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Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

If you are in the EU, do follow the advise and contact your MEP. The EU parliament is surprisingly accessible and open to criticism, especially if it is respectful and well-argued.

(It’s probably a result of constantly having their legitimacy questioned and and vile insults having hurled at them)

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And they will do what, exactly?

The EU Parliament has no real power. It can only say yes to things or delay them. As a consequence the only people who run for seats in it are either fanatically pro-EU or anti-EU, but none of them are going to have any real interest in copyright. They can say no and send it back and the Commission - if it wants this - will just send it back for re-approval again, or bypass them entirely.

The EU Parliament gets to edit all legislation. There are often thousands of amendments offered, debated, voted on, and approved or rejected.

Here is an example with 500 proposed amendments to draft legislation on cybersecurity: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/amendments.html?...

Click on the pdf icons to read the actual texts.

Please don’t spread falsehoods.

I think your post is also misleading. Under co-decision, the EP only gets to /propose/ amendments, not to approve them. The council are able to reject parliament amendments and get the law passed anyway. And of course, there are other procedures than co-decision for creating primary legislation which give the EP even less power.

While the grandparent wasn't 100% technically correct I think the broad view (that "The EU Parliament has no real power") is effectively correct. The lion's share of the power of the EU still rests in the Commission and the Council. By all means, write to your MEPs, but don't get too hopeful

> The council are able to reject parliament amendments and get the law passed anyway.

This is false. In most policy areas, if the council disagrees with the parliament's amendments, the proposal goes through a conciliation process. If the council and parliament don't reach agreement there, then the proposal is rejected. Thus, parliament has the power to reject almost all legislation. I wouldn't call that powerless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...

Yes, there is further process I didn't mention. No, it doesn't fundamentally change the situation.

I have come to think that the EU would work much better if the Council and the Commission got dissolved at once, were replaced by and actual "Government of the EU zone" and all the legislative power went to the EU Parliament.

The parliament did for example stop software patents. Yeah, one day there might be another proposal, but for now we don't have them enforced because of the EU parliament.

It did not. The EU issues software patents anyway.

OK, they stopped the directive to make patenting them generally easier in europe. There are still ways to patent software, usually by saying it's part of a hardware device.

The parliament has a history of rejecting stupid proposals like software patents. Please take your rhetoric elsewhere.

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