They do, and free speech and fair use are important issues to them.
The German law that is related to what US citizens call "copyright law" (Urheberrechtsgesetz) (note that I use this careful formulation, since Urheberrecht and copyright are based on different ideas) has no concept of "fair use".
Also, traditionally, in Germany, there is culturally a different understanding of what US citizens call "free speech" (freie Meinungsäußerung). "Freie Meinungsäußerung", for example, does not include defamation criticism or libel. So free speech in the US sense is no important issue for these politicians, because this concept is simply not ingrained in German culture.
To all the US free speech advocates: why is posting a copyrighted file in the internet not considered free speech and thus copyright law is to be abolished?
The Congress shall have Power To... ...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
and
Congress shall make no law... ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
So it's implied (by the constitution not being tautological) that there's a balance between the right of the people (free speech) and an power of congress (to implement copyright). Note also that that defamation/libel are not protected by the first amendment, but the theshold for proving it is high - information has to be known to be false to the speaker, and inflict an actual injury. For public figures and politicians, the speaker has to have "actual malice". These are not often proven. For example, "sell more newspapers" would not rise to the level of "actual malice".
The legal argument for that, rather, is that all rights are implicitly limited, and that, depending on how important the right in question is, how small the limitation is in scope, and how important the social objective that the limitation is intended to enable, it can be constitutional - with courts being the arbiters of what's important and what's small. The fact that the colonies had slander and libel laws on the book even as they passed the Constitution is often cited as a justification for this point of view.
I think it's a case of parallel construction. The original First Amendment was not a problem to libel and slander because it simply didn't apply to the states at all, only the federal government, same as all others until they were incorporated via 14A. It does, however, clearly conflict with copyright, and there's nothing in the text of the Constitution that resolves that conflict one way or the other, or even sets clear guidelines on how you'd do so. So what we have in practice is mostly judicial precedent - and most of it is constructed out of necessity to make things work (i.e. "we've always done it this way", or "bad things happen if we don't do it this way"). So you have a patchwork of concepts like fair use, creative expression etc.
The most convincing argument that I have heard is that freedom of speech is about freedom to express ideas, not freedom to use specific words to express those ideas. Since copyright only applies to the latter, it's not an infringement. I'm not sure I fully buy it, but it does highlight an important distinction. Stuff like fair use stems from that, to enable you to express an idea that's criticism of someone else's words.
Here's an interesting read on the subject:
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
Germany has "Urheberrecht" and "Verwertungsrecht", neither of which is exactly copyright, even though that's the most practical translation of either. German law may not have fair use, but it does have §51 UrHG "Zitate", which serves the same purpose, at least in the context of reporting on news articles.
> So free speech in the US sense is no important issue for these politicians
The Eurocrats do not want free speech to establish itself in the EU. That's very important to them.
There is indeed an exception for quotes (Zitate) and parodies (for the latter cf. https://www.ferner-alsdorf.de/urheberrecht__urheberrecht-zur... since it is not written down explicitly in the law). But, for example, memes fall into neither category and are thus typically illegal under German law, but legal under US copyright because of fair use.
Sure, there are limitations to it, e.g. denying the Holocaust or using Nazi symbols in Germany, and with regards to defamation. But otherwise just about any opinion can be voiced freely. Thid doesn't mean that thios particular EU law is any good, it just screams big media corporation lobbyism all over it. And yes, this implies some future potential limitations to free speech,l either by technically limiting the reech of smaller players (regardless of what the law states) and by giving governmants a tool to keep things of the internet. Especially the last part is troubling.
