> "But the way some of these have been carried out really has been against the grain of how a democratic society should function."
Democratic? WTF? In what sense is the EU Commission a democratic body?
The EU has finally settled on the wording of its Digital Single Market copyright reform package, a three-years-in-the-making effort, greeting the agreement with a sizzling rebuke of the "misinformation campaigns" around the measures. We managed to ensure that the user of a platform would not be liable for uploading something …
> I suggest you a "Democracy 101" course, because you look very confused.
The parliament is a democratically elected body. The commission is a star chamber of grandees that are appointed by the governments of the member countries. The commission draws up the legislation that the parliament gets to vote on: they are largely a rubber-stamping organisation.
It's really not very complicated.
Perhaps you should read that book yourself.
>In what sense is the EU Commission a democratic body?
"The text must be adopted by the Council of Ministers followed by a final plenary vote at the European Parliament in late March or April"
The Council of Ministers are elected by the people of the member states in their General Elections, while the European Parliament is elected by the people of the member states in the European Elections.
The Commission simply implement the law and regulation passed by the Parliament and are appointed and removed by elected chambers and national governments.
Never ceases to amaze me how many British people don't understand this - while happily talking about returning 'democratic control' to a country with the largest non-elected legislative chamber (The Lords) in the world after communist China.
Quote
The Commission simply implement the law and regulation passed by the Parliament and are appointed and removed by elected chambers and national governments.
Not quite true.
The commisison has the power to originate laws and policies affecting the people of the EU.
Whether the laws manage to get past the council of ministers or the parliment is another matter
And anyone who has that power should be elected by the people of europe.
Which means as far as i'm concerned, the only legit law making body in the EU is the parliment and as representatives of EU citizens, it should have the power to rule over the EU ,and the unelected and appointed people dumped into the dustbin of history.
>And anyone who has that power should be elected by the people of europe.
Legislative initiative is not power - Council, Parliament and the people (through open petition) also have legislative initiative. Only the elected Council and Parliament have the power to create law as you acknowledge earlier in your reply.
> the unelected and appointed people dumped into the dustbin of history.
The Commissioners are elected by the elected and serve at their pleasure - in the same way as the UK Prime Minister is elected by the elected and serves at theirs.
There are no appointed people, many in the UK make this confusion as they're used to the idea of a system where unelected people are routinely made Ministers of State and the highest legislative chamber is unelected. These ideas are inconceivable in most democratic countries, you'll find it needs explaining over and over to non-UK nationals.
@AC - I share your frustration. It is almost as if the majority of people in the UK don't want to understand. In general, they seriously believe that the British system is the only way to do it, and they are not remotely concerned about the lack of accountability of the government here.
If as much effort had been put into creating an actually democratic system in the UK (starting with a proper Constitution), as has been put into getting out of the EU, we would be very much better off.
In most EU democracies the government and its ministers are not elected by the people - the people usually elect the parliament and then a government is formed and voted by the parliament.
The EU commission is not that much different, but the fact that its member are usually chosen by the EU countries government and distributed among them - EU is not still enough integrated to work otherwise - so a compromise is needed.
Anyway, even in countries with direct election of the president or prime minister (but even in US people till vote for "Electoral College", France does elect its president directly...), then the government is formed by designating members (which may still need a parliament approval)
I see many believe "direct democracy" would work better than "representative" one, actually history shows that it usually leads to dictators and caudillos only.
Direct democracy seems to work OK in Switzerland, having lived there I would find it hard to argue that it is a particularly dysfunctional country. But of course they have had a rather long time to practice.
You can argue about its success in Denmark. EU/EEC votes are one thing, but changing the constitution requires parliamentary majority -> referendum with majority _and_ a minimum % of eligible voters being for, followed by a general election and a new parliamentary majority. Last change was in 1953.
And while I'm here:
"There's a great deal of misinformation floating around: the idea [the copyright directive] is going to damage the internet, restrict the internet, that the internet will no longer be the same – none of that is true or relevant."
So if the Internet is going to 100% unaffected by these measures, then what is the point of introducing the legislation?
If Google *do* decide to pull out of Europe, even out of pure spite, then the Internet will almost certainly will be different.
If Google *do* decide to pull out of Europe, even out of pure spite, then the Internet will almost certainly will be different.
It would be, but other than childish posturing, and at the absolute nuclear extreme very short term interruptions to service, Google won't be stomping off in a huff. Last year 33% of revenues were from their Europe, Middle East, Africa region. That's a cool $45bn of sales, and 60% of that is gross margin, and given their business model it is reasonable to guess that two thirds of that or more was from the EU. I'm sure other companies would swoop in to fill any Googlevoid in Europe, so Alphabet simply aren't going to chance it.
Google will play it their usual way - vast amounts on lobbying, and possibly even using their algos to influence matters, Cambridge Analytica-style. Luckily, there's an upside to Europe that Trump is president, because he doesn't much like Google and lobbying for US political support may not work.
Then again, in the US money talks, principles don't, so that last one might not hold.
Google's already shown, in the case of Spain, that they have no problem pulling a service out of Europe if it costs them more to run it than it brings in. If running Search/You Tube/GMail in Europe is going to cost them a trillion dollars in licensing fees and STILL NOT PROTECT THEM from European liability, well there's always the rest of the world. You say 33% from Europe (soon to be minus GB) Middle East, and Africa. Even if that's correct, Google would still be getting revenue from GB, the Middle East and Africa.
Europe can have the internet lite otherwise known as Sky TV over the interwebs while the rest of the world moves on into the 21st century.
You imply that after Brexit UK will weaken its copyright regulations. Being UK a powerhouse when it comes to content creations which has worldwide appeal and bring a lot of revenues, I really doubt so.
Good luck then with revenues from Africa (great broadband there, eh?), and especially with Middle East, where in most states what you can access is strictly controlled... but sure ISIS videos could have a lot of viewers....
EU is shaping the 21st century internet, unlike US that think it would be nice to have it like 19th century Far West...
It's not that it can't afford to play, it's just it believes it can set the rules to sustain extremely high margine exploiting other people's work. It could be still profitable, even if not with those extremely high margins, if it plays by the rules. That's why the void can be easily filled.
Google, and other tech companies, is nothing without the unlicensed content of others. Example of what Google really looks like:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:professor-moriarty.com&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&source=lnms&tbm=isch
Contrast with Bing:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=site%3aprofessor-moriarty.com&FORM=HDRSC2
Why not? Everyome seems to believe that President Trump was elected by Russian bots, ignoring the deep, deep hatred most Americans have for the Clintons combined with Hillary Clinton's inherent greed and incompetence. She tried to ride Bubba's coat tails, even claiming she'd put Bubba in charge of the economy, and still lost.
And to anyone who disagrees, I point to Clinton, with centuries of political practice and expertise at her disposal, being defeated by an unliked trash TV star who had zero political experience. Even Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Trump.
What, you mean trying to get MEPs to listen to their constituents?
Of course they don't, they represent themselves first, their party second, and lobbyists for large companies third. Constituents are somewhere about ninth on the list. Sadly this is true for the European parliament, the UK parliament, the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Assembly, Stormont, and most local authorities.
And Police & Crime Commissioners are even worse, where "the public" come in at 27th on the list.
Shockingly....My constituency MSP is very good, even personally answers emails and has had some quite lengthy conversations via email, along with prodding the local authority for failing to uphold their legal responsibilities.....compare that to politicos of the Blue and Red persuasion, Blue's staff never bothered answering the email bar the "automated acknowledgement", Red's staffer answered, was all for looking into matters well until said staffer heard it was regarding a public body with large levels of trade union membership.....said staffer suddenly changed their tune and made excuses out of the blue....hmm wonder why?
I don't know the details of the law, but even the explainer that Sajjad Karim gave in this article certainly makes it sound like this is highly likely to suppress legitimate speech and data sharing. On the surface, this sounds like a terrible idea to me.
But I don't live there and this isn't likely to affect me, so my opinion doesn't actually mean anything.
"highly likely to suppress legitimate speech and data sharing."
Legitimate speech and data sharing is not accomplished by copying wholesale the work of another. In deed the act is a suppression of freedom of speech as a speaker has a right to speak and an equal right not to speak. The wholesale copiers deny the creator that right. Suppose A decides that their work should not appear in the Daily Mail what right does B have to put A's work on the Daily Mail? Suppose C decides they don't want their music on YouTube, what right does D have to put C's music on YouTube. What right does YouTube have to say but it was D's doing that we now profit from C's work?
"I should have included no more nonsense about charging libraries a fee to read books to children."
Is that a thing and if so, who is being charged and who gets the money? Surely it's a "performance" and therefore a "new work". Just like I can buy some copyright sheet music and create my own performance from that.
Then this bit of crap should not adversely affect the use of Google and YouTube in this country.
For the news in the rest of the EU, I would suggest that Google just buys a right to publish the Reuters news feed - leave out all links to the EU news sites and watch them drown in debt.
Are the content industry trolls out in force, or are Europeans (at least those who post here) just that numb?
First off, both of those changes (articles 11 & 13) would fundamentally change how the internet works in Europe. If it passes in it's current form it will transform the internet from a communications medium to a broadcast medium.
Presently anyone can post anything and the liability exists where it should with the user doing the posting, not the site hosting the content. Volkswagen isn't liable if you drive your beetle into a crowd of pedestrians, and BT can't be sued if you use your telephone to libel an MP. In the same way You Tube isn't liable if someone uploads a copy of a Hollywood movie, or theRegister isn't liable if someone libels you in their comments section. You sue the person who did the deed, not the person who made the tool (or in this case the platform).
Does Google have lots of money? Yep, there's no denying that. Does that mean they have to license ever bit of copywritten material in the universe in order to stream You Tube into Europe? It will if article 13 passes. That would effectively turn You Tube into Vevo (and we all know how well that worked out for Vevo). End users couldn't be allowed to upload content, just in case they managed to upload something that wasn't licensed properly. Of course it not just Google that would be effected. theRegister couldn't maintain this comments section that I am currently using to write this on the off chance that someone would post something that wasn't properly licensed. No site could. Snippets, memes, gossip, individual creative works, all gone.
Google's content ID is the closest thing that presently exists to an upload filter, and it sucks. It cost millions to build and still can't handle fair-dealing properly. It's regularly abused by haters and extortionists (some of whom are the large studios themselves).
If you are an artist and want to get your work out there, assuming you could find a site that was large enough to have all the relevant licensing in place, you would have to go through a record label/movie studio/publisher just like in the days before the internet. Otherwise how could you prove your content was licensed? Good bye to the days of an artist publishing their own content (on say You Tube), building up a fan base, and then making a decent living with their art. Can't get signed by a label? Too bad, I guess you'll have to go back to tending bar.
As for article 11; wasn't this already tried in both Spain and Germany? How did that work? And that was just for news. Imagine the problem if you tried to apply it to _every_thing_. How would you know where a link took you if you couldn't put a blurb on the link? Will all links in Europe need to be licensed to be legible? Perhaps we should just have pages of < a >1< / a >, < a >z< / a > etc. Uggg...
If you think either of those articles (11 or 13) are a good idea, then either you're a member of a legacy industry pining for the 'good ol days' or your ability to think critically is seriously impaired.
"The amount of mistakes I make, it's annoying and sometimes embarrassing, as the last post."
That's why I always leave predictive text turned off. When I read it back I can see they typos. But when predictive text puts the wrong word in, that's harder to spot because the word is spelled correctly. It's not a perfect solution to using a phone keyboard, but it works a bit better for me.
Does BT makes a lot of money frorn those illegal calls? Or does VM profit from people driving its cars into crowds? The difference, if you look beyond your finger, is that YouTube business model is built on exploiting other people's contents - unlike VM that profits from making cars, or BT from people making legitimate calls.
YouTube is built to allow uploading illegal contents easy. VW cars aren't build to kill people (and if VM built dangerous cars it would be in trouble, as it is because it tried to gamble emissions rules), nor the BT network i built to harass people - and unlike YouTube, you can't have an anonymous telephone line easily.
So, OK - Google can ask users to register with their own identity as you have to do when you buy a car or a phone contract. So users uploading illegal contents can be tracked and fined. Just like you can be if you driver a car into a crowd, or harass someone on the phone.
Just, the YouTube business model won't work again....
BT Makes money getting you to subscribe to their telephony service (among other things). Volkswagen makes money selling you cars. And contrary to your myopic opinion, the purpose of You Tube is to gather statistics on your preferences and present you with ads. It does that _primarily_ by providing a platform for people to upload their own content. Most of the content hosted by You Tube is NOT content licensed by the major labels/studios. It's individual content. Many more artists can make a living using You Tube than were ever able to do so under the old system. It succeeds by being easy to use and garnering a large audience. Does that mean that some people may post infringing content? Sure, does that mean that every time some one uploads a video with some Prince song playing in the background it's infringing? Nope, there's even a famous court case involving a bouncing baby, a Prince snippet, and You Tube. Spoiler alert, it didn't go well for the studio.
Volkswagen cars aren't designed to kill, but it's very easy to kill people with them. BT phones aren't built to harass people with, but it's very easy to harass people with them. You Tube wasn't designed to exploit _illegal_content_, it's designed to let people share their own content, but yes you can upload someone elses content. Unfortunately, contrary to the opinion of the legacy industries, not every use is infringing (hint: fair-dealing).
Oh, and if you want to actually make any money with You Tube, you do have to let Google know who you are. Also, I guess you've never heard of a 'hit and run', or a 'burner phone' either.
"Google's content ID is the closest thing that presently exists to an upload filter, and it sucks. It cost millions to build and still can't handle fair-dealing properly. It's regularly abused by haters and extortionists (some of whom are the large studios themselves)."
It isn't meant to and shouldn't do either. 'regularly abused' is a push as according to Google less than 1% of DMCA complaints are wrongly formed and even less fraudulent. If someone wants to reuse some content and believes they have a fair-use or fair-dealing claim, then they should be willing to make that claim. Fair-use is a complex determination and can't be decided by some algorithm.
>"The Commission simply implement the law and regulation passed by the Parliament "
Rubbish. The parliament (MEPs) has no power to initiate legislation, they're a rubber stamp with - at best - power to slow things down. Legislation is initiated by the commission (who act as the "government"), and frequently from shadowy bodies further up such as the Eurogroup. None of us has any significant power to remove the (appointed) members of the commission; they are appointed by the council of ministers in conjunction with the president of the commission and finally waved-through by the MEPs. So IF you could elect a new government in your own country and IF the appropriate new government minister decided to humour you and change their choice of commission member and IF the rest of the council of ministers were amenable and IF the result was approved by the EU parliament, then you'd have the (very oblique) power possibly to change 3.5% of the commission, if you were very very lucky. By no stretch of imagination could this be called "democratic". Tony Benn's "Five Questions You Should Ask Any Politician" are still relevant; the last is "How do we get rid of you?" and in this case the answer is self-evidently "You don't".
(This is to say nothing of sustained attempts by the largest member states to reduce the commission to sixteen members, meaning most of the smaller member states wouldn't even get their 3.5%).
As for the council of ministers: Varoufakis (a reluctant remainer) is worth reading on why elected ministers serving outside the context in which they were elected become intrinsically undemocratic. He's also written an entire book on his experiences in the Eurogroup (on which a certain freedom of action is conferred by the fact that it doesn't officially exist, despite setting the entire European economic agenda).
"Always amazes me" how little of this gets researched, or discussed, or thought about.
How do I get rid of May? Hint, I don’t live in her constituency. How do I get rid of any other MP not in my constituency? I can’t.
How do I have my voice represented? By my MP. How is my voice represented in the EU parliament? My MEPs (2 labour, 1 UKIP, so only really 2)
I have as much power to replace an EU politician as I do a UK one. The EU is actually better in being proportional representation as well, even if it does result in a useless kipper.
Stern, thank you for posting that brief summary. I was tempted to do so myself but I am ashamed to say I couldn't be bothered to do all the typing.
As usual, to spread a lie (I'm not suggesting my fellow AC was doing so intentionally) takes almost nothing compared with the effort involved in disproving it.
In an article today, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47239600 a comment is made about gamers uploading videos of themselves playing games, almost certainly including copyright content, software, music, images etc.
Technically, these will also require licensing, even though most gaming companies don't issue takedown notices : to quote "Studios tend not to enforce their rights against YouTube gamers in order to avoid the PR implications of being heavy-handed with fans, and because the videos can have significant promotional value," said Ms Berry.
Significant promotional value!
And Music doesn't?
No, because if you publish you playing the game, you're not actually publishing the game - people wanting to play it will still have to buy the game.
If you upload a whole song/video, people will listen to/watch it without ever buying the song/video (but very few)..
Is it so difficult to understand?
So, I guess terrestrial radio is a myth? Wow, what have I been listening to all my life? I seem to recall there was (no I think it might still exist, it did the last time I was in my automobooble) this device called a radio, tune into one of many stations, and hear songs, _whole_songs_. These are popular songs (if not good ones, kids these days) and I never had to purchase them. I can listen to my hearts content, for FREE. Not only that, history is rife with examples of studios actually PAYING radio stations to play certain songs (hint: google Payola).
I seem to also recall that people still went out and bought vinyl, then 8-track, cassettes, CDs, and back to vinyl (huh?). The problem isn't people listening for free, the problem is greed and control. Greed that there is _anyone_ else making money off of content but them and terror that artists now have a choice on how to get their art out there WITHOUT going through them.
"These are popular songs (if not good ones, kids these days) and I never had to purchase them. I can listen to my hearts content, for FREE. Not only that, history is rife with examples of studios actually PAYING radio stations to play certain songs (hint: google Payola)."
Are you in the US where radio stations don't pay royalties on the playlist? In many other countries, every play on the radio incurs a royalty payment. The listener "pays" through the advertising.
Take an obscure 60's song, or maybe a 70/80's mainstream hit/album that is out of print ( and there are many) which you won't find on such as Spotify.
How does that fit with the above?
You-tube certainly preserves the cultural value by making it visible to an audience more so than some "music industry body" that probably legally owns the copyright(s) and yet is doing absolutely nothing to use it for commercial purposes. Use it or lose it.
You've no right on someone else's work until copyright expires. If someone doesn't want to publish something anymore it's a full right of theirs. Stop thinking your are endowed with magical rights to own what is not yours.
YouTube is a money machine. It's not a cultural preservation system, and will happily delete whatever hasn't enough views if needed - it has no mandate to "preserve cultural values" - unlike some institutions - which would not slurp used data and slap ads on your faces to access such contents.
Copyright isn't a *right* it's a monopoly that was supposed to be granted by the government to a creator for a _limited_time_ to secure certain privileges to the creator. The purpose of this grant is to provide an incentive to enrich the *public* body of knowledge and art. If the public never gets to access it, it fails to serve it's purpose. If artists are creating lots of works without it, it is no longer needed.
Copyright was never intended as a *money_machine* for big industries to wring every last penny out of an artists work. If the artist didn't want anyone else to see/use their work, don't publish it.
You can not own an idea or a word or a tune, no more than you can own a flame or the air you breath. Nothing magical about that.
Does this mean the end of such punny headlines, and it's many variants, unless multiple licences are obtained?
IIRC Michael Palin, of Month Python fame, stated that on their 1976 tour, in an unscripted and inspirational moment the raced to the front of the stage and sang "the hills are alive with the sound of music". Thus landing the Pythons with a substantial bill for licensing and performing copyrighted work.
More copyright thieves sending takedown notices to original content providers. These scum cannot be challenged as the YouTubers in Google's case will me marked with challenges and banned.
This problems are less with Google but what is now a wild west of claim, counter claim between law firms at the creators loss. Yes there are some blatant copies of stuff but they will easily republish via TOR
The correct way to put it is Copyright "Reform".
This is like the Trade Union Reforms put out by the late Mrs T. They were not always made to reform trade unions or benefit their members. They were to make the unions more useful, or less harmful, to her backers. It has left us with trade unions that need re-reforming.
Yes, UK, EU and the rest of the western world need copyright reformed. It has morphed into a Corporate Profit Enhancement system and needs turned back into something that helps the livelihoods of artists, authors and other content creators. While they are at it, our imaginary experts, could reform that patent system which has had pretty much the same done to it!
It's becoming increasingly obvious that (preferably anonymous) peer-to-peer sharing of absolutely everything is the only way forward worth bothering with. And we better start thinking about how we'll bypass their inevitable attempts to block it, when it gets big enough.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The progressive world community calls the adopted law only catastrophic, but it comforts itself that all is not lost, there is time left before the final vote and something can be changed.It is enough, however, to look at the alignment of support for the copyright law in the governments of the EU member countries to dispel illusions: the new law is supported by all countries, including the United Kingdom.Is it legal to download audio and video from YouTube?
It still remains a very controversial issue. However, the leading YouTube audio-ripping site YouTube-MP3.org agreed to shut down https://notmp3.com after being sued by a huge coalition of recording labels.