25 Aug 2016
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Dear European Commission, we don’t talk anymore, we don’t talk anymore, (…) like we used to do – The copyright review oddities part 2

Dear European Commission, we don’t talk anymore, we don’t talk anymore, (…) like we used to do – The copyright review oddities part 2

Remember when last year C4C and several of its signatories co-signed two open letters, one addressed to the European Commission and the other to the European Parliament, in order to share our concerns regarding the European Commission’s current approach on copyright matters in its public consultations? It wasn’t even so much about substance as about ‘form’. Our letter back then basically pointed out that in a normal policy-making procedure, the European Commission should ‘at least pretend to listen’ to citizens by:

  1. not finalising their action plan on copyright when there is an ongoing consultation on the topic they have clearly already made their mind up about; and,
  2. consulting in the broadest manner and allowing all citizens to voice their views on all issues at stake.

Well, guess what: we’re at it again.

Rumour has it that the Europe Commission started its inter-service consultation on its proposed copyright review, which basically means that the lead Directorate-General (DG CONNECT) is asking for feedback on their proposal from their colleagues in other departments. At the same time, we note that today, Statewatch released [PDF] a version of the European Commission’s Impact Assessment on the copyright reform, which is supposed to represent the in depth analysis of the European Commission and their justification (to the world and their colleagues) of why they are doing (or not dong) what they’re doing.

So basically, the Commission has seemingly been sweating all summer over all kinds of proposals (the justification of which we will be looking into over the next days) but…. NO ONE CAN SEE THE RESULTS OF THE CONSULTATION ON FREEDOM OF PANORAMA AND ANCILLARY COPYRIGHT WHICH CLOSED ON 15 JUNE 2016!

The Impact assessment looks notably at the latter and draws all kinds of conclusions on it, while there is not even a synopsis report available on the results. C4C for example knows that looking at the 2819 responses we collected, there was a resounding NO to ancillary copyright and an equally strong YES to freedom of panorama.

So how did these responses even remotely affect the conclusions by the European Commission?

Or moving back to popular lyrics, why does the whole process make us feel like:

wedonttalkanymore