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Stichting Vrijschrift

ScriptumLibre works on creating awareness of the economic and social meaning of free knowledge and culture for our society.

Lobbying Activity

Response to International Digital Strategy

19 May 2025

Vrijschrift welcomes this opportunity to give input on the EU's future external digital policy. A tension between offensive and defensive interests will always exist in trade agreement negotiations. A relatively new development is that democracy is under pressure; it deserves more attention as a defensive interest. A rebalancing is needed. Adversaries of our democratic systems can weaponise personal data. To protect our democracies we need to protect our fundamental rights as well. This Vrijschrift paper explores some issues in (digital) trade agreement texts, and some issues with regard to special interests. International trade creates multinationals, with great lobby powers. Networked societies create network effects, leading to winners take most. The combination of these two dynamics creates behemoths, with outsized effects on democracies and fundamental rights. Beyond the scope of this paper a further rebalancing is needed. To strengthen the EU's technological sovereignty, democracy, security, and defence, the EU will also have to concentrate on interoperability, and avoiding patents on standards, and will have to invest in open source and a European cloud. See the attached file.
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Response to Application of Article 3 (3) (i) and 4 of Directive 2014/53/EU relating to Reconfigurable Radio Systems

4 Mar 2019

Options 0 or 1 would be the preferred options. Suppliers cannot envisage all possible combinations of hardware and software. Especially not what combinations of open source firmware and their hardware could do. Option 2 through 4 would contravene recital 19 of the RED and would negatively impact a flourishing ecosystem of inventors, makers and SMEs as well as local wireless networks. If anything, mandatory controls on software defined radios ought to focus on parameters for power output, not on the software per se.
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