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Comment by mrleiter | Hacker News Reader

It was approved on in a committee of the European parliament (for legal matters), which means that now they will enter negotiations with the European Council and then after some time and processes laid out in Art. 293ff TFEU, it will be debated in the European Parliament at some point.

So yes, there is still plenty of room and time to discuss this rather unfortunate policy.

EDIT:

For more info: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20180618IPR...

Votes: Yes - 14 MEPs No - 9 MEPs Abstentions - 2 MEPs

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Is there a list of who voted and how available anywhere?

"It will be available once the minutes for the meeting have been compiled in the days to come." (from @EP_Legal)

https://twitter.com/EP_Legal/status/1009418817393577985

Video: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/committees/video?ev...

I wonder if any of these people have received campaign funding from entrenched industries that benefit from draconian copyright laws?

Having said that, GDPR has actually turned out to be a very well thought through piece of legislation - I actually agree with it's premises largely and the fact we can't take a database dump anymore and have full access to people's personal details is an extremely good thing IMO.

How Facebook are in compliance with it I have no idea as it would seem impossible to justify a lot of their more intrusive/social features.

Facebook doesn't need to justify it. All they need to do is send a notice to their users asking for consent. How many of them do will read what that entails, and how many of those would decide their privacy is more important for them than facebook?

What I mean is technical issues - searching an encrypted graph database has got to be very complicated!

My understanding is that consent is not sufficient. In addition, data collection must directly serve a legitimate business purpose. Though I guess Facebook has lawyers willing to argue that anything they do serves their core business.

My reading of it was that you need either consent or a legitimate business purpose, not both.[0]

[0]: Article 6(1), https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

Ah, yes. Agreed.

> I wonder if any of these people have received campaign funding from entrenched industries that benefit from draconian copyright laws?

Yes. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180531/00285739946/eu-pa...

Wouldn't the "link tax" have a detrimental effect on a site's Pagerank? Lets say someone writes a blogpost on site X and links to site Y, now site Y wants you to pay them for the privilege of linking to them. The blogger might just decide not to link (or save the hassle and not even ask whether they can link without paying). Over time site Y's incoming links drops as nobody is willing to link to it anymore.

Good luck with SEO under such rules, in fact it would be nice if Google then offered an easy way to filter out all the sites that require paying to link to them.

Here's a previous projection: https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/saveyourinternet/, looks like the EFDD switched their votes.

http://www.votewatch.eu/

I couldn't find the vote there... Looks like it's just the Parliament votes? (this was a committee vote)

Here are the votes:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/149721/juri-committee-...

Yes, here http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/149721/juri-committee-...

Here it is:

https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/not-giving-up/

Who voted in favour? Conservatives, social democrats, liberals and the Nazi.. uh nationalists.

Against? Greens and the left

You should be able to find the original list here, by opening the PDF for 20 June:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/juri/votes-in-co...

The actual content of the amendments is here:

http://www.emeeting.europarl.europa.eu/committees/agenda/201...

the Nazi.. uh nationalists.

That's not a constructive way to look at the world. It's the left-wing equivalent of claiming Obama is a Marxist. Get some perspective.

So yes, there is still plenty of room and time to discuss this rather unfortunate policy.

But not that much time. The main European Parliament vote is due in July.

For those of you in the EU, now is probably a good time to be writing to your MEPs.

If this law has already been paid for, what you would get from your MEP is a template response in the spirit of "I share your concerns blah blah, but copyrights are important blah blah". I don't think you can do much about it at this point.

You should really look up how EU regulations work.

Enlighten me please, as I don't believe the reasons for passing it are genuine.

Lobbyists don't usually hand over money. Usually they are just good at appearing trustworthy and, uh, explaining the positions of their clients in terms that politicians understand.

Therefore, their explainees think they are doing genuinely good things.

By the way, I saw a honest-to-god lobbyist at a panel discusssion once. He was wearing a sort of relaxed suit and had a slight punk vibe with slightly messy hair. The personality-free banker look wouldn't win trust so easily when speaking for business interests. Those people really know what they are doing.

Surely they don't hand over cash, I didn't mean that, but they give benefits by different means.

The main benefit they give is to explain technical concepts in terms the politicians understand.

Sometimes that's a "benefit", but that's when calling them yourself helps the most.

That benefit could also be a card to anonymous account in tax haven.

Well, they have in the past:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_cash_for_influence_scanda...

I'm way oversimplifying this, but I'm going to enlighten you by saying that this isn't a part of law yet. It merely passed a checkpoint called legal committee (that consists of 25 MEPs) on its way to become a part of law.

There are still multiple checkpoints that can be used to counter this, and the proposal will almost certainly be voted on by the entire EP, probably in December/January.

That's why calling your representative makes a difference.

I'm in the UK. Conservative MEP did as you said, Labour one sent a bit of a boilerplate that they are considering it, UKIP are of course against it but thats par for the course with them, the green one sent a detailed response and is voting against both art 11 and 13 (the ones I raised issue with).

I have had some very intelligent non-boilerplate replies from Green Party UK MEPs. However, it looks as though we won't have another opportunity to vote for them.

I've found the Greens Europe-wide to take the EU the most seriously as a political body. They run serious Europe-wide campaigns for EP elections, and send politicians of substance to the EP rather than sending the second string like most other parties do.

Hate them as most people in the UK do (I've never voted for them and wouldn't either), UKIP already resolved this (in a far more permanent way than the greens) by ensuring EU law does not apply to the UK in future.

Well that's completely false. We'll still be abiding by EU laws long after we leave. By 'most people', I'm assuming you mean the 30% who actually voted to leave?

> We'll still be abiding by EU laws long after we leave.

That's a rather ignorant comment.

The 'Great Repeal' bill as it was called was/is - I lose track of where it is in the law process at the moment - effectively did/will do a 'mv' of all EU regulation that the UK was beholden to over its own UK laws and when this has to be done before the UK leaves and will probably be done sooner.

Then the parliament will cherry pick the bits they want to keep and update/change/remove those that we do not.

> I'm assuming you mean the 30% who actually voted to leave?

Actually while the Brexit vote to leave was significantly more than 30%, the past polls that have asked a more specific question of sovereignty/law making by the EU commission that seems to override UK Law is significantly larger than the amount that voted to leave.

Voting Leave != Does not like EU Commission making Laws by people the UK did not and cannot vote out.

> of all EU regulation that the UK was beholden to over its own UK laws

There are very few of those. One of the problems people kept banging on about is that the UK "copper bottoms" any EU regulation, making it more onerous than it could be, when they add it to UK law.

Nothing ignorant about the statement that the UK will still be abiding by EU laws long after Brexit day, this is a fact. There's the possibility of diverging in some areas but even so the UK will largely align with the single market to maintain the levels of access it needs.

> Voting Leave != Does not like EU Commission making Laws by people the UK did not and cannot vote out.

And this betrays a very poor understanding of EU law making while hiding behind the shallow notion of who is elected and ejected on the behest of voters. The UK's political system is not exactly setup to satisfy that notion even after Brexit, since voters have no real choices & accountability is not seriously practiced. Bad politicians even after breaching ministerial code are simply reintroduced after a brief periods in the naughty box. Some are even rewarded for lying by getting high ranking cabinet jobs. Nothing so hollow as Brits handwringing about EU democratic processes while ignoring the problems with its own system.

It's completely true. While we're moving law to the UK, we then get to remove anything we don't like. And yes, the majority of people who voted wanted that.

>While we're moving law to the UK, we then get to remove anything we don't like.

Fancy naming a few laws that 'we' don't like?

If we want to trade and have anything to do with the EU, we're going to have to follow their laws and regulations whether we're in the EU or not.

No, because I don't know what you and the other 50 million people here want, and nobody has elected me.

Does the US follow EU laws and regulations?

What are you going to do next time the UK parliament passes a law you don't like? Dissolve the United Kingdom?

Can we?

I'd be in favour of dissolving it back to counties with a senate.

The south never does anything for us up North.

Yeah, but what have you done for us lately? </ducks>

London economy subsidises rest of UK, ONS figures show

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

It's not really surprising that the only part of the UK that gets significant investment is the only part that's able to make any money.

Or that the parts of the UK that traditionally relied on industries that went away but without any real attempt (Northern Powerhouse excepted off course...cough) to replace them.

Shrugs, Brexit is going to be interesting if the impact on the financial and legal services is as large as predicted.

Campaign to overturn it - which I feel is more likely to be successful here than in EU, which is comprised of member states with a wide variety of values.

I think the variety of values within the UK is just as great as within the EU as a whole. You can never convince everyone and you don't have to.

But I also think that not speaking a common language does indeed make campaigning for any particular issue more difficult.

It's a trade-off. Not having a say in Europe doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to comply, which will become painfully obvious in the near future.

No, in July is (assuming someone will force it, which is likely) the vote by the EP to confirm the the committee is authorized to work with the Council on the plans.

Whatever the negotiate out will then by voted on by the MEPs. The negotiation is likely to take a few months, and I kind of expect a fight about the speed: those against the proposal will want to stall to get the vote as close as possible to the elections in May 2019, whereas those in support likely want to get it out the door as quickly as possible. I've seen some people suggest December as a likely time for the final vote.

Right, but today's vote was just a committee. Next month it comes before the full Parliament. If sufficient awareness can be raised among MEPs before the vote next month that it becomes a toxic issue politically, my understanding is that voting it down at that stage would be an opportunity to effectively stop the whole process.

right, it would already by a good place to kill it, so yes, go call your MEPs!

But there's still another chance afterwards, which might be more successful given the timing of the election and people now maybe more likely to argue that it can be "fixed" in negotiations.

Ah, yes, sorry. I realised my original comment was ambiguous. I meant that the vote next month will be by the entire Parliament rather than just a committee, not that next month's vote will necessarily be the final decision.

>>> ...now is probably a good time to be writing to your MEPs.

Don't "write". Modern politicians don't open paper letters and they delete emails even more quickly. Tweet. Scream on Facebook. Most importantly: get the support of social media celebs. Between elections, any photogenic teenager with a thousand twitter followers has more political power than a thousand grandmothers writing letters. If you can, get some Hollywood celebs. A visit from an attractive movie star is better than years of campaigns and lawyers.

This is the sorry state of the world in which we now live but we can only act within the world we are given.

In the US politicians take calls and written letters most seriously.

It's far, far too easy to tweet or facebook something. A passing emotion with no commitment. If someone writes a letter they have put a lot of effort in and are seriously involved in the issue. They might even do something as outdated as vote or talk to their neighbors.

That's the kind of behavior that is dangerous to a politician and gets noticed. So written letters and phone calls are the best way to get a politician's attention.

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