FU-BAR

Some of you may know that the European Comission is having a public consultation inviting all interested parties to offer their thoughts on how the european copyright rules should evolve.

This has been going on since the 5th of December and will go on until the 5th of February, in 2014, which is but a month and a half ahead.

It has 80 questions and looks very daunting specially for people who only care about a few issues on copyright, and others don’t care at all.

You don’t have to reply to all, but if you want to help some part of it evolve positively, rather than the negative way it has evolved these past decades, having a map is very, very useful.

You may want to take up on the suggestions and expand your views but, as Amelia Andersdotter says, «The  Commission is more likely to take your views into account if you present  your position in your own words!», so grab some help, sure, but please to to write your own text to those issues that matter the most to you rather than just copying the suggestions to all 80 questions.

If they’re strong enough already you can just use the map in order to go straight to the questions that matter the most to you, but please participate.

It is very important that the European Comission knows what it’s citizens and organizations think of this matter, because otherwise they only hear for paid lobbyists, and you might have seen how bad it has been:

• DRM is emptying you of your rights to lend and format shift works
• Quasi-eternal copyright durations prevent you from creating original artworks derived from things that happened during your own lifetime
• Drying the well of the public domain
• Persecution of people sharing their favorite artworks with their friends and family
• There are greedy people who want to charge you money for the disks where you store your home pictures, movies, work, your cellphone, your tablet, your computer, all just in case you make a lawful copy which should be your right, anyways, and not merely a copyright exception
• Songs like “Happy birthday” are in a copyright mess, did you know about that?

Amelia Andersdotter is a Member of the European Parliament, elected via the Pirate Party and has a nice map filled with suggestions, should you feel like borrowing some fine words to help you explain what you feel while replying to the consultation.

Please do so, it is very important that you help, because then the European Commission needs to understand that this is a very important issue that matters to a lot of people and they’re the only ones who can start a legislative package of copyright reform.

• This is the consultation document from EC: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/2013/copyright-rules/docs/consultation-document_en.pdf
• Website: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/2013/copyright-rules/index_en.htm
• You can use this web-template to create formatted documents for submission to the Commission: http://okfde.github.io/eucopyright/