Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

European Parliament approves copyright reform

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 840 posts

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#581

Post by kortilla »

adrianN wrote: post #572
clarkmoody wrote: post #435

It'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…

I don't think cryptography can win against legislation. There are no technological solutions to social problems.

Well it has so far. The usability is the problem.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#582

Post by [deleted] »

atq2119 wrote: post #520
golergka wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With structures such as EU, the distance between the voter and decision-making center gets longer, and voter's influence smaller. Exiting these structures, just as limiting the power of any central or federal government in favour of moving this power to lower-level elected authorities (such as states in US or Russia) decreases this distance.

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. (…

[deleted]

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#583

Post by toyg »

makomk wrote: post #240
isostatic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 t…

> This is very different from the UK system

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.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#584

Post by kortilla »

hokus wrote: post #519
gpm wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet it wouldn't matter with respect to things like this. It would still be subject to the same laws. The same applies to radio mesh networking.

The postal service can send a box with say 10 * 6 TB hdd quite fast. Say 2 days for delivery. 480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.

High throughput but extremely high latency networks are significantly less useful than current networks.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#585

Post by smush »

mirimir wrote: post #500
random878 wrote: post #312

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…

Sorry, I'm not familiar with Freenet. Why must you use Tor to browse it?

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#586

Post by nicc »

adev_ wrote: post #514
nicc wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

> 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…

> Ahahah, the good joke.

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).

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#587

Post by ABCLAW »

koonsolo wrote: post #558
ABCLAW wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because now a startup has less than 3 years to add this content filtering, which provided as a service or not, is going to cost €€€. Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important. The articles, as written, are interesting because they already mention a ton of the balancing considerations. All of those are completely absent in these conversat…

> Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important. In practice, it will all be up to the judge: 1. Was your AI filter adequate enough to properly filter the content 2. If not, how high can the fine be? There is 1 easy solution to all of this: incorporate outside of the EU.

>In practice, it will all be up to the judge

That's the case for any piece of legislation.

The test isn't 'if your AI was good enough'. For the majority of people the most important part is: 'is it proportional to even use AI at your size?'

To which the answer is no.

If you're running a stream or youtube channel of self-created content, the cost of moving dramatically exceeds the total cost of legal risk you're eating in staying put.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#588

Post by nkkollaw »

adev_ wrote: post #501
nkkollaw wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt it. 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.

> 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...

Sure. Whatever you say.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#589

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ABCLAW wrote: post #527
fhrow4484 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When reading comments like this it feels like: there's no ambitious startup in Europe to become one of the large companies. Because now a startup has less than 3 years to add this content filtering, which provided as a service or not, is going to cost €€€. Do you think Spotify would be able to grow if it was created on March 27 2019 instead of 2008? A successful Content filtering as a service (compliance.ly & co. In…

>Because now a startup has less than 3 years to add this content filtering, which provided as a service or not, is going to cost €€€. Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important. The articles, as written, are interesting because they already mention a ton of the balancing considerations. All of those are completely absent in these conversat…

> Not really? This isn't a flat 'you need to pay 10k a yr regardless of your size' imposition. Proportionality is important.

The problem is the proportionality requirements are poorly designed. It would be one thing if requirements increased solely with revenue, but increasing with time or user count is purely destructive.

Plenty of small services will hit the time limit before they're big, and then the costs destroy them before they have a chance to be. And the fact that that's likely to happen will keep many people from even trying to begin with.

And user count doesn't mean anything if the profit per user is low. Many side projects have a million users, that doesn't mean it's making any money that could be used to spend on filters -- many of them are lucky to even pay for all of their own hosting costs.

> Do you know why that's an issue? Because sometime soon people are going to start getting bullshit copyright trolling demand letters, and all this furor about how the internet is dead is going to convince them to close up shop or cave instead of saying 'nah, serve me your originating documents, this is a bogus claim'.

That's a different problem. If there were real penalties for making false copyright claims then there wouldn't be so many fraudulent demand letters. I don't think as many people would be objecting to "copyright reform" if it did that.

Re: European Parliament approves copyright reform

#590

Post by repolfx »

dijit wrote: post #566
repolfx wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 th…

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.

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.

Post reply on HN