A survey on the ‘Regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy’, which can be accessed here, may well have passed youy by. The Editor is grateful for timely tweets from Graham Smith of Bird & Bird that have brought it to his attention.
The EU Commission offers a range of questions in the survey, by means of which it ‘invites all interested parties to express their views on the questions targeting relations between platform providers and holders of rights in digital content’. Respondents are asked to take account of the Commission Communication “Towards a modern, more European copyright framework” of 9 December 2015. Bearing in mind the date of that document, the deadline for survey responses (6 January 2016) seems rather tight but the Commission state that the deadline was set at ’13 weeks from the day when all language versions have been made available’.
The survey has come in for some criticism. EDRi have a piece entitled ‘EU Commission platforms consutltation: just how biased is it’ and Graham Smith’s tweets relating to it are largely devoted to questions such as ‘Where is the “How should we ensure full respect for freedom of expression on the internet?” question?’ and ‘Where is the “Should the scope for injunctions against online intermediaries be cut back?” question?’
But, biased or not, if there is any hope of colouring the EU Commission’s views in this area, it would be disappointing to miss the opportunity of responding.
