Now it is a long chain until he reaches to the people, and many “interested parties” get in the way.

I believe that it’s easy to blame the system to cover for inaction. I believe that nagging your MEP or sending a letter signed by thousands/millions to the European Parliament, let alone supporting MEPs with known and acceptable positions in such issues are vastly underestimated mechanisms. I’m not sure that an elected Commissioner, just by virtue of their election and not appointment, would take a more ethical position and not be swayed by big business, or that they would be open to discussion with the public, more than they are today.

On the other hand the E.U. does *not* have any trully big company , such as Disney, that holds many copyright works about to expire.

This is not true. Ironically, the vast majority of the ‘big 4/6′ music/film conglomerates belong (or include to a substantial extent) European owners: Vivendi, EMI, SonyBMG and all their subsidiaries for example. That — alone — is something like 20-30% of the market in film and more than 60% of the market in music.

I doubt the “internet revolution” will reach policy making any time soon. The recent example of France’s “illegal downloading” law is an example where, for example Fnac had much more say in the drafting than for example Free (which so far seems to have a good privacy record.). Of course we could have an exception and a slashdot user gets appointed commisioner.

My view is that these matters are mostly decided on the other side of the atlantic, and then decisions spill over. Given that, I would put my money on Obama on having a sensible approach, for example given his recent (and previous) voting on the tel. companies senate “spying bill”. In reallity I do not think anyone can actually change the current situation.

On the other hand the E.U. does *not* have any trully big company , such as Disney, that holds many copyright works about to expire. It does have some public companies such as television channels who could benefit from an open minded approach to copyright. In all honesty I can not make an educated guess.

In a way, it is sad that in Greece, there is not discussion about these things. The recent story ot ert-archives is an example, where most of the discussion revolved about the exclusion of Linux as an O.S., and a few people blogged about the licences as well, and gave a bigger picture perspective. If I remeber correctly you had a really nice post.

(BTW, ert-archives still does not work under linux by just clicking, and I do not have time to teach my mother to hack her way through… )

Για την πρόταση παράτασης του copyright στον αιώνα -παρά κάτι ψιλά- του επιτρόπου McCreevy (του γνωστού πατεντομανή) ο λόγος……

I’m not so sure that the appointment of election of a commissioner is a major issue here — commissioners can only propose legislation, not pass it; given the record of elected national politicians in similar cases, appointment vs. election seems to have minimal importance: Lawmaking at the Pan-European level is the task of the European Parliament, which is elected and (in principle) accountable for its actions. Given the past ‘successes’ of small business, academia and the ‘common man’ in convincing the Parliament (viz. software patents — disregarding the numerous and substantial controversies of that case), I still have a small token of belief on the power of the ‘common (wo)men’ in this continent. If anything, it seems to me that the ‘common man’ is much more powerful when compared to his/her U.S. counterparts in this respect.

In any case, I agree with you that most people probably don’t have much leverage, but that’s probably due to their indifference and lack of information and not their ability (or lack thereof). Hopefully, the momentum of the ‘internet revolution’ is going to be such that our little discussion here will prove meaningless before too long.