European Parliament approves copyright reform
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The bigger, more popular, and ubiquitous it became the more corporate and political powers were going to seek to rule it. Now were are at an age of internet giants with the GDP of small countries, and political elections being swayed by the bovine herds of Facebook and Twitter users (or useds as Stallman calls them!). The internet has come so far from my happy memories of the late 90s.
My prediction is that we will see multiple 'internets'. Whether for political reasons (e.g. China), or commercial (someone like Facebook or Google providing their version of internet to a 3rd world country).
Then of course we have things like dark web. I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation.
It's an interesting point in history. . . . (I'm a bookwork so please share any recommendations on this topic!)
480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s
And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.
I fondly remember conversations on AmiNet - an Amiga - dedicated FTN network.
That was all done over PSTN with 9600 - 19200 bps modems. Latency was days. All this didn't preclude massive amounts of collaboration over it.
I'd rather question if lower latency delivers any benefit.
I imagine that in practice the postal service may start to decline your custom somewhere around the quintillion-box mark, or perhaps even before...
What if a billionaire launched a constellation of low earth satellites which provided Internet?
They're not, regardless of medium, the same cops and IP lawyers can get on it and track down people to arrest and sue according to whatever laws are on the books, good or bad.
What if this satellite Internet service is a multinational corporation, with the directly owning entities based in Russia and China? Or perhaps Sweden? Part of a conglomerate under the ultimate control of a corporation on Mars?
I think we'll definitely have crossed some threshold when we have our first extradition from a different gravity well.
Today, if people in Russia or China run the servers there isn't much the EU can do (see: scihub and the US, for a long time piratebay too). You don't need a massive indestructible satellite constellation for that.
I'd also add that a billionaire isn't the criteria you're looking for here even if it was a policy targeting the people running the wire. It's a foreign government with sufficient military power to deter the US from arresting you, and sufficient technological power to set up such a network. Maybe it's a Russian Billionaire who launches them in your hypothetical, but it's the Russian government who provides the security that allows him to do that.
I was imagining containerized server clusters in low earth orbit as well, with the ability to rapidly export the entire state of servers across super high bandwidth laser links. Everything would be done remotely, and the corporations running them would also be in Russia, China, Mars, etc.
(Containerized in the sense of hardware in a shipping container, not Docker, though that would play a role as well.)
The latency can be huge when we have less-that-optimal conditions.
Since the throughput is low and the latency high, it's not streaming-video capabl. A buddy downloads a load of movies to an ssd and drops that off every now and then.
For real-time news I use an actual radio. There are some good news and music stations in the area.
I have an offline copy of the spanish language wikipedia.
Sounds like the 21st century version of Samizdat :)
> I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation.
You mean Tor, I presume. But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. And there are other overlay networks. Some basically just use VPN connections (such as tinc).
And they were always about being "free from regulation". It's just that hobbyists, activists and people into recreational drugs and CP were early adopters.
If you haven't read Vernor Vinge's True Names lately, I highly recommend it.
In recent years, investigators have been using customized clients to serve child porn, and track which peers receive it from them. For IPs in their jurisdiction, they get and execute search warrants.
Although there is arguably plausible deniability, most defendants lack the will and resources to fight. So they typically plea bargain.
Anyway, if you use Tor, they can't find you. But it's not as simple as that, really. Basically, you lease a VPS, working ~anonymously via Tor. You run a Freenet node on the VPS, and access the webGUI as a Tor onion service. They can take down the VPS, if they like, but won't know who was using it.
Traffic is not just obfuscated, it is encrypted. Sure, you see the IP of a peer which transfers stuff across your client - but you do not know what the stuff is as it is encrypted.
So the IP address is worthless unless you figure out a way to guess what the stuff is, and who requested is.
See my other reply in this thread for further details.
As far as "who requested" the stuff, as you say in your other reply, they have some statistical arguments. I agree with the Freenet Project that they're very likely bullshit.
However, if you're facing criminal charges, you'd better have resources for expert testimony to discredit their arguments. And if you don't, accepting a plea bargain may be the best option. Even if you are truly innocent.
But generally, I'd rather avoid having a warrant served, and my stuff impounded. So advertising my IP address as a Freenet node seems like a dumb move.
Hi, I'm a Freenet developer of the past ~ 10 years, so I'd like to clarify upon this :) (The project is still active, there was a release just this week!)
While there technically were indeed lawsuits in the US, the situation is not as black and white as "it's dangerous".
It is an anonymizing peer-to-peer network as well! What is dangerous under certain circumstances is only one of the three modes to use it: 1) Opennet, where Freenet uses random strangers as peers. 2) Darknet, where you only connect to peers you manually select, e.g. your friends. 3) Opennet with some Darknet peers in addition (I'll call it "mixed mode").
So Opennet allows law enforcement to connect to your Freenet potentially and thus analyze your traffic. Still, this does not mean that your Freenet will plainly tell its peers what you are downloading! Traffic is always redirected across a random number of peers, none of which tells the others who requested it - which provides plausible deniability. All traffic is encrypted, only the recipient can decrypt it. So you cannot just watch traffic and filter out illegal JPEGs or whatever.
What LEA did then is to come up some math and then claim to deduct from it that there is a certain probability that the illegal downloads were requested by the people they claim it came from. Their math is known and discussed by the Freenet core team, it may be addressed eventually - but from watching the discussion (not the math) I can say it should be taken with a grain of salt. It's not absolute proof that the claimed downloaders were in fact the downloaders. It's just a probabilistic assumption, which may possibly be wrong because the way Freenet works is rather complex (>200 000 LOC).
So as Freenet stores content encrypted on random user's machines (which is the advantage over Tor, Freenet is completely decentralized!), it is imaginable that law enforcement accusses people who did not willingly download it, but just happened to store it.
But: You can use Freenet in Darknet or mixed mode to be reasonably safe: The more of your peers are not controlled by attackers, the lower the probability that a statistical attack can be conducted.
Further, the said legal cases only happened in the US to my knowledge, and I'd argue that the legal system of that country seems a bit flawed. Outside of the US you can just run Opennet and probably be at the same risk as some random non-exit Tor node. You transport traffic which you cannot look into (because its encrypted) and store files which you cannot look into (because they are encrypted), so what's illegal about it anyway?
Further, it should be clarified that this is not a problem specific to Freenet:
ANY network which tries to be anonymous will suffer from the so-called "sybil" attack if it connects to random strangers:
If an attacker runs e.g. 100 000 machines on a network of only 1000 actual users then the probability that a single user only has connections to them is very high.
And anonymization must rely upon redirecting traffic across multiple peers - but it cannot if all peers belong to the attacker.
To my understanding Tor addresses this problem by heuristics, e.g. closely monitoring important, big machines in their network, trying to ensure they are in fact distinct entities - but that is really just guesswork, not hard mathematical security.
If Tor wanted to be truly secure it would have to add a darknet mode as well.
I should have been clear that I was talking about opennet mode. If you want to use Freenet in darknet mode, among people who know each other well, and trust each other, it's at least safer than (say) using a private torrent tracker. I mean, torrent traffic is also encrypted, these days.
It's true that you're relatively safe from adversaries, if you only use darknet mode. But there's always the possibility that one or more of your peers will get busted through some other exploit. And that they cooperate, and become informants.
But in darknet mode, you can only communicate with your peers, and can only access stuff that you and they have uploaded. If you want to communicate with the global opennet, and share stuff with it, at least one of your peers must have opennet peers. And that exposes them, at least, to adversaries.
If they get busted, and cooperate, others in the darknet are now at risk, because an adversary could use their client to probe its peers. They couldn't add other peers to the darknet, however, without some social engineering.
So anyway, it's whatever nodes that peer with the global opennet which are the main risk. And to do that safely, one can use anonymously leased throwaway VPS as gateways to the global opennet. You reach them via Tor. So if they go down, adversaries don't learn anything actionable about the darknet itself.
If the dark web becomes popular though, won't the same people try to regulate it?
They could make .onion link illegal for ISPs to load and kill it overnight.
It's super difficult to build a low latency mix-net that covertly works inside an adversarial network.
In addition to the current models over which onion/garlic routing are based upon you would (at least) need to add to the core of your software traffic obfuscation, a series of covert channels, NAT bypass, ...
Tor and other mix networks simplify the problem assuming that there's a portion of the Internet that is free and introducing censorship circumvention mechanisms.
Of course, the assumption is increasingly untrue.
"People who use the darknet usually are up to no good. This simple realization should be reflected in our legal system."
and
"I understand why the darknet can be useful in autocratic systems. But in a free and open democracy, in my opinion, there is no legitimate use."
In this case, it helps if the evil US military actually does use Tor :)
I think it's more likely that most people will forget that the internet was once wide open and will accept the locked down state as normal.
You want to regain your freedom? Use not-for-profit, decentralized platforms instead. You can use Mastodon [0] instead of Twitter, PeerTube [1] instead of YouTube, Aether [2] instead of reddit, etcetera. Other interesting P2P projects are DAT's Beaker Browser [3], and ZeroNet [4]. None of those will have problems with Article 13.
[0] https://mastodon.social [1] https://joinpeertube.org [2] https://getaether.net [3] https://beakerbrowser.com/ [4] https://zeronet.io/
EDIT: "Such [content-sharing] services should not include services that have a main purpose other than that of enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity." This is from page 62 of the document wherein Article 13/17 is to be found.
if those communities are aiming for a break even at best, would those as well be considered "for profit", though?
Even an LLC or INC that loses money is a "for profit" company. Most VC funded startups fall into this category where they lose money each year with the goal of eventually turning a profit.
"Member States shall provide that, in respect of new online content-sharing service providers the services of which have been available to the public in the Union for less than three years and which have an annual turnover below EUR 10 million, calculated in accordance with Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC 20 , the conditions under the liability regime set out in paragraph 4 are limited to compliance with point (a) of paragraph 4 and to acting expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice, to disable access to the notified works or other subject matter or to remove those works or other subject matter from their websites.
Where the average number of monthly unique visitors of such service providers exceeds 5 million, calculated on the basis of the previous calendar year, they shall also demonstrate that they have made best efforts to prevent further uploads of the notified works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided relevant and necessary information."
Paragraph 4 says this:
"4. If no authorisation is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have: (a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and (b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event (c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b)."
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think this is quite illustrative. Anyhow, do you have an example of a small content-sharing service provider that would be affected? I'm sincerely curious. This is a personal opinion, but I don't think any content-sharing platform should profit from copyright infringement; I don't think forums or other kind of communities the main goal of which isn't to profit from that activity would be affected.
That is not a requirement to fall under Article 13! Are you maybe mistaking "copyright-protected material" for "copyright-INFRINGING material"? Every creative text and photo is "copyrighted material", so this covers any for-profit UGC platform.
MEP Reda proposed making the above change in the text, that proposal was rejected. So the broad coverage is intentional.
/s
How ironic.
But even if it plays a restrictive tune, what if we use /robots.txt to explicitly tell if the website or specific contents can be freely indexed & linked to?
It smells like an opportunity to reboot the Web in a less centralized fashion.
For now, but where will it stop (or will it)? Another commentor pointed out that even small services running ads to pay for hosting could be considered "for-profit". Maybe not now, but it's just a matter of when. First they came for the platforms run by big corporations...
If those small services' main purpose is "enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity", then they are turning a profit from copyright infringement, whether it is to pay for their hosting or not, so they will be targeted, as the document establishes. That's my take on it, at least, but I think it is quite clear.
Many of the cases out there involved people sharing on a large scale. Examples like The Pirate Bay or Sci-Hub or Aaron Swartz, which involve distribution of large amounts of content to large numbers of people.
The smaller the platform, the less anyone will care about it, even if it is distributing a little bit of copyrighted content. Small scale copyright violation is so widespread, and the benefits of fighting individual cases of it so small, that there's simply no value to taking it on and they aren't bothering.
ISPs will be forced into doing more of this if piracy becomes large scale decentralized, which it will.
Copyright enforcement is about ambulance chasing. Small time channels, like game streamers, who happen to have captured a game that has a music soundtrack, have received DMCA takedown requests.
What we're witnessing here is a misplaced "I hate big tech, so therefore I support anything I perceive as targeting them" resulting in collateral damage that makes every one else's life harder, benefiting mostly rent-seeking big publishers.
The decentralization-will-fix-it cryptoanarchy workaround is a pipe dream. Every so often people imagine an unbreakable piracy distributed darknet will circumvent laws and make piracy safe and convenient for everyone, but the reality is, as soon as it becomes the dominant form, the powers that be will turn their attention to it, and the attempts to crack down on it will be far far more invasive and surveillance heavy.
Just ask Napster, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa, Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, all of which were brought down by injunctions.
All of those were commercial outings trying to make money out of their proprietary piracy client software, the open source versions are still around, and even very old networks like ed2k is still up and running. The current 'dominant form' is bittorrent, and from what I can tell it is doing just fine.
Left out of this discussion is simply some Chinese company, like Douyin/Tiktok just hosting a Youtube competitor, and hoisting a giant middle finger to the EU. The EU will have to erect their own great firewall to stop it.
And yes, the networks that survived are small, and not making money, which is the correct outcome for a network built on wide-scale abuse of copyright. Your response backs up my point, about how the media goes after large scale infringers, rather than worrying about small-time offenses.
That the over-policing of copyright will cast a chilling effect on independent media creation, that it will affect fair use and transformative works, and that the EU copyright laws will cause all online providers to err on the side of false positives. If you think automated takedowns, de-monetization, and capricious account bans are bad now, just wait until platforms are put in the untenable position of facing either huge fines for under policing, or lesser punishments for over policing.
I already told you that distributed networks have been taken down by concerted government action. Torrent sites have been shutdown. People have been charged during the Napster-era for hundreds of thousands of $$$ for songs on their hard drive. Here, how does this back up your point: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...
As I pointed out, my ISP, Comcast, is already deep packet scanning network traffic and automatically flagging what it things are pirate activity.
You continually confuse real piracy, like someone uploading a whole movie or album, duped from pristine original source -- what I'd call bootleg copies, with stuff like a kid uploading a dance video to a backing track and going viral. Do you really think someone singing karaoke or dancing to a 30 year old song means that person should have their video taken down?
Even song covers, some girl or guy practicing singing, and and playing music on their own piano or guitar, gets taken down. I think that's absurd, especially for music decades old that was released before the singer was born. Artists being sued for sampling or chord sequences, against, a travesty. I've a big fan of Kirby Ferguson's _Everything is a Remix_, which points out that some of the biggest complainers of infringement of their work, are in fact, thieves themselves.
If YouTube becomes too hard for Europeans to publish on, because it turns into a hyper-curated nanny state, my point is, people may turn to TikTok, Bilibili, or others which will happily host the same content, but whose government cares little about helping to enforce foreign government ideas about IP. The end result of this law will be that it will be ineffectual in reducing piracy, but will be very effectual in casting a chilling effect on actual indie producers, and make it incredibly hard for competitors to YouTube start up in Europe.
Limit copyright to 14 years, the original duration (28 with renewable). That was the law for the first 180 years of copyright. Given the hyper-speed of internet time, if anything, copyright duration should be SHORTER not the century long disaster it is now. If you limited copyright to a much shorter term, I might be convinced to buy into your overly restrictionist stance, but as it is, lifetime+ copyright + orwellian enforcement mechanisms is a bridge too far.
Also, you do realize that most of the people concerned about losing the most money to copyright infringement are big international media companies and guilds, like Disney, or MPAA, RIAA, GEMA, etc and that you're essentially defending Disney Corp's right, whether you realize it or not, to block Star Wars parodies and fan films. Or GEMA's right to block your daughter's violin cover. Unless you think algorithm filters are going to magically determine 'fair use' between a kid cover, or a fan film, and a true bootleg, the end result is going to be platforms over-filtering.
I'll also point out that Max Schrems, whose strongly campaigns for GPDR and against Google and Facebook, actually is vehemently against Article 13, and backs mine and EFF's position.
Article 13 dooms smaller companies and startups, thus further entrenching these big corporations. There was a provision added to Article 13 to protect "small and medium-sized enterprises", but according to the EFF [0] this "protection" is fatally flawed. It only protects them for 3 years, or until they attain 5 million unique visitors, or until they attain annual revenues (not profits) of €10 million.
That's not to mention that the exceptions for not-for-profit services also has been regarded as vague, which could be problematic.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/european-copyright-dir...
Only "smaller companies and startups" whose main purpose is "enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity". That's what the document says; how it will actually be enforced is still a mystery, of course.
P. S. I have pointed to that "protection" on a previous comment [0].
Also that link appears to be dead, so I'm not sure what comment you're referring to.
I've vouched for it, hopefully a few other people with enough karma to do so will and it will resurrect itself.
Europe tries to catch up to the Silicon Valley startup scene. But stuff like this makes it pretty clear that EU is too retarded.
Can you elaborate why that is?
We're taking about teenagers here, so it's not always clear to them that they cannot use ripped sprites from other games, or music, or whatever.
Basically I can make the uploader responsible for what they upload.
The secondary problem is that my biggest competitor also has a lot of copyrighted material, so I'm already very careful with that not ending up on my platform.
With this new law, anyone can sue me if there might be some sprite on there that they created. If I was my (non-EU) competitor, I would anonymously upload some of my own content to sue the EU company. Basically I'm a sitting duck.
I'm currently working on my platform alone, so implementing a filter is impossible. Even with a big team it would be impossible, since slightly modified sprites are derived works and so also copyrighted.
But if I'm outside of the EU, I can just block that region (not the biggest one anyway, and after the UK leaves, not a single native English speaking country in there).
If I get a competitor from the EU in the far future, I just do the upload & sue trick.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Mandate-R...
Oi! Ireland and Malta would have a word with you, mate.
> I can just block that region (not the biggest one anyway
Not the biggest, but the richest.
Of course since I'm just a nobody on a forum what do I know.
It depends on what you mean by rich. From a GDP PPP perspective there are issues on short, medium and long term when compared with other countries. For example: China is richer than the whole of the EU (incl UK). US is almost as rich as the EU. India is 1/2 and Japan 1/4.
*By rich I mean GDP PPP.
Not only does the US have about ~40% of all the millionaires on earth all by itself, its GDP per capita is 77% higher than the EU ($33,700 per capita per the Worldbank 2017 figures; versus $59,700 that year for the US). Its nominal GDP is also about $2 trillion higher, despite having roughly 200 million fewer people.
PPP is a near worthless measurement if you're a business trying to sell goods. It's the absolute last thing you'd rely on to gauge the pricing power in a market for a product or service.
but I agree with you that from a business perspective the US is de facto the place to be.
Pretty scummy behaviour :(
This kind of behaviour is going to lead us to having two seperate internets.
> Not the biggest one anyway
True, but does it need to be the biggets to be valuable.
> not a single native English speaking country in there
Except there are native english speaking countries in there, and besides, europeans can very often (region dependent) read/write english anyway.
Also, do you just not want to support none english content? What about spanish speaking Americans?
I also think you'll lose many users in other eurasian countries that use an anonymising network and have exit nodes in the EU.
No, EU kind of behavior does, just like China behavior.
> True, but does it need to be the biggets to be valuable.
I have lots of users in US, Australia, New Zealand, various Asian countries, and UK. Focusing on them allows me to skip translations.
> europeans can very often (region dependent) read/write english anyway.
As a European myself (Belgian), I know this very well. The Netherlands and Flanders are probably leading in this. But the bigger countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain prefer translated software. Just look at the dubbed movies they watch.
It's a lose situation anyway for me, there is no question about that.
I don't even see them trying to do this...
The entire attitude that I should "regain [my] freedom" seems condescending. I don't want to use a P2P alternative to YouTube or Reddit, because 99% of the content is on Reddit/YouTube.
I'm well aware that YouTube collects and sells my personal data, I just don't care.
The idea that legislation is good because it forcefully restricts my choices (indirectly, by harming YouTube), thus preventing me from harming myself seems to be a form of unneeded parenting/hand-holding/babying that I'm not a fan of.
That's the catholic and lutheran authoritarian mindset that is deep ingrained into the minds of EU politicians and large parts of Europe itself, that's what they mean with "democracy". They don't really trust people and their individuality.
Just check the backgrounds of the politicians who voted in favor, you'll find that most have this religious background and distrust in people and are easily manipulated by others "higher up the chain", like those cultural snobs in Paris.
That might change once everybody gets forced off Reddit/Youtube. The best-case scenario here is suddenly starting to look like revival of the distributed, non-profit internet in Europe. If that's the case, I can live with losing Youtube.
Wouldn't the killer feature of these P2P platforms (admittedly, none of which I've ever used) be to have a 'transparent bridge' to the mainstream platforms? I.e., like SciHub, almost transparently pirate content from their original source? Do any of them have it?
https://www.politico.eu/pro/germany-weighs-in-on-copyright-w...
So, what happened to that? ^
Parliament wanted:
> Apply the law to platforms that “optimise and promote” significant amounts of user-uploaded works and are not small businesses (turnover below €10M and less than 50 employees)
According to: https://juliareda.eu/2018/10/copyright-trilogue-positions/
---
Upload filters must be installed by everyone except those services which fit all three of the following extremely narrow criteria:
* Available to the public for less than 3 years
* Annual turnover below €10 million
* Fewer than 5 million unique monthly visitors
The "5 million unique monthly visitors" point is concerning too, because that term is not clearly defined.
One of my priorities in the next two years is to protect as much of the decentralised Web from the effects of the Copyright Directive, but it's not going to be easy. The large platforms, in their negotiations with the rightsholders who pushed for this directive, will have the explicit intent to turn it into a moat that can limit the growth of competitors, including non-commercial alternatives.
The rightsholders see even the smallest platform as a lawless environment that has no redeeming features, and worse than the now-regulated giants. Without active and co-ordinated lobbying by decentralised Net advocates, they will paint these alternatives as a "new generation of Pirate Bays", just as they did with YouTube and its predecessors.
Well, if that's true, then the big question becomes what counts as for-profit. Do you need to be incorporated? What about a blog that has some ads to pay for server costs? Will Europeans be able to upload to Youtube as long as they turn monetisation off?
If being non-profit is the big way out, then that goes a long way to mitigate the damage from this. Although it still sucks for small content creators who do want to monetize their own creations but lack the resources to create their own platform.
Youtube is the target of this law and as they earn money with your video, they have to comply with European law, if they want to be active in Europe.
It was always the excuse that 'only the big bad capitalists' will be hurt by this, but its simply not the case and has always been a false premise.
1) The legislation in question has nothing to do with protecting individuals privacy.
2) The solutions you offer are essentially not productized, they are not usable to normal people.
3) There is absolutely nothing wrong with companies making money.
This legislation is not being driven by Google and Facebook, it's being drive by Der Spiegel, Le Figaro, The Times etc..
It's also being driven by scared EU legislators who think that all their surpluses are going to American companies, it's a very weak hand to play, the 'strong hand' would be to have exceptional firms in Europe, doing things there.
If Google were a Germany company, this legislation would not exist. Surely German media firms would still want it, but since the surpluses from the situation would remain in the EU, then legislators would be less assertive about it, to the point wherein I think it would fail.
Instead of this legislation, we need:
1) Some tighter privacy rules that actually do affect G and FB
2) Taxation rules for the 20th century - ironically, this is an EU problem as they have Ireland/Netherlands/Luxembourg as their own loopholes
3) Stronger local entities, particularly in Europe to create a balance, that would lead to less motivation for political interference.
I take issue when people use the word profit to mean some evil, shameful thing. Youtube has amazing content and tools, and I'm sure a lot of their profit is re-invested in the platform. I doubt these other platforms come close in terms of functionality and UX. Peertube site design looks like it's from 2005. I know that might not be indicative of their core features, but first impressions are important, and this does not bode well.
There's a reason mainstream users never flock to these decentralized platforms: they don't have the fit and finish of a commercial venture.
You left out the "by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy, and having a persuasive (addictive) design in order to glue you to the screen so they can maximize their ad revenue, dismissing any human cost those practices entail" part. I don't associate the word profit with a bad connotation univocally; that's only an assumption on your end.
But yeah, Facebook tries to make Facebook a site you want to visit. Youtube wants you to watch YouTube. Should they try to make sites that aren't engaging?
Maximising ad revenue also seems not terrible for users? A week ago I saw an ad for some pants, and I'm wearing them now. I spent ages walking around town looking for pants I liked. Hopefully next week they start showing me shoes. IMO advertisers and these platforms tend to have incentives pretty closely aligned with their users'.
(Dunno about selling data. I thought that had stopped happening, and I don't like the idea.)
Sure, the internet mammoths of today make their profit tat way, but this legislation is probably going to be around for a very long time. Platforms of the future might find other ways to make a profit. (Or they might not, because legislation of this sort makes it much harder for a new platform to rise and challenge the mammoths)
And then there is the question how "for profit" is defined.
try convincing _anyone_ who isn't already on one of those platforms to switch. It's nice on-paper to say "don't like? don't use" but it's not going to happen.
Wikipedia probably stands alone as a not-for-profit (as do, incidentally, government-sponsored services - so in the UK, BBC should be fine for any liability, but Sky would be screwed, for instance.)
26 March 2019. The day the Internet died.
(at least in Europe)
But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- so what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels into other countries.
That'd be interesting. It'd render GeoIP rather moot, among other things. I suspect the EU and Member States' response would be either "VPNs are banned" or "no service catering for EU users may talk through a VPN endpoint".
No. The day the ”Upload Other People's Work" Internet died.
> what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels
Or just creating their own content. Wouldn't that be awesome?
Even better still: there's a song which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. That's it - silence.
"Your latest video upload contains 5 seconds of stunned silence, which has been identified as an extract of 4'33". This extract is copyrighted. Your video has been deleted."
Just having a urinal doesn't infringe on Duchamp's "Fountain", not even if it's the same model, only if it is presented as artwork does it become a copy of Duchamp's "work".
True, for 4'33'' there is a simple rule that they probably follow - ignore silence :). But for Fountain (if it ever came up) it's hard to imagine that the difference between a protected copy and a non-protected similar image could really be automatically discovered.
But the filter doesn't know about context, it just correlates two images... and you get "Comparison with copyrighted work 'Fountain', 75% match".
75% > 0%, so the filter says "non".
> decisions to disable access to or remove uploaded content shall be subject to human review
intended to handle those cases? I'm not saying that it will be adequate.
"Sorry, the video you uploaded 'Me playing Beethoven on the piano' contains BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY by BMG-EMI-XYZ Music Corp. You cannot upload this video."
Yes it's true XYZ Music Corp would only own that performance (as it's Beethoven and the piece is long out of copyright). The problem is, the automatic filter is a fuzzy matcher: it compares the upload against every other performance of Beethoven's 5th it's been programmed to recognise.
Let's say our uploader has been learning from one of those performances. Their performance will sound very similar to another pianist's -- at least to the fuzzy-matcher.
And therein lies the problem: the uploader's piece is clearly copyright to them, but the magic upload filter can't tell the difference.
It's like uploading a silent theatre production (let's say some kind of homage to silent films) and the upload being flagged for violating the copyright in 4'33".
> Article 17/9: Where rightholders request to have access to their specific works or other subject matter disabled or those works or other subject matter removed, they shall duly justify the reasons for their requests. Complaints submitted under the mechanism provided for in the first subparagraph shall be processed without undue delay, and decisions to disable access to or remove uploaded content shall be subject to human review. Member States shall also ensure that out-of-court redress mechanisms are available for the settlement of disputes. Such mechanisms shall enable disputes to be settled impartially and shall not deprive the user of the legal protection afforded by national law, without prejudice to the rights of users to have recourse to efficient judicial remedies. In particular, Member States shall ensure that users have access to a court or another relevant judicial authority to assert the use of an exception or limitation to copyright and related rights.
So this also encourages to appeal in court against the current very opaque content upload policies. Certainly this is not strictly better than the current situation (where you can be arbitrarily banned), but definitely progress compared to the situation today, where platforms just act like they see fit.
> Article 17/7: The cooperation between online content-sharing service providers and rightholders shall not result in the prevention of the availability of works or other subject matter uploaded by users, which do not infringe copyright and related rights, including where such works or other subject matter are covered by an exception or limitation.
So overblocking will be costly as well, if enough suitable laws are signed into effect and people start complaining. And this really puts large scale commercial (remember non-profits are exempt) sites in a though spot: they either share revenue with content-creators/their organisations (which are mostly s*, but could be changed...) or they employ even more moderators (remember the small paragraph, where banning is to be done by humans ;)) – which all severly limits the current exploitation of the internet as a big chunk of empty space, where the strongest strongman is going to grab the biggest slice and employs an army of user-slaves.
> Article 17/10: For the purpose of the stakeholder dialogues, users' organisations shall have access to adequate information from online content-sharing service providers on the functioning of their practices with regard to paragraph 4.
I guess already today a lot of people would like to know, how Content-ID blocks their content, but Google can't and won't say (because it will show their dirty secrets...).
=> IMO: all in all, for the average person, the internet might develop back to where it was 20 years ago with select content-providers and quite a large proportion of actual people hosting fun stuff (and moderating their own boards...). If people are as IT-literate as they claim to be (although I doubt that for the large percentage of fortnite-playing #saveyourinternet-people) we might as well enter a real golden age of the internet.
You call your lawyer and ask them to sue (as an example) Google.
I expect the response would be something to the effect of "are you mad, rich or both? Because this is going to take a long time and be very expensive."
Hasn't stopped big companies from making false claims before. After all they are the ones responding (and likely rejecting) the appeal of the uploader. See: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/sorry-sony-music...
> And we know that detecting that certain recording via music matching does not work, only checking the strong hash of it would work. Which would be trivial to circumvent by a single bit-flip.
So you're saying that even Google hasn't made upload filters work reliably? Who can if not the company behind Youtube?
They would need to match all EU copyrighted work. There's not even a database of EU copyrighted work. Because our copyright law works differently than in the US. There's no exact OCR or proper fuzzy matching of video or audio possible. Maybe with success rates of 60%. This is too risky for a big content provider. Esp. dealing with an entity who has no idea what they are talking about (the EU parliament).
Just because you could doesn't mean it's feasible from a financial point of view.
A real problem would be the usually long wait.
However, taking into account several more circumstances, either side might not be keen on a court case, and thus provide to avoid it. That hinges on morals and technical details.
The problem with copyright's blurry edges around the originality threshold hasn't changed at least. The Olympics organisation is famous for suing, and loosing often enough, over its trademarks, for example.
> take on a major media company in court
In court or outside? And why the media companies? Laws can be repealed by supreme courts on constitutional grounds. That's an even bigger judicial hurdle to consider. If lobbying or legislative orders are involved, it would be a superset of the problem, as the court is to an extend bound by the lawgivers interpretation of the law, disregarding any side effects that are implementation specific. That's the undefined behaviour of the law. The service nulled all your bits after you passed ownership? The content wasn't registered initially and you assumed it was licensed to null? Ohohoho, none of those side-effects were mandated.
So yes, its still an invalid flag, but if you want your video up again, you have to sue somebody who is probably in another country
Measures like this only serve Big Content. And badly, in my opinion.
There is consequence for failing to honour substantiated ones.
I've never, ever heard of a single charge being filed under that clause -- but I've heard of tons of instances of DMCA being abused. On this statement, I'd love to be proven wrong!
So basically useless. They claim to be acting "on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" and they are, even though the allegation is completely without merit.
/s
No
This law does nothing to change that in any case. Get a (US law) DMCA takedown, and ignore it, job done.
Now that americans are realising that other countries exist, and make laws like the DMCA, maybe they'll stop doing it.
Reminds me of the Dropbox launch thread here on HN a decade ago where some sysadmin chimes in with "but this is so easy for the layman to do themselves with FTP and [other technologies laypeople have never heard of]" (not an actual quote).
The blogosphere was similar to that, before everyone gave up and went to Facebook.
Will they analyze each video if it is a illegal or legal one, checking everything... or just implement a simple, fast and cheap filter that will block most of the content, with no way to appeal the ruling, just like youtube is doing now...
That way they need to shamefully roll back this law, and we're sure they don't try to pull off such a farce in the (near) future.
People on YouTube are creating content, lots of it. Will they still create it when some filter keeps blocking them?
If you want pirated stuff, just download torrents. They won't disappear with this new law.
The only thing that will appear are filters.
Therefore every platform provider visible in the EU (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, every blog, newspaper comment sections, ...) needs to stop accepting user content, because they cannot guarantee that copyright violations will not occur. They cannot be filtered and not detected. Think e.g. of song texts in images. Will you OCR every image for a work? There does exist a foolproof method to bypass AI, it's called captcha. Even if you install comment or upload submission queues with manual labor ("manual filtering"), you cannot guarantee copyright violations, only courts can do that.
The politicians might have thought of an GEMA-like index to store hashes of protected content in some form or another, which could be distributed to content certain providers, but this doesn't affect the law, which is much broader and not fulfillable. Thus Web 2.0 is dead.
If I would be Facebook I would rather ignore said new laws and go to court over it. The existing framework is good enough, the best way to handle copyright violations.
- use of unlicensed samples in music. Goodbye, Soundcloud rap and EDM music scenes!
- use of images and video clips in memes. Goodbye, Tumblr and Reddit!
Until Disney/Comcast/Weyland-Yutani decides that their own your original content. Or the content-id'ing algorithm generates a false positive. Just think a little bit about how all of this will be implemented.
It will either be the end of any kind of user participation on the European internet, or everything that happens has to pass through Google's filter. Neither are good options for internet freedom.
Note that Google's Youtube filter already has a tendency to block people's own content when it resembles content of the big copyright holders. For example: someone playing a piece from Bach on the piano when Sony has also released a recording of that piece from Bach. Youtube will flag that, Sony is fine with that, and small content creators don't have the resources to fight it.
That situation will get a lot worse.
This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
I haven't seen any support for the articles which actually shows the effects of the policy will be good, rather than arguments saying "it's meant to be good". Which is a fallacy that affects many politics which later end up having adverse effects.
But ultimately bureaucrats are happy whenever there is an excuse to increase bureaucratic power.
Edit: spelling
Further edit:
For the particular point you're putting out, to justify the EU policy you have to at least show that 1) those media outlets would receive all that traffic that those FB posts generated if the FB posts didn't exist in the first place, 2) that this outweighs costs from abusing that policy (claims over fair use, e.g. youtube copyright system) and content that simply will not get reshared, even if fair use and linking to the source material, out of fear of triggering the safeguards mechanism
I was just trying to put in perspective WHY the politicians feel the need to do this. It's mostly backlash against Facebook for years of content stealing.
Youtube and itś content ID system are actually what this law wants to introduce everywhere. While not perfect, it's still better than Facebook, which seems to be lawless on copyright.
In fact, it's all about the music industry wanting higher licensing payments from YouTube: At least as much per play as e.g. Apple Music pays. They call the fact that they're not getting that today the "value gap" – THAT'S the undisputed reason/justification for this law (just google the term).
(Facebook, by the way, also has a content filter: https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/330407020882707)
I think this sort of reasoning is largely fallacious. Just because people view your stuff doesn't mean that if you're successful in locking it down that they'll then pay to view it.
I feel the media companies know this and that's one reason they demand ever increasing copyright terms - to avoid older content eating in to current profits.
And be definition this can be seen as a loss since the viewing itself is the revenue generator.
This is a law that works to mainly serve the big copyright holders, and in a second degree, impacts the big tech multinationals (=read US companies) less than the smaller ones.
It makes no sense at all. Especially since all member states will have their own law. "Does our filter comply with Belgium law? Also with Luxemburg? And what about Slovenia?".
It's a big farce, that can only be approved by total morons that don't even bother to listen to people who actually know what they're talking about.
The proportionality requirement in the text of Art. 13 is more onerous to larger corporations. If you're a tiny blog with a banner ad or two, you're not getting slapped off the internet for having a comments field, because it isn't proportional to require cost and complexity increases of multiple orders of magnitude to police your comments section. Unless someone comes up with Compliance.ly & Co. which does the work for you at a price-point that is reasonable, in which case we've just opened up a new industry which hopefully results in Content ID going the way of the Dodo.
After some litigation occurs in which the boundaries of proportionality are set, we'll be in a better position to analyze the impact of this law.
Do you think Spotify would be able to grow if it was created on March 27 2019 instead of 2008?
A successful Content filtering as a service (compliance.ly & co. In your example), assuming it gets adopted by all major websites, seems like it would shift the problem to an even bigger gatekeeper than YouTube, how is this a good thing?
Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important.
The articles, as written, are interesting because they already mention a ton of the balancing considerations. All of those are completely absent in these conversations.
Do you know why that's an issue? Because sometime soon people are going to start getting bullshit copyright trolling demand letters, and all this furor about how the internet is dead is going to convince them to close up shop or cave instead of saying 'nah, serve me your originating documents, this is a bogus claim'.
And that's how the internet will die.
>Do you think Spotify would be able to grow if it was created on March 27 2019 instead of 2008?
If the competitive landscape was the same? Yes. In fact, Spotify's arc is exactly what this law is attempting to encourage. As they grew, they became a quasi licensing clearinghouse instead of another Napster or Limewire. That's the entire point.
>how is this a good thing?
Because you don't end up with 1 compliance service, and you can litigate against the compliance service if they're inappropriately killing your content creation business. As it stands now, if you try to fight YouTube or the content delivery pipeline itself on the basis of their filters, you die. That's not necessarily the case if there's a healthy competitive filter ecosystem. Whether or not we get to that point is another question, though.
In practice, it will all be up to the judge:
1. Was your AI filter adequate enough to properly filter the content
2. If not, how high can the fine be?
There is 1 easy solution to all of this: incorporate outside of the EU.
That's the case for any piece of legislation.
The test isn't 'if your AI was good enough'. For the majority of people the most important part is: 'is it proportional to even use AI at your size?'
To which the answer is no.
If you're running a stream or youtube channel of self-created content, the cost of moving dramatically exceeds the total cost of legal risk you're eating in staying put.
How does the EU legislation change how that works? It already exists.
Edit: Content ID already covers the requirements of Art. 13 under any reasonable reading of the legislation. Things aren't going to get worse because of the legislation. They'll get worse because of pressure from their content partners and because they refuse to spend on human support. Why spend when you can do nothing instead?
Your speculation doesn't make legal or business sense.
But hey, if you are outside of the EU, no problem. So guess what streamers will do.
This is not rocket science you know. This is just simple cause and consequence.
Stricter filters for EU citizens. And hey, maybe if we are lucky, YouTube decides EU isn't worth the effort anymore and decide to use the block filter.
1b. Regardless of (1), can you prove you made "best efforts" to acquire licenses for the content that was later found on your platform.
It's not specified who you should be seeking deals with, how you're supposed to know ahead of time what a user will upload, how you're supposed to identify the true rightsholders of an uploaded work, etc.
That criterion must even be fulfilled when you're less than 3 years old, by the way!
The problem is the proportionality requirements are poorly designed. It would be one thing if requirements increased solely with revenue, but increasing with time or user count is purely destructive.
Plenty of small services will hit the time limit before they're big, and then the costs destroy them before they have a chance to be. And the fact that that's likely to happen will keep many people from even trying to begin with.
And user count doesn't mean anything if the profit per user is low. Many side projects have a million users, that doesn't mean it's making any money that could be used to spend on filters -- many of them are lucky to even pay for all of their own hosting costs.
> Do you know why that's an issue? Because sometime soon people are going to start getting bullshit copyright trolling demand letters, and all this furor about how the internet is dead is going to convince them to close up shop or cave instead of saying 'nah, serve me your originating documents, this is a bogus claim'.
That's a different problem. If there were real penalties for making false copyright claims then there wouldn't be so many fraudulent demand letters. I don't think as many people would be objecting to "copyright reform" if it did that.
I don't think this is the issue. The requirements aren't set out in detail, and will largely be fleshed out by the courts. This is where the reality of Art. 13 will be set - in the rulings which follow.
Also, elements in a test don't react linearly in court judgements. Scaling from 100 users to 200 isn't going to suddenly mean that it's proportional for you to implement Content ID from scratch or that an applicable fine doubles.
The mental calculus I see here just doesn't take into account how courts work.
>That's a different problem. If there were real penalties for making false copyright claims then there wouldn't be so many fraudulent demand letters. I don't think as many people would be objecting to "copyright reform" if it did that.
I think most people can agree that the cut and dry abuse of copyright and copyright-adjacent systems should be penalized. But it is. Just not at the scale of individual content producers. If someone tried to extort you by placing false copystrikes on your work and you had proof, you would have a few torts or more general omnibus civil code provisions to use in most jurisdictions. But the cost and hassle of doing so might be higher than your expected return.
Justice doesn't scale linearly, which is a very, very big problem -- but not one that's unique to the Art 11/13 debate.
But that's part of the problem. It means a service you operate today is subject to a law that will be decided on tomorrow. So you either make the conservative choice, which is onerously expensive and may put you out of business immediately, or you risk being the case of first impression where the more cost effective choice you made is decided to be insufficient, and that too puts you out of business -- but only after you've dedicated years of your life to it.
> Also, elements in a test don't react linearly in court judgements. Scaling from 100 users to 200 isn't going to suddenly mean that it's proportional for you to implement Content ID from scratch or that an applicable fine doubles.
Users don't scale linearly either. Things have network effects. Side projects get posted to HN or similar and go from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands in the course of an afternoon.
And again, just because you have a lot of users doesn't mean you make a lot of money. Your project may have had a million users for a decade, but if the revenue from those users is only just covering your hosting costs as it is, now you're out of business.
> I think most people can agree that the cut and dry abuse of copyright and copyright-adjacent systems should be penalized. But it is. Just not at the scale of individual content producers. If someone tried to extort you by placing false copystrikes on your work and you had proof, you would have a few torts or more general omnibus civil code provisions to use in most jurisdictions. But the cost and hassle of doing so might be higher than your expected return.
Which means that it isn't, because then nobody does that and there is no penalty for continuing to do it in practice. And the solution to that is quite straight forward -- make the penalty for a false claim sufficiently large, and the process for having it enforced sufficiently simple, that it justifies the victim in spending that amount of time to enforce the penalty.
Moreover, even the existing penalties are quite useless because the biggest problem isn't overtly fraudulent claims, it's the extremely high volume of false positives the claimants have no real incentive to reduce.
No, it isn't. Tech changes rapidly, and legislation quite simply isn't going to be able to encode a specific contextual mutating standard. Law isn't wrong to offload that analysis to an institution that is in the thick of it, with access to expert testimony and amicus information to inform it. You WANT the EFF and other advocates being able to weigh in on how the balancing factors should work and you want the courts to listen.
>Side projects get posted to HN or similar and go from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands in the course of an afternoon.
Yes, and then 95% of those go back down to pre-spike levels of interest. If they's the odd exception which has a massive sustained uptick for their service which promoted copyright protected works, now they can think about licensing and formalizing their processes to protect all stakeholders now that they're a success.
Just because Napster was once small doesn't mean their business model was going to be exempt from attention forever.
> And the solution to that is quite straight forward -- make the penalty for a false claim sufficiently large, and the process for having it enforced sufficiently simple, that it justifies the victim in spending that amount of time to enforce the penalty.
That's not simple. Courts do not afford less due process to larger penalties. The cost is in the complexity; who owns the rights, what did they know about their claim, how easy was the mistake to make, etc. Proving this to a court that has no starting knowledge of what's going on requires money to compile information, prepare briefs, etc.
We like to believe there's no Kolgomorov complexity associated with getting justice, but getting justice requires translating reality into consensus at some level of fidelity. That process is EXPENSIVE.
>the biggest problem isn't overtly fraudulent claims, it's the extremely high volume of false positives the claimants have no real incentive to reduce
Maybe on Youtube that's the case, but that's more of an issue with us having a system of private algorithmic arbitration, which is a seperate issue. The courts are too expensive to follow up on individual claims, and the only alternative is for content holders to sue youtube for big $$$ through content collectives (the threat of which is why we are where we are).
That is separate from the problem that the "new law" created by the court is being imposed ex post facto on actions you've already taken.
It means you don't know what the law actually is yet when you're trying to comply with it. That kind of uncertainty leads people to make overly conservative choices that make beneficial projects uneconomical, or just causes them to give up because it's not worth investing years of your life in something you don't know the courts won't unexpectedly blow apart.
And if you want someone to take input from the EFF et al then why should we wait until it's already in court instead of doing that in the legislature before passing a bad law to begin with?
> Yes, and then 95% of those go back down to pre-spike levels of interest.
But the fact that they did have a million users for twelve months may get them hauled into court.
> If they's the odd exception which has a massive sustained uptick for their service which promoted copyright protected works, now they can think about licensing and formalizing their processes to protect all stakeholders now that they're a success.
Again, you're assuming that success comes with popularity. If you're losing money on every user you can't make it up on volume.
There are projects operated by individuals with a large number of users that operate at a net loss. If you say to those people that they have to implement Content ID because they have too many users, those projects are dead.
And the projects that actually are successful would have high revenue, so the only projects ensnared by a user count limit but not a revenue limit are the ones that are barely making it as it is.
> Courts do not afford less due process to larger penalties. The cost is in the complexity; who owns the rights, what did they know about their claim, how easy was the mistake to make, etc. Proving this to a court that has no starting knowledge of what's going on requires money to compile information, prepare briefs, etc.
Yes, exactly, so if that process is used then the penalty would need to be sufficient to justify the victim in going through that process.
But now let me ask you this. How is it that we're willing to impose a prior restraint without going through that process but not a penalty for false claims?
Yes, this happens in all industries that have cases being litigated all the time. In some instances, areas of settled law are completely upended by new rulings that change the status quo and force people to spend money on complying with the new state of affairs.
Yes, it sucks, but this is business as normal. The tension between certainty and flexibility in the law is a longstanding one.
You want these elements decided at the court level because these elements change, and legislation needs to be good law for a looooong time, whereas a shitty ruling can be blown up in months (sometimes in days).
>But the fact that they did have a million users for twelve months may get them hauled into court.
If they had a million users on a platform that shares and promotes other people's copyrighted works without a license, I'd sure hope they figured out their IP strategy.
> If you say to those people that they have to implement Content ID because they have too many users, those projects are dead.
Why would they need to implement Content ID...? That's the nuclear option in the field.
Do you think a blog's comment section needs filtering unless it becomes a common vector for sharing copyrighted material? It doesn't.
The objective isn't to nuke small companies - it is to strike a fair balance between distribution and content creation. No one wants distribution dead.
And court decisions that make major changes like that are rare, exactly because they result in widespread burdensome changes to existing behavior that would have been less burdensome if what was required had been better specified to begin with.
If you pass a law that requires such a court decision to happen before anybody knows how to comply with the law, what is anyone supposed to do in the meantime?
Especially when many of the questions are obvious, not bothering to answer them is just punting because they know the answers will be problematic.
> If they had a million users on a platform that shares and promotes other people's copyrighted works without a license, I'd sure hope they figured out their IP strategy.
Everything with user generated content is "a platform that shares and promotes other people's copyrighted works" and they're intended to be licensed from the user/creator. That the platform has no good way to know when what the user uploads is unlicensed is the whole problem.
And if they didn't have some way to do that when they were small then they don't have it when they first become big either. If you need a solution before you have a million users then you need a solution before you have a million users -- and then we're imposing the same burden on the little guy as on Google, if the little guy ever hopes to become Google without promptly getting sued into the ground.
I also reiterate that user count is unrelated to resource level. An individual can operate a platform with a million users and make no profit from it, but impose a laborious content filtering requirement and that platform is gone.
That is presumably the sort of thing they're trying to protect with language about non-profits, but this is where the ambiguity bites us again. If an individual operates a forum as a labor of love where the ads break even with the hosting costs, is that non-profit or not? What if some years there is a "profit" of $200/year? An individual who doesn't want to be bankrupted by lawsuits is not going to enjoy rolling the dice there.
> Why would they need to implement Content ID...?
We don't know what they would need.
> Do you think a blog's comment section needs filtering unless it becomes a common vector for sharing copyrighted material?
Are blog comments not copyrighted material?
How is the platform supposed to know what is being shared there without reading it all?
> The objective isn't to nuke small companies - it is to strike a fair balance between distribution and content creation. No one wants distribution dead.
The objective of DMCA 1201 wasn't to keep farmers from repairing their tractors.
The issue is the divergence between their stated objective and what they did.
Also: https://torrentfreak.com/german-data-privacy-commissioner-so...
The concern over data-use at filtering service companies is new to me and interesting but substantially mitigated if they are compliant with GDPR. I haven't seen this argument before, so I'll have to take a look. Thanks!
In 2013/2014 Ministry of Sound sued Spotify over not removing playlists based on Ministry compilations, created by Spotify’s users. Ministry claimed that its compilations qualified for copyright protection due to the selection and arrangement involved. [1] [2]
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/27/spotify-m... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/04/ministry-...
I'm sure everyone is dreaming of having a "tiny blog"</irony>
Meanwhile in the real world, the European streamers and content creators, who make a living from their content, are looking on how to escape the EU so their content doesn't get filtered out.
I did. I've followed every public draft of the language as its developed.
The article does not do what people are claiming it does. The internet is not dead. Small content creators are not being wiped out. The big tech giants are not creating yet another regulatory moat.
There are plenty of real problems with Article 13 that deserve discussion and elaboration so that when the first cases come out, they get decided properly, but this isn't a nuclear bomb that blows up the net and makes it a corporate-only zone.
You clearly didn't.
From the text itself: "for less than three years and which have an annual turnover below EUR 10 million"
Do you see the "and" there? This means that ANY business that is older than 3 NEEDS to comply with filters.
I read the text, because it directly impacts my platform. The solution is: start a foreign corporation.
Your comments here, and in your other posts where you think that streamers have "legal" problems, clearly indicate that you have completely no clue what you are talking about.
Small content creators will be filtered out, and small platforms will need to comply to all the different laws of each EU country. This is crazy.
I did. I wrote at length about it in the previous thread, and provided links to the language of the articles as well as the elements that were ignored.
You need to read ALL of the language to understand how the proportionality requirement impacts the scope delimitation requirement you're listing.
If you don't do that, you end up with a broken understanding of how the gears fit together.
The legislation does have holes in it, but they aren't that 'small content creators will be filtered out'. People aren't going to litigate against small content creators in the first place. They're going to get smacked by Content ID, which is already ruining livelihoods, but which is a completely separate issue from the EU legislation.
Its about the implications, how it relates to the status quo online and how the digital economy works. What they're trying to enforce is just irrational and goes against the natural flow of things. They're nuts.
They see overcomplexity not as a problem, but as a source of pride and a major bragging point. It is actually a massive clash of cultures even though they come from the same place as the people they are trying to govern.
It's election year. Since the big publishers are all for the reform, any politicians opposing it must fear for bad press.
Strengthening privacy protection makes the most popular model for sites to pay for content creation and operating costs--selling information about their visitors to advertisers--much less effective.
Maybe as part of that they want to make it more viable for sites to switch to a direct selling of content model?
1: prevent any free news websites from linking to their pay-walled website and paraphrasing/quoting the whole thing (most people won't pay for the original news source when they can read practically the same thing from a free website). Article 11 prevents this without compensation to the original source.
2: prevent any single user who has access to the pay-walled website from posting the entire article onto websites like hacker news and reddit which I see happen all the time (that and outline/archive links). Article 13 prevents this with automated filters that if fail, the news website can just sue the website and get compensated that way.
This law intent is to prevent unlicensed content to be available to European consumer. That will probably mostly work, with the usual caveat and unintended consequences we all know about, here on HN.
Is the way this legislation got through because of nasty lobbying? What if it was brought in to stem the tide of American tech companies destroying more European businesses by hiding taxes and dodging copyrights.
>Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse.
Europe has plenty of 'content powerhouse' companies. They just don't wear their nationality on their chest when they sell to the US.
We are no content powerhouse precisely because we are so concerned about all these bureaucratic things. Instead of just distributing better content more efficiently, we prefer to make it illegal to be better than the status quo.
Can't speak for all of Europe, but Internet-related legislation here in Germany has been a disaster since the mid-1990s.
Germany also probably has the strongest tech industry in Europe. Or at least as strong as France and the UK, it seems.
It's also why China has such lax IP laws. They are more of a manufacturing powerhouse than an IP powerhouse ( for now at least ) so they have little to gain with stringent IP laws. When their IP portfolio increases, you can bet that their government would be all about IP protection.
And going back even further, we had some of the laxest IP laws in the western world during the 1800s because we had so little IP to protect. Which allowed our businesses to take a ton of IP from IP-rich britain and europe.
It's greed and selfishness.
Google could have stopped all this be immediately kicking off all european newspapers from every google service they have and reinstating them only after they fill out and submit the form that they allow google to use their stuff without any pay.
Instead google only threatened to do this and european newspapers thought they have some power.
The only power they have is making and breaking european politicians, hence current mess.
They did exactly that when germany introduced the "Leistungsschutzrecht", which was pushed and lobbied for by all major german publishers. Needless to say they all agreed to offer their snippets for free when Google present them with their options.
A friendly reminder that this was said about TCP/IP. It does not apply to the application layer (WWW), neither in theory nor in practice.
- Online signatures? Gets laughed out of the room. They could be fake, they don't mean anything, they are paid, etc..
- Voting? Voting cycles are too long and voting decisions cannot be made on a single issue, so this is ineffective at best.
- Street Protests? It seems this is the only option. But as said in the article, even the credibility of these can be put into question.
So what do we do?
Same goes for your countries own election cycle.
Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system?
For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.
To be honest in France almost nobody knows who is seating at the European Parliament, we have absolutely no visibility to what is being voted, even less who voted what.
A commonly accepted view (at least around me, I might be biased) is that our representatives there are useless, whoever they are. We had about 60% abstention in 2014's elections, I think that says it all.
It should be available on the site of the european parliament as well.
Isn't it nice that the people deciding about the future of internet are doing that by passing around word documents like it's 2001? I wonder how many people here can imagine a more readable presentation of such data...
To quote J-Cole's BRACKETS
I'll write a check to the IRS, my pockets get slim
Damn, do I even have a say 'bout where it's goin'?
Some older nigga told me to start votin'
I said "Democracy is too fuckin' slow"
If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know
Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018
Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen
Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen
Dictate where my money go, straight into the palms of some
Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia: if you think anything referencing technologies like "upload filters" (their simple EXISTENCE!) is about anything then enabling tools of totalitarian mass control of sheeple.
In a normal open society people are free to put whatever they want up online. Now if someone else realizes afterwards that it violates their copyright, they can ask for it to be taken down in a certain interval of time, and if you or the platform don't agree about this, you proceed to settle the dispute in court. Even DMCA and such kind of work this way: after something ends up online you can solicit it to go down!
Same with people: you allow people in, and if they do illegal stuff (this may include whatever your laws want to say, including staying too much without holding a job or creating a business, whatever, write it in your laws) you kick them out or throw them in jail.
If go the other way, it's easy for the "Overton window" to slide over you and you'll go from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until you can prove innocence (or racial purity or whatever)" in a jiffy...
Once you're talking "walls" and "upload filters" you're on the path to some kind of fascism or natzysm, regardless of how you call it, and whether it's state or corporate powered (yeah, Google and Facebook will be more than happy making profits selling "upload filters" or "border control people screening technologies" just as well, they don't care where the $ comes from)...
Sorry, but you have it backwards. It isn't some "totalitarian nationalist utopia" that passed those laws, but the "European union".
And nation states are not by any definition "totalitarian". If anything, the rise of democracy in the modern world came along with the rise of the nation states.
What we had before was feudal kingdoms and autocratic empires. People revolted, spilt blood, and fought, to have their own nation states and be able to govern themselves directly, according to their will, custom, and local interests.
European Union, which nobody asked for, wasn't a grassroot movement, but a high-level top-down project (from rich industrialists, diplomats, and others post WWII) that was imposed upon Europe's nation states step by step. It has met longstanding popular reaction long before today (from the late 70s, onto Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, the Euro-constitution being discarded by popular vote again and again, referendums from different countries ignored or repeated (repleat with propaganda) until EU bureucrats got the results they wanted, etc, and so on, to today's Yellow Vests.
EU is a bureaucratic regression to empire-dom, only instead of an emperor there are private interests and bureaucrats ruling it.
And the popular vote is so removed from the actual decision making, and so diluted among dozens of states with different interests (some of which have big economies and influence, bribe, or threat a number of satellites and dependents for their political alliance) that might as well not exist.
That's what we're "enjoying" today with this vote, not some "dark" national dystopias...
(A united Europe under common government was, incidentally and ironically, the dream of a famous German firt-half of 20-th century state figure...)
Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad, they've all brought humanity together and pushed it further in science and technology and integration.
A combination of "empires" or "federations-of-federations", whatever you'd want to call then, and "swarms of city-states" (depending on the preference for more anarchy or more centrallization of each region) would be the ideal way to organize and develop humanity in my way.
"Nations" and "national culture" are an illusion that only brought pain and suffering: the great genocides of the first and second world war were precisely the result of thinking in terms of nations, and of distorting this concept to become "race-nation" or something else. If you just wipe the N-word form conceptual landscape and dictionaries, there's simply nothing left for evil authoritarian dictators to distort... humanity falls back to "an organic order" that naturally leads to micro-tribes and micro-city-states that organize themselves inside empire-federations ("anarchy in the small" + "hyper-integration in the large", "order powered by chaos" in a way) bringing greater freedom for us isolated individuals, because and imperial authority's hand is always far away, easy to hide from it when it threaten's your freedoms if you're smart enough and know how to dissimulate what you're actually doing (and "more freedom for the cleverest" is what you'd want anyway), whereas local power is always close and inescapable.
The whole idea of "direct democracy" and "local decision making" above micro-level (province-size tribe, city etc.) is bad imo. These "local decisions" are always crap. They only satisfy local power hungry manipulative psychopaths. You can't solve planetary climate-change and ecological destruction with local decision making!
And EU's latest legislative decisions are crap precisely because they are made from a point of weakness, the bureaucrats have retreated in a small "holdout" and they started thinking like a "nation"! If they would think more like an empire, they would think at the technical efficiencies of how exactly technically a law impacts at the scale of an empire and the timeframe of centuries (because, at least in spirit and produced knowledge, empires and imperial cultures are meant to last thousands of years) the economy, and they'd realise that a strong EU doesn't need to "squeeze some petty cash" from corporations in the short term, it plans to out-grow and out-power any imaginable corporation (because it could operate beyond the "sandbox" of monetary economy and because it would be something people could believe in, like in a god, and be 100x more motivated / loyal / "fanatical" maybe than any profit driven corporate drones).
Anyway, I just hope that once humanity gets over the current "bottleneck" with some technical breakthrouhgs (let's say... going multi-planetar and developing self-replicatable intelligent technologies), we can get our heads out of our asses and reinterpret history in a more sensible way and refashion politics accordingly. The current worldview is "OK & safe for keepings us all alive and not killing each other" in this delicate phase, but utterly suboptimal, nonsensical, and hardly worth living for imo.
No, Empires destroy regional governments, customs, and cultures, and bring upon them iron peace, of enforcing the will and customs of the winners. It's the peace of the graveyard.
And while the Roman empire is too far back, the crimes of the British, French, and other modern empires are too close for anyone to have the gal to call them "peace".
That's what jingoists and racist creeps called them in their time -- doing their "white man's burden" to bring civilization to those pesky Africans, Indians, and so on.
There have been lots of turf wars in History. None where more unjust, more unwarranted, bloodier, and more sick than the colonial wars and enslavement of over a billion people.
After the peoples in Europe fought to bring down the old empires and feudal kingdoms, and establish their own nation states, the ruling classes went for colonialism to expand their rule and build new empires, this time by exporting the exploitation globally (not that they gave up domestic exploitation completely, until the collapse of colonial empires after WWII reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population).
From the Belgians, who killed millions in the Congo, maimed kids, slaughtered whole villages, to the French, who killed thousands of protesters asking for their country's freedom as close as the 1960s, to the British, who gauged out prisoners eyes with spoons, and exhibited the last native survivors of their atrocities as museum pieces...
Hitler, even numerically, had nothing on those people. He just did those things to Europeans. Had he done them to Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Indians, etc, there would be people still applauding his empire and "peace" today.
And unlike the wars of the long past history, the people who ordered and performed the colonial "imperial" atrocities didn't have any excuse of not being well educated and well bread "gentlemen" of means...
The appraisals of empires is because history is written by those who killed, not the killed. And the people doing the appraisals are the descendants of the murderers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/britis...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/belgiums-genoc...
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/inglorious-empire-w...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-...
https://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/04/the-k...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini
Some "peace"...
Agree, the colonial empires did unimaginable horrors, you're probably right on this, probably they should never be praised. ...my bad for ignoring the part of their history that happened outside Europe. Maybe the word "empire" is a bad one to use, too many bloody connotations for non-europeans.
But there is to be said that the industrial revolution and its consequences would likely not have happened without the colonial empires. And, as much as we want to consider our society the consequence of the French Revolution and the independence war and all those etc., I think our true culture we live in (not the one we imagine when we go to theatre or read some lofty philosophy) that brought us the current comforts, including the laptops we type from, is the (incredibly bloody) product of industrial revolution and industrial capitalism that was fuelled by imperialism. There's where we come from, and it just is, guild / shame etc. are practically useless with respect to a past longer than a lifetime, water under the bridge etc. We just need to be wise enough to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And honest enough to take ownership of the true foundations of our society. And to use the fruits of the spilled blood as much/best as we can and make them plentiful to all - the only thing to do about spilled blood is to make bloody sure it wasn't spilled for nothing!
And:
> reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population
...that's another issues. I'd rather have whatever elite crops up at the top of an empire fan out and dilute their exploatation as much as possible. Modern informational society will make it much harder for far off acts of bloody exploitation to go ignored and unnoticed anyway, with a globalist culture of social responsibility, call it a "global-PC-2.0" (hopefully less ridiculous than the 1.0 version of "political correctness") in lack of a better word.
These are the challenges I care about: (1) how to create a "globalism 2.0" that economically works (maybe the whole dystribute-everything and crypto things can be put to good use here) for the best and also produces "global culture" (the 90's brought some mildly successful examples of this), and (2) how to create some "global-PC-2.0" or "distributed global eco social responsibility" (this will need some true innovation, and it will need truly un-censorable and anonymous communication infrastructure too as a substrate to work on - think "global channels that could broadcast live and no nation state have the power to shut them down even if they discover it breaks their (local) laws").
CDU/EPP does not help with that
> much stricter control of my country's borders
Do I need to remind which party Merkel is from? CDU
> better support for entrepreneurs
If you're a big German industrialist you'll get all the help from them, anything else? Nah
Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters).
The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (And you need to do this first or possibly somehow simultaneously, because once you reduced the size of political entities, it may no longer be possible to limit the size of the economic entities.)
Look at what happened when people tried to introduce Linux in the public sector in early 2000s at regional level - Microsoft promptly bought up anyone who could be bought, country by country, with discounts and (likely) bribes.
If you have a small business that only operates in New York, they don't care what the law in California is, it doesn't affect them. Walmart and Amazon care, because it does. And what they want is for the law to be the same everywhere, and for that law to be the one that benefits them. So they get that law passed by the central government. Then they take over everywhere because a) all the laws are the same, so there is no opportunity for a local business to carve out a local niche, b) the laws being the same increases economies of scale and lowers compliance costs for huge companies that operate everywhere but has no advantage for companies that only operate locally, so it increases the scale advantage of being large, and c) larger entities are the ones large enough to have a voice in the central government, whereas local entities have a stronger voice in local governments, so the laws that do get passed centrally are the ones that benefit the large players over the smaller ones.
We also have really bad central policies like the federal tax laws that make it so that when companies return profits to shareholders they pay heavy taxes but companies that retain the profits or use them to buy other companies do not, which naturally promotes mergers and consolidation and hoarding cash which then becomes a lobbying piggybank for huge companies.
So your theory is that we need a large government to rein in large entities. But the large government is already owned by the large entities. It isn't reining them in, and it won't. But the smaller governments could do so locally if they weren't being preempted at the federal level -- good luck being a huge conglomerate when every state is passing laws to give their local businesses a different advantage over you.
Sure, companies can use regulatory harmonization to their advantage, but they can also use tax and labour law competition between localities to their advantage.
First, it still can be. If the US has one set of laws and the EU has another set, a conglomerate has two sets of laws to navigate. That is still much easier for them than having dozens in each place.
Second, companies do their "harmonization" game with treaties as well, which of course only works by having a sufficiently powerful central government that can be controlled to sign onto such treaties and use their power to get other governments to do the same, using many of the same problematic shenanigans that happen at the federal level to create bad federal laws.
> Sure, companies can use regulatory harmonization to their advantage, but they can also use tax and labour law competition between localities to their advantage.
But that has nothing to do with entity size, and in fact is the opposite. If one state has advantageous laws then local companies there have an advantage over companies of any size that operate elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in the real world, tax havens are tiny jurisdictions for very good and well-understood reasons and the companies operating out of them are not in any meaningful sense "local", and the downward pressure on workers' rights is much stronger when multinationals can credibly threaten to relocate to one of several other jurisidictions with relevant manufacturing industries if new labour laws are passed locally rather than by a large trading bloc. And navigating 100 sets of copyright regulations rather than two is a challenge for a startup but something Amazon has ample resources to do where there's sufficient money in it to be worth bothering.
Local regulatory innovation gives us a lot more Google Bermudas and goods exported from Special Economic Zones designed specifically to privilege their patron corporations than local search engines and consumer electronics industries.
Tax havens are nonsense created by governments that want to impose taxes that aren't actually on anything.
If you want to tax companies who employ workers where you are, impose payroll tax. If you want to tax companies who sell to your people, impose VAT. If you want to tax companies that operate facilities, impose property tax.
If you want to tax nothing, tax "profit" and then watch how the "profit" is promptly removed from your jurisdiction. Because if the profit is a result of something that is actually connected to your jurisdiction in some way then you're really just taxing that thing and calling it income tax, but if it isn't then the company has no reason not to just declare the "profit" as having happened somewhere else where the rate is lower.
And then the local business can't do that, which is why those types of taxes should cease to exist in favor of the ones that tax something that actually happens where you are.
> and the downward pressure on workers' rights is much stronger when multinationals can credibly threaten to relocate to one of several other jurisidictions with relevant manufacturing industries if new labour laws are passed locally rather than by a large trading bloc.
This, again, has nothing to do with multinationals, and is in fact the opposite.
If California has more stringent worker protections than Texas this benefits local businesses in Texas. It only benefits multinational businesses if they move to Texas, and only to the extent that they move to Texas -- and if they move their entire operation to Texas then they're a local business and not a multinational.
Meanwhile what a multinational company can do that a local one can't is hire people in Asia or South America, which is a serious problem for a local business in Texas who is trying to compete with that multinational and suddenly has a bunch of requirements imposed by legislators elected by California who neither the business, nor its local employees who lose their jobs, actually wanted.
> And navigating 100 sets of copyright regulations rather than two is a challenge for a startup but something Amazon has ample resources to do where there's sufficient money in it to be worth bothering.
Which is why central control is problematic. You should only have to comply with the laws in effect where you actually are, so that you only have to comply with 100 sets of copyright law if you physically have operations in 100 different jurisdictions.
(Yes, something like direct democracy would fix this. But exiting the EU wouldn't get you that)
Sigh, how many times do we have to confute this lie?
The real power is in the European Council, aka national governments assembled.
That's the body that sets the agenda. The Commission takes its marching orders from the Council, then goes to the Parliament to figure out what it will accept.
The Commission is a smokescreen, it's your national governments who desperately wanted this. They pushed and pushed until they got it, because it benefits the national press -- whose support they need for re-election. Commissioners don't care, their jobs have different rules.
the issue is too much power too far from constituents and with little balances to prevent easy lobbying of few key people - it's basically broken at its core.
"just vote for different people next time"
yeah as if people don't say one thing and then do another. and once in power a rotation is simply too long, searching a candidate by trial and error to weed out the liars* would require a lifetime of committment, meanwhile the young generation would outweigh all the voting of those that have been keeping track of the politician scores by sheer demographic.
*spoiler alert: they all lie to some extent, or "compromise" if you prefer. but it's easy to fool voters on technical issues like these while gaining consensus with the popular topics of taxes, jobs and housing.
I’ll repeat: the problem lies with national governments asking for bad laws to be made, and then with MEPs for not voting them down (this one was very close, to be fair). That would have happened at any level. Do you know how many stupid decisions are taken at town-council level?
Democracy is difficult and imperfect, but it’s still the best we got.
> A person contravenes this subsection if the person makes pornographic material available on the internet to persons in the United Kingdom on a commercial basis other than in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18.
> [A notice that the section above is being contravened] must[ ... ]require the internet service provider[...] to prevent persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access the offending material using the service it provides;
That's hardly better for the Internet, and copyrighted material can _already_ be blocked by Court order - it's a small step to making that more widespread. Leaving the EU does not _necessarily_ solve this (it just moves the problem).
1. Establishing and consolidating a strong lobbying organisation. There are some NGOs and other interested parties (e.g. companies like Google or supporting organisations like Wikipedia), but they are not united. A united body brings coordination and single, quite more substantial, budget. Then you can efficiently deploy: 1) lawyers 2) accredited lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels 3) public relations professionals running far reaching campaigns.
2. Voting in the EU elections. There are various parties which are consistent in their opposition to such laws (e.g. "Pirate" parties, some Greens and Liberals). It might be a difficult choice, as there may be other positions of such parties you disagree with, depending on your political views. However, such voting could be considered as "tactical" i.e. with a goal to increase their presence or force coalitions, rather than driven by the desire to see them fully in power. It is a question of your priorities.
Isn't the European Parliament supposed to be this entity ?
The real problem is that if you have a single entity, then that entity can easily be corrupted by those who have the means to (read: money). This problem is unsolvable because those who have or profit from this power are also the people who get to decide if we want to do something about it.
I guess traditional content producers are not people, then.
It's a complex world.
No, corporations aren’t people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Not just "this instance", it's a general problem we have with our democratic system. It's the cause of many problems/bad actions, not just this one.
The solution is to reform the democratic system to be more, well, democratic. There are a bunch of ideas out there. I'm not really holding my breath though :-/
https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/political-rights/referendum/
I consider myself lucky !
Are there good polls measuring popular backing for (or indifference to) these bills?
Whenever you start to feel encroached upon by the new world order, the best thing to do is build another one right on top of it.
Build systems which route around this damage. It's the only way to be sure.
Could it be that EU regulatory bodies are normal government functions that run the risk of normal governance-related dysfunction and require the usual controls like limited power, rule of law, oversight, and less-than-worldwide jurisdiction?
The MEPs didn't care.
There are elections soon. But people will just vote for all the usual candidates, so why would they care?
This is just one topic out of hundreds. And most people care more about the road in front of there house than about something as abstract as freedom of speech. Sadly.
It could be an independent non-profit allied to other non-profits like EFF. When one of these non-profits wants to run a campaign against a bad law being enacted they can run a "campaign". They can explain why it is bad, just as they currently do, but as well as asking people to write to their local government representative they can also ask for donations to the campaign. These donations would then be used by professional lobbyists to lobby in the same way large organisations do.
It's probably a stupid idea, but I feel like it has the germ of something useful.
What is the third-party service doing here besides adding extra overhead?
Of course people shouldn't just be able to join this organization and take over the reigns, so they would need to be voted in. Let's say each region of a country will have a couple of candidates and regular votes are held on who will get to join the organization for a limited time. With this organization in place, we will finally be able to truly voice the people's opinion and act on their behalf!
There is something though about that idea that I cannot pinpoint. It somehow feels vaguely familiar. If I could just figure out how...
Macron is a crook. If any other president from any other civilized country would have sent the military to guard against its citizens' street protests [1] then that president would have been (rightly) called out the worst names, instead Macron is still seen by a large part of the mainstream media as this savior of European civilization and democracy.
[1] http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190320-military-be-deployed-saturd...
Burning cars and breaking windows isn’t peaceful protest. If that happened in New York and the mayor and governor didn’t deploy armed guards, up to and including the National Guard, many people would be rightfully furious.
The difference is America, being a federation, has many layers of armed police, from the NYPD to NYPD special ops to the National Guard to the FBI and Marshalls to the Army. France, being more unitary (departments don’t have National Guard analogues), escalates more quickly to deploying its military.
A few people doing that doesn't invalidate a peaceful protest that has lasted months now without doing any major damage (if you exclude Macron's approval ratings, of course).
Of course, when you have a lot of upset people it's easy to have a few problems--specially after months of protesting without the government doing anything major to address people's concerns.
It's also a common tactic from governments to infiltrate into peaceful protests and cause damage and disorders on purpose, to have an excuse to use force against protesters. In Italy it's common practice to send the secret service to attack the Police, and then reply with beating everyone up. Some politicians have even confirmed this practice in the open (Cossiga, for example).
I agree. Peaceful protest with violent elements, and the government deploying force to deter the violent elements, isn’t an oxymoron. The violent elements don’t invalidate the peaceful ones. And the armed response shouldn’t besmudge the government per se.
> It's also a common tactic from governments to infiltrate into peaceful protests and cause damage and disorders on purpose
Need a citation on this being “common.” Would also need some proof of this happening in Paris. Otherwise, we’re going into conspiracy theory land.
Given the violence made France look more inept than any of the demands did, given Paris gave into many of the policy demands, and given France’s fourth estate is reasonably competitive and competent, I’m sceptical of the claim that the looting was a false flag operation.
I'm not familiar with the French secret service, but since I've seen proof of this technique being regularly deployed in other countries it would just seem common sense to me to think that the French would do the same.
Cossiga's "confession" is even on Wikipedia (https://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/Francesco_Cossiga), he said in short: "the best is doing what I used to do when I was interior minister: let them protest, send the Police home and infiltrate protests to make them destroy the city. Then, when they lost the public opinion's approval, beat them up until they can't walk and the protest is over."
I think it's just normal business.
Italy has well-known corruption and mafia problems. Its press is less free than [1] and political system quite different from France’s. Even then, its frequency of violent protests is much higher than that of false flag operations.
Globally, there are more examples of peaceful protests becoming violent than of false flag operations. One’s prior should default to the former while being wary of the latter.
Not saying anything about France, but what was your prior that led into determining this? Your prior shouldn't be just as questionable as the problem you're using it for.
Neither is burning people alive in Caracas, but that doesn't stop Macron from supporting the riots in Venezuela.
Specially since military draft was made voluntary, in Italy the military are used to walk around at train stations, help out in case of protests, etc.
Actually, in Italy we have two institutions that are seen as "police": Police and Carabinieri. Carabinieri are exactly the same, but they're part of the military.
As for:
> Macron is still seen by a large part of the mainstream media as this savior of European civilization and democracy
The media is usually biased towards left-wing ideology, with a globalist spin. Since Macron embodies both those ideals, it's easy to see why he gets helped by the media.
I have no idea why the French would think that a banker who married his high-school teacher would be one of them. He definitely turned out NOT to be on the side of the average French citizen.
Hell, the Paris fire department is an Army unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Fire_Brigade
For the leader of a country, character is important.
If I was French it would definitely worry me that my president dated his 40-year-old high school teacher when he was 16, and married a woman 25 years older than him. Not the average Frenchman--which was my point.
> Why is it that right wingers want it both ways - Tucker Carlson thinks it’s not a big deal and presumably you don’t too until the male involved grows up and actually holds power.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
As for Carlson: https://jezebel.com/tucker-carlson-seems-to-have-a-lot-of-fu...
Nothing worries me, really. I'm Italian and live in Poland, I care very little about France and what happens over there. I also care very little what other people do, and only comment on Macron because he's a public figure. I just think it's extremely creepy, and wonder how he managed to get elected despite that aspect of his personal life, and the fact that he's a banker. Politicians are regularly attacked (or at least judged) by what they do in their personal lives. They're public figures and represent the country, after all.
> As for Carlson: https://jezebel.com/tucker-carlson-seems-to-have-a-lot-of-fu.
Thanks for the link, and I don't know that publication, but the articles next to that are "How to Write a Condolence Note" and "How to Select the Right Therapist for You"..?
Right. That's why I said it's weird that French people didn't have a problem with it, since most politicians get attacked for what they do in their personal life.
> but women having agency means a man can’t run a country all of a sudden? He’s somehow weak or compromised?
I never said that..? He's a Rothschild banker who married his high school teacher who's 25 years older than him. As he's not the typical Frenchman, it's weird to me that French people voted for him because "he's one of us".
I think I explained my opinion pretty clearly. You don't have to agree with it, though :-)
And no. Most politicians don't get attacked for their personal, private life. Those who are make the headlines, sure.
But most politicians are decent and focused enough on their life and work not to bother each other with unrelated, petty matters.
Being somewhere in between entails only thinking some of those things are really good, or only thinking some of those things are really bad, or thinking all of those things are only a little good, or thinking all of those things are only a little bad.
If you judge people based on policy or economics, neither Macron nor massive media corporations are on the left.
And why are you including me in that group (since you said only neo-Nazis believe Macron is left-wing).
That's extremely weird.
Pessimizer neither said or even implied that.
Ahahah, the good joke.
Most medias, everywhere world-wide are owned by billionars and follow the media-line of their owner. These guys are of course, conservative, right side, sometimes liberal .... but definitively not "left".
Qualifying guys like Ruppert Murdoch, Bloomberg, Dassault or Bollore (in France) of "left" ( or the medias they own ) is as idiotic as calling Trump a communist.
> I have no idea why the French would think that a banker who married his high-school teacher would be one of them. He definitely turned out NOT to be on the side of the average French citizen.
Maybe because the other choice was the daughter of a old extreme right dynasty from a party funded by old nazis and negationists. Maybe.
Mmm... Can you explain the media in the US are so much against Trump--with the majority of journalists still pushing for fake news about Russian bots and government intervention even after official investigations are closed, and with some of them even crying live when the Muller investigation conclusions came out?
Or, can you explain why most major news outlets in the States are categorized as biased towards left-wing causes on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com?
> Maybe because the other choice was the daughter of a old extreme right dynasty from a party funded by old nazis and negationists. Maybe.
I have no idea if that's true, but one shouldn't be punished for what his/her parents did (unless you're in North Korea I guess).
He's using one camp against an other to distract everyone from his own business. He always did it this way.
The official investigation confirmed—and charged specific Russian actors for—the “Russian bots and government intervention”. Even the AG Trump chose during, and for the rather transparent purpose of whitewashing, the investigation has highlighted that in his summary, stating: “The Special Counsel's investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election. [...] The second element involved the Russian government's efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.” [0]
> with some of them even crying live when the Muller investigation conclusions came out?
Arguably Mueller investigation conclusions have not “come out” in any meaningful sense, only a self-serving summary by a Trump loyalist who has a long history of opposing Presidential accountability to the law (not just for Trump.)
> Or, can you explain why most major news outlets in the States are categorized as biased towards left-wing causes on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com?
Can you provide any basis for believing the site you cite is a reliable neutral arbiter?
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/24/politics/read-mueller-key-fin...
Purely on that basis, the media as consumed has a bias for being conservative and also pretty dumb (as tabloids tend to be).
The net result of this proposed law will be more paperwork and more lawyers. In the long run, it will not accomplish its stated goals. It will simply slow down digital innovation in Europe and destroy any European dreams of becoming the next silicon valley
https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/2019/03/23/demonstratio...
(german only, sorry)
It's all a bit different than in the EU because people may be able to vote against that at some point.. Whether that happens is another question entirely, though.
Indeed having any meaningful restriction of free speech or the possibility to express it (which this legislation is about) would make me switch countries. I think that close to limitless free speech is a total base of everything. Even if other laws are really bad, like let's say death penalty, I have to have the possibility to freely speak about it to make it go away. But I can not distribute my opinion about some bad law and maybe make it go away as long as the speech itself is restricted.
Switzerland is literally surrounded by the EU, which means it has to accept most of its regulations anyway, one way or another. See the freedom-of-movement capitulation.
It doesn't really matter anyway, these things sooner or later will land everywhere. The interests aligned behind are too big not to.
Youtube became as big as it did whilst massively supporting copyright infringement, if not for Google they would have surely been killed. The bulk of the content on Youtube does not infringe copyright.
While good for you, EU will have one less citizen opposing internet restriction. We need a better way to deal with this but I cannot think of one.
>Politicians felt like your regular corrupt banana republic representatives this time.
That's what it converges to. Good ones don't survive.
The most effective way to change one's political environment since man could walk, enlightenment and democracy notwithstanding.
Has this ever happened in practice?
That's a very long way to anything that resembles democratic control.
A) Elected (though, indirectly, through the elected officials that you elect to be MEPs)
and
B) A body of law drafters and implementors with no powers to ascend anything to law by themselves.
The EC requires the EU parliament to vote on laws that it drafts, the EU parliament can require that laws be redrafted or amended. But the EU parliament is the only place a proposal can become law and those are our elected representatives voting.
Realistically the Commission are in charge. Because the so-called Parliament can't do anything except (at most) slow down the EU project a little bit, most people who run for election are just EU fanboys/girls who want to be close to the action. In the cases where they send new legislation back to the Commission for more work, it's usually to demand the EU award itself even more power than it was already doing. It doesn't act as any real check on the Commissions power. Even in the rare case of dispute, nothing stops the Commission just making minor changes and telling the Parliament to vote again, which they do. In fact "vote again" is the modus operandi of the entire EU project, whenever anything the Commission and related institutions wants gets rejected.
This setup is unique in the world and exists primarily to obfuscate the reality, as far as I can tell. Europhiles use it to claim the EU is "democratic" although the word Parliament means "the body of government that makes law" in English, and the EU Parliament doesn't meet that definition. There are free elections but they can't change anything meaningful, and as a result turnout has been falling steadily for decades, polls show the population don't trust the EU and see it as "out of touch" although fixing out of touch lawmakers is the entire point of elections. The whole thing is theatre intended to distract from the real power brokers: men like Selmayr and Juncker.
In good faith I'll argue the following:
Just because you do not directly elect the commissioners does not mean that they are "unelected". You can make the case that a garbage worker is "elected", but that would be by civil servants (by way of interview) but that is a stretch beyond the pale and a straw man (in all but the most charitable perspectives).
You're right about the dwindling EU election turnout but this is largely fuelled by a lack of campaigning; most people don't even bother with EU politics because they're more concerned with their countries politics. The EU itself suffers from being uncharismatic and so open that it's a sea of information (which ends up seeming opaque because there's just /so/ much information). I suspect this will largely change with brexit as people are waking up to what the EU actually is. Largely in the UK for example everything that was a political failure was blamed on the EU and those lies are the foundation of what caused brexit.
The EU has many, many flaws, but characterising it as undemocratic is flatly incorrect.
> although the word Parliament means "the body of government that makes law"
Technically parliament is an ancient french word that means "speaking", (akin to parley) but that's a digression. What I largely meant was that while the parliament itself cannot draft law, however it is the only body that can give ascent to a draft-legislature to make it law.
That is not undemocratic, that is the definition of democracy with a sprinkling of civil service.
In equally good faith, I'll observe that our disagreement is because I'm using the word "elected" to mean "has run in some sort of election and won by getting votes". You appear to be using a rather different definition, something like "some N number of appointment steps away from someone who directly ran in an election and won" where N is maybe 2 or 3 depending how you count (local politician -> head of government -> commissioner), except that commissioners are appointed one per country, no? So it's not like all the heads of state get together and run a giant interview process. Rather, the positions are dished out on a national basis. If the UK or Germany happens to field half the most qualified candidates that doesn't matter, Portugal will still get a commissioner.
most people don't even bother with EU politics because they're more concerned with their countries politics
Yes, oddly they care more about the elections where candidates discuss the issues they care about. The top concerns of populations in every country in the EU, according to the EU's own polling, are quite consistent - immigration then terrorism.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-eu-eurobarometer/immigrati...
How many MEPs are talking about restricting immigration or controlling terrorism? When was the last time you heard about a tightly fought European election where "tough on immigrants" was a factor?
It never happens because the Parliament is irrelevant; if someone wanted to waste their time getting elected to the EP on such a platform it'd be useless, Juncker has said "borders are the worst invention of politicians" and thus the issue dies there.
The EU is fundamentally uninterested in the top concerns of its citizens and there is no way to change that via voting. That is the ground truth and why the EU is correctly described as undemocratic.
Democracy was a nice dream, but ultimately the only way to get anything done has always, is and will always be violence.
Which I am not advocating, because then the state will do violence to me.
I think the take away is to understand the values about what you don't like about whatever is going on... and apply them to yourself as best you can. Otherwise it is just finger wagging and finger wagging is so easy and fun that we often miss the fact that if push came to shove, we might do the same thing, or worse.
This is going to sound weird, but this _is_ why it feels like the old internet is gone: everything is moving way too fast.
Many revolutionary movements are eventually co-opted by elites (often the elites of the overthrown system) for their own purposes. Sometimes the new system put in place after the counter-revolution is worse than the system the original revolution sought to overthrow.
The cypherpunks foresaw the dystopian surveillance state decades before the reality and tried to get out in front of it via cryptography. But the raw economics of central service network effects completely destroyed a distributed, control-your-own-keys world. Going forward there are always proposals for a state-controlled "third-key" on all encryption.
Likewise, the gatekeepers of the old system (record labels, Disney, etc), have always used the state to enrich themselves. The Internet caught them off guard and they tried to fight it in the early 2000s with lawsuits for file sharing, which hurt their public image greatly. But centralized services came to dominate distribution once again. And now we're seeing obvious self-enrichment with these "reforms."
By its nature it attracted a bunch of people with particular political persuasions. But it wasn't only people of those persuasions, and neither was the entire thing an instrument for those people and their persuasions. Technology allowed for newer and richer forms of communication, and things just happened from there. And this is where we are now, sadly.
We can look to other disruptive technologies over time to see how the entrenched / favored industries handled the change. The story is mostly the same, but the players are different.
The mercatilist impulse is to freeze economics to ensure current levels of profit via state fiat. Even companies that start out revolutionary/scrappy/innovative become conservative after they acquire large market share. It's more important to maintain profit levels, quarterly earnings, and share price than it is to make a risky attempt at another disruptive innovation. Unfortunately, that impulse too often leads them to lobby the legislature or crown.
It takes time to buy politicians (at least until PaaS - Politician as a Service becomes a thing).
This is a fight between titans of industry in two different verticals. Content is upset that publishing is getting all of the money - and a brief examination of the valuations in those respective industries shows they're probably right on that front. Is this the optimal tool to right those scales? Probably not, but it certainly isn't constructed to kick Grandma's bakery and blogroll website off the internet at the behest of Big Bread.
To the extent that Articles 11 and 13 have problems (and they do) they should be addressed, but the fearmongering makes it very difficult to actually talk about those issues and their context properly.
Julia Reda (German MEP for the Pirate Party) had most of the up to date info for the whole fiasco since it started. And she also provided new versions of the texts whenever they became available.
Unfortunately, a ton of articles basically copy her opinions or findings without the source material, so they get distorted.
In my opinion the original version with the amendments was simply insane; the work of technologically illiterate lawmakers in conjunction with copyright lobbyists. The final version makes an awkward attempt to fix some of the criticism by simply making things more vague, so each member state can decide how draconian they want to go with its enforcement. Calling the political discourse that opposes these articles "fearmongering" is disingenuous.
I don't have an issue with political discourse that opposes these articles, given that I criticize them in almost every post I've written in this thread.
I've criticized fearmongering, because it has immediate unwarranted deleterious effects on the European tech scene. Fearmongering is also very lucrative and sensational press material, so there's a need to speak out against it: it comprises the overwhelming majority of reporting on the issue.
https://edition.faz.net/faz-edition/wirtschaft/2019-03-26/f3...
Via
https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110278976654794753?s=20
See #Controvery
For the same reasons New York might care how Alaska gets its energy. Climate change concerns. Concerns that a fellow voting union member is building critical economic and energy ties with an authoritarian regime. (More selfishly, perhaps, because New York wants to sell them its own energy.)
For Germany, the alternative currently seems to be coal, which is one of the reasons I find this somewhat annoying. If it was a matter of "Nord Stream 2 or wind energy" I'd say "fuck that Russian gas, let's go green!" But alas, that's not what this is about.
Also Nord Stream 2 would make Germany more dependent on Russia gas.
At the same time US wants to have EU and Germany on their side in fight agains China + sell resources to EU. Germany on the other side does not like "being controlled" and has some attraction to Russia. There are thoughts that Germany may want to make an allience with Russia to weaken US influence on EU.
I belive it is just a surface of what is happenning. And it is all related to "peace/war" questions, who are allies to whom, global market shares, etc.
It is not just some "stupid decision", there are lots of issues hidden under the hood. And more such decisions to come in the nearest future I belive.
Being German myself, I don't think it has so much to do with being controlled or not, but the difference between several powers having some degree of influence vs. one having it all. Russia and the USA are certainly two very big players in world politics, and Germany already seems to have plenty of co-dependence with the United States.
I don't mean to say Nord Stream 2 is necessarily a good thing, but I do believe that some of the powers involved don't seek this balance as much as just to isolate Russia.
From ukrainian point of view Germany seems to forget about risks of not isolating Russia after Russia annexed territories and invaded several countries. WW2 did begin some kind of similarly as I understand: countries were seeking for "balance" and didn not want to make any rough decisions which could influence their economics in a "bad" way. The result was not very good.
I understand that every country has interests. But in this very case we see that Germany is already buying russian gas through ukrainian gas system without any issues besides risks intriduced by Russia itself. So Nord Stream 2 is more about relationships and not the gas or economics alone.
At the moment we see Article 11 and 13 approved as a consequence. And it is just the beginning.
That was the rationale when the EU killed South Stream - a proposed pipeline from Russia through the Black Sea and south Europe. Some of the countries involved had already made large investments and had great hopes for the pipeline which would have generated transit fees.
Germany's push for Nord Stream 2 - a more or less direct pipeline from Russia - today feels self-serving and hypocritical. It looks like Germany is abandoning its obligations while smaller and less wealthy countries had paid the price.
Germany did more than any other country to realize the modern renewable-energy industry and it's failed its climate goals. The lesson should be that you have to try every tool in the toolbox, including nuclear energy.
Fukushima accident revealed the irrationality of the public. Fukushima-scale accident every decade somewhere in the world would be low cost to pay for replacing coal. It's only the drama behind the accident that makes people to lose their minds.
A few extra nuclear bombs going off per year in cities would soon change the desire for this I suspect.
According to the world health organization, the number of premature deaths caused by coal and Particulate Matter is on the order of literally millions per year.
https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-...
This means that if we switch to nuclear and this caused us to have a chernobyl scale disaster every single year, that it would still be massively safer than coal.
And even if we use your ridiculous example of a nuke going off in a city every year, guess what, that's still safer than coal. (This is, of course, not how nuclear works)
So yes. Give me the bomb going off in a city every single single year. It would still kill less people than coal, according to the World Health Organization.
Yes, really. This is not an exaggeration.
I doubt we will see any reasonable economics for nuclear as long coal, oil and gas is allowed to be burned.
True, and that's why the carbon tax would have to be super-high as to make oil and gas financially un-viable. Banning burning fossil fuels is a better step, though, I agree.
Didn't California try equally hard with renewables as Germany? And failed equally hard.
Well nearly no information. I had a flyer for the SPD Senior Citizen Group in my mailbox...
Fortunatly in this day and age you can do your own research
I now found out that I have to scroll to the bottom and select Germany there. Weird.
as an example, many parties now feature some feminist points, even though it was originally against their ideology.
For example, all members of (Dutch) D66 voted against this directive, but of their faction (ALDE), 60% voted for. I will not lend my vote to such a faction, so sadly D66 will not get my vote either in the upcoming May elections.
https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/copyrightvot...
I'm not sure, how the blocking you propose should work (your comment shows as much ignorance as most MEPs speaking for the reform do), as the directive basically enables any rightholder to enforce claims against the platform as soon as they publish any copyright violating material. The whole point is that rightholders should not have to rely on takedown notices anymore, which imho is not necessarily bad – this does also not in any way stand of overdue policy which limits the outrageous fees on copyright violations (for example, why not sign bills which make you pay the (standard) license fee+30% if you're violating copyright, when you are using the protected works in your own work (for blatant theft, like reuploading a music video, fines could still be like they are today...)?).
I'm wondering how much of the current user-created content on those platform is driven by that
Which people? People in his peer group on youtube sure. The world is a big place. I can see 5 people from my seat here on this train, I suspect not a single one has any idea what article 11 or 13 are, not would they care.
Now it's possible pressure groups could argue that they should vote one way or another in a vote on the subject -- i.e. google could turn people against it, or murdoch could turn people for it, but your statement that "people are clearly against it" is quite simply false.
EDIT - at least here's how the parliament groupings voted - https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110552457682264065
1: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/general-secretariat/corpo...
I was right.
Although I remember plenty of comments on HN about how Facebook et al. would be blocking EU users because it would be too expensive for them to comply with GDPR.
One or two US based newspaper websites were all I noticed blocking access because of compliance reasons. I expect a similar impact due to Article 13.
Still others present a "subscription required" page if you connect from Europe, but display the content if you access them from the US (or through archive.is).
Sadly neither will happen. The major social media sites and apps were too silent this time around. Back in 2012 when ACTA was voted on there was much more activity.
Since Youtube and Facebook etc. already have filter mechanisms in place they probably want to profit from it by selling it as a SAAS to smaller companies that don't have the resources to implement their own filtering.
Parties and people who run for the European Parliament don't really have concrete policies or manifestos. In particular they can't run on a platform of repealing bad laws, because unlike in a real Parliament, they aren't allowed to do that. All they could do is politely ask the Commission to let them repeal the law, they'd be told no, that'd be the end of it.
So in practice EP politics are wafer thin and the only major differences between parties and politicians are to extent to which they are pro or anti EU. That's why the "Parliament" is stuffed with protest candidates from parties like UKIP. They can't actually do anything, they just make speeches and flame the rest of the MPs, but those MPs can't do anything either except egg on the Commission. So people tune out and don't care about European elections anymore.
There is some fear amongst the establishment now that the next EP elections will be different and people will send anti-EU candidates on a much larger scale than before. But not much fear, because the only thing these candidates can do is slow things down, and realistically even that won't happen because the EU frequently re-interprets its existing laws and treaties to give the Commission new powers on the fly. They'll just do more of that.
We are EUROPE FOR CREATORS. A gathering of professional organisations of writers, musicians, producers, comedians, films makers coming from all over Europe.... [snip]"
Translation: "We are GEMA, BPI, ...., and we make our money from creators' work. And we want more! More!"
They are notorious for asking licenses for everything music related even if the artist does not exists.
A Belgian satirical program created a concert with the artists Kenwood (mixer), Suzy Wan (jar of Chinese food) , Mister cocktail and the party mix (pack of nuts) and they still managed to send a bill of a couple of hundred euros for these artists they represented...
I'm sure the automated filters will do a better job than me to make the distinction between parody or original.
Maybe we should let such a filter run on that website, so we know it's a parody or not.
Not doing so means they all have something to gain from this.
Not saying this is the first such thing that happens, but it's probably the one that will make me stop using the word to refer to the society I live in.
Of course google/fb etc had a stake in this and were lobbying. They're not the ones who stand to lose from this outcome though, even if that's what the Axel Voss & team would like to believe.
You mean a handful activists? The people at large do not care one bit.
You can claim that you're acting in their best interest, so they should be counted as "on your side", but that's obviously false.
/sarcasm
Yes, mislead will is also a will.
However, the Brexit vote should never have been legally binding, it's now how referendums work in England. The people who wanted Brexit literally said out loud we lied next morning, the resigned and/or disappeared.
Sure, it's the will of the people...
It wasn't.
It should have been legally binding, if it had been then it could have been challenged in court and very likely would have been overturned due to the cheating of the leave campaigns.
N Farage, May 2016.
Sure, there's always some dubious local leaflets, or a stupid statement or three, in every election. This was quantitatively and qualitatively different by orders of magnitude. By far the most disingenuous campaign I've ever seen for a UK vote.
So I do feel duped - I don't think it matters which way one voted - as UK elections have generally done much, much better at presenting issues. The leave campaign promised the moon on a stick in a very US style, which 24hr news happily amplified. Farage burst the bus slogan the morning after the result.
Suffice to say both sides ran bloody awful campaigns, and the end result is no-one is happy.
The first EU referendum saw a booklet sent to every household discussing and arguing both sides of all the main issues - to allow people a chance to understand before voting. Leave actually had a case back then - in joining the EU we were turning our back on significant and long standing Commonwealth trade arrangements.
It's not just one ad or campaign, or funding, but a whole interminable series of them. At some point it's no longer poetic licence and firmly into fraudulent. The vote should - based on the numerous breaches found - have been invalidated and a rerun forced, along with prosecutions for those found to have breached rules. A fraudulent contract is not held to be binding.
Not for a different answer, but for a referendum that adheres to the standing laws of the land. It matters not if the result of the rerun is another vote for leave - this time one achieve by legal means. How else to ensure that the democratic process itself remains fit for purpose and something we can have confidence in? Without the need to accommodate international observers.
Otherwise where's democracy? Why should that be OK, but fraudulent contracts or selling of investments not be? Does no amount of fraud invalidate the process for you?
Frankly, it's just people being unwilling to consider that the opposition has legitimate and deeply held political grievances with the status quo. I mean, just think about the argument. People only voted for Trump because of Russian meddling. That implies a belief that media can significantly influence people. But the vast majority of the media hated Trump. So then you have to hold two opposing viewpoints simultaneously: that media is deeply influential (when it's paid for by the Russian state) and that it simply isn't influential (when wielded by the established media and every celebrity with a platform). I suspect that there are a lot similarities with Brexit.
So which is it? Does media matter? Or does it not?
Some of the reports of Russian involvement seem just a tad too convenient. Besides, much of the Trump/Brexit phenomena is explainable without. Maybe there was foreign meddling too, who knows?
The grievances seem clear for anyone who cares to look - those areas and people hardest hit by deindustrialisation, globalisation and have been deprived regions for knocking on 40 years, and also hardest hit by austerity voted most for leave, and for Trump. The chance to kick the system, hope for jobs, for a different way. So blame silly voters or the parties might have to admit that leaving those regions to rot may have been a mistake. Admitting mistakes isn't on message, so politicians can't do that!
Of media, I suspect for most of us old media - TV and papers - has far less an effect than ever before. So they get more and more outrageous to try and stay relevant. Most now get news from a selection of sites rather than the morning paper or evening TV. For older folks who still have the habit of news from a single source, I suspect they still have impact. I really doubt any media site or paper can turn an election like they could in the 70s and 80s.
Advertising on the other hand is much more insidious. I'm used to seeing ads from both sides of every campaign. Personalised net and social media ads mean people can be targeted with what they're susceptible to - their own personal hot issues. That has the potential for effect the old media used to have, perhaps far more, and is invisible to all except recipient. I was certainly very surprised (and disappointed) by some of the FB ads revealed after the referendum.
I think we may be in violent agreement. :)
"There is no plan for no deal, because we'll easily get a great deal" Boris Johnson.
"getting out of the EU can be quick and easy - the UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation" John Redwood.
I'm sorry, but in what universe are the terms for non members going to be better than the terms for members? The banks were expected to compensate for the insurance misselling scandal...
I think it would be interesting if there was a law that you couldn't say something untrue in an election. That would be incredible. But, of course, then all your politicians would be in jail. As it stands, it falls on the opposition to eloquently communicate the truth in a believable way when someone lies. If they fail, I'm not sure you can blame democracy.
To be a bit less pointed, I understand that you are angry, but your anger is not effective. If the Brexit side lied (and I'm inclined to agree with you here), how did Brexit win? How would you improve the situation? If your answers are something like "Because Brexiteers are stupid racists" and "There isn't anything you can do", then you'll never get any farther. You need spend your time learning how to communicate to the people who voted for Brexit and to get your message across in a way that they can understand.
Otherwise you just become the angry guy on the internet, which isn't really satisfying for anyone.
I don't like Orban, and his propaganda is shameful, but what he does is exactly what people want (and corruption on the side).
The opposition does not have any shared platform that the majority of the people would want, other than "not orban".
That's how it should be. 5-6 medium sized parties. Having only 2 choices is not democracy either.
Propaganda is the key, because he uses relentless propaganda to hammer the message that migrants want to go to Hungary and take people's jobs, etc., and he uses migration as an answer for everything (those who ciriticize government corruption, do so, because they want to let in migrants, etc)
Many people believe him, because the opposition has much less opportunity to convey its message (less money for billboards, Fidesz took over the major radio stations, shut down opposition newspapers using economic means, etc.), so people have to actively seek out alternative news sources, and those who don't are mainly reached by government propaganda.
But it's a problem of hungary not having a strong democratic culture. It's not a problem of "not what people want".
Also, I feel the immigrant thing is not as relevant amongst Fidesz supporters: Jobbik has the same view with regards to migrants that Fidesz has, but did not get 49% of the votes.
People vote with their pockets, and hungary had years of good economic growth, the government cut income taxes, tourism boomed and real estate followed.
Much like the situation in italy's '50/60s economic miracle, people will put up with corruption as long as they have a booming economy, even if the government is not responsible for such growth.
Hungary will hit a brick wall in the near future, but it will have gone there by the will of its people.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
The whole thing was a backroom deal between Germany (which wants gas from Russia) and France (which apparently really likes ultra restrictive Copyright). We would have the same result without this fake theater of the simulated democracy facade. Time to abolish the EU.
The EU is also already dying. Brexit will come soon and Italy is on it's way out. What the remnants will be is unclear but the EU as a whole has already failed. The settlement process to unwind it will be lengthy and painful.
(The reality of course is that the US has had not only a say, but often the only say in how the internet should work in the rest of the world for decades, and when it comes to copyright law we have an undemocratic international treaty dating back generations that keeps pushing expiry dates back and back globally)
That's a non sequitur. I believe that these copyright changes will apply in Switzerland too due to international agreements.
There are many types of democracy, each have pros and cons.
People almost never vote in favor of war.
IIRC they even shot down german war planes that entered their airspace and suffered no retaliation.
So yeah, they do have a knack for maintaining their neutrality.
I haven't looked at who voted, but I suspect that the votes aren't on a country-by-country basis either.
* Europe
> Russian influence
* Russian, Chinese, American and whoever else wants a piece of the cake.
What? Dude, the EU can only do this because the member-states are backing it. European politics is corrupt at least from the national level up. Would you abolish countries next? Because that's what it'd take.
I see the problem within society. There's too many people who care only about themselves and who don't mind at all if their neighbors got thrown under the bus by politics, even if they don't even gain anything. It's a problem of mentality.
The president of the commission is voted for by the people (Juncker received the most votes in 2014)
Does America vote for the secretary of transportation?
In theory under say a westminster system MPs can take control. This is almost unprecedented until last night. Even when they do push non-controversial laws (Private Member bills, like the upskirting one recently), they're usually stopped.
So the difference seems to be
1) The president of the EU commission is effectively elected by the people. Same as the prime minister (except for May, Brown, Major and I think Callahagn who were simply appointed on their first attempts. So 3 of the last 7 were elected) 2) The UK prime minister has a selection of about 1400 people to select from when appointing the executive (members of commons and lords). There's no comfirmation from parliament. The US President can appoint anyone, with confirmation from the senate. The EU commission president gets to appoint from candidates pre-selected by the EU heads of government, and those appointments have to be confirmed by the MEPs. 3) The UK parliament can in theory (but rarely in practice) pass laws. The EU parliament can't, however through the committees they seem to have more power to make changes than in the UK.
The UK, US and EU are all different, but they are all democracies.
Does the secretary of transportation have the power to create laws?
Do you honestly believe that a functioning democracy doesn't require a) separation of power (not present in EU, where legislative and executive power is merged, and the parliament has only the power to (dis)approve) and b) direct accountability to the people of the most impactful, legislative, branch (not present in EU, where legislative branch is appointed by executive)?
MEPs can also amend bills coming from the commission, so very similar to the UK system.
Of course we live in interesting times, with a minority government, a fractured party, and parliament last night made a move that hasn't been done for over 100 years. Even last night all parliament did was gain control over it's own timetable.
Still parliament can't effectively pass any laws on it's own -- take the Voyeurism (Offences) #2 bill. An MP had attempted to introduce this, but 1 MP had objected, and thus it couldn't be passed. Instead the government introduced it.
The secretary of transportation has no legislative power as opposed to the EU Commission. This comparison is flawed.
> The president of the EU commission is effectively elected
It is the most intransparent and indirect way of determining a political position. As voter you have zero control over who is part of the Commission.
Also the EU constitution was put in place without the consent of the people of the member states. It was completely instigated by some elites hence inherently undemocratic.
It's the same way the British PM is elected. Direct (or rather electoral college) elections for the U.S. president is one way, but many countries have the head of government as leader of the largest party. In this case Juncker was the nominated candidate of the largest group (the EPP)
In practice, Congress has over the years delegated a lot of legislative power to the agencies.
Now, pretty much no-one voted for MEPs based on which alliance they were part of - they voted based on party, because it's the parties that decide what platform their MEPs are running on and that are the ballot. Not only that, which alliance was bigger was pretty arbitrary and depended almost entirely on how the backroom deals between the various parties had gone. Oh, and there's some justified suspicion that this was all specifically set up to get Juncker in: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/eu-democratic-... (He then rewarded one of the guys who helped him manage this with an extremely shady permanent appointment as the head of the EU civil service.)
This is very different from the UK system, where each party and its leader agrees on their platform for the next election, publishes it as a manifesto, and runs collectively on the promise of enacting those policies if they win. Partly because, unlike the UK Prime Minister, the European Commission isn't meant to represent the people at all - it's meant to represent the EU's interests as an institution.
The Westminster system works only because First-past-the-post can effectively disenfranchise 2/3rd of the electorate, dramatically reducing the variables of parliamentary arithmetics. When that doesn't work, the system crumbles. And this is precisely what we have seen in two of the last three UK elections, with hung parliaments: alliances were built in the Commons that have little or no connection to manifests and the likes.
The EU Parliament is infinitely more representative of the population - which is why, for example, the UK could send several MEPs from UKIP, who have failed to enter the British Parliament for 20 years.
> there are no EU-wide political parties, just shifting alliances of local national parties
That's just not true. The two main groups are very stable alliances of the postwar socialdemocratic and conservative parties. Only small parties "shift", and that's just a recent development due to a rise of populistic parties that reject the traditional left/right setup. (They are also forced to aggregate for administrative reasons depending on their size).
> Now, pretty much no-one voted for MEPs based on which alliance they were part of
Nice baseless generalization there, that's definitely not the case. In countries that take MEPs seriously, there are big discussions on where each party will "sit", so to speak. In many cases it reveals where the real insticts of a new party really lie.
The Guardian piece you link is particularly interesting. It's permeated by a conviction that national governments, rather than MEPs, should "run things" around Bruxelles, and when it doesn't haeppens it's some sort of stitch-up. It's a very anti-democratic view, but it suits the UK discourse that the EU is "unrepresentative" when the UK is a minority on a give subject - and it reflects an authoritarian view of government, typical of post-Blair Britain.
> He then rewarded one of the guys who helped him manage this with an extremely shady permanent appointment
Yep, this was a scandal. The EP censored Juncker, and the situation did not escalate only because he's on his way out anyway. Hopefully the new Commission President will fire Selmayr. We'll see.
Not what Tory MPs say. They say things like
> Neither Cabinet, MPs nor Party Policy Forum ever saw or debated it. It was roundly rejected
> and widely agreed to have cost us our majority, leaving the mandate in Parliament, not the
> Party. (As I wrote in @Telegraph the morning after). Lost majority=Lost mandate.Now I hate this new law, I think it needs to die, but I recognize that a democratic process created it. I also recognize that “democratic process” includes cronyism, special interests, ignorant and venal politicians, and the rule of a minority of powerful people. What I find many times here is a belief in pure systems ruled by logic and strict interpretations of language (again, programmer logic), while real life and politics are nothing like that.
In short, people here should be given a free copy of The Dictator’s Handbook when they sign up, and s quiz on the contents before they’re allowed to comment on political threads.
Again, this is where you’re running into problems. You’re confusing among other things, the branding with the reality. The DPRK has “democratic” in the name, but so what? Even in less blatant departures from the spirit of the thing, democracy in practice takes many forms. No one (I hope) thinks they live in an Athenian democracy, so what kind of democracy are we talking about? Usually it’s a buzzword interchangeable with “free society” which is another buzzword.
For example, the U.S. styles itself as the world’s leading democracy, but that’s branding again. In reality it is nominally a federated system of indirect representative republics. The U.K. also considers itself a leading democracy, but in practice we’re a constitutional monarchy where power mostly rests in a parliamentary system and civil service.
In short, talking only in terms of buzzwords means that we can project whatever desires we want on “democracy” or “freedom” when the reality is complex.
I have no idea how you got that idea considering I just wrote that the systems we call democracies may not be all that democratic in reality.
If this boils down to Europe not being your idea of democratic now, and for the entirety of its history, then you’re making no point at all.
As in, with poor results. Which is exactly how it does work when it is working. Almost invariably the results are poor because so many of the voters are ignorant.
As evidenced by Merkel and Voss's reported comments (which were in the Wired article on this): "The protesters are a bunch of people Google paid off to protest. Every one of them has a pay cheque".
Which to me sounds a lot like the oft-quoted line from the other side: "George Soros is bankrolling this".
Words mean what the majority thinks they mean.
Democracy as a word has been used as a word that means, mostly, that there are elections. The specific notion that the people decide directly is usually referred to us 'direct democracy'. A very wide ranging set of systems which all have in common that, primarily, some chunk of the populace gets to vote politicians out of office, has been called 'representative democracy'.
In the case of 'representative democracy', the 'democracy' bit still means 'power' for 'the people'. It's just that the 'power' that 'the people' have is specifically the ability to vote in (and out) a bunch of representatives who then decide.
Perhaps it is disappointing that this model didn't do what you wanted it to do here (which is: Presumably said representatives should decide to do what the people want them to do), but to lean on etymology to claim that this isn't 'democracy', that's just fallacious reasoning.
Because you decided they didn't?
Elections are coming up pretty soon, if they really didn't then the vast majority of them are getting voted out in what will surely be the greatest upheaval in the history of the EU; which of course won't happen because hundreds of millions of us do feel that we're being correctly represented.
protip: just because you got outvoted, it doesn't mean that democracy isn't working correctly.
Hundreds of millions? Surely not. I am sure that there isn't even one hundred million EU citizens that know and/or understand what this is, let alone feel good about it. That's why nothing will change, I agree on that with you, but that changes nothing about how bad and wrong this is.
> Because you decided they didn't?
No. It's because every trustworthy organisation that cares about open Internet actually says (contrary to their usual silence) that this is alarming and have done everything they could to stop this. I really don't understand why you don't listen to them, I see no logical reason not to - everything they (e.g. Wikipedia) say is true and objective. There is a middle ground that we could try to find.
On top of that, every single author/content creator I know is against it and says that their work is doomed because their platform won't accept it or will end. Because of how much of that content is educational, this is definitely something that goes directly against interests of every EU citizen, much more than any copyright-related bullshit.
In this case, foreign corporate interests (EU produces a minority of worldwide content) were more valuable to our representatives (that we can't even choose because our country is too small - we have less than 3% of the EP) than our own interests, and that's why I don't think democracy is working, not because I got outvoted. On top of that, in this case, my country is caught in the middle of a German-France political deal that we can do nothing about (again, less than 3% seats in the EP). It is literally against all interests of all citizens of my country, approved to serve German/French interests - that is totally undemocratic. There literally is not a single subject (person, company, etc) that would benefit from this in my country - every content creator here is small.
Protip: Just that it suits you doesn't mean that hundreds of millions of people are happy with it, especially if most nonprofit AND commercial players agree it's wrong.
Just a reminder that quite a lot of people are against second brexit referendum because repeating it would be undemocratic.
Remember ACTA? how many times it was tried again and again under different name?
The only ones who wanted those articles to pass were media organizations akin to RIAA - which frankly speaking are a parasite of the industry, which have tons of money to burn on legal lobbying.
And nowadays - where artists can directly sell their works to customers - they are absolutely unneeded.
Plus the whole idea of upload filter is absolutely idiotic. It will either do nothing, but give excuse to further escalate the law(especially if it goes towards centralized content filter - which could be easily used for censorship). Or it will be implemented in similar vein to youtube copyright system - no way to decently appeal, automated process that tags more content than it should, taking the least amount of effort.
Link tax on the other hand was already tried in few countries - Germany and Spain or Portugal(forgot which one it was) - in former case most media outlets signed a contract with search engine and social media corporations that they can list their content for free.. in other case such contracts were forbidden and media outlets reported a loss of profit - because way less people were visiting their sites - they disappeared from indexing services, and social media platforms - which serve as a form of advertising.
Also - didn't EU post a study that piracy actually boosted sales and profits of movies and music? Because it works as free advertising, and most(but not all) of pirates wouldn't buy the product anyways. (https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...)
On a side note you should never ever accept a law just because you trust a current government to not abuse it. You cannot 100% prove that in future there won't be a government that will abuse it.
Yes. This is how slavery was ended in the British empire and how the civil rights act passed in the US.
Écrasez l’infâme
The way the parliament is elected is quite fair - it gives a little more power to people in smaller countries, but that's not unusual (UK westminster constituencies vary from 22k to 120k. U.S. congress areas are more even, ranging from 500k to 1 million). There's an argument that it should be more even than the current 11:1 ratio, but we call the U.S. senate democratic and that's a 69:1 ratio.
The actual choice of MEP comes down to a proportionate election, meaning that if you get 15% of the votes, you get 15% of the MEPs. This beats fptp systems where MPs in the house of commons are elected with as few as 30% of the votes cast.
Voting for a representative is the very essence of representative democracy. Perhaps we should have direct democracy. As it happens I watched an episode of The Orville[0] last night which covered this scenario.
Personally I'm a fan of representative democracy. It's the worst system except for all the others. I expect my representitive to work full time in understanding proposals and voting on my behalf, but they are a representitive, not a delegate. This is where direct PR falls down (who gets the seats is down to the party, not to the voter. I can't vote for Candidate B rather than candidate A if they are part of the same party. STV works better in this case, although 90% of voters don't really care and in the UK 80% don't even know who their MP is!
The cynical in me would complete the sentence with "...a vast majority would not even understand what the article is about"
That's why I vote for people who can spend a lot of time looking at it and voting for or against it in parliament.
As it happens my preferred grouping were pretty much split evenly, there's certainly pros and cons.
It only works as long as the representatives see it as their duty to represent the will of the voters accurately, which I'm starting to believe is an antithesis to human behavior, and thus will never be the norm.
I'm not saying that European society (if such a thing even exists) is inherently undemocratic; just that it's not democratic enough to be called a proper Democracy.
And I'm not even asking for direct democracy on everything, but there should be laws in place that force politicians to put decisions up for vote to the public if there's a certain level of resistance from the population.
Take for an example the UK referendum to leave the EU. Even though it's overall a complete shitshow, and all sides usually agree on that, nobody can really claim that it wasn't a democratic decision. Was it a smart one? Who knows, I doubt it. But it was democratic, and that's more than I can say about this mess.
For example I am for a "democracy of experts" system, in which any decision must be voted exclusively by those who have expertise on the matter the vote is about.
From my point of view the Brexit vote is totally not-democratic because it put an absurdly complex decision on a big part of the population which has not even remotely the competence to decide on the matter.
As you see it is not all white or black.
Isn't that not just a technocracy? I actually think a system like that would make a lot of sense, but I still believe the population should have the power to veto a law that they don't want.
As for the brexit vote being undemocratic, I see your point, but I don't think just because the people were uninformed that means the referendum was undemocratic. First of all, I don't think most MEPs who voted for the copyright reform were any more informed, on average. I also think it should ultimately be up to the population of a democratic system to decide things, even if they don't understand the situation entirely. That's the point of democracy.
There's a Youtube video kicking around of someone (I forget who) going round Europarl asking MEPs if they'd actually read Articles 11 and 13.
The most common answer, by a country mile, was "no".
We elect representatives to read these things and make a reasoned decision on our behalf. Not to do the political equivalent of putting on a blindfold and throwing a dart, hoping to score a bulls-eye.
I think that too, IF they take the time to become experts in the matter of the law they don't want.
Manipulating people and having them vote without all the facts on the table and then denying them that vote after the facts were on the table is not democracy.
And who decides who is an expert on what?
That's not really the idea behind representative democracy. It's supposed to work that you vote for the person whose values intelligence and approach to policy you agree with, and they use their skill and judgement from there on in - you can of course lobby them on issues.
This is the problem with representative democracy; it assumes there's a good proxy for my voice, and there increasingly isn't
Large parties, party discipline and backroom deals are (imnsho) fundamentally at odds with a well-functioning representative democracy.
Representative democracy is meant to be a way to mitigate the problem of true democracy, which is the idea that it's easier to build a consensus among a small group than a large one and also that "the unwashed masses don't know what's actually good for them".
Bottom line is that it's impossible for 1 person to serve as a uncompromising proxy for a large group of people on multiple issues. Even if there weren't parties, there would be a point where my 95% agreement representative gets into the 5% of issues where we disagree. And no matter what, that's going to feel bad man.
Parties exist almost as a separate mechanism than government itself. They're more strongly tied to elections and voting than any specific application or creation of policy. They're about how we select our leaders, not what our leaders can do.
Unless your goal is to short circuit the process by created additional bureaucracy/difficulty in the process, it still doesn't seem like a bug. And if that is your goal, it seems more that you have a problem with the law creation/implementation and not how people's voices are being represented.
#include "vote-leave-broke-the-law.txt"
If you told UK citizens that the choice is in fact for a No Deal Brexit and what that will mean, they wouldn't have voted for Brexit. However the population was lied to about the economic benefits and voted against their own interests.
So when the population can be lied to on such a scale, what do you find as being more democratic exactly?
And more importantly, after it was clear that Britain will not get a good deal, why wasn't the referendum repeated?
I still find it hard to not value your own autonomy. For thousands of years, wars of independence were fought for this exact purpose. You might not value it, but I don't think you can attack others for placing value on it.
The only Leave-scenario people actually could have voted for in the referendum was a no-deal-brexit. Any other promsies were ranging from uncertain to wishful thinking.
I disagree. I think this is exactly the kind of question that lends itself well for a public referendum. The problem with Brexit in particular was its execution, not its premise.
For one, the people were given only a binary choice. As is clear by now (and many people knew that before), there are more than two options on the table: it is about in or out of the EU, the EEA, the ECJ, the EUCU, and about the laws underpinning the GFA. Secondly, the entire referendum was strung together haphazardly because the government didn't think it could lose, so none of the campaigners (let alone the public) knew what they were arguing for. And because of that ill-defined question, we still see major division among parliament about what people actually voted for. Lastly, the entire campaign was hijacked by xenophobic tendencies that only distracted from the main question.
Case in point would be Owen Patterson, a prominent brexit campaigner, who wanted to
1) Invoke Article 50
2) Negotiate a new deal which looks very much like the EEA plus CU, but witout any closer integration
3) Offer the public a referendum between that new deal and staying in the EU
You are oversimplifying this - that vote was between a definite (the status quo) and a vague future direction (insert personal fantasy about what "leave" actually meant)
Is it any more democratic to make people choose between "definitive choice x" and "the mystery box", than it is to make people vote for a vague bag of promises (a representative) as they already do?
If not, then what you're probably after is a democratic choice between two or more defined options. But who chooses which options are presented to people? Who oversees the ensuing floods of propaganda?
A direct democracy moves even more power to the propaganda machine, not the people.
A democratic approach would be to conclude that a 1.8% majority is in the error margin, and then carefully listen to both sides and try to work out something that many people on both sides can live with. That way you can get a solution that appeases 70&, 80%, or more. That's real democracy, in my book.
It's not an easy path though, especially not in the face of what I call "chest-beating politics". The Brexiteers have not proven to be especially easy to compromise with on pretty much any issue.
There are many better ways to enact more direct democracy, by the way. For example, you can have a randomly chosen subset of people (maybe 50, or 100) vote on every proposed laws, more or less the same as jury duty. The difference with a general referendum is that these people will actually get the time to properly inform themselves and have good-faith discussions (instead of idiotic Boris Johnson spectacle bullshit "discussions").
There are many variables you can tweak, and other possible systems as well. Reading up on e.g. Athenian Democracy might be a good start, if you're not already familiar with it.
Almost every argument I’ve seen about Brexit has included someone arguing that it wasn’t. This is generally followed by “oh, but Remain broke the rules too” rather than any actual defence of the behaviour of the Leave campaigns, which doesn’t actually help any of this look more democratic.
Did any parliament members run on this issue? If so, how many? The point I'm getting at is, to what extent did "the people" really have a say in this issue?
Politicians are elected and some time down the road laws are proposed without much, if any, input from the people. It's not really possible to know ahead of time what laws will be proposed years in advance and how your representative will actually vote on them when the time comes. That's my main gripe with the whole "well you should've voted for a better representative!" argument. Yeah you can vote them out after the fact, but ahead of time the best you can do is vote for someone who represents your district's interests in the most general sense. It's really a crapshoot as to what your representative is going to do once they're sat in front of some dense, hard-to-understand legislation cooked up by a nameless, faceless corporate-political committee.
That sweet, sweet money flowing into their pockets.
I'm more annoyed that they keep pushing the similar legislatures despite widespread protests. remember ACTA and others?
It looks to me like they will keep pushing same stuff, that people actually do not want, again and again - just wait some time until the heat dies down so to say.
At least call out the House of Representatives, that's what supposed to truly represent individuals. The senate is supposed to be at a state level by design (originally of course it was supposed to be a check on the general public, but it doesn't work that way anymore).
I did ("U.S. congress areas are more even, ranging from 500k to 1 million")
> The senate is supposed to be at a state level by design
Yes, same as the EU Council (which is 1 rep per country, although that rep is the head of government of each country rather than directly elected -- I believe the senate started off in a similar fashion)
The U.S. House is more balanced than the UK parliament or European Parliament, but it's not an insane inbalance. Not sure what would happen if American Samoa became a state. Would it's rep get a vote? If so that would be 1 vote for 55k people. You'd have to have about 6000 reps in that case to have an even spread.
In fact I think it should be standard procedure for every poll. Making MEPs publicly state the reason for their vote makes them more accountable and this at least makes them think (hopefully).
TL;DR summary: The directive will have to be implemented in national legislations, a ~2 year long process. There are a bunch of contradictory laws and regulations to be reconciled. Your app or platform can probably ignore the new rules as they're too unclear and unenforceable - but do join trade associations that can provide good, reliable legal support.
[Edit] here's another article from EFF explaining the next steps:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/eus-parliament-signs-d...
As much as I can't do anything about the law itself, I can make sure that it will not wipe out startups and small companies that are trying to compete with the internet behemoths. We at Pex are making our Attribution Engine free of charge to all content creators, rights holders and platforms [0]. We will publicly announce it within next couple of days. I know it's far cry from the law not being enacted at all, but we hope it's something.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CLybxCFg_gz4n62UqVr3XEsy...
It's currently unlawful to format-shift (eg, rip CD to MP3) in England, so it's unlikely we'd have put up much argument against this.
> Under the new regulations, only the individual who purchased the original copy of the work, and not others such as a friend or family, is legally allowed to copy it.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-q...
The government said that this type of copying would have minimal impact on the rights-holders. Those rights holders disagreed, went to court, and won, and so now format shifting is not legal.
The court case is here: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2015/1723.html
It's long and complex. The first few paras are a good introduction.
EDIT:Genuinely baffled that this link to a primary source has been downvoted.
Currently, because of this case it's not lawful to format shift. I'm not saying that I think this is a good thing; I'm describing the law as it is in England.
Using the Guardian sources linked above:
> The high court has quashed regulations introduced by the government to allow members of the public to lawfully copy CDs and other copyright material bought for their own private use.
[...]
> On Friday, in a further decision, he said: “It is clear that I should quash the regulations. I make clear this covers the entirety of the regulations and all the rights and obligations contained therein.”
[...]
> The changes had come into force last October under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. Prior to 1 October, it was unlawful, for example, to “rip” or copy the contents of a CD on to a laptop, smartphone or MP3 player for personal use, although the format-shifting activity had become commonplace. The regulations introduced an exception into UK copyright law permitting the making of personal copies, as long as they were only for private use.
The law said format shifting was unlawful. The government introduced regulations to make format shifting lawful, but they didn't include mechanism to pay the rights holders. The judge ruled against the government, those new regulations were quashed, and format shifting became unlawful again.
Here's what the judge said: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2015/2041.html
One Labour MEP, both Conservatives - no response. Not even a form letter.
Other Labour MEP - "You are being brainwashed by Google. This is the best thing for the Internet ever! You'll see!" (paraphrased as I don't have the email to hand, but she did use the word "brainwashed"). Frankly the whole exchange struck me as extremely immature on her part!
Two UKIP MEPs - reply a few hours after I emailed them. "We'll be fighting this as much as we possibly can. It's a disaster. The Articles say one thing and say something contradictory a few sections later!"
Much of the fightback seems to have been from the populist far-right parties (with the obvious exception of the various Pirate parties). I wonder if the EU has realised it's just handed a massive win to them -- all they have to say now is "look, we tried to protect your Youtube but the EU stopped us!".
I've had to fill in a GDPR concent form on paper for my local car dealership and I put no to all forms of marketing.
In fact if Germany and France agree on something, this going to happen. I don't think that UK will accept that, even if they risk "hard brexit" (which is largely demonized, I can't believe that any bigger EU economy would just give up trading with UK, especially when World economy will start slowing down and every eurocent will count).
It is immeasurably more complicated than "I'm sure everyone will want to trade with the UK!". This is exactly the sort of line is expect to hear from the fanatics here.
As I said elsewhere on this story -- the EU has possibly just handed Eurosceptic parties a massive win in certain demographics they've had trouble making inroads into.
Is this the page for this vote? https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term8-copyright-in-the-digital-s...
If it is, it says 312 voted for it, 317 against it, 24 abstained. But it passed? Why?
Amendments did not pass 312-317 and Directive passed 3xx-247 (cant recall the exact numbers)
Where the laws don’t apply is if your service is to host user content and you have the size to circumvent justice. YouTube makes a lot of money off legal content, how much is unknown because they literally won’t tell you how much they earn from your content, but they also earn money from illegal content. They avoid responsibility by being large, and these copyright laws is going to combat exactly that.
It’s not perfect, but how else do you suggest that we make the laws that apply to you and me also apply to big tech companies?
Expect a takedown notice and it goes away.
These big companies let people upload their own videos.
Now they are liable for what their users share.
Expect them to disable letting users share videos.
So the EU will get corporate-tube at best - assuming they don't just get the China treatment. They thought they were too big to pull out too.
I would have liked to see a higher threshold so that small and medium sized companies weren’t affected. But it’s refreshing that we finally put an end to the blatant abuse by the ad industry.
I think they’ll just automatically flag the copyrighted video (sometimes incorrectly) and prevent YOU from sharing it. They won’t suddenly pay the copyright holder when someone else uploads a copyrighted work.
The solution to “some of us might be subject to shitty rules” is “make everyone subject to shitty rules”? Also, why do you think large companies won’t be better positioned to comply with these rules? They can more-easily license what they need and lobby the regulators whose powers are being increased under these rules.
Unless you’re against copyrights in general, I have a really hard time seeing why you’d be against this law.
It simply pushes the responsibility from you, the YouTube uploader, to YouTube itself. Maybe that will lead to YouTube preventing you from uploading videos, maybe YouTube will block Europe, but I honestly doubt it because of money, and in either case, the EU represents the people of Europe, YouTube represents a few shareholders, I know whom I personally prefer taking a lead on copyrights.
I get the people who are opposed to copyrights in general, but I’m just not.
I haven't looked into it too closely, but isn't it the case that they do apply if a platform doesn't have the size, but is more than three years old?
There's no big database of all copyrighted works and if it existed it would be the biggest violator of them all.
It is technically impossible to verify the owner of a copyright using anything other than the courts.
Yes, and I don't want them to.
"The Copyright Directive protects freedom of expression, a core value of the European Union. It sets strong safeguards for users, making clear that everywhere in Europe the use of existing works for purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature as well as parody are explicitly allowed. This means that memes and similar parody creations can be used freely. The interests of the users are also preserved through effective mechanisms to swiftly contest any unjustified removal of their content by the platforms."[0]
[0] From the final press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-19-1839_en.ht....
> The likes of Google News would have to pay publishers for press snippets shown in search results.
I don't really understand the rationale behind this. Really, I am trying to put myself in the shoes of a policy maker, why would I do this law? It's the publisher's role to ask for money, isn't it? Why should a country force a company to pay for sharing content from another company? I don't understand...
[0]:https://m.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-approves-controversial-cop...
The countries with high corruption get more voting rights than the ones with less corruption.
Wouldn't be so bad if they focused on just trading deficiencies, but no, they want to have their own culture budget ffs.
Never thought they'd actually pass this terrible "law".
Terrible.
But maybe not a complete surprise. Pandora's Box was opened two years ago when Germany privatized censorship. Maybe, back then we did it for all the "right reasons". But in politics, that's all too often just the beginning of a slippery slope. And many of those who today protest this new censorship where in favor of it the last time. Because that time it was supposed to censor "the other side".
This should help prevent fake news and foster a more balanced online discussion.
YouTube really built an empire on copyrighted content, and still continues to profit from it, as a result of liability shield that the DMCA provides. It has never sat well with me.
Today YouTube no longer relies on copyrighted content to be relevant. User generated content is now the primary source of views and ad revenue, but that wasn't always so. I remember when YouTube was the place to go to watch The Daily Show, SouthPark, SNL, and a host of other things. That's how YouTube became popular. This, "It's okay to break the law as long as the end result does more good than harm," is a weird line of thinking that seems to permeate a host of tech startups these days. And in the case of YouTube, while it's true that copyrighted content infringement is no longer their business driver, there's still a large portion of content that is copyrighted and YouTube shouldn't be profiting from that for no reason.
If YouTube was a public utility, as many people—particularly "creators"—seem to want to treat it things might be different. But YouTube isn't a public utility. Letting users hide behind anonymous accounts shouldn't magically absolve you of liability.
I think letting things develop the way they have probably did more good than harm at the end of the day, but I'm not sure that justifies it—and I don't think it should just be allowed to continue.
The current content gatekeepers built their studios by violating Edison's patents. In fact many innovators got started by subverting copyright restrictions in some form.
Perhaps that tells you something.
Also, it's not a one-way street. YT is a platform where artists can effectively reach a worldwide audience for free, something their publishers would have to pay handsomely for before, in the form of prime-time ad spots on multiple TV networks.
Upload-Filtering is impossible if done right. You could implement 30%, but this will not help you as you are still liable on any miss.
return random()>0.5
Will this make companies headquartered anywhere in UK, in more advantageous position, than a company serving user-created content, with HQ in European Union?
(I can’t name a strong contender in the wild currently, but I would also hope that this regulation, if successfully implemented, catalyzes some progress in this direction as a side effect.)
Whatever, the faster this EU fails, the better.
What they haven't realized is that paying authors a fair revenue when a copyrighted content is shared is still a problem below the horizon. Or, to be more precise, it's also a problem, and it requires a good degree of innovation (see micro-payments, content consumption tracking, Blockchain+smart contracts etc.) in order to be tackled.
But we haven't gotten there yet because the real problem is upstream: HOW do we recognize that some uploaded content is copyrighted in the first place, and who's the right copyright holder for that content?
How do we do it in a scalable way on platforms where thousands or millions of videos, images or posts are shared per day?
How to pinpoint the right copyright holders for a certain content, taking into account that the current situation is extremely fragmented to say the least, that there are multiple national societies for authors that have barely progressed technologically in the last decades (nor have been pushed to do so), that many of them haven't even digitized their own records, let alone provide a unique database where the information about their intellectual property can be publicly accessed?
And finally, how to find the right balance between blocking the unauthorized publication of copyrighted content and avoiding an over-zealous approach where companies start blocking legit content as well? (Hint: it's not by putting strict time constraints on taking content down and threatening huge fines on companies).
YouTube has already had for some years some content filtering algorithms that automatically block the upload of copyrighted material. It has taken years to build to a company with the size of Google. It required billions of videos to be collected and labelled, massive investments in manual reviewers and engineers, and it's still an algorithm that makes lots of mistakes. How do we expect a smaller start-up to successfully implement a better solution?
How could the EU regulators fail to see that this law will create more entrance barriers than those it promises to take down? Google, Facebook etc. have been fighting against this law because it's really bad for the internet in general, but they'll be the ones to benefit most from it. Sure, they'll have to pay a higher toll to make business in Europe, but it's guaranteed that they won't have many competitors. Because, unless the EU pushed for a more distributed and open access to intellectual property, they will be the only ones who can afford to build an infrastructure that really complies with the new regulation.
It's really a shame because the law could have been written in a way that would have really solved the problem without creating new ones. Even people like Tim-Berners Lee (the dude who created the web) and people at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley have raised their voice: the EU had the moral obligation to sit with them and listen to their concerns before going down its path, and it failed to do so.
There were tons of better ideas. Pushing the associations of authors and artists to digitize their information and make it available in open format. Make a shared database of copyrighted content. Expose an API that businesses can use, where you provide a snippet of some content or its hash digest and the system will tell you whether it contains any copyrighted material, and who are the authors. Set up a continental infrastructure for micro-payments to make sure that authors receive their fair share for each play or view, regardless of where the content is consumed. These are big things to build and no company is really incentivised to do it alone: that's when politics should step in and remove the blockers on the way. Unfortunately the EU this time has chosen the "we set the bar, we don't know if it's too high, and actually we don't even care, good luck you guys" approach without listening to anyone. And that's a huge shame on them.
An upload filter would be good for the internet because.....
-It prevents copyright holders from being infringed upon and having to produce paperwork to enforce their copyright.
-It could possible prevent harmful material from being uploaded before it can be reviewed.
-It puts liability on the tech companies to account for their platforms.
-It protects content creators.
An upload filter would be bad for the internet because.....
-It raises the bar for entry into the tech market.
-It increases the amount of work a new-comer in the market must do before launching a product.
-It adds a lot of localized complexity to the internet.
-The internet was not made to satisfy the requirements of sovereign nations each imposing their own arbitrary laws.
-The internet was supposed too/has the potential to be a globalist resource that transcended political borders.
An upload filter would be good for my business because.....
-It requires me to perform some due diligence on user-submitted data that I otherwise would probably overlook.
-It reduces the likelihood that I'll receive a DCMA takedown request.
-It will increase public trust and perceived security.
-People like to see compliance with regulations, even the ones they don't agree with.
-I could roll out the filter to all users and market it as an added layer of protection.
An upload filter would be bad for my business because.....
-It greatly increases the amount of time I must spend processing simple uploads.
-The user must wait for the file to be processed before they can continue using my service (assuming they want to use their file right away).
-It will cost time and resources to design, test, and deploy a filter.
-It adds complexity.
-I will need some frame of reference before I can determine if a file is original or copyrighted.
-I cannot trust the user to tell me if they own the rights to an uploaded file.
-I could try and geo-fence Europe so I don't have to filter non-European files but what if the copyright holder being infringed is in Europe?
-What if a file I filtered out has a copyright holder in the US who has no rights in Europe?
-Technically OSS is copyrighted. A file licensed under MIT might not be infringing anything although a file licensed under GPLv3 might be infringing.
No forgiveness for kneecapping free expression in return for some lobbyist euros and pretending it protects artists.
And to the artists who were dumb enough to believe it: if your art wasn't mediocre you wouldn't have any trouble drawing the attention of the copyright industry, as they are always looking for something new to milk. So you traded off a big break that won't happen anyway for the collective right to free expression of the entire Union. Good job, you utter tossers.
having said that, it's still a stupid regulation which shows EU parliament's incompetence in this regard.
My new company in the US can safely ignore the EU when it comes to both Article 13 and GDPR. There is nothing they can do about it. I can take on EU users, who can freely upload content, and I do not need to comply with the EU filter laws.
There is merely one primary requirement: all of my business and infrastructure must remain outside of the EU. So long as I do that, I get to avoid those laws. This of course isn't unique to the US, the same is true of most other non-EU nations.
You don't even need to speculate. Just look at China
People actually did have access to real news, via radio. Listening to the Allies broadcasts was illegal, but possible.
What you can't do is claim that uploading a rip of Generic Marvel Action Movie VIII is 'communication'.
I am sure the same will be done by the EU states in regards to upload filter. First, they use it in order to block data because there's a copyright in place, but very soon it's going to be blocked for other reasons (e.g. the user sends a message with a keyword the EU doesn't like etc.).
It's very easy to implement GDPR compliance, and A LOT of websites opted for blocking their content in Europe instead of working to make their services compliant.
The requirements for being compliant with these directives are so difficult, than only major companies will have the resource to do it, and many will definitely not think it's worth the effort.
Reddit and other social networks rally users against this law however as it's contrarian to their bottom line and growth curves. It is important to pause and consider if the law (certainly promoted by large copyright holders) harms these networks, individuals, or society at large.
If companies catered to a lot more expensive to implement laws it's baffling to me why many, many websites don't work in Europe after they passed GDPR laws, then. I guess the fact that they can't use people's data however they please anymore doesn't make it worth it to serve webpages here..?
"A LOT". I live in Europe and the number of website inaccessible due to GDPR is not even one for one thousand... And most of the "non-compliant" ones are insignificant.
Only big companies or lawyers makes GDPR a big deal...
Really? I had the impression that it borders on impossible to be GDPR compliant. At least in theory. In praxis nobody is GDPR compliant and nobody cares.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...
This would also cut back on the amount of content being published to an extent someone like Google could have very robust and thorough moderating teams.
Cashflow being in the black isn't enough. The risks have to be offset. It isn't particularly clear that can be done without offloading financial risk to the parties who are posting content on the platform. Having very high financial penalties combined with legal requirements that are probably impossible to implement could just mean the "cashflow in the black" will be that way until it inevitably isn't.
China has already walled themselves off, Russia's been looking into it, the EU is just next in line.