As someone who grew up alongside the internet, I wonder if this is just part of the bigger picture of where the internet has always been heading... The bigger, more popular, and ubiquitous it became the more corporate and political powers were going to seek to rule it. Now were are at an age of internet giants with the GDP of small countries, and political elections being swayed by the bovine herds of Facebook and Tw…
European Parliament approves copyright reform
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Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#592Never thought they'd actually pass this terrible "law".
Terrible.
But maybe not a complete surprise. Pandora's Box was opened two years ago when Germany privatized censorship. Maybe, back then we did it for all the "right reasons". But in politics, that's all too often just the beginning of a slippery slope. And many of those who today protest this new censorship where in favor of it the last time. Because that time it was supposed to censor "the other side".
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
The non-democratic EU is not the problem? The people having the real power in the EU are not elected (the European Commission).
> The people having the real power in the EU are not elected (the European Commission). Sigh, how many times do we have to confute this lie? The real power is in the European Council , aka national governments assembled . That's the body that sets the agenda. The Commission takes its marching orders from the Council, then goes to the Parliament to figure out what it will accept. The Commission is a smokescreen, it's…
the issue is too much power too far from constituents and with little balances to prevent easy lobbying of few key people - it's basically broken at its core.
"just vote for different people next time"
yeah as if people don't say one thing and then do another. and once in power a rotation is simply too long, searching a candidate by trial and error to weed out the liars* would require a lifetime of committment, meanwhile the young generation would outweigh all the voting of those that have been keeping track of the politician scores by sheer demographic.
*spoiler alert: they all lie to some extent, or "compromise" if you prefer. but it's easy to fool voters on technical issues like these while gaining consensus with the popular topics of taxes, jobs and housing.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prematurely closing the existing plants is insane however.
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.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#595It's called counter-revolution. Many revolutionary movements are eventually co-opted by elites (often the elites of the overthrown system) for their own purposes. Sometimes the new system put in place after the counter-revolution is worse than the system the original revolution sought to overthrow. The cypherpunks foresaw the dystopian surveillance state decades before the reality and tried to get out in front of it…
This isn't a fight between elites and the proles - most people who are framing the result today as such have not read the text of article 11 and 13. And I don't blame them, most articles on the matter conspicuously refuse to link the text, for some reason. This is a fight between titans of industry in two different verticals. Content is upset that publishing is getting all of the money - and a brief examination of th…
Julia Reda (German MEP for the Pirate Party) had most of the up to date info for the whole fiasco since it started. And she also provided new versions of the texts whenever they became available.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a law that serves multinationals; quite the opposite. The proportionality requirement in the text of Art. 13 is more onerous to larger corporations. If you're a tiny blog with a banner ad or two, you're not getting slapped off the internet for having a comments field, because it isn't proportional to require cost and complexity increases of multiple orders of magnitude to police your comments section. Unle…
> If you're a tiny blog with a banner ad or two I'm sure everyone is dreaming of having a "tiny blog" Meanwhile in the real world, the European streamers and content creators, who make a living from their content, are looking on how to escape the EU so their content doesn't get filtered out.
I did. I've followed every public draft of the language as its developed.
The article does not do what people are claiming it does. The internet is not dead. Small content creators are not being wiped out. The big tech giants are not creating yet another regulatory moat.
There are plenty of real problems with Article 13 that deserve discussion and elaboration so that when the first cases come out, they get decided properly, but this isn't a nuclear bomb that blows up the net and makes it a corporate-only zone.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#597Here's what will probably happen. A handful of websites and news outlets will create blanket legal agreements allowing anyone to freely link to their content. There may be some online paperwork that flies back and forth between the content provider and the person wanting to create the link. Websites offering these blanket agreements will flourish. Websites that do not provide their content for free will go unnoticed…
I think the law precludes such agreements; i.e., publishers are forced to claim license fees for their work whether they want to or not.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fine in theory, with a big caveat. Our lives are increasingly dominated by big entities, and the political ones are often small fish compared to giant international corporations that can play smaller political entities off against each other (example: Amazon headquarters). The idea of limiting the size of political entities has merit, but it will backfire unless you also limit the size of economic entities. (…
It's really the opposite. These large entities are created by centralized governments. If you have a small business that only operates in New York, they don't care what the law in California is, it doesn't affect them. Walmart and Amazon care, because it does. And what they want is for the law to be the same everywhere, and for that law to be the one that benefits them. So they get that law passed by the central gove…
Sure, companies can use regulatory harmonization to their advantage, but they can also use tax and labour law competition between localities to their advantage.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#599As I said on one of the other threads... 26 March 2019. The day the Internet died. (at least in Europe) But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- so what we're likely to see is a massive spike in people streaming video over encrypted tunnels into other countries. That'd be interesting. It'd render GeoIP rather moot, among other things. I suspect the EU and Member States'…
What's weird to me is: Europe isn't exactly a content powerhouse. Why are they so concerned with copyright protections?
We are no content powerhouse precisely because we are so concerned about all these bureaucratic things. Instead of just distributing better content more efficiently, we prefer to make it illegal to be better than the status quo.
Can't speak for all of Europe, but Internet-related legislation here in Germany has been a disaster since the mid-1990s.
Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably fraud, but yeah, still no consequences for large media corp execs who are personally responsible for that fraud.
The DMCA has a similar provision (from memory it's something like "filing a false claim is considered perjury"). I've never, ever heard of a single charge being filed under that clause -- but I've heard of tons of instances of DMCA being abused. On this statement, I'd love to be proven wrong!
So basically useless. They claim to be acting "on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" and they are, even though the allegation is completely without merit.