Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-26-Speech-3-168"
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"en.20050126.9.3-168"2
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".
Mr President, I should like to underline that only 12 months after its adoption by the Commission, we are now about to fulfil the conditions for a second-reading agreement on this important programme. This is rather unusual and that is why I wish to underline it. I wish to congratulate the rapporteur, Mr Rübig, and all the Members involved in the negotiations who made it possible to find an agreement with the Council while preserving the means for a proper functioning of this programme, in particular as far as the budget is concerned.
We all know that the availability of content is one of the essential factors for the development of the new information society services. In the digital economy, content covers all types of information, text, images and sounds that can be transmitted by the networks. The eContent Plus Programme focuses on improving the conditions for innovation, notably in certain sectors of the digital content market. The online environment provides an ideal platform for innovative digital content products and services that transcend national boundaries. That is why this programme has a real European added value.
Imagine that Europe had one digital content market, without barriers imposed or national and organisational boundaries – a market where all consumers would understand all the languages of the Union. It is likely that we would see many more maps, for example of trans-European roadways, waterways and other features, on the Internet. As the rapporteur has just underlined, we would see large European digital libraries of cultural and scholarly repute. We would see a greater abundance of European digital learning material, which our schools and teachers need. There would be a real cross-fertilisation between cultures and access to each other’s traditions.
That is exactly what we want to achieve with the new programme. But we know that much remains to be done in order to overcome existing fragmentation and to allow businesses to develop innovative cross-border digital content products and services. Nevertheless, this is one of the rare programmes where SMEs are
much integrated. When I look at how the programme has been working so far, out of the 600 organisations participating in the funded projects, 241 participants are SMEs. So this programme is of benefit to those SMEs that show innovation and want to go in the direction of progress.
In this programme we will focus only on those parts of the digital market where there is a clear fragmentation in Europe and where market forces alone cannot operate sufficiently well in driving growth. We are, therefore, targeting three domains: spatial or geographical data, educational material and cultural content. We will also give special attention to the linguistic diversity of the European Union, because we know that today’s information technologies can be made to work and to overcome the difficulties in combining formats and languages.
This takes organisational effort, it takes experimenting at cross-border level, and that is exactly what eContent Plus will deal with. It will strengthen the conditions for a flourishing content market for the benefit of business, citizens and culture. That is also why the Commission is happy to accept the amendment tabled by the rapporteur."@en1
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