[jcranmer]

I'm glad I'm not the only person that thought that the evidence of malicious suppression was lacking. The basic facts are that the EU Commission commissioned a study on the displacement of sales by piracy and did not report the results, and that this study found that piracy did not appear to have a significant impact (one way or the other) on sales. From these facts, the conclusion is reached that the EUC intended to show that piracy was killing sales, found otherwise, and buried it to save face, which sounds a lot more like projection of the reporter's viewpoints than logical reasoning to me.

It's not clear from the original tender (which I wouldn't call an "announcement") if the study was ever intended for general publication. It's also not exactly news that piracy isn't the cause of declining sales--there are studies a decade ago that you could have pointed to that would have debunked the "piracy is killing music/books/movies" trope.

> Actually, there's no such concept as "copyright" in France/Germany and other European jurisdictions with Code Civil heritage.

Uhhh... Berne Convention disagrees with you. The only original common law signatory to the convention was the UK, and the main instigator of the convention was France. For all practical purposes, copyright in the Anglo-American sense is the same as the droits d'auteur in the French sense.