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Markus Trienke, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Liability

European Media Freedom Act: some reflections from Wikimedia Europe

Press freedom 2023 according to Reporters Without Borders, author: NordNordWest, license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The European Media Freedom Act is a proposal for regulation put forward by the EU Commission in September 2022 aiming at safeguarding media freedom and pluralism in Europe. For Wikimedia it is relevant, because, on the one hand, it wants to regulate how online platforms moderate content by media service providers and, on the other, it introduces some general rules of media law, including the protection of journalists.

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Wikipedia will be harmed by France’s proposed SREN bill: Legislators should avoid unintended consequences

The Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile with traffic speeding by at night in Paris, France. Image by Jennyzibreva, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Written by Jan Gerlach, Director of Public Policy at the Wikimedia Foundation; Phil Bradley-Schmieg, Lead Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation; and, Michele Failla, Senior EU Policy Specialist at Wikimedia Europe

(Wikimédia France, the French national Wikimedia chapter, has also published a blog post on the SREN bill)

The French legislature is currently working on a bill that aims at securing and regulating digital space (widely known by its acronym, SREN). As currently drafted, the bill not only threatens Wikipedia’s community-led model of decentralized collaboration and decision-making, it also contradicts the EU’s data protection rules and its new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). For these reasons, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Europe call on French lawmakers to amend the SREN bill in order to make sure that public interest projects like Wikipedia are protected and can continue to flourish.

Read More »Wikipedia will be harmed by France’s proposed SREN bill: Legislators should avoid unintended consequences

Who Should be Liable for Free Software? 

I love free software day 2020 at Wikimedia Italia, Milano
I love free software day 2020 at Wikimedia Italia, Milano, Author: Francesca Ussani (WMIT), License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

The EU’s new software liability framework is coming and FOSS developers should care

Amidst the legislative discussions around AI and cybersecurity, the EU is trying to figure out the right liability framework for software, including free software. Wikimedia shares the view that companies shouldn’t get a free pass for their services just because they open sourced their code. At the same time, we don’t want to see coders, who share their work with the public and peers in order to learn, tinker or to improve a free project, worry about liability too much. They need clear and effective safeguards.

Read More »Who Should be Liable for Free Software?