We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Today’s topic for Copyright Week is Transparency: Whether in the form of laws, international agreements, or website terms and standards, copyright policy should be made through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process.
For Copyright Week last year we wrote about transparency and representation in relation to the public consultations leading up to the European Commission’s release of their new Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market. Our headline read, “Evidence-based copyright policy making should be a no-brainer.” We argued, “It’s obvious to us that any legislative proposal should be developed from reliable, impartial economic and policy research whose foundation is based on evidence and facts.” But when we saw what was in the Commission’s draft, it became clear that a large swath of substantive feedback from the public was mostly ignored.
Here we are a year later, and the situation in the EU has not improved one bit.