider access to knowledge and culture are both universal and individual. The first include the expansion of areas and cases of free and fair use, the establishment (or removal) of restrictions and exceptions for certain categories of users (cultural institutions, teachers and students), types of works (ones intended for learning or created at the expense of state funds), different types of use (for distance learning, machine analysis). The second type of measures are more country- or case-specific (e.g. purchase of rights on a work, followed by providing access to the general public). There is also a noticeable expansion of the scope of collective management of property copyright and related rights, providing organizations carrying out such management with the possibility of using more flexible models of interaction with interested parties: both right holders and users.
Initiatives to expand access also influence museums, archives and libraries, the system of legal deposit, education, science, information technology. The case of Russian national electronic library and the concept of so-called ‘united electronic space of knowledge’ are good examples of U-turns made by leading cultural institutions as the new media agenda is making ‘copylefters’ out of former status-quo powers, surprisingly taking a stand for innovative strategies and emancipating laws. Drawing from the Russian context, however, the blockchain-backed systems of copyright registration and harmonized protection of moral and property rights protection, championed by an alliance of collective rights management societies, legal rights management companies and NGOs is perhaps more important as well as the introduction and development of alternative systems for resolving copyright and information disputes, mediation procedures, normative and technical regulation of some of the most typical conflict situations.
The research builds the case for BRICS-focused copyright reform. In brief: protect what needs to be protected, let people use the rest, put moral rights above property rights in perspective.