„German newspaper FAZ reports its investigation found strong indications that Germany traded its support for the #copyright deal for French concessions on Russian gas #northstream2„
Because one of the hidden games played in the EU is 'keep the Germans in check'. Some might even say this was one of the original intentions behind the foundation of the EU as a 'peace upholding structure' across Europe.
> why the hell France (or the rest of the EU) even cares about where Germany gets their gas from in the first place?
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.
Nord Stream 2 would make gas system in Ukraine vurnable and allows further military escalation from Russia side, as it would be possible to transport gas via Nord Stream 2. This would make peace in EU under question also since aggression won't be in Ukraine only in case it escalates.
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.
> Germany on the other side does not like "being controlled" and has some attraction to Russia.
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.
Sure. I agree. I used "controlled" word as some kind of abstraction. It is more about influence.
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.
And in this case it means Russia gains much more influence over eastern Europe. As a Lithuanian, I'd rather isolate Russia much more and have more dependency on US.
Because the EU policy on energy is to promote diversification and not allow Russia to use their status as an indispensable supplier to impose their geopolitical will and monopolistic pricing.
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.
Even if there are people out there who deny climate change, geopolitics like this ought to convince everyone that distributed renewable energy is the way forward.
Climate change denial is large problem only in Anglosphere.
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.
I think that you underestimate how many people coal kills.
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.
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.
Nuclear isn't built because it isn't financially viable. I'd love to see more nuclear, but it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. Maybe if we added a carbon tax that was reasonable considering the climate emergency it might be.
It depends on the cost, honestly. If the cost is too high, no utility will continue to run those plants. I agree with you, but the reality is that finance runs everything these days.
Main cost of nuclear power plant is the capital cost of building it. Operating nuclear plant is extremely cheap, even cheaper than maintaining solar or wind power plants.
Yea, and capex is the hardest nut to crack since it requires investors that want to make a profit sooner rather than later. I love nuclear, but it's not a realistic resource at this time. All the downvotes in the world won't make this untrue.
A carbon tax would be nice, but I rather see in EU a complete ban on burning coal, oil and gas for electricity. From there people can do what ever they want to solve the energy shortage during production lows, be that nuclear or other solutions.
I doubt we will see any reasonable economics for nuclear as long coal, oil and gas is allowed to be burned.
>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.
I would seriously like to hear from you folks why you disagree with my statement above, please comment. I have a feeling it's either rabid pro-nuke folks (I was a nuclear technician in the Navy, so I am also pro-nuke) or the pro-oil folks that disagreed with my carbon tax proposal. I have no idea right now why you think my position is wrong, so please enlighten me.
This is the first example of French-German "leadership" about which Marcon and Merkel were talking in the end of 2018. EU just enter hegemony phase of these two countries and I believe nothing good will come out of it for European structures and the continent.
I will now start my move out of the EU. I know how heavily restricted Internet feels like from my frequent Iran travels, and I will move out of any country that moves 2 inches in that direction, whatever the "good reason" might be. Politicians felt like your regular corrupt banana republic representatives this time. And now they know how to get away with this, they will try it with something different again soon.
Switzerland is the current plan. It will enable me to keep my business in Germany while not living in CrazyLand myself. I also considered USA and Canada, yet this would mean more problems (at least at the beginning). I am quite familiar with Switzerland and I appreciate their special political system a lot.
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.
I totally did not see this. Thank you for the warning. As I am not totally into politics, I thought that the stupidity of the EU would not be repeated by Switzerland. Honestly, if they do this, I can stay where I am and take some time to investigate the situation in the US or Canada again. Of course, only it Switzerland, there can be referendums, while in the EU we totally do not have them.
If a single law makes you switch countries you should overthink that decision. It's a bad law for sure, I even joined a demonstration against it, but it's like totally on a different scale than censorship in the Iran. Please inform yourself before making such statements.
I did not mean that the EU copies the brutally censored web of Iran, but that I heavily oppose any legislation that takes away any part of "free speech".
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.
> I thought that the stupidity of the EU would not be repeated by Switzerland
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.
If you want to move out of the sphere of influence of the copyright cartels you're going to have to achieve escape velocity at some point. Those places where copyright infringement is not going to result in repercussions are generally not worth living in.
While it might not seem so, I totally favor the enforcement of copyright laws (I still think they are over the top in their current form, but anyway, I am not against them). I just think that the individual user is responsible, not a platform. And this is what the big problem with all this is. We are living in a platform world as this eases things, yet they are given a task they can not possibly complete without essentially giving up on what they do). There will never be something like a European Youtube again, it is a financially impossible task now.
There never was something like a European Youtube before, the closest we ever got was 'dailymotion' and that suffered greatly from France's idiotic policy of handing out money with strings attached to be able to veto exits to US companies.
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.
Lots of laws propagate to other places, as time passes. Brazil now has its own GDPR version, which is heavily inspired by EU's GDPR. Some laws are good to be the same, others are not (this is one of the reasons people has been supporting the most recent nationalist movements).
While I understand what you mean, I don't see myself as having to suffer from stupid legislation. I am no politician and do not plan to be one at this point.
There is nothing we can do, by design. The European Commission has the exclusive ability to create new laws, and they're almost totally isolated from any kind of 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.
The European Commission is sadly not elected by the MEPs, but by PMs of the member states. The European Parliament has to approve the Commission, but can only approve or reject the entire Commission, and not individual members of it.
Commissioners are not elected, that stretches the meaning of the word past breaking point. By that definition literally any government employee right down to sewage workers are 'elected'.
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.
This is so thoroughly untrue that I'm concerned that you're intentionally misrepresenting things.
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.
Just because you do not directly elect the commissioners does not mean that they are "unelected".
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.
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.
This is an interesting problem to me. I sometimes think that having multiple locally bought lobbies with individual priorities is preferred to a single giant lobby doing winner take all on large scales.
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.
But you have giant lobbies anyway, because companies and cartels are multinational, even if the parliaments aren't.
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.
Solve what problem? The problem of lobbies in general? No, it doesn't.
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.
Then you'd have to tell me what kind of action my comments imply. Opposing consolidation of power over multiple populations who can only oppose it in aggregate is what I imply is bad, and discord / lack of unity among those populations gives umbalanced influence to that unified central power.
Local parliaments are closer and have more contact with their constituents so they'll automatically be more transparent and if my local government becomes unbearable I can move 200 KM and be free of it but if the EU becomes unbearable I have to move 2000+ KMs to a new continent.
There is no denying that postings here get hijacked by those who praise every fine and law directed at american tech companies so they should know or admit it if they do that this "directive" is part of that trend.
So what you're saying is that some people support some measures (while others don't) and disagree strongly with others (while some do agree). Sounds... right? :p
Maybe this will have you reflect on dismissing opposition to EU ("reckless Brexiteering nationalists") and consider why people may oppose (some aspects of) current EU. Some of those "reckless Brexiteering nationalists" may simply have experienced similar things with EU legislation before, in areas you don't care about.
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.
Well, my position has been that platforms have been built on the knowledge that they're heavily used for content theft but that they're shielded from liability for it unfairly. (See Section 230 here in the US). And I think the tech industry is a pox on our news media and the money they need to do real investigative work. (See Apple taking like a solid 50% revenue on their news service.)
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.
There is no way this new law actually protects little guys. All the exemptions for small platforms go away once that platform exists for 3 years. After that you turn into another Google and Facebook. So is the EU somehow expecting a new market to open up for alternative players who only expect to be around for 3 years, before closing up shop? Who is going to invest in that? How is it going to make "big tech" less powerful when it is explicitly an on-ramp to bait and switch more "big tech" into existence?
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...
> It is stunning that critical thinking is now so bad that they can convince a majority of MEPs this is not a complete fantasy.
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.
> platforms have been built on the knowledge that they're heavily used for content theft
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)
Machine learning based moderation has time and time again proven to be woefully inadequate. Human intervention is required, and Content ID does not meet the requirements of this new article. And I would argue the amount of cash Google and Facebook stockpile rather than hiring human moderators reflects that they are doing far from "their best".
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.
Hey, I hate google almost as much as people who eat while on the computer, but I still think this law is dumb. Many have already pointed out how it actually plays directly into the hands of Google and other big tech.
I don't understand this view at all. Why would a company that benefits this law spend so much money trying to prevent it from passing? Surely by now we recognize that big tech will always move in the direction of its own profits, so shouldn't we look at what they're aiming for, and recognize that is their best case scenario?
I would argue that the people who make policy decisions at Google are incredibly smart. If this was going to cement their monopoly, wouldn't their resistance to it be... Muted at best?
> I don't understand this view at all. Why would a company that benefits this law spend so much money trying to prevent it from passing?
A couple of Devil's Advocate suggestions for you:
- Their self-interest is enlightened enough to see that there is long-term benefit in the playing field being at least somewhat even, e.g., because unassailable monopolies become lazy and eventually collapse under their own weight.
- The people who run Google were startup founders once, and many of their employees and products were once startup founders/startups, so they know that a healthy startup ecosystem is to their benefit.
I neither strongly believe nor disbelieve the truth of these positions. Nor do I know if they are any part of Google’s thinking behind its campaigning.
I'm just suggesting them as possibilities that might help you make your own position more robust.
> I'm reasonably happy the EU is interested in shifting profits back away from big tech
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.
Well, it's a damn shame, a lamentable mistake. Maybe it is even indicative of structural issues. (Having said that, the EU is still one of my favourite jurisdictions to be based in. And there are not many people that extol "everything the EU does"; things are rarely black and white.)
It's the biggest blow the EU has given me so far. And yes, my support for the EU got weakened a lot by this. Just... the guys voting for this law had generally been the converative and more nationalistic parties which usually argue against the EU.
Clueless twats. I will look up all who voted for this farce and let them know individually it will haunt them for the rest of their political career.
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.
The parliament definitely does have constituents, and they needed to approve this for it to get through (the rest of the bodies are either controlled by the parliament or by the individual governments of the EU members).
Which EU body is not elected? The European Parliament is directly elected by the people. The Council consists of each member states elected governments. The Commission could be considered not elected, but everyone involved in choosing it is ultimately elected, either directly or indirectly. It also cant make laws without the approval of the unambiguously elected bodies.
Legislative power is co-held by the parliament and the council: the parliament is directly elected by the people and the council is elected by the governments that were elected by the people.
Am I the only one who kinda feels like I'm not living in a democratic system anymore?
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.
I think there is a feeling that this law was largely authored by/for narrow (commercial) interests in the entertainment industry, with little to no regard for its consequences for other parts of the web like open discussion forums and projects such as Wikipedia.
The tech industry are also major lobbyists, who often spend more on influencing politicians in their favor than the entertainment industry does. Commercial interests were on both sides, as much as they'd like you to believe it was a valiant fight of the little guys to save the Internet.
hard to argue that, given the actual in-person turnout at protests, and the role that EDRI and other NGOs played. Those involved there have been very active, and very public, for a long time. Julia Reda is one of them, but maybe also google Thomas Lohninger.
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.
When you have massive parts of the population telling you they're not going to vote for you again if you support a piece of legislation, I'd say it's reasonable to say you are betraying your voters when you don't even reconsider your position.
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.
>Brexit vote should never have been legally binding
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.
You seem to have misinterpreted me. I was not speaking to the finality of the Brexit vote (and I agree that a roughly 50/50 split is not a mandate), but to the tactic of attempting to invalidate your political opponents by claiming that they were duped or hoodwinked into voting the way they did. It's incredibly patronizing (in addition to being illogical).
It's not a "tactic". It's a statement of the absurd level of lies and disinformation from the Brexit side from Farage, Gove and Johnson and in interviews and advert all the way down to local campaigns. Subsequently shown to have had illegal levels of spending, criticised by the electoral commission and countless stories about hidden funding, dubious tactics from Cambridge Analytica or whoever, or bullshit facebook ads. Remain came out with some poor predictions, but there weren't, as far as I can tell, any outright lies. A distinct lack of revelations after the event too.
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.
So the actions of some people (whoever lied about issues related to the referendum) invalidates the actions of a separate, unaffiliated group (voters)? In other words, what you're saying is that all I have to do to invalidate your vote (and, really, your entire political viewpoint) is to take out some ads on Facebook that make untrue claims about your cause?
That's the reason the political process, funding, advertisements are all regulated in the UK. To supposedly prevent such things. Clearly struggling in current conditions, but redesigning the oversight is a different conversation.
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?
Look, I'm not British, so I don't know all the details on the Brexit campaign. I just see a certain thing all the time (generally on the part of people on the left, though I am certain that the roles have been reversed many times in the past), which is to point to some disinformation (Russian meddling in the U.S., whatever happened around Brexit in the U.K.) and then draw the conclusion that the only reason people on the other side voted for Brexit/Trump is because they're just so darned gullible that they were taken in by the Russians (or Farage or whatever).
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?
I know that there's been voter blaming for Brexit, Trump and other surprising results around the world, but I don't hold with blaming the voters for being foolish/gullible. Even if the surprise option won, or especially if they were sold a pup. There's usually a reasonably simple underlying reason too -- unemployment, tax, corruption and disillusion with current politicians, an especially compelling campaign or a particularly poor one, etc.
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.
Which is a case in point about the will of the people. Especially in very complicated situations, the people do not necessarily understand the impact of their choices, which is why they select representatives to act in their stead.
The choice offered was a 'have cake, unicorns and rainbows with a free puppy' or remain in the EU. How were they expected to understand the real impact of their choice when it was so blatantly missold?
"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...
Hey, I'm as onside with getting rid of Brexit as anyone, but a democracy is voting for a person or a platform. That person may be a horrible lying bastard, or the platform may be so full of holes you could drain spaghetti on it. That's just the way it works. People vote for the thing that they vote for. Now, if you decided to overturn the vote because the voters made a bad choice... that's pretty much the opposite of democracy, even if it results in a better choice.
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).
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.
You started a flamewar with this and then fuelled it below. This is exactly what we don't want on HN, and breaks the site guidelines badly. Would you please review them and follow them when posting here? You'll find that they include:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
The EU is not democratic at all. Especially because the unelected European Commission has executive and legislative power.
The parliament only has veto rights and even at that it spectacularly fails as Art. 17 shows.
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.
These are pretty weak arguments to get rid of the EU.
In many democracies, the government has the power to propose legislation. And what democracy doesn't have backroom deals?
The problem here is that the backroom deal of two countries (Germany and France) now has influence over countries that are totally unrelated like e.g. Finland. This turns the EU into a tyranny where might is right. Why should Germans have a say about how the internet should work in Finland?
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 problem here is that the backroom deal of two states (California and New York) now has influence over states that are totally unrelated like e.g. Wyoming. This turns the US into a tyranny where might is right. Why should Californians have a say about how the internet should work in Wyoming?
(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)
I never said that the US is a great example for a functioning democracy. The best example for democracy is Switzerland. It also has the highest standard of living in the world as a result.
Switzerland's high standard of living is almost entirely due to their smartness. They kept out of wars and as a result could incrementally (and exponentially) build wealth instead of rebuilding their country from ruins every few decades.
And it only wasn't invaded because the entire country was (and is) a standing army, and Germany would have to pay dearly for every mile they tried to take.
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.
That argument also applies to any democracy (or indeed any polity larger than a household): why should the people in my town have a say over the laws in the adjacent town?
Abolishing the EU would have the unfortunate consequence of unmitigated Russian influence over all of East Europe. The system needs to change, but abolishing the EU entirely would be a net loss.
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.
European Commissioners are selected by natioanl governments.
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 America vote for the secretary of transportation?
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)?
In the UK legislative and executive power is normally merged by the government whips maintaining control, and the parliament has the power to (dis)approve. Parliament can attempt some amendments, but they must be in scope, and again under normal circumstances the amendment won't pass without support of the government.
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.
> Does America vote for the secretary of transportation?
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 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.
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)
It might be illuminating to talk about what it meant for Juncker to receive the most votes in 2014. First up, there are no EU-wide political parties, just shifting alliances of local national parties, none of which have more than 30% of the MEPs. For the 2014 elections, they came to a deal where the alliance with the most MEPs got their choice as President of the European Commission. (Which is not how it's supposed to work, but let's put that aside for a moment.)
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.
> 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.
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.
It's purely democratic. Median age of Germans is 48 and most old people just want cheap gas to heat their houses. They are still offline and don't care about the pyramid scheme /dba/ welfare state.
I'm seriously baffled about the amount of HN commenters, who I'd assume are highly educated, who think that democracy doesn't work if they don't agree with every law produced by it.
Education and intelligence don’t imply any particular insight into our motivations or feelings. It’s also true that an education focused on programming and tech in general is an extremely limited focus unrelated to politics. Then there’s just the reality that people understand on some level that “undemocrstic” is more emotive than “I don’t like this outcome and wish it hadn’t happened.” Finally a lot of people seem to hav a very warped idea about how the systems they live in really work, and when they find themselves on the wrong side of that system they assume the system isn’t working as intended.
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.
Democracy is rule of the people. If the democratic process leads to the rule of a minority of powerful people, isnt it valid to say its actually undemocratic, or at least insufficiently democratic?
>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.
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.
That’s not what I’m saying. Rather it’s a problem that “democratic” is largely an unhelpful term which obscures rather than reveals anything about a political system.
You’re going in circles here. You define democracy in nebulous terms that have little or no bearing on any self-styled democracy since Ancient Greece. If that’s your standard for democracy, then of course the whole world falls short and this ceases to be an interesting or productive discussion for exactly the reasons I raised in my original post. Beyond giving a demonstration of just what I’ve come to expect and dread from political “discourse” here, is there anything else you’re going for?
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.
If you're referring to me, I don't think like you described. However, I think representative democracy like we have it now is not suitable for a law like the one we're discussing. I want to be represented by experts and not by people who are ~50 years old and who are barely using the Internet.
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.
The difficulty is when the elected representatives decide unilaterally to pursue their own goals and aims, putting party before country and constituents.
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".
Democracy does not mean that you always get what you want. A majority in parliament and the council were in favor of this law, so you can't say it's undemocratic.
Democracy does not mean that the parliament and council is in favor, but that "the people" (translation of "demos") have "power" (translation of "kratos").
I am sick of people using this as some kind of an universal argument. The communist party in 1946 was also elected lawfully in my country, and Hitler also was (and yes, I'm fully aware that he lied to the German people - that's the point). And the fact that someone elected these people does not change anything about the possibility of them lying to the people that elected them, and it also changes nothing about the lawful and moral obligation these people have to their people (people they represent - all citizens of their country, not "people that voted for them"!) that they should act in their best interests - which they can just not do at any time, such as now, which makes this argument irrelevant.
But that constitution, if legitimate, expresses the will of the people itself. So what really happens is that the principles of the people bound the whims of the people.
But it does. "Persona", etymologically, means 'mask' (Per = through, Sonare = Speak. As in, 'the thing you speak through', context: Plays and such, where you'd wear a mask). But I doubt you'd have any luck telling Merriam and Webster to update the definition of 'Persona' and mention only the mask thing.
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.
No, the representatives have a moral and lawful obligation to act in the interest of the people they represent; that is the principle that is holding representative democracy together. They did not do that this time and that is why it feels anti-democratic.
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.
> 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.
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.
The power stems from the people, but in a representtve democracy we the people give the power to elected members of parliament, to represent us so that those parliamentarians can devote their time into the different issues and ensure broad support, contrary to more direct forms of governance where the general population can't invest much time into many debates and only engages where particular interests are touched.
is it democratic for most elected governments to keep pushing for legislature again and again, waiting a bit between attempts? Repeat it ad nauseam um 'till people get bored of protesting.
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.
>is it democratic for most elected governments to keep pushing for legislature again and again, waiting a bit between attempts? Repeat it ad nauseam um 'till people get bored of protesting.
Yes. This is how slavery was ended in the British empire and how the civil rights act passed in the US.
Yup, for me EU democracy looks like Roman Republic democracy at the turn of eras. People living at the times of First Triumvirate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Triumvirate) also thought that they live in democracy, they could vote and choose their representatives. Yet, as we know today, no decision could have been made without agreement of Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Magnus and Marcus Crassus.
The whole eu-institutions look like a benevolent dictator would like to have a democratic fassade.
Lots of talk, and big halls to have a speakers corner in. And at the end of day, the important decisions are mady by people who are not actually part of the process.
The EU Parliament, who we vote for every 5 years (and have elections coming up), vote for a law. You don't like said law, therefore it's undemocratic?
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!
Quite, I haven't got a clue on all the ins and outs, and I'm relatively clued up compared with most people I know. I've seen a lot of lobbying from google and co saying it shouldn't pass.
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.
To make my point a bit clearer: I am almost convinced now that "representative democracy" shouldn't count as a "democracy" just because the population can vote who they get ####ed by.
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.
Well it depends on which is your view about "what is the most democratic vote system".
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.
> 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.
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.
So you think the MEPs made a bad decision because they were mis- or uninformed, but then you would trust that the population on average would be more informed?
They were about as well-informed as much of the general public.
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.
> 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.
I think that too, IF they take the time to become experts in the matter of the law they don't want.
As I also mentioned in another comment, after the facts where on the table (as it became clearer and clearer that the UK will not get a deal), the referendum could have been repeated.
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.
> 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.
> It only works as long as the representatives see it as their duty to represent the will of the voters accurately
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.
Right, but the problem is often the 'lesser of two evils' voting options. There's no choice present for me that I feel represents what I want/need in an elected official. I'm not voting for what I want, I'm just making sure that what I loathe doesn't get into office.
This is the problem with representative democracy; it assumes there's a good proxy for my voice, and there increasingly isn't
This is where party-based politics fails representative democracy. There are supposed to be N voices in parliament, so that at least N different voices can be heard.
Large parties, party discipline and backroom deals are (imnsho) fundamentally at odds with a well-functioning representative democracy.
It's a feature, not a bug. As much as people want strong individuals as representatives, time has shown over and over again that a well oiled machine (party) will be much stronger. Those parties then create rules that reinforce the need for coalitions and weaken individuals.
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.
I mean strong vs weak government is really a whole other discussion.
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.
Sorry, but the Brexit referendum is the perfect example of choices that should not be made directly by the population, because it lacks the competence to foresee the effects or even to distinguish fact from fiction.
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?
>Sorry, but the Brexit referendum is the perfect example of choices that should not be made directly by the population, because it lacks the competence to foresee the effects or even to distinguish fact from fiction.
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 problem is that the UK seems wanting to cherry pick their autonomy and make use of the benefits the EU has to offer while rejecting the obligations and rules of such a union. Obviously it doesn't work like that and the eu doesn't have any interest in letting them have their cake and eat it too.
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’m the case of Brexit, it’s possible that having more frequent engagement with direct democracy would have left the people feeling less ignored by government and less inclined to try to “stick it to them” as a method of voicing their general feeling of discontent. I think we see this around the world, where ossified representational democracies leave people feeling rather disenfranchised and thus taking whatever potshots they find available.
the Brexit referendum is the perfect example of choices that should not be made directly by the population
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.
> none of the campaigners knew what they were arguing for
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
> 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
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.
The Brexit affair can hardly be called "democratic". The topic of the referendum was a vague question without any specifics, and it was a slim majority, while also disenfranchising a vast number of 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.
> 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.
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.
> The EU Parliament, who we vote for every 5 years (and have elections coming up), vote for a law. You don't like said law, therefore it's undemocratic?
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.
>The EU Parliament, who we vote for every 5 years (and have elections coming up), vote for a law. You don't like said law, therefore it's undemocratic?
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.
>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.
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.
I want to see who voted yes, plus I want to read for each MEP a short statement explaining why they think it is a good idea. Better yet, a short video fragment with their statement, so the media can use that to make them look stupid when this legislation turns out to be a total failure.
You mean like this? [0] What does it matter. Too many people seem to be too dumb to even understand how silly those politicians are and how uninformed this decision was. And honestly, they don't look like they care either way. As long as netflix works and someone will sell them beer, why would they care about silly concepts like "democracy" or "freedom"?
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).
There is a whole movement, called "Democracy in Europe Movement 2025" aimed at restoring democracy in Europe. European Parliament is definitely NOT a democratic institution. It became a sad lobbying haven. https://diem25.org/
I've also said it in the other thread about this, Macron is basically a crook, he has just sent the military to guard against some of France's citizens street protests [1], that's not at all democratic. Unfortunately, with the Brexit situation, with Angela Merkel who's on her way out and with Italy which is partly run by a comedian's party France has gained an unrivaled influence over EU affairs and in one way or another we (meaning us, EU citizens) are all under Macron's rule right now.
Btw, this initiative is heavily supported by Macron, from here[2]:
> France’s current batch of national politicians have consistently advocated for the worst parts of the Directive, and the Macron administration may seek to grab an early win for the country’s media establishment.
You're right about his influence in the EU and on the directive.
However he's completely in his right to have the army against disorderly protests that cause damage (including fire to historical buildings the last time).
Armies are supposed to fight against foreign troops, at worst, they are supposed to take sides in the event of a civil war, in no way are they supposed to be sent against their own citizenry. At least not in a democratic country.
What's worst is that the crooks that run things around my part of the continent (I live in Eastern Europe) have given Macron's recent actions as an example, as in: "if France's rulers are happy to tear-gas their own citizenry why are we blamed for doing the same thing"?
Militaries were not sent against anyone, they were placed to protect more of the institutions (that were not on the paths of protests), so that police forces could be relieved there to be concentrated on hot protest areas.
The Gendarmerie (a quasi-military force) have been quite apt at sending hard things into people's faces, no need to send in the military. This was purely a show of force from Macron.
The Gendarmerie has a double status: it's a military force but it's mission is one of police.
Now, a state (democratic or not) _has to_ show force, because that's one of the definitions of a state: an entity that takes the monopoly on violence.
Given the violence that demonstrated itself in some very specific places by very specific groups of people (and disrupted things even worse for others), it has to be expected that the state reacts. The contrary would be a sign of weakness through which more chaos would pour.
Moving militaries to replace police on some institutions' security is and was stupid, as it's not their core mission.
But calling "citizens street protests" the guerilla-like behaviours that triggered this clumsy response from the government is a bit naive and misleading as well.
If you study France's Fifth Republic rules (Constitution), you'll see the president has some discretionary power that are not democratic, in order to be able to take on decisions to safeguard the republic - that's a direct heritage of De Gaulle, that saw that in 1940, the president had not the power, and could not decide to make the army react fast enough to counter German invasion.
So, nothing real new so far.
This initiative was supported by Macron, as it was by many others. Nothing new either that France (and French cultural crowd) has always been historically in favour of this kind of copyright move, or even stronger ones.
> If you study France's Fifth Republic rules (Constitution), you'll see the president has some discretionary power that are not democratic, in order to be able to take on decisions to safeguard the republic
I'd say that the republic was not put in danger by these protests and that this kind of move creates a very dangerous precedent. I also had thought that "La Révolution française est terminée", to quote Francois Furet, and that's why I think that "de facto" no-one was expecting any French president to send the troops. Did De Gaulle send the troops in May '68?
On the rest, we differ. I'd say that these events are very, very concerning - especially given that the team in charge of the country is clearly not as experienced/diligent as the previous ones, yet.
The built-in error with democracy is that the politicians have the incentive to be re-elected. Therefore, they will use all available resources to try to satisfy enough before the next election. This makes the decisions they make become extremely short-term, often a time horizon of less than 4 years. A pretty good indication of this is to check on the sovereign debt in all democratic countries. You borrow money to finance reforms, the purpose of which is to get yourself re-elected. Likewise, the political class has strong incentives for the public part of society to grow. Then they secure their own and the sin's survival. A good indication that it is to look at the development of taxes and regulations that over time only increases. There is no currently relevant opposition to this. Every problem discussed has basically all the same solution; some type of public effort.
If you allow yourself to think about this logically, you realize that it is not a viable way, a country needs a long-term perspective. Every decision made in one country must be beneficial for that country in the long term. You have to manage something that your children and grandchildren should live in and it should be in better condition than when you took over it yourself. This is actually obvious. Making decisions at the expense of one's children and grandchildren is unreasonable.
Right now, the whole Western world is actually living on what our ancestors have created, and they lived in times where it was obvious that they did better for future generations. Today we burn it at both ends. Of course, a system that prizes laziness and short-sightedness and punishes fitness and diligence cannot be long-lived. The future will look at the present as a very strange parenthesis in the history of the West. That is, f we do not go under.
Just wait until they eventually are greeted with a notice "Sorry, we've blocked all users from Europe due to the new copyright reform" on every major social media site/app.
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.
The big ones will be fine. They are already using filters. It's all the forums and such that have no way to implement the technology that the upcoming directive calls for, and they will have no choice but to block EU. Regarding news sites - usually it's the comments section that's the user created content, so I guess they could simply remove that for EU visitors, or, if that feels like a hassle, just block EU.
Almost all US regional newspaper websites are blocking access from EU. Many other US sites as well but luckily most of them they just don't care to comply or enable geo fencing.
I still see far too many sites which want me to opt out of 100+ trackers individually. I usually just leave. Thanks for hindering my procrastination habits I guess.
There are an absolute mountain of US sites which block European IP addresses to avoid GDPR. Mostly news outlets. I've never seen so many 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons errors in my life!
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.
Are we able to see, who voted how? I would like to have a website showing you which persons not to vote, in your location for the upcoming eu votes in may.
The question even is if i can vote for the pirates in my region. So far i haven't even seen the slightest bit of voting information for the upcoming vote.
Well nearly no information. I had a flyer for the SPD Senior Citizen Group in my mailbox...
I've been looking for a while for a good summary of how to vote that I could link to people, but not even on europa.eu do they have that, which really speaks for itself. If anyone knows of a good source, I'd love to know about it.
The selection is based on the display language. If you're a native English speaker voting in the upcoming election, you're aussumed to be voting either in your home country (Ireland or Malta are the only ones where English is official) or "abroad", which is the third option. German speakers would be expected to visit https://www.europawahl.eu/ instead.
Sorry, I voted for the Pirate Party the last three times, and they still didn't get enough votes for even half a seat the last time. There's a limit to how often I'm throwing my vote away. Luckily there are a few other parties with sensible policies.
I‘ve heard the same reasoning from someone who voted for „one of the big parties“ so his vote wouldn‘t be thrown away, the same person is ow complaining about the politics of the party he voted for.
If you don’t give your vote to a party, just because it could be lost, you will ultimately end up with only 1 party to vote for.
Unlikely in Dutch parliament; we currently have 13 parties in its 150 seats. And the PP isn't my perfect party, and also not the only one with good internet and privacy (and social, and environmental, etc.) policies. I just would have liked them to get at least one seat, to get a voice in parliament, which can be quite effective, see e.g. the successes of the Party for the Animals (PvdD), who started similarly. I tend to vote for small parties anyway.
I will vote not only on national-party basis, but on the voting behaviour of the international bloc they are part of.
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.
this this mean you won't vote at all? there was no pure anti-13 block iirc. not casting a valid vote is my generation's way of causing outcomes like the current one.
I am curious how this will affect Brexit. At some point it looked like public opinion in UK leaned against it. Right now it seems that EU is ready to pass any law which is pushed by a powerful lobby, even if this law is not the most well-thought idea like Article 11 and 13. This does not make EU better place to be in.
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).
And there were still British MEPs speaking for it, because it's the "future". I wonder why they can't even abstain or just stay away (like about 13% of the parliament did anyway...) after they engaged in Brexit for decisions which won't affect them (implementation of this directive is still about ~2 years off), but apparently paychecks are stronger than decency and common sense...
Please, play damaging economic games with your own country not mine. No one cares about this in the UK right now, we are far more worried about the meltdown of our government and their attempts make us all poorer with the Brexit madness.
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.
I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if it pushes a chunk of the tech-savvy youth vote towards "Brexit at any cost".
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.
To what degree has Britain's waning influence contributed to this? London was historically Europe's most competent commercially-minded city. I'm hopeful to see a counterbalance emerge in Frankfurt or Paris, but the writing on the wall indicates that's unlikely.
> 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.
Those are the new regulations that were stopped by this court case.
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.
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.
This is UKIP's stopped clock being right once a day, they just vote against anything in the EU. They would support a worse version of the bill locally.
The UK in general will support such increases in copyright power. The government for the most part is not tech-savvy enough to understand the objections to article 13.
Could this directive speed the creation and adaptation of distributed technologies? If the topic of uploading to centralized cloud entities is just removed or ignored all together.
Sure, maybe now that there's not a lot of fish left in the oceans anyways, you could start convincing the almighty VCs to pay for an army of solar powered submarine drone servers that host IPFS nodes with Starlink satellite uplinks randomly scattered in international waters...good luck engineering the < 1 second time-to-play on those videos!
With well-implemented and sufficiently widespread P2P there’d be too many people to sue.
(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.)
You just sue the early adopters and write some articles about how the new system is used for criminal activity only and then completely ban it. You can't have technological solutions to political problems.
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:
This will be an unpopular perspective on the matter, so you have been warned: Article 13 only affects for-profit platforms that host and share copyrighted material. These platforms are run by big corporations that turn a huge profit 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.
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.
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.
Who will be able to afford the better lawyers in that fight to argue if they're for profit? MediaCorp(tm) or the small community that got a little too popular/spotlighted?
In the US you need to register as a non profit, have a board of directors, etc.
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.
> I don't think any content-sharing platform should profit from copyright infringement
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.
And I don't think any car rental services should profit from crime, so we seize their profits if their renters perform a crime while renting their cars.
Has the minimum size been taken out of A13? Earlier drafts I'm pretty sure had minimum turnover/staff counts which were far above small community scale (tens of millions/year).
That's something I've been wishing for, yes. It would certainly be the best possible outcome, although I am not sure how the entire thing will actually unfold (I don't think anyone can be sure about it yet).
Probably not, as self-hosters are disproportionately affected by spurious or malicious copyright claims (they don't have the pooled resources to fight).
On the other hand, the copyright owners will have a harder time finding the allegedly infringing material. A bot that can find and scrape media on any website needs to be pretty advanced, especially if the site is using encrypted media extensions. And after that, getting into contact with the owner of the site is not trivial. It won't be worth the effort in the majority of cases. The centralisation of media on youtube, soundcloud etc has been very practical for litigious copyright owners.
Those services do not necessarily need to be publicly accessible. Think of a federated network of private servers with closed user groups, which allow to share stuff easily with selected users on other servers. The directive would probably not even apply to this, but even if it does, it would be pretty hard to go after you, ay long as you don't share critical material with people you don't know.
Depends on how the link tax is played out. If companies are forced to pay a websites owner to link to it, I doubt even Google or Facebook would pay for that considering Google dropped German websites when they tried to get Google to pay them with their own link tax law. Then you'd have your website, but nothing would link to it and you would never get any traffic besides the people you specifically tell about it.
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.
Isn't the link tax only for news sites? Because in that case, it won't affect non-news sites at all, it just means legitimate news sites will become unfindable. The rest of the Web will survive.
> Article 13 only affects for-profit platforms that host and share copyrighted material.
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...
>Another commentor pointed out that even small services running ads to pay for hosting could be considered "for-profit"
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.
Everything online is “copyright-protected”. Copyright automatically applies to anything fixed in a tangible medium of expression. So it applies to any service that lets you share content.
Copyright enforcement has always been about going after big abuses. With some incredibly rare exceptions, generally speaking, nobody has ever been at serious risk for sending one copy of a movie or music CD to a friend. There is too much sharing and too many individual parties to chase after every way people technically violate copyright law.
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.
Arguably, BitTorrent is mass distribution of, frequently, large numbers of files, by design. That being said, I think you see a lot more activity against the torrent tracker sites than individual seeders, and it's exceedingly unlikely someone who just leeches would see any sort of legal harassment.
The last part depends highly on your location. In Germany there are law firms specialized in watching popular torrents. They make millions from threatening users with legal proceedings and if you leech popular content you're more likely than not to get a letter from them.
I once clicked on a Torrent for a Disney movie. A day later, I received a notice from Comcast that I have 1 out of 5 strikes of accessing copyrighted content, and if I hit 5, my internet access will be terminated.
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.
>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.
Doing fine, as in, a tiny insignificant chunk of the userbase of the major consumer platforms use them. They are not serving most people, and are frustrating to use.
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.
So you suggest that, in order to compete with China, the EU should allow Google to violate copyright law at large? I don't feel like this is a compelling argument, as it suggests the rule of law should simply be dismissed for any business which might have a competitor in China.
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.
No, I suggest that modern copyright is a regressive system, and the enforcement mechanisms being imposed on behalf of wealthy publishing guilds is essentially regulatory capture that pretty much increases the risk of greater surveillance and policing in general. If you look at DMCA takedowns on YouTube, the obvious pirates are caught pretty quickly, I know, because I frequently search for marvel movies clips, and they disappear almost within hours of me finding them. The disturbing cases, which you claim won't happen, are small time channels where people's content is flagged because of fair use, even 15 second clips of background music for an intro get a take down request. Seriously, do you think 15 seconds of someone's song on a title sequence is going to deprive the originator of someone paying to hear his full song?
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 MP...
Not all for-profit websites are run by big corporations. The companies you're describing here are also the ones that will find it easiest to comply with these new regulations. YouTube for example was already pressured to create a filtering system, ContentID. Behemoths like Facebook will have a far easier time adapting than your typical startup.
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.
>Article 13 dooms smaller companies and startups, thus further entrenching these big corporations.
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].
I have a platform where teenagers can easily create and share games. I'm currently based in Belgium, but with this new revelation, I'm forced to move abroad with my company. (I already checked I could create a Delaware inc)
Europe tries to catch up to the Silicon Valley startup scene. But stuff like this makes it pretty clear that EU is too retarded.
Right now, when one of my users uploads copyrighted material, I can take it down when I see it. Or when I get a complaint (DMCA takedown).
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.
Your platform needs to make at least x million a year and have userbase of x million and exist for at least x years. Only then the filtering is mandatory...
Europe is not that valuable a market for advertising platforms. There is a reason why companies choose to monetize the US first before even attempting to monetize internationally and that is because US advertising revenue per impression is almost 3x what you can get in Europe.
I'm not arguing with that (I would also add that language fragmentation is still a problem). But it does not justifies incorrect blanket statements like above.
If it keeps going like this the EU is gonna waste all its capital and become poor. Yeah, it looks like economy is still running, but you can't escape the laws of economics. Many don't see it because they're not into politics, but the EU, Germany, France, Italy are making an article 13 for all kind of industries, every day. Eventually you run out of capital (including willpower and time) and a slow descent become a collapse.
Of course since I'm just a nobody on a forum what do I know.
yeah cost of creating new business is going up, taxes and red tape around existing business are going up, taxes to the middle class are skyrocketing, welfare is dropping and everyone's wondering "why is Europe having a youth unemployment problem"?
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.
The EU isn't close to as rich as the US, the parent comment was far off the mark.
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.
> This kind of behaviour is going to lead us to having two seperate internets.
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 know whether Article 11/13 are good or bad (although at first glance they seem to be bad), but I don't think this attitude of "forcing freedom" onto others is good.
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.
no, because it's using the data themselves to make even more money out of you. When once one agency collected data, sold it to advertisers, which sold ads to companies, which bought space in papers, YT is collection-agency, ad-agency and paper all in one – which should be kind of scary for any regular user.
>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.
> I don't want to use a P2P alternative to YouTube or Reddit, because 99% of the content is on Reddit/YouTube.
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.
"I don't want to use a P2P alternative to YouTube or Reddit, because 99% of the content is on Reddit/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?
Sorry -- not all affected platforms are run by "big corporations". All for-profit plateforms over 3 years old are affected, even small ones. This will severely harm the EU startup scene in that category.
> 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)
The term they use is "online content sharing platform" + some rules about organizing content. Please see the text, it is a bit messy, I think it is better than quoting parts of it here. Depends on how you interpret it.
I wish this was true: in the negotiations, it was clear that many of the supporters of Article 13 felt that this was too much of an exception, and will, in the upcoming transposition into national law, seek to cover as much as they can. As someone else mentioned, one way is to say that anything not run as an official non-profit for its official purposes is covered. Another is to target the inevitably commercial elements of even not-for-profit platforms (services that offer pre-packaged Mastodon instances for instance).
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.
"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."
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.
If it's your own blog, you are basically responsible for your own stuff. If you document where you got your assets from, I think every court will give you a pass, if someone wants to get you with the laws resulting from this directive (though the existing copyright-laws still apply to you).
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.
You should look at European laws (as should all the European citizens rightfully protesting stupid politicians)... For private blogs, the current process still will apply. I'm not even sure, if it does today include the provider privilege (which basically favors commercial platforms today), thus already enforcing moderation (or selling out discussion to disqus, etc). Also, people today could run around posting extremist propaganda in comments, which makes moderation necessary. As the result of this, most private (german) blogs I know are already implementing human content filters, e.g. post by email.
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.
> These platforms are run by big corporations that turn a huge profit
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.
Design and "fit and finish" are some of the tools the bigs use to keep you locked into their increasingly user-hostile ecosystems. If you really want to escape their clutches you have to give up some of the creature comforts.
>I take issue when people use the word profit to mean some evil, shameful thing.
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.
These companies are self-interested, and for companies "self interest" usually means "customer-focus". Their reputation and the long-term health and loyalty of their users are worth a lot to them.
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.)
> You left out the "by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy,.....
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)
> You can use Mastodon [0] instead of Twitter, PeerTube [1] instead of YouTube, Aether [2] instead of reddit, etcetera
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.
I appreciate the links. However - you need incoming revenue to maintain infrastructure as well as software.
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.)
Remember that newspapers reported on this vote in passing if at all because they supported it, they are not innocent observers especially with everything concerning tech companies.
This is also huge blow in the artist community, because if they will have no license or contract with big media entities their work will not be shared. And I hope Google, MS and Wiki will stick together in blocking any content from entities requiring any sort of pay. Of course this would not solve all issues featured with these reforms.
Smallest are always loosing when it comes to laws like that.
You can still share on your personal site (even your commercial one, as you won't violate copyright I guess and so can't be sued effectively (if local legislation would get their shit together even not in the typical extortion form))... Random, unaccounted internet fame by the magic of some proprietary algorithm might be harder too achieve though, but I see no censorship in this (and indeed today, censorship is possible with this algorithms).
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...)?).
Sad, sad day. I remember having discussions with my 14 year old son regarding articles 11 and 13. He said it would be impossible for these articles to come through, as people are clearly against it. He then called me a pessimist and naysayer. I wish he was right.
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.
The UK will likely not go in a better direction. non-UKIP UK MEPs were in general in favour of this legislation (UKIP only against because they are against anything the EU does, not because they are in any way more informed on the issue).
Maybe I did not explain myself enough. What I'm saying is that if a free Internet existed during WW2, resistance would have been able to communicate and collaborate. Moreover, people would have had access to both, propaganda news and real news.
There is no way a free Internet would have existed in Germany and the German-occupied territories during WW2. The resistance could in theory have organized one clandestinely. But setting up a secret computer network isnt really easier than setting up a secret telephone or telegraph network, which is good enough.
People actually did have access to real news, via radio. Listening to the Allies broadcasts was illegal, but possible.
When a company says it starts collecting data for the purpose of a and b then it is correct. Fine. However, the company very soon finds out that it can make more money out of the collected data when using it for purpose c and d.
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.).
> France’s current batch of national politicians have consistently advocated for the worst parts of the Directive, and the Macron administration may seek to grab an early win for the country’s media establishment.
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.
> 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
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.
> Burning cars and breaking windows isn’t peaceful protest.
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.
> 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.
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'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
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.
> Globally, there are more examples of peaceful protests becoming violent than of false flag operations.
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.
France has many levels of police, too. Most countries have similar federations as in your US example. In France, the CRS is a reserve force of the national police who specialize in crowd and riot control. If you've ever been to a sporting event in Paris (or a train station during one) you'll see dozens of CRS there keeping order. And they're not the actual military.
In Europe it's normal to use the military for a variety of reasons.
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.
I checked with a French friend, in France (like in Germany) it is illegal to send military forces to do any kind of police like duties. However, under the "terror fighting" emergencies still active, military forces are on French streets.
The line between police and military in France is a bit blurry, given that the two national police forces - police nationale and gendarmerie nationale - are themselves part of the French military.
Police Nationale is not part of the military.
And fire department and Gendarmerie Nationale being army units has more to do with historical/organizational/governance reasons, than with a military-specific purpose.
GN core mission is one of police, pretty similar to PN. Nothing related with the main army corps.
What does his personal life have to do with the point you’re making? 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.
> What does his personal life have to do with the point you’re making?
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.
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.
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 :-)
Well. He is seen as right-wing in france (i.e close to the money). Average older citizen do like people who will protect their rent system and who seems to add stability, that's why they voted for him. Wheras most of my non-economically challenged younger friends prefer a bit of chaos and a high-ish inflation, and did not.
He is currently considered left-wing when compared to neonazis and white separatists, though. A lot of people (including neonazis and white separatists) currently think of the left-right continuum as being extreme left (think racism, sexism, and homophobia are really bad) -> center (don't care about politics) -> extreme right (think racism, sexism, and homophobia are really good.)
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.
> 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.
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).
> with the majority of journalists still pushing for fake news about Russian bots and government intervention even after official investigations are closed
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?
If you genuinely care about what's true or not, look up the largest newspapers by circulation for a couple of European countries. I've only done it for Germany and the UK; in both cases the market is dominated by conservative publications, particularly right wing tabloids.
Purely on that basis, the media as consumed has a bias for being conservative and also pretty dumb (as tabloids tend to be).
I mean they deployed the National Guard in Baltimore after the first day of Freddie Gray protests. There was some burning and looting going on, so it got labeled a 'riot', but honestly what's been going on in Paris has probably been worse.
I recognize the irony of my statement, the majority of the world has been dealing with the US interfering with their nations' laws for nearly three quarters of a century. Nonetheless, it irks me that laws in other nations, like the EU, can have such an adverse impact on me.
I think it is less irony and just a matter of human nature. We're always more critical / resistant when "someone else" imposes something, less so if we get to do it.
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.
A wild guess: nothing changes, or things even improve somewhat. Not very invested into content distribution. If it has chilling effect on social networks, so be it. And memes can die for all I care.
Europe is more likely to be hived off from rest of internet as most companies won't cater to such nonsense. Progress continues, just less so in Europe.
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.
Businesses historically catered to a lot more expensive to implement laws. Personal data territorial hosting, years worth of logging for law enforcement, content filtering compliance, and it was barely on anyone's radar.
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.
Sure, I guess... What size businesses are you talking about? There are a lot of small websites that will go bankrupt (or, just close down) if this is passed, where there's a solo developer that has no time nor money to implement AI-powered filter to figure out if his users upload copyrighted content. If you're talking about Apple and Google, then sure--but the internet is mostly made up of extremely small, understaffed projects.
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..?
> 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.
"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.
I've suggested before that users could post bonds to have publishing access to a platform. Large organizations, like Disney, would have no trouble posting a bond to allow publication to Youtube. Smaller "social influencers" could post under some sort of syndicated organization. That organization would take a cut of all of the ad revenue / promo deals, whatever makes sense up to a point.
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.
Even hacker news could decide to block EU IPs, so they don't get slapped with some lawsuits, should one commenter ever put some copyrighted content into the comments.
839 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 459 ms ] threadhttps://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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah nobody is defending this unless you're part of the copyright lobby, the news lobby or some other mafia-like organization
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.
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.
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.
I would argue that the people who make policy decisions at Google are incredibly smart. If this was going to cement their monopoly, wouldn't their resistance to it be... Muted at best?
A couple of Devil's Advocate suggestions for you:
- Their self-interest is enlightened enough to see that there is long-term benefit in the playing field being at least somewhat even, e.g., because unassailable monopolies become lazy and eventually collapse under their own weight.
- The people who run Google were startup founders once, and many of their employees and products were once startup founders/startups, so they know that a healthy startup ecosystem is to their benefit.
I neither strongly believe nor disbelieve the truth of these positions. Nor do I know if they are any part of Google’s thinking behind its campaigning.
I'm just suggesting them as possibilities that might help you make your own position more robust.
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.
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.
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...
https://twitter.com/ByDonkeys
It also assumes that no other referendum are based on falsehood, including the original membership referendum.
In reality, the people vote for the wrong result, and the leave campaign comes under the microscope
EDIT: flagged? because it's pro-brexit? politics are being played around flagging. I wish there was a process for this kind of flag abuse.
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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
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!
[0] https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule
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
However now that's "remoaner loser talk"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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC6EQooiAjo
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).
Btw, this initiative is heavily supported by Macron, from here[2]:
> France’s current batch of national politicians have consistently advocated for the worst parts of the Directive, and the Macron administration may seek to grab an early win for the country’s media establishment.
[1] http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190320-military-be-deployed-saturd...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/eus-parliament-signs-d...
However he's completely in his right to have the army against disorderly protests that cause damage (including fire to historical buildings the last time).
What's worst is that the crooks that run things around my part of the continent (I live in Eastern Europe) have given Macron's recent actions as an example, as in: "if France's rulers are happy to tear-gas their own citizenry why are we blamed for doing the same thing"?
Now, a state (democratic or not) _has to_ show force, because that's one of the definitions of a state: an entity that takes the monopoly on violence.
Given the violence that demonstrated itself in some very specific places by very specific groups of people (and disrupted things even worse for others), it has to be expected that the state reacts. The contrary would be a sign of weakness through which more chaos would pour.
Moving militaries to replace police on some institutions' security is and was stupid, as it's not their core mission. But calling "citizens street protests" the guerilla-like behaviours that triggered this clumsy response from the government is a bit naive and misleading as well.
If you study France's Fifth Republic rules (Constitution), you'll see the president has some discretionary power that are not democratic, in order to be able to take on decisions to safeguard the republic - that's a direct heritage of De Gaulle, that saw that in 1940, the president had not the power, and could not decide to make the army react fast enough to counter German invasion.
So, nothing real new so far.
This initiative was supported by Macron, as it was by many others. Nothing new either that France (and French cultural crowd) has always been historically in favour of this kind of copyright move, or even stronger ones.
I'd say that the republic was not put in danger by these protests and that this kind of move creates a very dangerous precedent. I also had thought that "La Révolution française est terminée", to quote Francois Furet, and that's why I think that "de facto" no-one was expecting any French president to send the troops. Did De Gaulle send the troops in May '68?
On the rest, we differ. I'd say that these events are very, very concerning - especially given that the team in charge of the country is clearly not as experienced/diligent as the previous ones, yet.
If you allow yourself to think about this logically, you realize that it is not a viable way, a country needs a long-term perspective. Every decision made in one country must be beneficial for that country in the long term. You have to manage something that your children and grandchildren should live in and it should be in better condition than when you took over it yourself. This is actually obvious. Making decisions at the expense of one's children and grandchildren is unreasonable.
Right now, the whole Western world is actually living on what our ancestors have created, and they lived in times where it was obvious that they did better for future generations. Today we burn it at both ends. Of course, a system that prizes laziness and short-sightedness and punishes fitness and diligence cannot be long-lived. The future will look at the present as a very strange parenthesis in the history of the West. That is, f we do not go under.
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.
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...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2lvR35XcAArVsz.jpg:large
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.
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
(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.)
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...
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 MP...
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].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19491806.
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.)
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.
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.).
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.
[1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking
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).
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.
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.