The bill as a whole would definitely pass, but the specific issue (whether to vote on the link tax and update filter separately) passed by only five votes, and 13 people said they meant to vote the other way.
Whether either or both of those amendments would pass on a separate vote is unknown.
It's not unlikely that at least some of them claim it was a mistake to avoid taking responsibility for their vote because they're aware of how unpopular it was. After being in parliament for at least ~5 years, it's hard to believe so many of them still haven't figured out how the voting works.
It's also possible some just understood the question incorrectly or confused it with something else
There are a couple of explanations being floated. First of all there where two votes, not just one, and if you wanted to vote 'correctly' against A13 you had to vote NO on the first vote and YES on the second (or vice versa to support A13), The people who voted 'wrong' voted either NO to both or YES to both.
Secondly apparently the order of voting was changed at the last minute (there where a whole bunch of things being voted on that day) so people who had written down what they where going to vote on each issue (NO,NO,YES,NO,YES,YES,NO etc.) and missed that the order had changed would end up voting wrong. Ie. they knew they wanted to vote YES on issue 27, but issue 27 was actually the 28th item voted for that day. At least two MEPs in Sweden are using this excuse.
But basically a bunch of MEPs just didn't think it was that important to pay attention to the details, phoned it in, and screwed up badly.
> But basically a bunch of MEPs just didn't think it was that important to pay attention to the details, phoned it in, and screwed up badly.
Indeed. Epicenter.works published a table[1] to make it easier for people unfamiliar with the voting system to follow along. It uses the same template that the MEPs use, except with the "Vote" section filled in from the perspective of someone against Art. 11/13. This might make it easier to understand why this mistake could happen but it seems clear enough that, if you're actually paying attention, you could avoid mistakes on such an important issue.
you could avoid mistakes on such an important issue
I think the other issue is that for you and me and everybody here this is a super important issue, but for many of the MEPs it's just confusing regulation nr. 843 they have to vote on this year.
On the news channel I follow, at least three votes were highlighted (this one, one about adding a few countries to a list of tax havens, and one about ending the timezone switching).
> There are a couple of explanations being floated. First of all there where two votes, not just one, and if you wanted to vote 'correctly' against A13 you had to vote NO on the first vote and YES on the second (or vice versa to support A13), The people who voted 'wrong' voted either NO to both or YES to both.
I think it was the other way around actually. They first voted on whether to allow an last batch of amendments, which would have allowed separate voting on article 11 and 13 (and this vote failed by 5 votes).
Then only after that they voted on the real deal.
But you would never say this about an engineering system. If you had to make a series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to correctly deploy a bugfix, and someone got that wrong, the postmortem would be about what a terrible UI that is and how it has to be changed to improve system reliability. An operator making an easy-to-make mistake would never be considered "at fault".
That's how we treat things that really matter for websites. Voting in parliament is a lot more important than that. I'd rather see a real postmortem and plan for improvement, not blaming the users.
had to make a series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to correctly deploy a bugfix
Unfortunately this is not uncommon. Tools like Jira are sometimes configured with a maze of steps and jumps around the UI (buttons, fields, dropdowns, popovers in various orders) to get a ticket into the correct state.
Without knowing how often this happens in other votings it's hard to tell if this is unusual.
The only number I could find where between 2014-2015 [1], but in that year the average was 6.7 registered 'mistakes' pr. MEP. So it seems to happen quite often, I guess it only rarely has this big consequences.
I watched the voting online. The way it works is properly preposterous. Things go insanely fast. Alternating risen arm and electronic votes.
Votes are only announced by the president which calls them in his or her native language then translated into all other languages. Quite often translators aren’t able to keep up leading to numerous errors in voting.
What an absolute farce. It’s laughable how archaic these processes still are. Might be inclined to think it was almost intentional to push through the legislation that best serves the small number of already-wealthy lobbying entities.
You're really arguing that 700 representatives from 30 countries speaking in 10 different languages with live translation and voting with automatic tallying is _archaic_?
But I agree, the way the counting works and how they do not seem to care at all about accurate results seems ridiculous: https://youtu.be/lzigiPUXNzI
13 MEPs accidently woted wrongly. Well, how often such accidents happen in the parliament? Was it actually an accident or it's just a way to recover their faces in front of their voters?
the EP website states that even if there are any "corrections" from the MPs, it will not change the outcome of the vote. So the MPs really do that only to "save their face" on twitter
Hopefully, when the European people find themselves firewalled from services ranging from Wikipedia to eBay, they will learn and remember who's responsible.
It could also lead to more discontent with the EU in general. The bloc is just not under sound economic leadership.
I'm not exactly a euroskeptic (I love the Schengen area), but the EU has had a number of very severe missteps, such as their continued flogging of austerity that has kept southern European economies from recovery.
Is anyone really surprised that a politician would make an excuse like this? Whether the politician actually made a mistake or is just saying so after the fact really is immaterial. When it counted, they did the wrong thing. Trying to make excuses after the fact says a lot about the politician.
I'm wondering if Article 13 is a trick. The EU is probably afraid of right-wing/Euroskeptics winning big in the coming elections. How to get the youth vote? Well, what about threatening their beloved Internet?
How would that work? The 'youth' makes up a large part of the supporters of these parties you're referencing. Also in many cases these parties oppose Article 13 so this isn't in any way bad for them.
I've tried to read the law, but it's hard when you're not a lawyer or a politician. The sentences are weird, the words are weird and just like all other in the law making business version control is apparently magic that are not allowed to be used.
Anyway, yes, I think it's a trick, but not in the way we anticipated. There's a ton of weird language about collective licensing and collective licensing management organisations. For the most part it seems to revolve around ensuring that libraries and archives have access to what ever they need to do their job. A lot of places on the other hand it seems to be something that anyone can make use of. So if you want to make a streaming service, with old Hollywood movie and licensing the movies are impossible or prohibitively difficult, for example if it owner of the movie can't be tracked down, you can just license the movie from the collective licensing management organisation in your EU state. Or license a whole bunch of movies in one go, because licensing the right individually seems to fall under "prohibitively difficult".
I don't know, I can't read legalese, but it seems that there's a bunch of stuff that allows for easier licensing deals across Europe and I think that's what the EU is really going for. Breaking large parts of the web is just collateral damage.
Really, some lawyer need to translate this into something we can all read and understand.
I'm not a citizen of an EU member state. But from an outside perspective, a significant number of MEPs "accidentally voting the wrong way" seems to indicate a severe and systemic problem with the European Parliament.
Failure of one the fundamental
mechanisms of representative democratic government calls into question the legitimacy of that government, and of that system of government.
This is ammunition for the advocates of illiberal systems.
I agree that these endemic procedural messes reveal that core parts of the EU may be illiberal, overly federalized, and could use reform. But how is acknowledging its weaknesses ammunition for illiberal systems in general?
Out of all the alternatives it gives ammo to, those advocating for more local, directly democratic governance have been receiving the lions share compared to those advocating alternative authoritarian schemes.
You're implying that a representative democracy is a liberal system, which does not follow. Maybe you could argue that it has the best potential to be liberal, but history is replete with examples of huge violations of individual liberties under these governments.
Perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of democracy is a good thing? Indeed, why is it legitimate to violate an individual's liberties through a vote of 50% + 1 of her peers?
Edit: I'll echo the peer comment that a reasonable compromise could be smaller units of government, which better represent the people. Smaller states also the limit the scope of abuse of the people within and the threat to people without.
> Perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of democracy is a good thing? Indeed, why is it legitimate to violate an individual's liberties through a vote of 50% + 1 of her peers?
Someone has to decide what these liberties are. You can require a greater majority than 50%, but replacing democracy by something else does not help.
Leaving the EU can be equally messy, our own Remainer-in-charge-of-Brexit PM nearly voted against the government last month. If nothing else, Brexit is proving that the EU is better than the alternative.
It's a pretty arcane system with laws drafted by the (unelected) commissioners and the EU HCoJ and sometimes (as in this case) ratified by MEP's who all too often have little understanding of what they are voting on because they weren't involved early on in their creation.
I looked into this in a little more detail yesterday after the Techdirt article was posted. It's a lot harder to format nicely on HN, so see here [1] if you want the details, but it looks like the vote about amendments would have changed from:
Official vote: 312 for, 317 against, 24 abstained
Corrected votes: 320 for, 314 against, 20 abstained
It seems very rare to have that many corrections. Out of the 191 separate results in the voting record document, the only other one with more corrections was the actual vote on the directive right afterwards (but the corrections couldn't have flipped that one).
64 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadhowever as the EU parliament has no legislative powers: we're stuck with this forever
Whether either or both of those amendments would pass on a separate vote is unknown.
It's also possible some just understood the question incorrectly or confused it with something else, not just "misclicked".
Without knowing how often this happens in other votings it's hard to tell if this is unusual.
There are a couple of explanations being floated. First of all there where two votes, not just one, and if you wanted to vote 'correctly' against A13 you had to vote NO on the first vote and YES on the second (or vice versa to support A13), The people who voted 'wrong' voted either NO to both or YES to both.
Secondly apparently the order of voting was changed at the last minute (there where a whole bunch of things being voted on that day) so people who had written down what they where going to vote on each issue (NO,NO,YES,NO,YES,YES,NO etc.) and missed that the order had changed would end up voting wrong. Ie. they knew they wanted to vote YES on issue 27, but issue 27 was actually the 28th item voted for that day. At least two MEPs in Sweden are using this excuse.
But basically a bunch of MEPs just didn't think it was that important to pay attention to the details, phoned it in, and screwed up badly.
Indeed. Epicenter.works published a table[1] to make it easier for people unfamiliar with the voting system to follow along. It uses the same template that the MEPs use, except with the "Vote" section filled in from the perspective of someone against Art. 11/13. This might make it easier to understand why this mistake could happen but it seems clear enough that, if you're actually paying attention, you could avoid mistakes on such an important issue.
[1] https://epicenter.works/sites/default/files/copyright_dsm_fi... (PDF)
I think the other issue is that for you and me and everybody here this is a super important issue, but for many of the MEPs it's just confusing regulation nr. 843 they have to vote on this year.
it's a complete joke, it goes so fast the interpreters can't keep up and people end up making constant mistakes
https://youtu.be/zLh9DMuetm4?t=58
I think it was the other way around actually. They first voted on whether to allow an last batch of amendments, which would have allowed separate voting on article 11 and 13 (and this vote failed by 5 votes). Then only after that they voted on the real deal.
But you would never say this about an engineering system. If you had to make a series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to correctly deploy a bugfix, and someone got that wrong, the postmortem would be about what a terrible UI that is and how it has to be changed to improve system reliability. An operator making an easy-to-make mistake would never be considered "at fault".
That's how we treat things that really matter for websites. Voting in parliament is a lot more important than that. I'd rather see a real postmortem and plan for improvement, not blaming the users.
Unfortunately this is not uncommon. Tools like Jira are sometimes configured with a maze of steps and jumps around the UI (buttons, fields, dropdowns, popovers in various orders) to get a ticket into the correct state.
The only number I could find where between 2014-2015 [1], but in that year the average was 6.7 registered 'mistakes' pr. MEP. So it seems to happen quite often, I guess it only rarely has this big consequences.
[1] https://www.europaportalen.se/2016/02/svenskt-rostvelande-st...
Votes are only announced by the president which calls them in his or her native language then translated into all other languages. Quite often translators aren’t able to keep up leading to numerous errors in voting.
But I agree, the way the counting works and how they do not seem to care at all about accurate results seems ridiculous: https://youtu.be/lzigiPUXNzI
I'm not exactly a euroskeptic (I love the Schengen area), but the EU has had a number of very severe missteps, such as their continued flogging of austerity that has kept southern European economies from recovery.
Anyway, yes, I think it's a trick, but not in the way we anticipated. There's a ton of weird language about collective licensing and collective licensing management organisations. For the most part it seems to revolve around ensuring that libraries and archives have access to what ever they need to do their job. A lot of places on the other hand it seems to be something that anyone can make use of. So if you want to make a streaming service, with old Hollywood movie and licensing the movies are impossible or prohibitively difficult, for example if it owner of the movie can't be tracked down, you can just license the movie from the collective licensing management organisation in your EU state. Or license a whole bunch of movies in one go, because licensing the right individually seems to fall under "prohibitively difficult".
I don't know, I can't read legalese, but it seems that there's a bunch of stuff that allows for easier licensing deals across Europe and I think that's what the EU is really going for. Breaking large parts of the web is just collateral damage.
Really, some lawyer need to translate this into something we can all read and understand.
I have seen far less critical processes with far more safety checks and redundancy in place to minimize human error.
Let's say that I'd be very careful.
Failure of one the fundamental mechanisms of representative democratic government calls into question the legitimacy of that government, and of that system of government.
This is ammunition for the advocates of illiberal systems.
Out of all the alternatives it gives ammo to, those advocating for more local, directly democratic governance have been receiving the lions share compared to those advocating alternative authoritarian schemes.
Inside of Europe, I'm thinking about Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin. Outside, I'm thinking about Xi Jinping.
Perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of democracy is a good thing? Indeed, why is it legitimate to violate an individual's liberties through a vote of 50% + 1 of her peers?
Edit: I'll echo the peer comment that a reasonable compromise could be smaller units of government, which better represent the people. Smaller states also the limit the scope of abuse of the people within and the threat to people without.
Someone has to decide what these liberties are. You can require a greater majority than 50%, but replacing democracy by something else does not help.
Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in how their own lives are run, the exact mechanism could be many things.
https://inews.co.uk/news/brexit/brexit-vote-results-parliame...
It's a pretty arcane system with laws drafted by the (unelected) commissioners and the EU HCoJ and sometimes (as in this case) ratified by MEP's who all too often have little understanding of what they are voting on because they weren't involved early on in their creation.
Official vote: 312 for, 317 against, 24 abstained
Corrected votes: 320 for, 314 against, 20 abstained
It seems very rare to have that many corrections. Out of the 191 separate results in the voting record document, the only other one with more corrections was the actual vote on the directive right afterwards (but the corrections couldn't have flipped that one).
[1]: https://tildes.net/~tech/brp/europes_controversial_overhaul_...
Well fuck me.