Source: http://reguligence.biz/tag/bulgaria/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 14:24:24+00:00

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Bulgaria was one of the 22 member states to the European Union that signed ACTA at a recently organised ceremony of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo.
and to cause a huge societal debate.
Following a week during which the media nearly overexploited the issue, four committees of the Bulgarian Parliament summoned the ministers Vezhdi Rashidov and Traicho Traikov to a hearing.
The hearing occurred yesterday and was well visited by right holders´ organisations as well as by representatives of the non-governmental sector and the civil society in general. Being one of the latter, I attended the hearing too.
the representatives of the civil society are more or less strictly against it.
By the way, I made big efforts to broadcast the hearing on Twitter and you might want to visit my stream, in order to see who has said what in greater detail.
My impression from yesterday´s event is that GERB – Bulgaria´s currently ruling party – endorses the trade agreement too and is willing to execute the necessary parliamentary ratification.
and is ready to make the ratification conditional upon some reservations mainly with respect to the digital enforcement.
I hope that yesterday´s hearing was just the beginning and that many others will follow. I might get the chance to participate in a working party to deliver an expert opinion to the Parliament, but shall in any case remain focused on the matter and make information available on that blog!
Bulgaria: Freedom Of Information Or Purposive Opaqueness?
This is a screenshot of Bulgaria’s commercial register’s website.
The interesting thing about it is that anyone (to the extent he or she can navigate in Bulgarian) may access it and search for company related information.
Well, not exactly as soon there will be some.
Owing to a current legislative initiative the register is very likely to compete with below info column in terms of free and transparent information access.
Whether in an attempt to create an association with their party’s name or not, but said party’s representatives reason and defend the planned restrictions with “well-proven and tested European practices”. As one may expect, they still owe a detailed explanation as to what practices they have meant.
Mrs Iskra Fidosova (MP), chair of the justice committee and advocate of the restricted access.
This move would halt the more and more frequent cases of abuse of personal data, explained the guy below.
Mr Emil Radev (MP), proposer of the initiative.
However, according to the Access to Information Programme (AIP), an NGO, there is no actual proof that such abuses have increased after the introduction of the register in early 2008.
Not only this, but AIP stresses on the importance of the register for the purposes of journalistic investigations. The latter is of a particular relevance since the vast capital invested in Bulgaria during the last decade is considered of unclear provenance.
do the Bulgarian politicians care for?
Maybe for that of the mysterious 26-year-old entrepreneur whose one-month-old company allegedly enabled him to spend some 162 Million Euro on the bankrupt steel plant Kremikovtzi?
Do not misappropriate the law, guys.
It has been a long time since I wrote my last posting related to Bulgaria. During the last days, however, a police campaign or even a raid directed against the online content provider www. chitanka.info (chitanka meaning an alphabet book in Bulgarian) achieved a huge medial attention and, particularly, that of the Bulgarian blogosphere. While the police claimed a success over a group engaged in “Internet piracy”, journalists and bloggers saw an attack against the knowledge society in Bulgaria.
What was the problem in the first place?
Chitanka.info had digitised numerous printed books and made them available on the Internet to the world at large. In legal terms, chitanka.info had copied and adapted (mainly literary) works and subsequently communicated those to the public. On the grounds that, the foregoing acts represented acts restricted by copyright law, publishers and right owners’ associations argued that chitanka.info had infringed the copyright in the works, because they acted without the consent of the respective copyright owners. Apparently, these very right owners instructed the police to raid chitanka’s premises and to seize the equipment hosting the arguably infringing materials.
The operators of chitanka.info raised several defences, some of which were legal by their nature and some that were not. Regarding the latter they argued that their offering addressed school kids and thus served to satisfy primary educational needs. They further argued that some of the books they offered to download represented sold-out editions, not re-published since then and thus no longer available in bookstores. Eventually, they stressed on the misery reigning in public libraries and on the fact that today’s consumers demanded an online access to books, but publishers yet failed to (legally) satisfy this demand. Chitanka.info’s legal defences grounded on Art 24 (9) of the Bulgarian Act on Copyright and related Rights (Copyright Act) and on the fact that their offering was merely altruistic as it did not depend on a payment.
I would like to focus on chitanka.info’s legal defences in this posting. Art 24 deals with the free (fair) use of works for which users neither need tot obtain the copyright owners’ consent nor owe they any payments in connection with thei use of those works. Subsection 9 of this Article regards – as the Bulgarian and hence legally binding version of the act calls them – the “publicly accessible” libraries. Please observe that the English translation of the act accessible via the link above refers to “public libraries”. This ostensibly unimportant distinction, displayed by the translation and of later relevance, might prove decisive for chitanka.info’s case.
To the best of my knowledge, neither the Bulgarian Copyright Act nor other legislation in force in Bulgaria defines the term of a “publicly accessible” library. By contrast, the Bulgarian Public Libraries Act delivers a definition of the term “public library”. Accordingly, a library needs to comply with certain requirements set out in Art 8 of said act, in order to be deemed a “public library”. There is no doubt that chitanka.info does not comply with those requirements. The Public Libraries Act was, however, delivered in 2009, whereas Art 24 (9) of the Bulgarian Copyright Act was last amended in 2005.
What did the lawmakers have before eyes when they drafted the Public Libraries Act?
Are public libraries to be equated with publicly accessible libraries at all?
The terms public library and publicly accessible library are identical. Since chitanka.info does not qualify as a public library it likewise fails to qualify for the limitation under Art 24 (9) granted to publicly accessible libraries.
The terms are not identical and the lawmakers did not intend to curtail the limitation under Art 24 (9) to only public libraries. Moreover, the limitation should apply to any library that is publicly accessible. Chitanka.info would then qualify for the safe harbour provided by Art 24 (9). Public libraries would qualify as well as they are by their definition “publicly accessible”.
It will be up to a court of competent jurisdiction to decide somehow or other. I personally would support the second solution approach as I am of the opinion that copyright law is misappropriated when used to prevent the spreading of information, particularly for educational purposes. My friendly piece of advice to the police would then read: do not misappropriate the law, guys.

References: Art 24
 Art 24
 Art 8
 Art 24
 Art 24
 Art 24
 Art 24