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Comment by chme | Hacker News Reader

What I find odd about the protest against this is that it is mostly coming from Germany. Why is France not protesting against this more?

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The French government is very much for Articles 11 and 13, while the German govt ... can't make up their minds. One of the German coalition parties is against, including the justice minister, but she still voted in favour of it. Quoting this [1]:

> Wenn Barley im Kabinett nicht zugestimmt hätte, hätte sich Deutschland im Kreis der EU-Staaten enthalten müssen –- dann wäre die nötige Mehrheit nicht zustande gekommen.

Translated:

> If Barley had not agreed in the cabinet, Germany would have had to abstain in the circle of EU states -- then the necessary majority would not have been achieved.

The French government is so much for the directive that the French ambassador even tried to convince SPD party members... which is diplomatically very impolite, you don't just meddle with interior politics of another country [2].

[1]: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/EU-Copyright-Artikel...

[2]: https://netzpolitik.org/2019/frankreich-draengt-spd-abgeordn...

There were some rumors that Germany giving in here is a high level backroom deal to secure French support for the gas pipeline in the Baltic sea linking Russia and Germany (which the US are opposed to).

Thx for the reply, but it doesn't really answer the question: Why is the French government so uniformly for this reform and why are there no demonstrations against this in France, while at the same time in Germany this is a pretty dividing issue.

Does the French use and understand the internet differently? Do they have more trust on the government to not mess this up? Or do they currently just have different, more pressing, issues on their mind?

I wonder if the fact that France, and the French government, have a very protectionist approach to their own culture factors into this. Anything that limits the power of the US to spread its 'culture' is seen as a net win.

If you're talking about the people, I would say that pretty much no one here (talking about the average guy), heard about article 11 and 13

If Belgium is any indication, there has been a strong lobbying from the French-speaking media for Article 11. They've been unsuccessfully trying to "extort" money from Google News for years now [1] (in French). Article 11/13 will be just another avenue to do that.

[1] https://www.lesoir.be/art/google-sanctionne-la-presse-franco...

Great question! I don’t know France that well. Perhaps there are no IT companies in France dealing with user content in a significant way? Perhaps debate on the matter is stifled by incompetent media not understanding questions of importance that would make them realise how important news about this is?

I would argue that it is maybe even worse, as there is a potential conflict of interests of our main press agency, AFP, about this topic, as they are a huge proponent of Article 11. French media are very reliant on that news agency, so we don't hear about the protests about it, and the public do not care.

It doesn't help that our main EFF-equivalent, La Quadrature du Net, didn't have a very clear position about the copyright directive at some point [0].

[0] https://www.nextinpact.com/news/107093-directive-droit-daute...

Dailymotion is French. Funny, because I often find videos on Dailymotion that we're copy-struck on YouTube.

Too late my friend, we already achieved to kill most of our startup ecosystem and made fly away any kind of entrepreneurship. And not only about internet-related businesses but in a broader way.

Now we are just trying to export our brillantly superior ideas.

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