[dungeonlight]

On 24 September, the European Commission launched its all-encompassing and not very clearly defined public consultation on online platforms (the title is actually a lot longer but we are trying to spare you some pain), covering a lot of issues that are not copyright related.

Although it may not jump at you at first glance, the questionnaire also addresses:

‘… the relation between platforms and their suppliers…’ and ‘the role of online intermediaries including ways to tackle illegal content on the Internet.’

This basically encompasses questions that can be used to highlight that you do not want Internet intermediaries being pushed in a role as ‘voluntary censors’ of the web, that you think licensing terms offered to researchers and many creators by right holders are not always fair, that you consider text and data mining to be crucial for research, and that at the end of the day, you expect your fundamental freedoms as a user to weigh in the balance.

To avoid this consultation only being answered by the ‘usual suspects’, C4C has mobilised a number of its signatories as well as non-signatories to revamp our http://youcan.fixcopyright.eu/ tool, to facilitate the process of responding to the EC consultation by allowing people to:

1. Get a selection of questions relevant to them depending on their interests (online users, teachers, librarians, cultural heritage representatives, etc.). This does not mean they have to answer all of these questions but filters out what is likely to be most relevant to them.

2. Get an explanation on what the questions put forward by the European Commission mean in ‘normal language’ and what possible elements of answer can be provided. There again: it is up to the person filling in the answering wizard to provide their own answers, the provided explanations only serving as guidance.

Whilst the Commission consultation runs until 30 December 2015, our online form will be available until 25 December 2015 midnight, as we need to transfer the collected responses to the European Commission with the technical support of Mozilla.

So, what do we need from you:

20 minutes of your time to go to our http://youcan.fixcopyright.eu/ questionnaire, chose your ‘persona’, and fill in the questions you want to respond to, from those we selected as relevant to copyright
2 minutes of your time to send an email to your networks to inform them of this initiative and encourage them to participate (just think of this as your very special way to give an end of year present to the European Commission) or put a .txt file in your uploads, which contains the content of this discussion thread here
20 seconds of our time to send out a tweet informing the world that

#FixCopyright: Go to http://youcan.fixcopyright.eu/ & respond by 25 Dec 23:59 to the #copyright questions of the European Commission

http://youcan.fixcopyright.eu/ is an initiative put together by a broad cross-section of interest groups from across Europe, from rights holders to public interest NGOs to large consumer representatives and everything in between.


Source: http://copyright4cre...ight-eu-isback/

This post has been edited by dungeonlight: 05 December 2015 - 11:47 AM