The copyright consultations. They were supposed to be over by 5th February, but the deadline was surprisingly extended to 5th March. So right now there is some more time for the general public to participate in this process. All the stakeholders (that is what we use in eurotalk for interested parties) are now intensifying their efforts to bring people to the debate. That is simply great. Democracy in practice.

The Czech Pirate party showed a good level of initiative. Firstly, one initial billboard was placed in central Brno. But with more time available for the consultations the party decided to place additional ones all over the country.

In the beginning of this project there was an interesting debate. Should we - as the Pirates - use billboards as the method of promotion of our ideas or not? Well, the conclusion was not very clear. But one thing might be. These billboards inform about a project. They do not spread any slogans or smiling faces. They want to raise participation of the general population in a democratic process - by informing more and more people about current issues in Europe.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to have billboards about all the topics where the people can participate. Most of the general public in the Czech Republic (and frankly… in many other countries) simply does not know about the possibility to directly address the European Commission and take a role in the decision process. That is unfortunate and that has to change. And it is very nice to see that there are people who would like to make this change for real.

It is highly surprising, but yet it happened. The European Commission decided to extend the deadline for the Copyright consultations to 5th March 2014. 

The reason seems to be quite simple. In recent days in January the amount of people interested in the whole idea of public consultations rose significantly. According to available information the number of responses the Commission received was around 2500. We had the successful coypwrongs project that helped everyone to understand and better interpret the whole issue and also lot of effort was done in the whole NGO sector. Many pirate parties informed about this issue (the Czech Pirate Party even promoted it on billboard in Brno). Several MEPs already asked for extension of the deadline, as well as some NGOs did. 

On 5th December 2013 the European Commission has launched the public consultation on whether a copyright reform should be initiated or not. The Commission simply wants to ask all Europeans if we should change copyright; if we should make it more European, more restrictive, more liberal or how should it look in the future.

Based on the suggestions that the people will send by e-mail, the Commission will decide, if the reform should be initiated or not. The time frame is highly limited – as the current term of the parliament is going to end in May, the timespan for the consultations was defined only for 2 months – from 5th December to 5th February. And the parliament will have to talk about the proposal or adopt it/reject it if the Commission will draft the proposal. So – if you want your voice to be heard in this issue, you have only one week left! But remember: The European Commission has to take your comment into consideration. And every voice counts. Each suggestion has a chance to change copyright.

So how can you participate? Simply. Download the form, read our manual how to fill it and send it to the DG Markt in the European Commission: markt-copyright-consultation@ec.europa.eu

​CC BY-NC ND TIMECODEX JÜRGEN ASBECK

Some of the Pirate Party‘s main issues were affected by actions of several foreign government organizations. The population of European member states was affected. NSA‘s “PRISM” as well as the British “Tempora” program have recently been leaked by ex-agent Edward Snowden who considered personal rights of people living outside US-borders being attacked. Even the European Parliament has been “bugged” by American Agents. 

INTERVIEW AMELIA ANDERSDOTTER AND CHRISTIAN ENGSTRÖM

KOMPASS:
Amelia, what do you as a member of the European Parliament consider an adequate response to voters asking: 

What can Europe do to prevent member states from being under unchecked surveillance by non-European agencies?

AMELIA ANDERSDOTTER:
The most defining issue will be the data protection regulation, but also how we see Europe as a continent. Data protection is actually a European speciality, a regulatory framework and a series of big research and innovation investments that we‘ve made in Europe in order to continue being good with human rights. We have a lot of good innovations, companies, researchers and knowledge, both on the technical and the sociological side. We have the European Union because military rule was not so good, and when our militaries were still always arguing it made us all feel bad and additionally many of us died. The European Convention of Human Rights codifies a strong framework for

Our modern digital society is based on the ideas of Web 2.0. That means that everyone creates, distributes, consumes, reuses and share the culture. The former model, where authors create, distributors distribute and consumers consume is more and more a sign of the past.

But even before that, when the number of people creating content – art, movies, books etc. - was limited, a certain pattern in their creative behavior could be seen, preserved through centuries in many books, plays, movies etc.

In essence – the idea where people copy concepts, transform them and combine is not new. But so far it was a common practice inside of a very limited amount of people, such as writers, directors, photographers, artists or even programmers (anyone remembering the “Pirates of Silicon Valley” movie?)

Not a long time ago I had an opportunity to see an independent documentary by Kirby Ferguson called Everything is a Remix. The movie is pretty much based on a very interesting assumption – that information evolve, just like living organisms do. Memes – the basic elements of information – are evolving and constantly undergoing changes. Yet, their basic idea and principle remains the same for the long time. Ferguson presented countless examples proving this assumption to be true and he did so in a manner so desperately missing in contemporary US documentary movies.