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Dear European Commission: not this again!

German MEP responds to open letter from civil society with her own letter to the European Commission, asks them to stop looking at the Internet as problem 

Last week we saw two open letters sent to European Parliament and the European Commission by Copyright for Creativity and dozens of other groups, advocating on behalf of “Internet users, news publishers, consumers, journalists, libraries, civil society organizations, start-ups, online services, Internet service providers and IT companies from all over Europe.”

The letters were in response to a public consultation currently being carried out by the Commission on issues of digital policy and Internet governance that will affect not only the 500 million plus users in the EU alone, but by extension the rest of the global Internet which shares access to websites and content from around the world.

In the letters, the drafters raise concerns ranging from the biased nature of consultation questions (for select sections you have to be a ‘rightsholder’ even to answer) to the backwards nature of releasing a roadmap for action before the public consultation is even finished.You can see the leaked draft the communication here.

This highly influential digital policy plan is expected to be released on December 9th, leaving Internet users to assume that a course of action has been chosen regardless of their input in the consultation. Thankfully, it looks as though Internet users will see this as an invitation to get louder and grow their numbers -- over 10,000 have responded to the consultation using this tool alone.

It's in this context, we’re heartened to see German MEP Petra Kammerevert respond publicly to the letter, even going so far as to send her response to the Commissioners who will be drafting legislation to update the Copyright Directive in Spring 2016. Her statement here is in German, but we’ve pulled out a key quote opposing ancillary copyright, or what we call the ‘link tax’:

Press publishers need to stop seeing the Internet as a competing medium and especially to demonise search engines. Spiegel and ZEIT seem to have understood this better than others in Germany. It is our task to effectively support the publishers in the transformation process with other instruments.

It would appear based on both the leaked Commission communication and the nature of the questions in the consultation that the Commission is at least considering raising the issue of the link tax from the dead. We’ve previously detailed – along with many other scholars, lawyers, open Internet advocates, and innovators– exactly why this link tax idea is horribly misguided at best, and at worst an attack on the very fabric of the Web.

Or, as community-member Bill succinctly quips on Facebook:

It boggles my damn mind that we need to explain this beyond "This is a stupid idea and whoever came up with it should be mulched.

Kammerevert herself notes that this legislation has already been debated or introduced three times before in European Parliament, and rejected. She raises her own deep skepticism over the policy, and encourages the Commission to listen to the chorus of groups and individuals calling for a more balanced and transparent approach to policymaking for the digital sphere.



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