Wonder how everyone here who keep praising and extolling everything the EU does has to say about this.
Edit: being downvoted to oblivion suggests either that they are in denial or there are many paid shills around or both, either way I rest my case.
Edit: being downvoted to oblivion suggests either that they are in denial or there are many paid shills around or both, either way I rest my case.
Young EU supporters, like me, are the very people who were demonstrating against this.
We are caught between reckless Brexiteering nationalists and a lobby-bought EU parliament.
I wouldn't say this is about "lobby-bought EU parliament". This is about the parliament routinely rubber-stamping everything. Rejections are extremely rare. This legislation had so wide opposition that there was a chance it won't pass. Even this passed. Consider how well the process works for things that aren't of so much public interest.
It’s pessimistic as it assumes always corruption. But pragmatic as it minimizes corruption by maximiing the inefficiency and cost necessary for lobbies to spread cash more thinly and come into conflict with lobby arbitrage country by country. For example, copyright lobby might win in country #1, but hardware lobby wins in country #2 and we end up with conflicting laws in different countries. As opposed to both countries using the same laws so it comes down to which country spends the most money in total gets their law in both countries.
Of course, I think it would be better to have a law set that represents will of the people and Pareto frontier of max indicidual benefit and community benefit.
We already have three major international copyright treaties (Berne, UCC and TRIPS), two of which actually predate the EU, and the other was not primarily pushed by it, which set strict rules on how "independent" parliaments can legislate. So not having the EU doesn't seem to have helped.
The problem of EU lobbying, and inter-national divide-and-conquer? Yes, to some extent.
Framing this as politician's fallacy, action for the sake of action, suggests that lobbying won't be worse in the EU than at a local level. In reality, it's easier to consolidate a smaller same-nation population, than multiple international ones. Just look at how stereotypes are used to discredit - lazy greeks, racist little-englanders etc.
There was a large-scale poll, who cares what the small-scale polls say.
Of course, referendums aren't really polls. Polls have no official effect, you can freely refuse them and lose nothing.
I'm reasonably happy the EU is interested in shifting profits back away from big tech, and confident the Internet will adjust and survive the reduced viability of the large content platforms.
As a fan of decentralization and quality journalism, and no ties to any company affected positively or negatively by these decisions, I'm on board.
Yes, and most providers have usually done a good job at reducing content theft on their platforms, to the extent of their capabilities.
The only thing that has changed is that now they can be punished for not meeting someone elses subjective standard.
> I'm reasonably happy the EU is interested in shifting profits back away from big tech
If that's what you believe, then I understand your position. Sadly, you could very well be completely mistaken. Google, Facebook & Co. already have their filters; they can prove that they're trying their best.
It's only the smaller communities that will be affected, and they won't have the money for dozens of well-paid machine-learning specialists to build them content filters. We'll see how long it takes for google to sell access to their services.
Of course, if you think I'm mistaken, I'd love to hear your reasoning (I'd also really love to be proven wrong on this topic)
Platforms that have human reviewed content or where people self-host their own content will have no issues with this change, and platforms will be likely significantly less profitable if they truly move to comply with the law, as it will require armies of humans, or massive liability costs.
The directive is idiotic, self contradictory, and cannot possibly do what they say it will.
It is stunning that critical thinking is now so bad that they can convince a majority of MEPs this is not a complete fantasy.
RIP EU. This is the last straw. Selling off free expression for cheap Russian gas. Motherfuckers. If I hear one more "muh russian internet manipulation" peep from these twats...
I don't think MEPs are dumb or incompetent for anything other than choosing the wrong people to advise them on technical issues. Consider that not everyone necessarily understands how internet content even works.
Politicians don't even seem to understand that you can't "just scan content that infringes on copyright"; that you have to scan the content precisely to find out if it does so.
What worries me is how they don't admit that they don't understand the situation. That they blindly believe that they can get a rough understanding of things and create good laws easily.
What worries me even more is how they ignored the clear protest from large parts of the population and just powered through it as fast as they could. It's the same as with GDPR; they only hurt the small guys because they don't understand what they're even making the law for.
I'm not "worried", I want these people out of office and far away from influence. The B Ark is in charge.
This is not going to happen. Regulations are very likely to favor incumbents as their high rate of profit can more easily accommodate them. Incidentally this is the reason why sometimes big companies are in favor of laws that seem to be bad for them: they are worse for the competition.
But yeah nobody is defending this unless you're part of the copyright lobby, the news lobby or some other mafia-like organization