Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
es.wikipedia.org
es.wikipedia.org
This was due to the culture of Europes entrepreneurs which is often "bureaucracy first, product later".
Now lawmakers seem busy putting another burden on top of that. Laws that put Europe behind the rest of the world in how easy it is to build online services.
Where will Europe be in 20 years? Will it become a developing continent of the digital area? Or will German Engineers somehow make up for innovation via assiduous execution? I find it hard to see how that could work.
Politicians might think 'Now that we have the web, lets regulate it'. But I wonder: Now that we lost the web, how will we avoid the same with AI? AI will have orders of magnitude more impact on our lives then the web. How will we avoid losing crypto? In the age of crypto, people might freely chose what currency to use. Do we want the worlds currency to be owned by a US company? How will we avoid losing biotech? Will the same happen to our bodies that happened to our data? Will they be owned by a handful of US companies?
Not all services popular in Europe are US-based. Asos, Zalando, Flixbus, Klarna, Xing, Spotify, Auto1, Takeaway.com are just some of the big names, that lots of people in Europe are using on daily basis. Here in Berlin there are lots of startups with quite interesting and fresh ideas. Very few of them will be impacted by the (terrible) new law: the web of information we might have already lost, but the web of services will prosper and grow much bigger than it is now.
I don't think Google could've been built in Europe, but as a European I certainly would love more European products in tech: one advantage is that Europeans think in localisation by default, and some American products start our being very USA centric.
I'm not from Europe or America and the only one I've heard of is 'spotify'.
Are you really denying that the EU is well behind the US in terms of software though? I mean that's immediately obvious to any casual observer. Not sure why people are so defensive about it.
Yes, a lot.
Taxes, industrial base, spin off jobs, etc. so many reasons.
They also throw their weight around to get local tax concessions when they do open offices internationally, so I'm not sure it's that great a loss in any case.
I could also see it hurting the greater industrial base, a lot of companies need software but can't afford to compete with silicon valley style salaries.
I will just say that doing what US companies do should not be what Europe should aim for to get ahead. It would be no step forward.
Feel free to relocate if you're not pleased with the quality of life where you currently live.
For one thing, it’s not exactly easy to move to another country, not since World War I. You can’t simply pick a country and move to it - and you full well known that when you dismiss somebody with this sentence.
For another, I like my country. And I have every right to not like where it’s heading. “If you don’t like my politics, emigrate” is preposterous.
Have they? I don't think that's clear at all.
By which set of metrics? These US companies are extremely successful. I'm assuming your ideological position(s) runs afoul of them, and that's fine, but how does that help businesses in the EU?
I can't wait for the French, German, and Greek wikipedia to also shut down so that I can read this again!
https://www.google.com/doodles/gottfried-wilhelm-leibnizs-37...
It is, indeed, inconvenient to consider the rights of the users when building a service, especially when they aren't the ones who pay you for it. Still, I'm not sure it's such a bad idea.
Thus, we get dumb laws by politicians so they can point to what they have done for the average user that has no understanding of how any of the internet works. The web of today for me has really just turned into a problem of critical mass. For example, Google Eternal September[1], early adopters (nerds) have been going through this problem on the internet for awhile, and I honestly feel like it's never going to get better for us.
C'est la vie.
(Flawed analogy, because the website malicious JavaScript analogy would be, what, also having to assume their nerves haven’t been spliced with wires leading to a remote control?)
And dozens of emails about updated terms. Not to mention that some sites now require a non-EU proxy.
All to solve a problem that was 100% solved a decade ago with a simple adblock. I can't imagine a more effective anti-EU campaign than these Internet laws.
I have also opted out of Foursquare (and Facebook, and many other services of very dubious value) by not using it. The main obstacle that stops Foursquare from selling my location history is not having anything to sell.
If, on the other hand, that opting out requires clicking through a slew of warnings every time I visit a website, I'd rather see my browsing history sold to advertisers. Frankly, I'd like an EU_CITIZEN_WHO_DOES_NOT_CARE browser header to opt out of all these protections.
Governments are just as out of touch, judging by a UK cyber-security report that the BBC reported on a few months ago, or by the way Zuckerberg and the US Congress interacted.
Mobile is very popular now. Most of the mobile hardware is China-based. Now most Europeans and Americans use Chinese hardware. Is the US and EU falling behind?
Entrepreneurs will look for business given the current laws and opportunities. The data-mining business is just not a way to go now in the EU, with all the legal overhead.
Yes. And also in AI deployment.
Source: Am American.
Here in Israel, which is often considered one of the closest "startup capitals" to Silicon Valley, what almost any new company will do is just lunch in the US, since it's an easy market. Most wouldn't launch in Israel, since it's such a small market (8 million people).
A few will launch in Europe, but because of all the issues mentioned above (different laws, languages, cultures, etc), the US is a much more attractive first target.
Once they get big, they might then move to Europe.
That's by no means the only way, but it's a common one.
There are a few accelerators/etc who specialize in helping Israeli companies approach the US market and get exposed to Silicon Valley.
Other than that, most of the problems are kind of the same as with any startup - trying to build something people want. The biggest issue is if "things people want" is different in Israel and the States, and that's why exposure to the US market right from the start is so important.
As for immigrating to Israel - I don't really know much about the topic. If you're Jewish, it's incredibly easy, but if you're not, then I have no idea how the process looks like. Sorry.
I am EU-based developer, the majority of my customers are in EU, and I pay a US company 8.9% of revenue to avoid the crippling VATMOSS bureaucracy - because it’s cheaper that way. Not avoiding VAT, mind you, I still collect the enormous 20+% tax on sales, just avoiding the associated hassle.
And that’s just one example.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
Years ago, I said (both quip and serious observation), "China is the prototype."
Now, every political entity has the ability to lock down and survey its piece. Perhaps by purchasing a system, configuration, and support from China.
That might feel like fragmentation. But, a lot of those capabilities are working more and more in concert, particularly when it comes to IP rights and the influence, including coercive as well as incentive, of IP rights maximalists (as in, "the most for me").
As the old saw goes: "Follow the money."
That's why I keep telling people to focus on creating other, independent physical layers.
For a long time, I tried to live with the legal rules. To find that really, they only let those same powers screw me sooner, longer, and harder.
I'm all for compensating creators. Not so much, the ever more monopolistic and perpetual rent-seekers, nor their authoritarian facilitators.
While I agree that the „move fast and break things“ mindset seems to work for general entrepenuership and innovation in the markets, I really hope that we won‘t follow this approach in developing AGI (artifical general intelligence). As we move up in our AI capabilities it will become increasingly important to coordinate and control further expansion as opposed to fall into an arms race which may have dire consequences for humanity. I would recommend „Superintelligence“ by Nick Bostrom as a great resource and argument for the dangers that are inherent to this dynamic. So „bureaucracy first, product later“ does have place in the tech sector... especially in the future.
Having said that, the current legislation seems to be a bad thing for the web and Europe. There is obviously still the problem of enacting the right kind of bureaucracy, which we still don‘t seem to have figured out, yet...
> Now that we lost the web, how will we avoid the same with AI? (...) How will we avoid losing biotech? Will the same happen to our bodies that happened to our data? Will they be owned by a handful of US companies?
AI and biotech are two areas where we really need close regulatory oversight, to keep all the "move fast and break things" startup superstars at bay. Companies like Uber or AirBnB that show total disregard for society at large are somewhat fine as long as their impact is limited. But I fear the day we'll get Uber for biotech. I don't want to see people taking liberties with safety of poisonous and potentially self-replicating substances.
Similarly, general-level/self-improving AI is something we'll get one shot at doing right. Again, not something I'd like to see coming from a startup seeking quick market domination or early exit.
> How will we avoid losing crypto? In the age of crypto, people might freely chose what currency to use. Do we want the worlds currency to be owned by a US company?
I have mixed feelings about this one. More freedom is great, but I feel some level of control over currency is necessary for proper functioning of a state. Moreover, cryptocurrencies in the present form are something that should IMO be unmade. As implemented these days, they're absolutely ridiculous waste of electricity that primarily fuels scams.
If this is a pun, its a very good one.
Are you just mindlessly repeating the usual right-wing nonsense that you read somewhere on the internet, or can you back this up with facts?
Now everybody is affected equally and in fact European companies may have a first mover advantage because the GDPR closely matches the privacy laws several European countries had already implemented previously (whereas US companies in some cases may need to start over from scratch if they want to ensure their compliance).
I haven't seen the community discussion that led to this decision, but assuming that it was democratically decided across collaborators from the entire Spanish-speaking world, I think gives the protest a lot more weight than the title may suggest.
Dear reader,
On July 5, 2018, the plenary of the European Parliament will vote on whether to proceed with a proposal for a directive on copyright. If approved, this would significantly damage the open Internet as we know it today.
Instead of updating copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation of all citizens in the information society, the directive would threaten online freedom and impose new filters, barriers and restrictions on access to the Web. If the proposal was approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news article on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated; even Wikipedia would be at risk.
So far, dozens of relevant people in the field of IT have strongly opposed this proposal - among them the creator of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the Internet pioneer, Vinton Cerf - 169 academics, 145 human rights, press freedom, scientific research and technological development organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that promotes this encyclopedia, among other projects for free knowledge.
For these reasons, the Spanish language Wikipedia community has decided to shut down all the pages of the encyclopedia before and during the vote, i.e. until 10 am (UTC) on July 5. We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free publication with verifiable content. We call on all Members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the many proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge, including the deletion of Articles 11 and 13, the extension of freedom of panorama throughout the EU and the preservation of the public domain.
In other countries of the Spanish-speaking world, such as Colombia and Mexico, the Wikipedia community has recently opposed similar proposals. We ask you to keep up to date with their development and support this effort.
For more information on the campaign in the European Parliament and how to act, visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_vote_in_.... You can follow the communication on social networks with the tags #WikipediaSeApaga, #SalvemosInternet and #SaveYourInternet.
The Spanish Wikipedia community
It's a shame it's buried behind pointless discussion on whether the EU has internet giants.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2...
If you have JS disabled, everything works as usual.
[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicado_4_julio_2...
Upload filters would edit our posts silently and we would have no recourse.