This has been a good week in that quest. Yesterday the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted through a directive that allows anyone to access ‘orphan works’ – cultural works for which no copyright owner can be located. And the day before saw the digital portal Europeana invite everyone, including commercially-minded startups, to freely reuse the metadata associated with its 20 million digitized cultural objects.

The two moves are very much connected. Europeana is made up of contributions from a wide spectrum of museums, galleries and archives, with their digitized content spanning from prehistory to today. But, when it comes to adding recent orphan works to that pool, these institutions currently have their hands tied.

That’s because, in Europe, it’s illegal to digitize orphan works. The law sees anything that was authored as under copyright, with all the restrictions that entails (the situation is similar in the U.S., although libraries and archives get a limited exemption there). And if it’s copyrighted, that means getting in touch with the copyright holder if you want to use it. If no-one knows who that is, then tough luck.

So, by 531 votes to 11 with 65 abstentions, the European Parliament voted on Thursday to recognize orphan works for the first time. Content will be granted that status as long as a diligent search is conducted to try identifying the author. If the author later pitches up, they can then claim compensation for its use, but public institutions would only have to pay a small amount as long as the use was non-commercial.

That doesn’t mean museums, for example, couldn’t sell postcards of an ‘orphan’ photograph (the directive covers audiovisual and printed material) – there’s a special get-out clause for that, although the revenue would have to be fed back into the search and digitization process.

There are similar initiatives underway in E.U. countries such as the U.K. but, as with most things copyright-related, the European Commission and legislators take the lead and national governments follow.

Pooling culture

So what do those public institutions do with their cultural collections? A lot of them make it available for viewing or listening through the Europeana portal. 20 million pieces of content is a hefty haul, and all of it comes with metadata.

That metadata is now free to use without restrictions, as it’s been made available under the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication. That means it’s open to commercial use, and that, the Commission hopes, will lead to a wave of new apps and games for smartphones, tablets and the web.

Not only that, but the metadata can also now be used in linked open data projects involving, for example, both museums and the tourism sector. In short, it should allow new business models to emerge.

“We have a huge pile of cultural assets on Europeana, so that collection should be grown as much as possible (orphan works or whatever the relevant licensing is) and be exploited as much as possible, and shifting to open data lets us do that,” Ryan Heath, spokesman for digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, told me.

But it’s not just the stimulation of new sectors that’s behind this drive for the opening-up of cultural data.

That’s part of it, for sure, and so is the desire to create a level playing field for businesses and institutions across the EU. To really understand the underlying motivation, though, you need to step back and think about the ‘single market’ idea as a whole.

The European Union exists because of the continent’s fractious history. It has a lot to do with keeping Europe competitive through scale but, on a fundamental level, it is there to stop member states fighting with each other. And the European project can only work if the EU’s half-billion inhabitants feel at least some sense of unity.

And one small but meaningful way to encourage unity is to digitally pool as much of Europe’s cultural history as possible and present it through a single, unified portal. As Heath put it: “We share a heritage and heritage is so important that we should all be able to access all of it for free online.”

I know this seems incredibly trivial at the moment, what with the euro crisis pushing the EU toward banking union and maybe even political – they’re no longer scared to use the word – federation. But, even if the issue of cultural metadata pales next to that kind of seismic subject matter, it’s absolutely part of the same picture.

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Parliament’s influential international trade committee on Thursday voted 19-12 against merely deferring its decision on adopting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) until the  European Court of Justice has decided whether it would violate the EC’s fundamental freedoms.

The vote means parliament is more likely to adopt the committee’s view against ACTA in its July 4 plenary meeting, regardless of whether the court rules it lawful or not.

There is a growing realisation that, in the online age, digital piracy, physical counterfitting and patent abuse can best be tackled through global consensus on intellectual property legislation. But digital liberties activists have mobilised a campaign against ACTA, citing “secret” inter-country negotiations over how digital piracy must be handled.

The agreement was signed in October 2011 by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.; it was later signed by the European Union and some of its member states. But the commission will find it hard to adopt ACTA without parliament’s consent.

In a Brussels press conference following Thursday’s vote, Swedish Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter hailed it as a “great victory”. German Left MEP Helmut Scholz called it “a victory for participatory democracy”.

Scottish Labour MEP David Martin, who has been ACTA’s rapporteur (investigator), said: ”This was not an anti-intellectual property vote, this was a vote against ACTA.” Martin said ACTA was too vague on the role ISPs must play in online IP enforcement, its proposed sanctions for copyright abuse and other definitions.

There is, of course, a counter-logic here. If ACTA was so vague, why did it stir up so vehement and specific a campaign against it?

German CDU MEP Daniel Caspary, speaking to journalists, lamented ACTA’s outright discarding rather than refinement: ”If you’ve got a cold, you should try to cure him, not kill off the patient. We said we wanted to improve ACTA. If we reject it in plenary in two weeks’ time, we’re going to have to start again, people are going to be put at risk of having counterfeit goods again.”

Martin continued: “I welcome the active engagement of citizens, which is not always the case for legislation going through this parliament. When it came to defending our intellectual property or civil liberties, I’m pleased the committee voted to protect our civil liberties.”

Although some EU member states had already consented to ACTA, Martin said they would not be allowed to sign up if the EU does not.

If the parliament votes against ACTA, many observers will look to the European Commission for what, if anything, it plans to do next with the agreement.

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With 578 votes to 10, the European Parliament almost unanimously voted through a new roaming regulation on Thursday. This will be the first time that there’s a retail cap on data roaming within the EU.

App providers around the world should also be delighted to hear that, since the move should lead to a hefty rise in mobile internet usage there — in particular, for content and location-based services. But mobile operators will be furious, as they have lashed out before at the European Commission’s proposals, but to no avail.

From the EC’s side, high roaming charges are a barrier to both the Holy Grail-like single market and free movement within the continent.

By putting price caps on data we have created a roaming market for the smartphone generation,” digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said. “More than that, we have ended the rip-offs familiar to anyone who has used a mobile phone while travelling abroad. I am pleased that year after year the European Union is putting money back in the pockets of citizens.”

Data-roaming charges have been coming down in recent years – around 75 percent since 2007 – but not nearly enough when you consider that the actual cost of providing such services is between 1-3 euro cents per megabyte, far, far lower than most people get charged. Operators throw on massive mark-ups in the order of tens of thousands percent, but now they’re facing a cap of 90c/MB on 1 July this year.

The data-roaming cap will graduate downwards over the next couple of years, reaching 50c/MB in 2014. The maximum charges for voice and text message will also fall, although retail price caps have been in place for those services for a few years now.

Long-term changes

But the caps aren’t the end of the story by any means. Looking for a long-term solution, the EC made sure the new regulations will also see operators forced to decouple their roaming packages from their domestic packages.

The problem is that people hardly ever select their domestic mobile contract provider on the basis of how much that operator charges when they leave the country. So, as of two years from now, consumers will be able to select competing packages from a host of carriers when they’re planning a trip.

Of course, the measures pushed through by Kroes will only affect those travelling within the EU. Internationally, the scene is still pretty bleak. It’s not unusual to see charges of $15 per megabyte, and there’s no global regulator to force a change.

For Europeans travelling outside the EU, the new regulation does at least bring in a default €50 cap on roaming bills — customers can of course opt to go past that limit, but the general idea is to stop people from getting so-called ‘bill shock’ when they get home.

The benefits of lower data-roaming charges are clear. The EC estimates savings of more than €1,000 a year for business travelers, and €200 a year for families going on their annual vacation.

But, on the supply side, the operators’ loss is the app provider’s gain. The cheaper it is to surf the web on your tablet and smartphone while you’re abroad, the more likely you are to do it.

The same goes for apps – all those location-based services out there that currently see most of their use on the domestic level will now experience much greater takeup by those who most need to use them. It may actually become viable to catch a show over a cellular connection while abroad.

Whatever your view on regulation, it’s hard to spin Thursday’s vote as bad news for consumers, the EU as a whole, or the rapidly growing app and content businesses. Not that that will stop the operators trying.

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The Pirates saw their first major electoral success in the European elections of 2009, when voters in the movement’s birthplace of Sweden returned a Pirate to the European Parliament. The Swedes didn’t vote the Pirates into their own legislature, mind you, but now big wins are coming in Germany, the continent’s largest economy and the ideological home of the hacker movement.

Why Germany? Because that’s what the Pirates are trying to do: hack politics, in the sense of making-and-tweaking-stuff sense, rather than destroying it. The movement may have begun with a narrow focus on intellectual property, but it has developed into an attempt to make the political process transparent — and of course better suited to the digital age.

Piratical beginnings

The first Pirate Party appeared in 2006, when Swede Rick Falkvinge (‘Falconwing’, a name he came up with for himself) decided to rally advocates of copyright reform. His case was strongly aided by legal attacks on The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing site, but the remit grew to take in stances on software patents (bad), DRM (bad) and transparent government (good).

Then came the 2009 European elections, which eventually led to all the Pirates’ digital policies being adopted by an alliance of left-wing parties, including the Greens, and last year, when Pirates grabbed all 15 of the Berlin state parliament seats they stood for.

Then the Pirates moved up another step, winning four state parliament seats in the western Saarland region. They’re likely to repeat the trick again in two more upcoming state elections, and current polling has them on track to come third in the national elections next year.

If the German Pirate Party was a tech startup, now would be the phase where it’s seeing a surprising number of downloads and starting to panic about scalability. Pirate politicians are only now getting their first experience of power and responsibility, and they know it — they’ve ruled out joining any coalition federal government (Germany does coalitions, almost all the time) until the 2017 elections.

Not that anyone would want to form a coalition with them yet. The Pirates have declared that they will only go into partnership with a party that agrees to livestream the coalition negotiations, so everyone can see what deals are being cut. Right now, that’s a no-go for every party bar the Pirates themselves.

Liquid Feedback

One thing that’s important to remember about the Pirate movement is that, like Silicon Valley to some extent, it brings together a spectrum of people ranging from techno-utopian left-wingers to libertarian right-wingers. This creates a broad base — but means that on a lot of essential stuff that doesn’t relate to the common ground of intellectual property reform and transparency, the Pirates actually don’t yet know what they collectively stand for.

For example, how do you get the left and the right to agree on economic policies?

It should come as no surprise that they’re turning to technology to solve this kind of problem.

For the last year and a half, the German Pirate Party has been experimenting with a piece of software called Liquid Feedback, an online system for formulating and voting on policies. Right now those policies then go to a traditional vote at party meetings, but the Pirates are considering using Liquid Feedback to finalize position papers (something that the Italian Pirate Parties are already doing).

Any Pirate Party member can use Liquid Feedback to propose a policy, or to comment on or create alternative versions of other members’ proposals. Proposals get revised and voted up or down. Each member gets one vote — but here’s where the system becomes much more than a simple decision-making forum.

Not everyone wants to sit there marking up every piece of policy. That’s what elected representatives are for. But not everybody likes having elected representatives — some people really do want to treat every minor policy like a referendum.

So Liquid Democracy lets party members delegate their votes to other people for everything, or only for certain policy areas, or not at all. It’s effectively a sliding scale between representative and direct democracy, with each voter choosing what level of responsibility and control they want to have.

If someone has been delegated votes, based on their popularity or expertise, they can then re-delegate their votes to someone else. The system could theoretically allow the creation of a dictator, but because each member can cancel their delegation and reclaim their direct vote at any time, this outcome wouldn’t last for long.

Into the future

It’s hard to say how much of an attraction Liquid Feedback is for the general public. The system itself is as ugly as sin and, while the Pirates recently produced APIs to let people create sexier front-ends for smartphones and the like, it’s almost certainly not a draw in itself.

But the ethos behind it is. Make no mistake, the biggest reason voters are flocking to the Pirates is that they’re disillusioned with the opaque deal-making and elite hierarchies of traditional politics.

The Pirate movement on the other hand is very much born of the internet, with its open nature, ever-shifting meritocracy and low barriers to entry for new ideas. The goofiness of net humour is there in force — Pirates have been known to turn up to Berlin’s parliament in fancy dress — but the message is serious, and it is taken seriously.

And while the focus has shifted somewhat from intellectual property to transparency, the long-running war between tech and copyright also continues to send new converts the Pirates’ way.

The Pirate movement is really still in its infant stages. There are a tremendous number of kinks that need to be worked out in the way the party operates and what it wants, from the mechanisms of Liquid Feedback to much deeper internal ideological clashes. There are also questions to be answered about the alleged extremist past of some high-profile members — something that can carry a lot of weight in Europe.

And if they navigate all this, it will still be a few years yet before Pirates are taking weighty political decisions. But at this rate, they will almost certainly end up in that position. Of course, that depends on the country – Germany’s political system encourages the growth of new parties, whereas the UK’s and the United States, for example, do not.

However, even if the Pirate movement as we know it turns into something else, the foundations have been laid for a long-term phenomenon: politicians who not only get technology, but who enthusiastically use it to engage in a new relationship with voters.

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The activists, who claim that the car industry’s thinking is in “the stone age,” stopped at the car manufacturers’ lobby group, ACEA, and gave them copies of a Greenpeace report about the impact of car industry on climate change. On their way to the European Parliament, they were stopped by the police, but later released without charge, Greenpeace reports.

Most recently the European Parliament has proposed to cut average carbon emissions from new cars to almost half their current level by 2020, reports the Financial Times. Under proposed legislation the average new car sold in the EU could only emit 95g of carbon per kilometer, down from the current 160g/km regulation.

The makers of Europe’s larger cars, notably Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes, have been lobbying for a size-based emissions regulation scheme to encourage bigger but lighter cars. Meanwhile, Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne has spoken out against this weight-rated system, saying it penalizes the little guy. Still, the new proposal is very ambitious. Currently, only the likes of Daimler’s tiny Smart, which emits 88g/km, can meet the tough new proposed regulations.

In the U.S., California continues its own battle to enforce regulations for tougher emissions standards on cars. Yesterday it came out that the White House played a “pivotal” role in the EPA’s decision to deny California a waiver to enforce its own regulations. California has been trying to force car makers to abide by a state law, which would require a 30 percent reduction of emissions by 2016, and is currently embroiled in an investigation and a lawsuit with the EPA.

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Some of these people and their shows may already have TV deals. (So many have been handed out, it’s hard to keep track.) Whether they do or not, these shows should be rushed into production and put on the air now.

Makezine’s Bre Pettis. Anyone who can teach you how to create a ring out of a quarter, assemble a Rubik’s cube out of dice or turn a theremin into a weekend project and keep it entertaining deserves way more air time than Ty Pennington.

Though the cute-girl-hosting-a-web-show business model is tiresome, Cali Lewis on Geekbrief.tv still pulls it off with aplomb. She has such an easy on-camera presence, and the show itself is a great rundown of what’s going on with gadgets and tech.

They’d strangle me with an ironic t-shirt for saying it, but Vice Magazine’s vbs.tv would be awesome on the boob tube. As Jason Tanz over at Wired points out, the Vice crew is doing some extremely dangerous, and extremely entertaining news coverage. Case in point: This story about a designer of bullet-proof clothing, and the reporter gets shot to test the product. Give these guys a travel budget!

But what do you think? Which web shows would you like to see make the move to TV? Tell us in the comments section.

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