According to a draft communication on copyright reform leaked yesterday (via IPKat), the Commission is considering putting the simple act of linking to content under copyright protection. This idea flies in the face of both existing interpretation and spirit of the law as well as common sense. Each weblink would become a legal landmine and would allow press publishers to hold every single actor on the Internet liable.
The stupidity of the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels/Strasbourg never ceases to amaze me. Fresh from royally doing terrible things to the poohc regarding net neutrality, out comes this insane plan.
And then people wonder why the EU has such a bad reputation.
I think the quote from Rube on Dead Like Me is appropriate here, “You really !@#$ the dog on this one, Peanut.”
If the British vote yes in the referendum to leave the union, it gives the other non-euro members of the union an opt out to follow. Those that has adopted the Euro allready, might find it harder to leave the union.
While the above (without having read the article) obviously looks stupid it is simply wrong to say it is unelected bureaucrats forcing this upon us. Independent of who proposes a law it has to be passed by parliament and that is directly elected by you and everyone.
When you elect someone on promises, there’s no guarantee (s)he will fulfill the promises. After all, it’s only promises, not an actual contract on results. One can only claim having made his/her best effort and still earn the corresponding wages during the mandate. Plus getting paid by lobbies and having his/her after-career guarantee. Sounds like deja-vu ?
I completely agree with everything you say: it is all too common that governments cannot or do not want to keep the promises that got them elected. My point really only is that this is no structural problem particular to the EU, and blaming “unelected” bureaucrats only caters to general anti-EU sentiments.
(As an aside, I at least do not see a good alternative to how the system should work. Legally binding governments to implementing certain proposals seems problematic, and, looking at Switzerland for example, systems of direct democracy do not seem favourable either.)
The only way is up – Yazz
No, I mean, dictatorship. At least you have one path traced and not buzzing democracy with conflicting interests. The longer lasting dynasties were dictatorship. Ever.
Roma felt down, ancient Greek democracy felt down, as soon as you ask people, it become a mess. A recent study in France revealed that at least 42% of asked citizens are requesting a more technocratic/authoritarian government that really take measures instead to giggle on the seat trying to please everybody (and gets re-elected).
Fuzzy logic have its limit.
I am pretty sure results are skewed by the choice of an unrepresentative sample.
If that number is true I hope that 42% of French people packs their stuff and can get an agreement with the rest of France in order to settle down in a part of the French territory where they can have their freaking technocratic/authoritarian State negating 2.25 centuries of struggles for progress.
Yeah, when people live in decent conditions and have never experienced true lack of freedom – but they lack education and ignore history – they seem willing to give up their freedom for a bit of unproved additional efficiency in the system. Our historical memory as a society is unbelievably limited. Frighteningly so.
Democracies have fallen in history – but so have absolute monarchies and dictatorships. Nothing is eternal, but we should try to move forward instead of backwards. And please nobody tell me that forward/backward is subjective.
EDIT: Yeah, in case it is not clear from my reply, I understand Kochise isn’t supporting that view but just reporting facts.
Edited 2015-11-10 09:43 UTC
Very few dictatorships have lasted for 50 years. Most only last until the dictator is deposed or assassinated. A handful (eg Rome 501BCE-202BCE) have lasted over a 100 years. You should note that the Roman dictators survived an average of two years before being deposed or killed.
Nearly every dicatatorship in history has been an economic and cultural basket case. In each and every case the dictators have eventually resorted to brutal repression and mass murder to maintain power.
Iceland. the Isle of Man and the Faroe Island have all been democracies for over 1000 years. Switzerland has been a democracy since 1291. Great Britain has been a democracy since 1707. The USA since 1776 etc, etc.
Edited 2015-11-10 10:25 UTC
Nothing wrong with bureaucrats being unelected so long as they are accountable and following the instruction of elected representatives. But they need a keen appreciation of the limit of their mandate to act.
But the EU has extremely meddlesome bureaucrats who possess only a very weak mandate, courtesy of a weak, largely unregarded European Parliament and a powerful, largely undemocratic commission.
Is it even possible to have a genuinely democratic mandate when Europe does not have a genuinely unified demos? Maybe, maybe not. In the absence of that certainty the bureaucrats should admit their limitations. Fat chance!
Bit of an odd date to choose. Great Britain has existed since 1707 as that was when the Scottish Parliament voted itself out of existence and thereafter its members sat in what was previously the English Parliament.
Its debatable whether you could describe either Scotland or England as democracies before 1707 and that didn’t change in any meaningful way immediately after the Act of Union.
You could claim representation in England started with the Wessex Witan in the 8th century, Simon de Montfort in the 13th century, the Reform Act of 1832, or Universal Suffrage in 1918. No doubt there are other interesting moments too. At what point it became democratic as well as representative is a moot point.
How long have lasted Egyptian’s dynasties ? Yeah, dictatorship requires to have one view only, otherwise it would be called a democracy. And yes, most of the time some people gets removed from managing staff through assassination, coup d’etat, impeachment or loss of election (tick the right answer). Nevertheless, while the citizens (and slaves) might not agree with the leadership, at least it is not constantly balancing from one end to the other like a metronome.
Imagine if we had 4 years election cycle, it would be like an excuse to be constantly on election without real challenges being addressed and actions taken due to the fear of not getting re-elected. That would indeed be the end of democracy and the beginning of the politico-financial dictatorship, where lobbies prevails above citizens’ first interests.
Well, the democratic alternative to both elections and referenda is the lottery. The ancient Athenians used statistically significant policy juries as a sort of upper house to check the Assembly. They basically put law-making proposals on trial.
Same thing with the other EU bashing post. Really looks like someone has an antiEU agenda to hammer.
I would find it acceptable if people would complain and claim “EUexit” or secession when your country’s choices are lost in the myriad of voices present in the European Union. Either because of unjust rules or even simply because you believe your country deserves more weight in the EU. I may disagree (or not), but I would find that a reasonable argument.
However, when you find that _your own country_ basically votes in the EU for the stuff you supposedly don’t like, then claiming “LET’S QUIT THE EU!!” is plain stupid. The politicians _your country_ sent to Brussels are also part of the problem. How do you expect them to become part of the solution if you move them back from Brussels into your own borders?
Do you think they’re stupid because of some specific Brussels weather thingie?
Put some order in your own house/congress/parliament/council of tribes first!
It’s the same story in Catalonia. The main party’s been using Spain for a scapegoat for all of Catalonia’s economic troubles _even when they themselves voted in favor of most of Spain’s current fiscal policies_. People started to believe the ruse, started claiming for secession, and now everything will blow up in their hands.
And, being quite progressive myself, I’ve always been in favor of smaller and independent nation-states, but really, this type of broken rhetoric makes me so mad.
Edited 2015-11-10 19:28 UTC
Right to be upset towards to the politicians-for-rent that are proposing this. But to be fair the EU parliament previously rejected and blocked such similar attempt (see same blogger other articles).
Let’s not throw the baby with the bathwater… and hope they can block such proposal.
I find it unfortunate the author (who is a member of parliament) didn’t link to the specific part of the leaked document that is claimed to indicate ‘the Commission is considering putting the simple act of linking to content under copyright protection’.
The closest thing I could find after a quick scan of the document was:
Which sounds like this is something to keep a keen eye on, but doesn’t seem to warrant the alarming language in the article to me.
Did anyone else find something more worrying?
I find it unfortunate the author (who is a member of parliament) didn’t link to the specific part of the leaked document that is claimed to indicate ‘the Commission is considering putting the simple act of linking to content under copyright protection’.
Probably because he was afraid of copyright lawsuits?
Edited 2015-11-09 23:04 UTC
She. She’s Julia Reda. She’s the Pirate Party MEP. There’s even a picture of her at the top of her page.
Again I haven’t read the article, but I don’t know how they would police this…
If I allow linking to my URL for advertising purposes etc, then the domain gets sold to someone else, is it still valid for use (as permission has been granted), even though the content has changed? Would you have to re-authorise usage every time content changes (on your own site)?
I would not attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to corruption.
Oettinger has been behaving like a corporate shill from the start. And for good reason, look who pulls his strings according to this article:
http://www.euractiv.com/sections/innovation-industry/oettinger-meet…
+10000
corporate lobby 100%
European telcos (Telefonica) trying to milk American companies (Google).
Edited 2015-11-10 07:47 UTC
This is Only a draft proposal. Any MEP can put one together. At this stage the draft proposal hasn’t been accepted, which means it won’t even be discussed in the parliament. If it even gets that far, Then it would be voted on.
It’s a storm in a teacup and simply to early to be getting wound up by this.
Yes, but it’s one we sadly need to have. The idiotic MEPs & Commissioners who continue to propose these clearly idiotic and unworkable schemes need to be fully aware of the sort of response they’ll receive if they propose anything as idiotic or unworkable in the future: perhaps then they might stop doing it and we can relax a little bit.
Hopefully here in the UK our government might get the message and stop proposing idiotic and unworkable data retention schemes, but generally the UK government is impervious to embarrassment so they keep trying, bless ’em.
I’m not sure of the authors on this particular draft (because i cant track down the authors), but in general terms its not uncommon for the eurosceptic/anti-eu blocs to release draft papers for clearly unpopular/nonviable to generate anti-eu news stories for the popular press.
Edited 2015-11-11 10:48 UTC
Let’s see what they are going to package it with to get it through parliament.
They did a “nice” job with combining the weak net-neutrality with limits on roaming tariffs.
Edited 2015-11-10 10:06 UTC
If all items not listed under the copy-right exemption section are automatically copyrighted, aren’t all websites therefor protected by copyright?
OS News has a copyright notice on the bottom of the page. It is thus under copyright protection.
It’s terms of use state that posters retain their copyright protections.Thus, each poster would have to give each person linking to OS News permission to link.
Thus, any link to OS News without the permission of OS news and each person posting would be a copyright violation.
I don’t expect all of the big players: Microsoft, IBM, Ford, Sony, … are going to place their home pages in the public domain just to make linking to them legal.
And the cases where people have stopped others linking to their sites have suffered a drop in traffic and more than likely sales.
Do you honestly think that the likes of Ford will stop people sharing links to their latest model?
They want the information out there. Sharing links is free publicity and marketing.
It’s not that not knowing stuff is stupid. It’s rather stupid to not know that you don’t know, or that you do know you don’t know but don’t admit it.
Seriously, why don’t they ask someone who knows stuff? I like that we do have a EU, but on days like this, …, meh.
Edited 2015-11-11 11:49 UTC