A report proposing major changes to copyright laws in the EU has been adopted by the European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee (JURI) after it spent several hours voting on 550 amendments. The report was written by the German Pirate Party's Julia Reda, and had attracted widespread praise and criticism from different quarters.

Some of the report's original ideas included: a single copyright valid across the entire EU; placing works created by employees of government, public administration, and the courts as part of their official duty in the public domain (that is, with no copyright); allowing audio-visual quotation (in online videos, for example); enshrining freedom of panorama (the ability to take pictures of public buildings and distribute them without permission of the architect); and allowing the public to circumvent DRM in order to make use of exceptions to copyright.

Reda called today's vote by the JURI committee a "turning point," and said: "after decades in which the focus was on introducing new restrictions to protect the material interests of rightholders, this is the strongest demand yet to reconsider the rights of the public—of users, cultural heritage institutions and scientists and of authors who build on existing material."

In particular, she singled out the "legal uncertainty" that Europeans face in their everyday online interactions with copyrighted works as a key issue that needs resolving with an updated copyright directive.

The report as adopted includes a call for at least some copyright exceptions—which are designed to safeguard important rights such as quotation, parody, or research and education—to be made uniform across the EU. Currently, each member state has adopted a different set of exceptions for its national laws. The report also calls for these exceptions to be safeguarded against override by contractual or technical means—DRM, for example.

As well as measures that would strengthen protection of authors in contract negotiations, the newly adopted report hopes to make it easier for libraries to lend e-books and to digitise their analogue collections, as well as for scientists to conduct text and data mining to extract new information from academic papers available online.

An important victory was the rejection of text that would have granted publishers a so-called "ancillary" (extra) copyright, which would have required online search engines to pay for the use of even small snippets. German publishers have already experienced first-hand what happens under such systems: when Google stopped using snippets from publications in order to avoid paying licence fees that publishers had demanded, German newspapers and magazines found that the number of visitors to their sites dropped precipitously. German publishers ended up offering Google a free licence to their content so that the search engine would once more display snippets in its results and thus drive traffic to the publishers' site.

One defeat for Reda is that her proposal to protect the freedom of panorama was not accepted. Instead, an amendment was adopted that stated "commercial use of recordings of works in public spaces should require express permission from the rightsholders." Reda said this "could threaten the work of documentary filmmakers and the legality of commercial photo-sharing platforms."

The report will now be voted on by the full European Parliament on July 9, where more amendments could be made. The final text will then be sent to the European Commission, which will use it as input for a legislative proposal on copyright reform, expected to appear by the end of the year.