It’s time EU laws caught up with technology

The problem is not the politicians, they're just an easy scapegoat.

You can influence the society by voting with your money. Money is power and every time you give money to someone you give them power. Choosing who you work for, what products you buy (not only with money but also with your privacy) has enormous impact.

This doesn't really need a government to "create room to tinker, create, share, and learn on the internet", it just needs the government(s) to fairly apply the law and punish businesses who rampantly abuse it. With US DMCA claims, all are made under the penalty of perjury that the claims are valid and true - how many stories do you know of that are about companies being punished for an overreach of copyright claims or for false claims? The answer is likely none because despite there being debate over the copyright misuse in courts, there are just too many damn instances of copyright misuse to even start with.

It's a considerable imbalance in US law because it's truly a case of where a wealthy few are able to protect their rights and use the law as a cudgel to get their way, and often their claims have no basis or are not covered by the copyright law as the companies want to interpret it. However, individuals do not have the resources to adequately challenge these claims, and the fraudulent DMCA claims have effects beyond the takedown.

That's not entirely fair. For example, here in the UK, the government did try to reform copyright to some extent by introducing a private copying exception in 2014. This was several years later than it should have been and followed multiple extensive official reviews of IP laws, but at least they got there.

The exception was reasonably clear and quite tightly defined. Roughly speaking, it legalised actions like format shifting, making backup copies, and storing content on cloud services, provided they were for the personal, non-commercial use of someone who already had a legitimate permanent copy of that work. By modern political standards it was remarkable for following the original spirit of copyright so clearly: an individual would be free to enjoy a work they had lawfully obtained, including taking advantage of modern technologies, but the basic principle of copyright that the individual could not duplicate the work to share it with others was also maintained.

That law was overturned less than a year later following a judicial review, based on technicalities of EU law particularly around compensation for rightsholders.

There are a lot of things wrong with this situation, but in any case it is now abundantly clear that the EU authorities are heavily pro-big-copyright and have no qualms about using their influence to block progressive reforms or anything else that might be a threat to big rightsholders. They have repeatedly interfered both with member states' national governments, as in this case among others, but also on the world stage with organisations like the WIPO, from promoting longer copyright terms (again, contrary to overwhelming public opinion in evidence given to the official reviews) to blocking plans to ease restrictions on libraries so they can perform their public function.

So yes, unfortunately some politicians seem to have completely lost the plot here, but not all of them. Of course, in the particular case I mentioned, the power structure is about to change between the UK and EU authorities, so hopefully whatever deal gets worked out over Brexit will at least escape that particular unwanted interference.

What boggles my mind is that such views are cloaked in the garb of "freedom" but are essentially confiscatory and anti-freedom. They want to take away the freedom of people who create things to share those things on terms of their own choosing.

Copyright doesn't need to catch up with technology. The whole point of copyright is to keep people from getting ripped off. The fact that technological advances make it easier to rip people off doesn't create justification for changing the laws.

The above petition had an effect on European MEPs.

Did you ever write a "big" program completely bug-free? I think we should first start by writing correct programs (e.g. invest more in Coq, linters, etc.) then "pass" our wisdom to law writers.

Laws should definitely be more declarative though. There seems to be a push towards a more imperative style of law making which results in very inflexible legislation.