When the European Commission put forward their proposal to retrospectively extend the copyright term granted to sound recordings, locking away vast swathes of our cultural heritage in a commercial vacuum for 45 years, it was clear that they had rejected all the expert evidence in favour of voodoo economics.

Now Professor Bernt Hugenholtz has written a letter to Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso asking why. Huggenholtz, Director of the Institute for Information Law (IViR), which was tasked by the European Commission to look into the arguments for and against extending copyright term, says his team were “surprised” to discover that their studies had been completely ignored, and that statements the Commission have made that “there was no need for external expertise” in drafting the proposal were “patently untrue”. He goes on (with our emphasis):

As you are certainly aware, one of the aims of the ‘Better Regulation’ policy that is part of the Lisbon agenda is to increase the transparency of the EU legislative process. By wilfully ignoring scientific analysis and evidence that was made available to the Commission upon its own initiative, the Commission’s recent Intellectual Property package does not live up to this ambition. Indeed, the Commission’s obscuration of the IViR studies and its failure to confront the critical arguments made therein seem to reveal an intention to mislead the Council and the Parliament, as well as the citizens of the European Union.

In doing so the Commission reinforces the suspicion, already widely held by the public at large, that its policies are less the product of a rational decision-making process than of lobbying by stakeholders. This is troublesome not only in the light of the current crisis of faith as regards the European lawmaking institutions, but also - and particularly so - in view of European citizens’ increasingly critical attitudes towards intellectual property law.

The letter goes on to demand that the Commission fully inform the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers of the findings of the IViR studies. You can read it in full here.