September 12: Catastrophe looms over the European Parliament
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Should you check the European Parliament's agenda for September 12, you would find the voting on "Copyright in the Digital Single Market", the proposed new European Directive on Copyright.
Draft agenda - Wednesday, 12 September 2018
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=AGENDA&reference=20180912&secondRef=SIT&language=EN
This newly-proposed legislation is infamous for introducing two censorship mechanisms: censored content which can never be referred (article 13), and content that cannot be referred without paying for it (article 11). The introduction of a censorship machinery in Internet would be catastropic, because once commissioned its use would be quite easily abused.
This proposed legislation would be particularly damaging for Software Freedom. The Free Software Foundation Europe calls for acting on it:
"Call to Action: Save Free Software this September"
https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180905-02.en.html
Cory Doctorow writes in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website an article explaining why the entire world should raise in arms against the catastrophe that looms over Internet:
Why the Whole World Should Be Up in Arms About the EU's Looming Internet
Catastrophe | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/why-whole-world-should-be-arms-about-eus-looming-internet-catastrophe
On his own website BoingBoing, he explains the bleeding case of musicians that have had their recordings retired from YouTube because Sony says it owns the copyright for the works of Johann
Sebastian Bach:
The future is here today: you can't play Bach on Youtube because Sony
says they own his compositions / Boing Boing
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/05/mozart-bach-sorta-mach.html
On his most recent article, Cory reviews todays situations, calling the threat not a catastrophe but a Extinction-Level Event:
6 days until the EU votes on an extinction-level event for the internet:
here's what they'll debate / Boing Boing
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/06/six-days-left-2.html
On of the articles that Cory Doctorow quotes is publised by Wikimedia (the publishers from Wikipedia), and on it the german music professor Ulrich Kaiser relates his experience publishing in YouTube old classical music recordings completely free of copyright and discovering that YouTube takes all of them out claiming copyright violations, making to publish classical music practically impossible.
The future is here today: you can't play Bach on Youtube because Sony
says they own his compositions / Boing Boing
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/05/mozart-bach-sorta-mach.html
Let's remember: this is what is already legal, authors in Internet platforms are facing the unpleasant task of proving that their audiovisual is free of copyright every time a big company makes a reclamation, which they are getting used to do systematically, at a big scale, and without the smallest verification. If the proposed legislation would be approved as it is, the situation would became worst: there wouldn't be any need of a reclamation for this to happen, the censorships would be previous and systematical.
Can Beethoven send takedown requests? A first-hand account of one German
professor’s experience with overly broad upload filters – Wikimedia
Foundation
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/08/27/can-beethoven-send-takedown-requests-a-first-hand-account-of-one-german-professors-experience-with-overly-broad-upload-filters/
These are the two campaigns to stop articles 13 and 11. If you feel you oppose them, take action:
#SaveYourInternet - Fight the #censorshipmachine
https://saveyourinternet.eu/
Save The Link | Save The Link
https://savethelink.org/
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
I'm reminded of this article:
http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/04/20/im-tired-of-this-protest-the-next-lettersoup-bill-shit/
And honestly, I'm beyond sick of this kind of stuff too. So much that I kind of hope that this passes just so a disaster can unfold and force real change to occur.
On 10/09/18 06:12, wrote:
> I'm reminded of this article:
>
> http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/04/20/im-tired-of-this-protest-the-next-lettersoup-bill-shit/
>
>
> And honestly, I'm beyond sick of this kind of stuff too. So much that
> I kind of hope that this bill passes just so a disaster can unfold and
> force real change to occur.
I call that "speaking like a loser".
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
Well, what does stopping this one bill with desperate pleas really accomplish? There's a core problem here, and begging your representative to vote against this isn't solving that.
It's like with net neutrality. There were efforts going on for years to take net neutrality away, and all anyone was willing to do is this kind of half-assed action, stalling it. Now we've lost net neutrality, and we're already seeing the effects of that.
If we want a real solution - a victory - we need to clearly identify the source of the problem, and come up with a concrete plan to address it.
There were lobbyists begging our representatives for years to take net neutrality away. The source of the problem seems to be: our representatives end up acting in the interest of those can pay lobbyists (mainly companies) and not in the public interest. That is plutocracy. In my humble opinion, addressing that problem is no reason to stop trying to get our representatives to listen to us.
In the European Parliament in particular (where public money finance the political groups, as it should), we have some success: there is no software patent in the EU, ACTA is dead, etc. Tomorrow's plenary vote is a partial success too: without a public mobilization, the Parliament would not have denied (on July 5th) the legal affairs committee (JURI) the right to negotiate with the Council: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20180628IPR06809/parliament-to-review-copyright-rules-in-september
I don't think it's just the lobbyists. There's a deeper problem: the general population doesn't care, and representatives and corporations know this. So how do we get the general population (not just a sizable, scattered minority) to care about these issues permanently (rather than for the month it takes to stop one particular law or agreement)? I'm not entirely sure. But it's going to require a lot of hard work, and spending so much time stalling takes away from that.
On 11/09/18 06:15, wrote:
> Well, what does stopping this one bill with desperate pleas really
> accomplish?
Begging? I just told them that if they give way our freedom of
expression just to please a lobby they would prove themselves to be a fraud.
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
I didn't say "begging", but yes, that's really all that's going on. Using stronger words to describe what you're doing doesn't change that. This is a desparate, pleading tone. A stronger tone would be to threaten to vote them out of office.
But even a stronger tone isn't going to make it any better over the long-term, because at the end of the day it's still just a delay, because the general population still doesn't care and another opportunity to do the exact same thing will present itself. We need a real solution, not a fake one.
On 11/09/18 21:27, wrote:
> But even a stronger tone isn't going to make it any better over the
> long-term, because at the end of the day it's still just a delay,
> because the general population still doesn't care and another
> opportunity to do the exact same thing will present itself. We need a
> real solution, not a fake one.
Sorry onpon, but I don't believe you. Why I am going to believe
you would fight for "real change" when you aren't moving now? Change
happens tomorrow at noon, not when you wish it to be scheduled. This is
the moment that defines us. Some of us are fighting, and you are just
staying in your cloud and despising everything that happens below. You
are amongst the people that doesn't care, yet you think you can look at
the rest from a superior position. You cannot. Should any "real
change" happen in the future, it would probably not when you expected
it, and also be achieved by people like me, not like you.
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
I didn't declare that I was going to do anything. I only said that stalling in this way is not really helping and a proper solution is needed.
> Some of us are fighting, and you are just
> staying in your cloud and despising everything that happens below.
I don't "despise" anyone. But this manner of "fighting" is not effective. It's defensive, has too little popular support, and is doomed to cave at some point or another.
Everything we do has a cost: opportunity cost. Time you spend calling representatives and begging them to oppose a bill, signing petitions, and explaining this basic stuff to the public again and again is time you are not spending doing something else, possibly something much more productive.
I'm not spending 100% of my time productively. I'm only human. But if I want to do something productive, I work on libre software development, or some other thing that I know is doing some long-term good. Or, I brainstorm and try to come up with better things to do.
TL;DR long story short: Onpon looked at
the rest from a superior position..
Sended mail to my MEPS by saveyourinternet
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