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European Parliament approves copyright reform

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Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#741
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU Elections are coming up. Vote for the pirate faction in your country or check who voted what and only vote for those parties that voted against A13 or if there are none, parties that are vocal against A13. Same goes for your countries own election cycle.

American here. Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system? For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.

French here.

To be honest in France almost nobody knows who is seating at the European Parliament, we have absolutely no visibility to what is being voted, even less who voted what.

A commonly accepted view (at least around me, I might be biased) is that our representatives there are useless, whoever they are. We had about 60% abstention in 2014's elections, I think that says it all.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#742
post #76

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, dismissi…

> 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.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#743
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ad…

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?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#745
post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...then you're free to enjoy the "advantages" of "stricter borders" together with messed up copy right laws that will stop you from creating and sharing on open platform websites, you deserve them both :) Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia Sorry, but you have it backwards. It isn't some "totalitarian nationalist utopia" that passed those laws, but the "European union". And nation states are not by a…

I'm particularly fond of the idea of a European Federation (I don't think the "European Union" went far enough, that's why it's failing... but hopefully the fire can be rekindled in an upgraded "globalism 2.0" movement once people see how bad the current tendencies work). This is why I hate it when the EU forgets its true purpose of acting like an Empire for European Culture and Civilization , and starts behaving lik…

>Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad

No, Empires destroy regional governments, customs, and cultures, and bring upon them iron peace, of enforcing the will and customs of the winners. It's the peace of the graveyard.

And while the Roman empire is too far back, the crimes of the British, French, and other modern empires are too close for anyone to have the gal to call them "peace".

That's what jingoists and racist creeps called them in their time -- doing their "white man's burden" to bring civilization to those pesky Africans, Indians, and so on.

There have been lots of turf wars in History. None where more unjust, more unwarranted, bloodier, and more sick than the colonial wars and enslavement of over a billion people.

After the peoples in Europe fought to bring down the old empires and feudal kingdoms, and establish their own nation states, the ruling classes went for colonialism to expand their rule and build new empires, this time by exporting the exploitation globally (not that they gave up domestic exploitation completely, until the collapse of colonial empires after WWII reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population).

From the Belgians, who killed millions in the Congo, maimed kids, slaughtered whole villages, to the French, who killed thousands of protesters asking for their country's freedom as close as the 1960s, to the British, who gauged out prisoners eyes with spoons, and exhibited the last native survivors of their atrocities as museum pieces...

Hitler, even numerically, had nothing on those people. He just did those things to Europeans. Had he done them to Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Indians, etc, there would be people still applauding his empire and "peace" today.

And unlike the wars of the long past history, the people who ordered and performed the colonial "imperial" atrocities didn't have any excuse of not being well educated and well bread "gentlemen" of means...

The appraisals of empires is because history is written by those who killed, not the killed. And the people doing the appraisals are the descendants of the murderers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/britis...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/belgiums-genoc...

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/inglorious-empire-w...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-...

https://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-unite...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/04/the-k...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini

Some "peace"...

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#746

As 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'…

> But of course -- "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"

A friendly reminder that this was said about TCP/IP. It does not apply to the application layer (WWW), neither in theory nor in practice.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#747
post #76

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, dismissi…

> 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 th…

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.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#748

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…

Yes, the Internet caught many "corporate and political powers" by surprise. But now they're getting it locked down. > I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation. You mean Tor, I presume. But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. And there are other overlay networks. Some basically just use VPN connecti…

> But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor.

Hi, I'm a Freenet developer of the past ~ 10 years, so I'd like to clarify upon this :) (The project is still active, there was a release just this week!)

While there technically were indeed lawsuits in the US, the situation is not as black and white as "it's dangerous".

It is an anonymizing peer-to-peer network as well! What is dangerous under certain circumstances is only one of the three modes to use it: 1) Opennet, where Freenet uses random strangers as peers. 2) Darknet, where you only connect to peers you manually select, e.g. your friends. 3) Opennet with some Darknet peers in addition (I'll call it "mixed mode").

So Opennet allows law enforcement to connect to your Freenet potentially and thus analyze your traffic. Still, this does not mean that your Freenet will plainly tell its peers what you are downloading! Traffic is always redirected across a random number of peers, none of which tells the others who requested it - which provides plausible deniability. All traffic is encrypted, only the recipient can decrypt it. So you cannot just watch traffic and filter out illegal JPEGs or whatever.

What LEA did then is to come up some math and then claim to deduct from it that there is a certain probability that the illegal downloads were requested by the people they claim it came from. Their math is known and discussed by the Freenet core team, it may be addressed eventually - but from watching the discussion (not the math) I can say it should be taken with a grain of salt. It's not absolute proof that the claimed downloaders were in fact the downloaders. It's just a probabilistic assumption, which may possibly be wrong because the way Freenet works is rather complex (>200 000 LOC).

So as Freenet stores content encrypted on random user's machines (which is the advantage over Tor, Freenet is completely decentralized!), it is imaginable that law enforcement accusses people who did not willingly download it, but just happened to store it.

But: You can use Freenet in Darknet or mixed mode to be reasonably safe: The more of your peers are not controlled by attackers, the lower the probability that a statistical attack can be conducted.

Further, the said legal cases only happened in the US to my knowledge, and I'd argue that the legal system of that country seems a bit flawed. Outside of the US you can just run Opennet and probably be at the same risk as some random non-exit Tor node. You transport traffic which you cannot look into (because its encrypted) and store files which you cannot look into (because they are encrypted), so what's illegal about it anyway?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolved_English_parliament

That's not exactly spliting up the UK.

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.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet What if a billionaire launched a constellation of low earth satellites which provided Internet?

How are satellites different from the radio mesh networks they already mentioned? They're not, regardless of medium, the same cops and IP lawyers can get on it and track down people to arrest and sue according to whatever laws are on the books, good or bad.

They're not, regardless of medium, the same cops and IP lawyers can get on it and track down people to arrest and sue according to whatever laws are on the books, good or bad.

What if this satellite Internet service is a multinational corporation, with the directly owning entities based in Russia and China? Or perhaps Sweden? Part of a conglomerate under the ultimate control of a corporation on Mars?

I think we'll definitely have crossed some threshold when we have our first extradition from a different gravity well.

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