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EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

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Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#91
post #20
post #12

I wonder whyI always get downvoted into oblivion for stating that which to me is an obvious fact: The EU is too far removed from reality to legislate. It now has a long and sordid history of over-doing things to the extreme. In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns. We had what felt like a complete shutdown of IT departm…

Yeah. Remove EU and I'm sure Russia will be happy to take over your little countries. Individually European countries are pretty weak. They're only strong as a common entity.

The EU is not the only thing keeping Europe from being deaf and blind, and Russia has much better targets than most of the EU if it was going to take expansion risks. This is needless fearmongering.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europe is still the closest thing to paradise on Earth" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/19/europe... It's from 2012, but the vast majority of what's said there is still true.

Europe is however more likely than the US is to get bad quickly. It became a bad place to live for example from 1914 through 1918 and then again from 1939 through 1945 with, e.g., shortages of food and other life essentials while the US remained OK unless you were in the small fraction of the population that got drafted into the US military (and even then you would not have endured food shortages). Although the creat…

First there was no EU neither in 1914 nor in 1939.

Second, the US were not a nice place to live in 1861, while Europe was. Time changes.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This particular kerfuffle comes because the Danish food authority recently classified kanelsnegler, or cinnamon rolls, as an everyday pastry https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/eu-worrie... Sounds like this is more of a "Denmark problem" than an "EU problem", unless you think the EU should simply not legislate the use of products that can cause health issues when present in high quantities in food (i…

How ever does the US survive this cinnamon overdose epidemic? The reaction to a bad regulation being passed shouldn't be "oh, well, the government can just exempt your specific product from that regulation".

The US are doing many things well, but the quality of their food in general is not really an example to follow.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#94
post #38
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm afraid the example is quite real. But sure, example could be dug up of good things the EU have done. But even in those cases the cost is much too great. For instance, they built a really nice hallway at the Parliament, but when it came time to name it, they assigned 76 diplomats and the president of the EU to work through the name. That alone ended up costing something like 11 million euros. I can't think of…

> Not surprisingly, the EU has the lowest growth rate in the world. What would be the growth rate without the single market?

Competition breeds excellence

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#95
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the cinnamon patrol comment is related to this, which does seem to indicate the interpretation of an EU law is to blame: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/12/25/256602581/wh...

It seems like the EU explicitly made it so the cinnamon rolls wouldn't be affected: > The EU's regulations on a common type of cinnamon called cassia limit how much bakers can use: 50 milligrams per kilogram of dough, if it's a traditional or seasonal pastry, or 15 milligrams per kilogram if it's just a regular old everyday pastry. But the Denmark decided their traditional seasonal pastry was an everyday one > This p…

Can you please explain to me why anyone on the face of this earth would want their government deciding how to classify types of pastry in order to determine how much cinnamon people are allowed to use?

It kind of sounds like the issue is that outside of safety regulations someone told some petty tyrant that they got to decide how to classify pastry so of course they decided to classify it in such a way as to require action and importance on their own part at the expense of everyone's inconvenience.

I suspect the proper fix is to fire everyone in that department and start over.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the EU explicitly made it so the cinnamon rolls wouldn't be affected: > The EU's regulations on a common type of cinnamon called cassia limit how much bakers can use: 50 milligrams per kilogram of dough, if it's a traditional or seasonal pastry, or 15 milligrams per kilogram if it's just a regular old everyday pastry. But the Denmark decided their traditional seasonal pastry was an everyday one > This p…

Can you please explain to me why anyone on the face of this earth would want their government deciding how to classify types of pastry in order to determine how much cinnamon people are allowed to use? It kind of sounds like the issue is that outside of safety regulations someone told some petty tyrant that they got to decide how to classify pastry so of course they decided to classify it in such a way as to require…

Because they have reason to beleive it can cause liver damage?

Most countries have a body regulating what you can eat that will do it's best to stop you from ingesting dangerous amounts of, well, anything.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#97
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the EU explicitly made it so the cinnamon rolls wouldn't be affected: > The EU's regulations on a common type of cinnamon called cassia limit how much bakers can use: 50 milligrams per kilogram of dough, if it's a traditional or seasonal pastry, or 15 milligrams per kilogram if it's just a regular old everyday pastry. But the Denmark decided their traditional seasonal pastry was an everyday one > This p…

But a "kanelsnegl" is an everyday pastry in Denmark.

But it didn't use to be? From the article it sounds like it used to be a "traditional pastry"

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#98

I wish that the EFF would include links to the updated directive. The latest I can find is the language as of 2018-05-25 ( http://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35373/st09134-en18.pdf ) which doesn't contain the terms "commercial platforms", "news site" or link. It does leave the definition of "unsubstantial parts" up to member states, which is indeed worrying from a single market perspective. Furthermore, that wordin…

This is a much better update: https://juliareda.eu/2019/01/article-13-almost-finished/ It describes the changes and why they will/will not work

That is indeed. Thank you for that.

Instead of requiring filtering on behalf of rightsholders that refuse to license to platforms (an asymmetric relationship that just increases costs for one party), I wish that the EU would legislate FRAND style royalties.

As in, if you want copyright protection then you have to issue Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licenses to any platform that may want to host the content. Don't want to issue such a license? Then the EU won't help you protect your work. In that way a platform could just host the content using a central database and performing deduplication instead of using the same central database to forbid viewing. Rightsholders would get royalties by virtue of the license agreement, EU would spend less money policing copyright since there would be many more legal avenues to access content.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#99
post #79

To get around the linking to news sites problem, couldn't search engines just not provide ANY links to news sites? Who defines what a "news" site is? Is there a strict definition? Anybody with a website? If it's something I have not read or known before, it's "news" to me no matter how old or from where.

That's what Google did in Germany when a "have a contract with news sites" law went into effect. It didn't take long before Google got free access to all German news sites.

Spain learned from this and make a minimum compensation mandatory. Since then Google News hasn't been available in Spain.

So now they're making a third attempt to make Google pay for sending business to news site. The result will probably be the same though.

Re: EU Copyright Directive is a catastrophe for free expression and competition

#100
post #94
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not surprisingly, the EU has the lowest growth rate in the world. What would be the growth rate without the single market?

Competition breeds excellence

The EU is big enough to compete with the US and China.

Without the EU, the UK is about as big as California.

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