Key Polish Political Party Comes Out Against Article 13
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Few months back when the previous voting took place all of their representatives were voting for article 13. Right now, due to forced coalition most of the current EU parlamentarists got rather bad starting places (giving them low election changes even in light of good voters support) and there were talk about switching parties already.
Now, week later I find out they changed their mind and are going to protect European Internet after being so eager to push this law. Smart, not that surprising yet funny move nonetheless.
Oh, and when approving it they were defending it very vocally. They didn’t pass it by ignorance. That’s for sure.
In the next voting still most were against. There was no point at which more people from Poland voted for article 13 than against.
https://i.redd.it/8437i584v0m11.png
In Poland internet freedom, software patents etc is a big issue since forever. See: https://thankpoland.info/
Anti-ACTA protests started in Poland as well in 2011 and were a big thing, they happened in every city basically and the government had to go back from the deal, which then lead to reverting it on the EU-wide basis.
September 12 everyone from PO voted for censorship:
Michał Boni (PO)
Jerzy Buzek (PO)
Danuta Hübner (PO)
Danuta Jazłowiecka (PO)
Agnieszka Kozłowska-Rajewicz (PO)
Barbara Kudrycka (PO)
Janusz Lewandowski (PO)
Elżbieta Łukacjiewska (PO)
Jan Olbrycht (PO)
Julia Pitera (PO)
Marek Plura (PO)
Dariusz Rosati (PO)
Adam Szejnfeld (PO)
Róża Thun Und Hohenstein (PO)
Jarosław Wałęsa (PO)
Bogdan Wenta (PO)
Bogdan Zdrojewski (PO)
Tadeusz Zwiefka (PO)
> In the preliminary voting
As for the second voting still most europarliament members from Poland voted against.
And it wasn't the final voting, just choosing the version of the VOSS report for further work.
Back in 2012 when ACTA was on the agenda, there were numerous popular protests against it in Poland, mostly centered around young internet users. Donald Tusk, then-Prime Minister and chief of the Platforma party, reacted with "The government won't bow down to any blackmail"[1] and reaffirmed his intent to sign the ACTA.
Thankfully a few days later he changed course and refused to sign it, as per the popular demand.
[1] "Nie wyobrażam sobie, by polski rząd ustępował przed jakimkolwiek szantażem" - https://www.wprost.pl/technologie/343029/jutro-podpiszemy-ac...
The opposite would be the UK situation where people are slowly realizing that Brexit is a bad idea and the ruling body refuses to back down despite the popularity of the move dwindling.
As is voting out leaders you don't wish to follow anymore, even immediately.
Poland has no true left wing party anymore, and there are more extreme right voters too. Something is stirring on the right. PiS and PO are different shades of centrist I think. Especially that what PiS does and what it says are two completely different things.
The law is obviously lobbied by entertainment industry to target likes of YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram etc. However its sure sounds pretty dumb. Next time if I want to backrupt a website, I can just upload tons of copyrighted material there.
The bare minimum technical solution seems to be excessive. You need some kind of "Shazam for all the things", which can identify copyrighted material by having a small snippet. And for that you actually need a huge database with fingerprints or whatever of copyrighted material.
Please let us know if you have a simple and cheap solution that every blog owner can implement (without high costs).
That said, we're making our Attribution engine (the shazam for all audio-visual content) free to all platforms and rights holders [0]. It's surely not a great situation, but we don't want to stay still and let the small platforms to crumble under the weight of the giants.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CLybxCFg_gz4n62UqVr3XEsy...
One is that you can have your own database of copyrighted works, let anyone submit one, and the law considers that sufficient. But then everyone has their own database that starts with nothing in it, none of them really ever have more than 1% of the total copyrighted works in them nor ever really catch anything, and uploading everything to everyone's database is completely intractable so nobody bothers.
The other is that having an incomplete database is insufficient, but having a complete database is still intractable because anyone else can at any time create a new copyrighted work that isn't in it. And then troll you with it because they know it isn't in any database but can have someone upload it to your site just so they can use the law to destroy you. No database will ever contain more than 1% of the total copyrighted works, because they're created by the millions every minute of every day.
So does pooling together like that actually buy you something? It doesn't seem to change the "are you screwed" calculus much one way or the other.
That would imply that one database with an obvious way for rights holders to register their content should be the right way to go.
But we will not know up until an EU country actually writes the law.
Having a single database seems unusually problematic. If there is only one operator, who is that supposed to be? What happens if/when they give up or go out of business? What happens when they charge monopoly rents or their system is unreliable or full of bugs?
On the other hand, if there is one submission process that submits works to everybody's database and people have their own copies, that seems like it would be of particular interest to pirates -- go sign up as a database recipient and the copyright holders will send you copies of all their works.
It's as if no one has even attempted to think through how this would work.
What is being targetted here are websites that rely on infringement for their popularity and traffic and ad revenue.
I'm not sure why are you stating this like some sort of undisputable truth.
For Joe blogger there is proportionality (https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Art_13_unoff... - 4a). And if Joe blogger decides to open comment section then he should read it every so often.
If not then this Harry Potter excerpt would be hard to find among spam overflowing comment section.
This, and the successfulness of GDPR, is why I'm so doubtful over the problems presented about Article 13.
Big boys like Amazon wouldn't be able to get away with this shit (ends up on HN regularly):
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/268109-an-update-on-my-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/01/02/amazon-s...
Now you tell me how do you make Amazon and similar not to profit off scam? Ask them nicely? Doesn't work.
Not being a lawyer, I have no idea how hard it is for a prosecutor to get that outcome.
(So far as opinion, I would like copyright duration reduced to 7 years from publication, but suspect it is easier to make a human-level-creative AI then to change the law).
Google seems to have had such a hard time doing so that it has the appearance that they've given up
> Now you tell me how do you make Amazon and similar not to profit off scam?
The fact that they're selling a plagiarized book is grounds for a lawsuit from the author.
For article 13, everybody can sue. And copyright already has lows like grannies without internet ending up in a court for alleged file sharing.
the 2 laws are not even remotely comparable.
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/b434e9/article_11_i...
Every single time, goddammit.
The downvoter must believe it’s ok for politicians to sell the electorate down the river.
There's still admiration for strong figures like Putin, Piłsudski, Churchill, even Stalin. People who don't trust institutions are sympathetic towards autocrats and their displays of strength.
The Polish law works in such a way that a party member can jump ship, join another party and still have a seat in parliament. Then if he's loyal enough they put him on a voting list (in many cases you vote on lists of people, not individuals).
Your being incorrect on such a basic historical fact is quite a red flag.
> For a few centuries Poles no longer ruled themselves
1.23 of a century (1795-1918) is not "a few". Unless my 8 year old nephew is a few meters tall :)
> and there's no strong tradition of civilized debate
Yes and no. It's true that when Poland didn't exist as an independent state, much of the political debate was pushed underground - or abroad.
On the other hand, this very political debate - at least among the intelligentsia - flourished nevertheless. A great many of Poland's finest political writers (such as Staszic, Ściegienny or the Stańczycy) were active in the 19th century.
> Don't get me started about "democracy of gentry", because the class composed at most 20% of society. So a vast majority had no say in what's going on.
"Don't get me started about Athenian democracy, they had slavery".
That's blatant ahistoricism. Democracy of gentry predated the concept of nation in its modern sense. By the standards of the era, this political system was way ahead of its times. The gentry - or the citizens with political rights - accounted for no more than a few percent of the population elsewhere in Europe.
And it Poland they weren't a closed caste, either; you could attain the status as well as lose it. There was some degree of social mobility.
Poor gentry was pretty much indistinguishable from commoners in terms of affluence, and mixed marriages weren't anything out of the ordinary.
Also note that Poland eg. granted voting rights to women as soon as it regained independence (1918). Quite a few democratic countries kept them waiting longer. It wasn't until 1944 in France or 1971 in Switzerland that roughly 50% of the population had no voting rights.
> There's still admiration for strong figures like Putin, Piłsudski, Churchill, even Stalin. People who don't trust institutions are sympathetic towards autocrats and their displays of strength.
I find it doubtful whether Churchill really counts as an autocrat.
And would you care to substantiate your claim of "admiration" for Putin or Stalin?
> The Polish law works in such a way that a party member can jump ship, join another party and still have a seat in parliament.
That's the whole point of democracy. The mandate comes from the voters, not the party. If the voters feel cheated, they shouldn't elect the guy the next time.