How can I find who voted for it?

There is something suspect about the EU's cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.

Of course what's best for the people and the internet is a non-consideration for these politicians who work for the moneyed-class rather than the people.

The news companies ( especially the big ones like BBC, NYTimes and CNN ) already bullied google and facebook to give them exceptional preferential treatment. Now they want a link tax? We already have news companies' social media team bombarding the internet with their spam, now they will go into overdrive mode if news links are monetized. That's so ridiculous. What's to stop anyone from creating a "news" company and them spamming their own links everywhere to profit from this tax?

As for the upload filter, all that's going to do is to impede or silence critics, artists, etc using materials protected as "fair use".

People talk about china or russia all the time, but the biggest enemy of a free internet so far has been the EU since their legislation can be global while china and russia are pretty much confined to their own borders. And of course with EU behaving so erratically, this will just embolden china, russia and the rest of the world to act in bad faith as well.

But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?

Where can I get the collection of all copyrighted content so I can build this filter?

Problem solved.

Huh? How does this follow?

This is beyond ridiculous.

For example, you may block EU traffic, but if you have a bank account in the EU, and if an EU citizen discovers somehow, perhaps while travelling abroad, that you are misusing their personal data...

(Inb4 the national laws end up including huge exemptions for site run by the government or political parties).

A more technical campaign would be reverse engineering the filtering algorithms (censorship machines) that sites end up forced to install, and finding a way of generating new copyrighted content that has the equivalent of a "hash collision" against already popular (or political) content hosted on websites using the filter.

All I can say is I hope Europeans enjoy their new walled garden, because I sure as hell won't be complying with these rules.

If they did so they can conveniently also ignore that $5B anti-trust fine.

How is this different than making gunmakers responsible for shootings? Continuing with the analogy, the only option the gunmaker has is to essentially close up shop. Seems like an impossible law to follow. "Develop better algorithms for filtering inappropriate material or you're gonna be sorry" sounds like tyranny.

I don't see it very clear that the biggest tech companies are losing their grip on the internet with these new laws. They will be able to weather this and even profit just fine.

In 2018 I'm considering rejecting clients with an Eu requirement.

What actions can the average citizen take against this?

I feel like this is actually forcing the biggest tech companies to increase their grip on the internet.

On the other hand when the government wants to regulate something I'm also immediately suspicious.

Will the concept get less mockery now?

Moderation over the last years has been strict though. I haven't seen any illegal content on there in ages.

If you fear that arXiv will implement filters that will recognize that what you are uploading is a translation of an obscure Prussian research paper and block the upload, I don't think that's going to happen. (But I will be really impressed if it happens!)

Like always here, death by regulation. The way governments grant monopolies to established players and kill competition.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2F%2F...

EDIT: The final text will apparently be published here eventually: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/texts-adopted.html

How can anyone think that while uploading a new set of content on a website, it would be an instant job to compare against all other legal content already uploaded?

What? Where? How? Is the author of this article somehow confused? The article doesn't make clear in any way how the new law would threaten any tech giants' grips on anything. Tech giants are the first to jump regulatory bullets that would kill anything on a tighter budget in its way.

After this goes through I will become a single-issue voter, to leave the EU.

And the link tax has excemptions for plain hyperlinks and the like, which prevents most distopian uses of such a provision.

If google acts on this it will be because they know this was written with them in mind and if nothing happens stricter laws will follow. But for everyone else it will be a non-issue.

Upload filters on the other hand are a much bigger problem, mostly because copyright law is way to strict to make them reasonable.

It seems to contain a bunch of amendments that seem to make at least Article 13 a bit less draconian. In particular, 13.2b seems to require a human-reviewed and appealable complaints mechanism.

All in all, it's still very shitty.

I intend to save the list of those who voted for and set a reminder to dig it out when the next EU elections come up. I hope people with more social media presence than I do the same.

While I am not a particular fan of the dominance of Google and Facebook, I like it better how they handle the web than what we have seen from the 'creative' companies. It took years until they found a way to monetize their content properly (e.g. Spotify, Netflix) and even now after they pushed DRM down our throats, they kinda complicate things by not letting you watch the full HD version on certain platforms or restricting streaming rights on a per country basis.

"The great danger is that it will destroy the capacity for free speech on the internet and social media, which has exploded in recent years and is an invaluable alternative to the so-called mainstream media."

https://www.ukip.org/national-ukip-news-item.php?id=18

The law is about the so-called "fake news", now that we're close to the 2019 European parliament elections.

At my understanding, there will be discussions about the amendments and another vote, like the one we had two months ago. Is it right? There is still time to act, right?

Also, is there a place to see who voted what? Elections are close and those choices could impact the vote of many. I knew Votewatch but I don't know if it still doing it, saw some excel file going around last time and wondering if they are being updated, to see who changed ideas.

I received one "pre-canned" email acknowledgement from UKIP, attempting to make the bill into an "EU bullying us" issue, and nothing from anyone else. One politician I tried to call had a published phone number that connected to a commercial money lending service.

And mainstream political parties wonder why people feel disenfranchised. They have become a professional political class, completely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The result is protest (Trump, Brexit et al).

1. Access for EU residents is shut down on many sites. 2. GDPR is not taken seriously, even if 11 and 13 get repealed. 3. We once again do not have a legal body to look to as privacy thought leaders. 3. People will stop taking the EU seriously as a

The changes going on at such governmental levels should not be unexpected. These kinds of changes have been happening over many decades. Very few, if any, governments (I am not talking about politicians here) want to give the citizens of itself the freedoms that could threaten the well-being and growing control of that government.

Politicians may have agendas (obviously they do) and can in some way direct how the relevant government will operate. They have less control than they think and they are there only fo relatively short periods of time. Most of the legislation that citizens end up suffering under is dictated not by the politicians but by other control structures.

Policy changes made by the various political representatives will be warped by those who are in charge of bringing these policies into reality.

The changes being discussed here for the EU are in line with the premise that government will gain more control over its citizens and the ones who have pushed for this will find out quickly enough that there are very large unintended side-effects that will come back and haunt them.

The fundamental concept driving all this movement towards control of what citizens can and can't do is to ensure that when needed those same citizens will follow whatever directives are given. This is just repeating what has happened in the past many times.

Does that mean we lie down and just take it or is there something that we can do?

If you are going to actively do something, you must start out first realising that there are going to be consequences. You have to make up your mind as to whether or not you are willing to face those consequences.

Then you need to look at what action you can take and take without the destruction of others. Peaceful civil disobedience can be a strong motivator of change in some cases.

And starting next year there will be exactly 0.9% [2] of the citizens that speak the language that the EU government conducts itself. Now it is 13.9% [1], which is not exactly a good number. As if it wasn't already a huge problem that the French and German governments essentially control the EU.

Combine that with the fact that large blocks hate eachother. Like famously the French and German governments, for example, but those are hardly the only examples. Some blocks have actually recently had shooting conflicts with deaths (the Catalan and Spanish governments, if you're wondering, and yes, both have representation, even though the Catalan government gets no representation in the commission or council, the only institutions with real power in the EU).

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(british+population+%2B...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(irish+population)%2Feu...

(also I find it odd when people apply this argument to the UK where we have a fully unelected upper house!)

But it applies to processing of personal data, this is independent of if it happens over the internet or not.

Not rly an MEP problem I think. Most people don’t care that much.

This is definitely a deficiency of your local press.

> I don't recall voting for any MEPs

Elections are held every 5 years and organised by your local electoral authorities? Which country are you in and are you a national or a resident?

Where do you live if I may ask? here in austria it was everywhere before the vote and now new articles with the result.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections2014-results/en/turno...

despite claimes on election night that turnout had (very slightly!) increased over the previous election

https://www.politico.eu/article/this-time-its-different/

Election turnout falling consistently as the elected body's powers increase consistently. Not great.

Now, granted the situation is more complex than just that the commission can push through whatever it wants, but the following statements are true:

1) the commission can block whatever it wants (ie. it has a monopoly on legislative initiative). So it has a negative veto, and can prevent (and does prevent) anything it wants.

2) the commission can, in cooperation with the EU council, create and adopt legislation, without anything more than getting the Parliament's position (but not approval) [1]

3) they can even use other procedures to get what they want [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...

In practice the commission and council requiring each other is essentially the commission doing what it wants because it's mostly the same people, and even when not, they're necessarily from the same country and party (well, everyone in one has a counterpart in the other that's from the same country and party).

So no. The EU is a dictatorship. The commission has the only lawgiving power, and can block anyone else's initiative. The parliament ... is better paid but no more powerful than my cat ... (plus the politicians in there couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag whereas my cat has claws).

(and let's ignore the fact that the commission also controls the EU court of justice)

No, this means that when you get over 10 mil euro, then you have enough money to pay for third party solution to content filtering. This costs couple of thousands a month and you are covered. You don't need to create your own ContentID platform to comply with the law.

It is possible to lodge a complaint with the Commission if transposition is deemed inadequate (and I'm sure copyright holders would do exactly that), and the Commission may bring a case against the country before the ECJ.

See: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/applying-eu...

The EU is failing in both the tech sector and the media sector. This is just sacrificing one to slow down the other's decline. Censorship is a bonus but it's not the goal, just like privacy was a bonus and not a goal of GDPR.

>Another reasoning could be to "prepare" a censorship infrastructure, but I can't find any hard evidences to this.

The only thing you need to watch for right now, and what will be seen in the future, is uneven enforcement. You'll have a choice to either censor material Europeans [are bound by law to] find offensive, or face a nice fine. Again, much like GDPR (though that law is also designed to get big tech companies to pay their taxes). This probably will come in the form of a deal with companies that won't be disclosed to the general public, but it's a nice backdoor way to get around US law which correctly doesn't require such censorship.

Your example is actually a good one: The Netherlands might have added that the document must be legalised but their law still matches the directive's requirement and the added restriction is neither unreasonable nor onerous and might keep in line with the country's practices.

The bottom line is that those who hope that transposition will change the directive in any meaningful way are going to be sorely disappointed.

All you need is a privacy policy and the ability to delete / return customer data when requested. But that doesn't have to be in real time/automated, you can just set up an email address and respond manually. It's rare you'll even get a request if you're a company with such a small IT budget.

All the other things (double opt-in email, not contacting your customers in an unsolicited way) are process changes that can be implemented without IT cost.

Much as I hate to admit it, the biggest reason US tech companies have been so much more successful than European tech companies is that the US imposes far fewer regulations, which allows companies to use more of their revenue on growth.

The copyright industry and their bought-and-paid-for politicians have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no mental model for such forms of distribution. Have you forgotten the panic that ensued fifteen years ago, when the music industry was suing middle schoolers?

(The irony is that the very same platforms these industry lobbyists are whining about only became popular because they killed P2P via the courts.)

The physical equivalent is more like you sending pirated dvd's through the mail to your entire neighborhood. The equivalent law would then require the post office to check all packages upon sending to verify that they contain only content which is not pirated, which for privacy reasons they do in an automated way that sometimes blocks the package with the family movie you're sending to your mom (because your daughter was wearing mickey mouse ears and the automated check thought it was a disney movie).

Oftentimes when you physicalize online legislation it becomes apparent just how invasive and silly it is.

Give the government power to take away your rights, that's indeed what it will do.

I guess it’s true that some people in positions of power view themselves as rules over others, but I always thought that most people here in the western world held the view that the government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Is this not the case?

There is plenty of things the government can spend their time on that is actually beneficial to its people, including:

- Regulating industry where necessary to protect employees and the public from harm; physical, economical, psychological, privacy, or otherwise.

- Negotiate with other countries so that mutually beneficial agreements are reached with regards to import and export of goods, as well as immigration, emigration and travel relating to the exchange of labor forces.

- Creating and enforcing laws for how the public is allowed to act so as not to cause harm. Things like laws that prohibiting DUI etc.

- Coming up with ways to protect and help people that get sick or have permanent illnesses or handicaps, to ensure that everyone can have quality of life.

That is what government should be about, not about control for the sake of control itself.

This just isn't true. The rest is garbage in, garbage out.

Many US newspapers now redirect to tronc.com for a standard disclaimer.

For example, the LA Times redirects to http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/latimes.com/, which says this.

Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

The Frederick News Post of Frederick, Maryland does this.

https://www.fredericknewspost.com/

How do I know? I don't. Maybe it does track users. But the website was used as a counter example to "forces every website", and a hypothetical news.ycombinator.eu which doesn't track users or keep any PII on them (conceivable by any reasonable person) is acceptable as a counter argument.

The point stands. GDPR doesn't force anything. It just prevents you from tracking people silently.

And who would read MEPs reasonings about something "uninteresting"?

So, yes, there is plenty of room to improve democratic processes today, especially with the communication tools we have. However, I guess that laws which make things worse for the general public but are in too complex niche areas for people to actually realize the issues, will ever remain a problem. Try ask your non-tech social contacts if they consider it fair, that big internet companies like Google don't have to pay for other peoples' work. And this is the narrative of the supporters.

Just the last sentence is wrong. The EU isn't a mess in terms of IT, it's merely irrelevant on the global consumer market.

As someone who's spent a significant amount of time in each of those cities and all around both the US and Europe, I can firmly state that this is _not_ true.

The cultural differences between European cities is vastly overrated. On the other hand, the differences across the US - particularly differences between urban metropolitan areas and everywhere else - are massively understated.

What about the cultural differences between SF (or Detroit, Seattle, any other big city) with small town America?

Honestly - Have you lived in all of them, like me?

> city is as technologically dysfunctional as their European counterparts.

You mean.... Like Estonia that is 100% covered by LTE, while RI has dead zones? Or the fact that FinTech startup funding is highest in London?

Geez!!! I didn't think that nationalist ignoramuses have spread to HN.

As a small business you can comply with the GDPR fairly easily unless you have no regard for anyone's privacy to begin with. And even if you're not 100% compliant you won't be insta-sued to bankruptcy, you'll only be reported and the relevant data protection agency will check on you. The GDPR encourages data protection agencies to help businesses fix their problems and only use fines as a last resort for gross violations and wilful negligence.

Unless you're storing/processing information that has special protections (e.g. religion, sexual orientation, medical data) the bureaucracy is also fairly tame, especially for small businesses, especially for businesses that aren't at their core based on processing personal information (e.g. not online dating startups).

Compare this with the "upload filter" as it has been interpreted in the media so far: allegedly every website that allows users to upload content would have to implement their own Content ID database and sign deals with publishing companies or license filtering services.

Why the EU specifically? I'd say, most states and groups of states have this attitude nowadays.

How would the EU block them? This is especially important if the Russian or Chinese entity has no locus or presence in Europe.

(for instance, would you be able to get around it using a different DNS, or by using a VPN?)

Web 2.0, [...] refers to World Wide Web websites that emphasize user-generated content [...][1]

So while in the beginning most users were also authors, there was a time between when there were a lot of websites which served content, but didn't let users add theirs. At that time guestbooks were to only place you could add content to someone elses website. To some degree message boards where the start of the Web 2.0.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

I'd argue that 80% of statements made by political actors are about spreading misinformation (or fake news), misinterpreted (misreading latest wikileaks reports) or deliberate lies to drive a point home (immigrants are driving the UK economy down!). For example when the US reps states "we found nuclear guns in Iraq" is it a valid statement or nefarious misinformation. Does prior experience by an actor amount for anything? Who gets to decide?

Wouldn't that also preclude inclusion of the title? How would single word descriptions even be meaningful beyond being used as citation link anchors?

Give the exact quote a Google for a laugh. It really is the most nonsense anyone has ever fit into a single sentence.

Summary: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

- https://gitter.im/solid/chat (Tim Berners-Lee system)

- https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

- https://gitter.im/amark/gun

- https://gitter.im/datproject/discussions

etc.

Guess history truly does repeat itself.

Liberal democracies are generally given more of a benefit of the doubt when it comes to their anti-liberal policies (eg Patriot Act), as it pertains to the seriousness of the threat they represent to the well-being and freedom of the population. That is, it's not anticipated or widely feared that those policies will next lead to vast gulags and the near total elimination of all human rights.

Human Rights Watch just put out a hundred page report on what's going on in Xinjiang. To paraphrase their findings, what's going on in China is the most repressive large-scale effort seen in the country since the cultural revolution days of mass murder and purge.

With China, given they're already an authoritarian dictatorship with few human rights, and they're regressing rapidly from the small gains they had made, there's a built-in legitimate fear of its surveillence programs being directly used for terrifying things. Indeed, it's happening right now.

And the reality for those of us that don't like it is that authoritarianism doesn't appear from nowhere. It appears because of the prevailing attitude of large segments of the population.

This means that criticism towards authority is generally received with skepticism and a very high evidence standard is used to judge the 'correctness' or the 'paranoia/conspiracy' of the claim. This while simultaneously accepting authority claims with little questioning and zero, even negative demand for evidence.

I would agree the down voting is uncalled for given the good nature of the question. But given the previous explanation, I'm not surprised by it.

Edit: spelling

And now we are stuck with upload filters.

Why?

I don't think so. I think MEPs are much closer to members of a state-congress in the US than member of congress. With the equivalent of a member of the US congress being a member of some national parliament.

My criterium here is how fierce the campaign is to get elected. At the very least here in the Netherlands, the campaign for the European Parliament is nearly an afterthought in the news. It ranks far below the campaign for the German parliament, let alone our national parliament.

The directive (Article 13(2b)) requires the service providers to provide an "effective and expeditious" complaint mechanism for unjustified removals with human review, though.

As an example note that this very website heavily prefers the original title for the link text, only changing it when substantial updates are made or the original title is heavily biased.

rightly, they're going after the newspaper.

it's disingenuous to suggest youtube only makes tools for video content distribution whilst omitting the fact that they are the only consumers of those tools.

Do you also consider vandalism a form of freedom of expression?

EU elections have a rather disappointingly low participation, it's no wonder that things get lobbied into existence.

Representative democracy is IMO the most effective form of democracy for large scale hierarchies of authority, at least if you want something democratic. (There is always the option of a benevolent, immortal god-princess but we lack candidates with qualities in the categories benevolent, immortal and god-, not for a lack of belief or trying)

Mark my words: if this were enforced, people and most companies would simply stop linking these sites. What I think will happen instead is that many websites would not want this kind of situation, so we will add a new clause to the robots.txt permitting linking and small snippets, and most websites would enable it rather than lose the link and search traffic. Then we'd be back where we started.

By the way, what happens when an European newspaper is hosted in US? What laws apply?

Maybe search engines could adopt some sort of standard that would allow pages to provide their desired description using meta tags if they don't want an automated summary. I could see a problem with pages using dishonest summaries, but perhaps that could be addressed by penalizing the page rank if the provided summary is too different than the summary that Google would have generated.

Whats happening in real i think is that EU realized it will never be able to chop Google or Facebook in pieces so they make it harder for these companies to exist on local market. At the end of the day free market still rules in Europe - if Facebook disappears their hole will be quickly filled in with 20 other social networks “made in European Union”.

Real regulations about this stuff require real technical expertise, and it's going to be at least a generation before that expertise exists in the political class. The alternative is to let the tech lobby write the regulations, but booooooooo.

> The Commission’s proposal “would hurt anyone who writes, reads or shares the news — including the many European startups working with the news sector to build sustainable business models online,” Google said in a statement.

> Out of interest, can you name another example where the EU was authoritarian (acting in a way that the British government wouldn't have)?

I can't really speak to things the EU would do that the British government wouldn't - as you've already said, the UK government is pretty bad too. But we have more democratic control over the UK government than we do the European, because it's more localised. I've heard many examples of overreaching EU directives through listening to parliamentary debates but my memory sucks, so I'll give you a couple of examples that I can remember without re-researching the topic: the EU national fishing quotas (famous for decimating the British fishing industry), and the EU's "enthusiasm" for collective bargaining at the WTO. Rather than negotiate directly, many of Britain's trade agreements are bundled up into the EU's and then the EU makes special concessions to Britain. We've actually been historically quite good at forcing the EU to give us trade concessions so as far as I am aware it's not been too harmful to our prospects (I welcome a correction from anyone more well-versed in the UK's international trade standing) but it's still an example of EU authoritarian practices.

In July 2006 a legal challenge started. By 2014 the directive was ruled incompatible with the EU charter of fundamental rights. It took a while, but that's due to having to go through your own country's courts first for a referral to the ECJ.

> I would strongly argue that the UK has a longer history of independent judiciary

Yes. I could equally strongly argue that the UK has a longer history of the judiciary delivering very favourable decisions that fly in the face of basic logic and rely on the privilege of the judicial classes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

That’s how it worked in practice.

And while this may work(1) for a theatre-model (where the consumptive act can be funneled into a tightly-controlled venue (which is something I already posted about a few day ago, so I won't repeat that but what is necessary)), how is any mechanically reproduced media to be distributed to individuals? That is to say, DVD and Blu-ray and such media, electronic books for sure, and, possibly, physical ones as well, and any and, essentially all, material delivered to the individual for (relatively) private consumption.

(1)[And even then what of 'media laundering'? It may be illegal for a third party to interfere in a contract by, say, bribing the contract signer to break said contract and distribute an copy of the media in violation of contract, but, say, if one or the other party simply leaves it in the middle of the street and someone unassociated with any of the involved parties picks it up, they could then distribute their own copies of said media at will, legally.]

Under such a system, where does the contract into play? For example, your posts in this conversation, which are conveniently protected by copyright law as it stands now from being appropriated by myself, or any other reader, to use in whatever fashion we please. Should we have begun negotiating these posts before we knew what we were negotiating about?

> The two parties willingly choose a court to fall back on if their contract needs arbitration.

But, again, what does a decision one or more parties are not 'compelled' to follow matter? There are only two alternatives: either everyone agrees that they can't be held to account because they refuse on some kind of intellectual/moral/ethical grounds, in which case, the only consequence to being a bad actor is the likelihood of reduced future business with the offended entity (and even that is not assured, based on the state of the market, localized monopolies, power relations, etc), or it devolves into a shotgun wedding.

> The reason why copyright law has been perverted

From Tsarist Russia to the Act of Anne in Britain, copyright began as state censorship, so arguing for some 'golden age' (other than the vaguest wording in the U. S. constitution) is to ignore history.

If the PDF (https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copyright_Se...) posted elsewhere in this discussion is accurate, Article 13 paragraph 3 was amended:

> When defining best practices, special account shall be taken of fundamental rights, the use of exceptions and limitations as well as ensuring that the burden on SMEs remain appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided.

SMEs = Small and Medium-sized enterprises

To be fair, that hypothetical problem is caused by a broken classifier and not the law. After all, youtube already blocks and removes content like you've described but no one is accusing the classifier of stiffling free speech.

They will use this in any way they can. Just because a few say this is not the intent of the law, I have yet to hear a court ruling that minds the intent of the law and not what the law says. (On a EU level that is)

Unfortunately, the downstream effects will hurt everyone else.

Google got a free license in Germany while Yahoo did not. Even if they ban the free license (which is a whole nother set of even bigger problems) Google can just not list them at all. It's not like they care about Google News all that much.

No, that's not a “means of production”, in the Communist sense, and so ownership of it is not “private property” in the sense that Communist theory opposes such.

> I'm sure that we can agree that media companies do depend on the existence of strong intellectual properly rights to run their business.

That's irrelevant to whether intellectual property qualifies as a means of production in Communist theory, which does not define “means of production ” as “anything a business relies on to run”, but instead as the physical instruments to which human labor is applied in the course of production.

Opposing media companies on this is not something which has anything to do with the Communist opposition to property rights in the means of production.

Make our own content and host it ourselves?

This type of law is only effective due to centralisation of Internet services. If everyone self-hosted and was accountable for their own content there would be no scope for such legislation. All HN would hold would be linked-lists of URLs, no actual comment content.

Imagine a decentralised, federated HN where each comment originated from its owner's site.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag...

Such as what? I hear UKIP demonised a lot, but I genuinely don't know of anything they've done that is bad that wasn't simply political disagreement (wanting to leave the EU) or talking about contentious issues in a clumsy and ham-fisted way (immigration).

Having a tangential thematic connection with a fact doesn't stop an accusation from being baseless.

> If you oppose the right to use private property as a means of production, and consequently oppose a law that enforces your right to profit from your private property, then you're clearly advocating a basic communist dogma.

No, you aren't. Communists do not oppose the right to derive profits from property, they oppose the right to have propietary ownership of the physical instrumentalities of production.

Intellectual property is not a thing which can be a “means of production” in the sense used in “basic communist dogma”, and thus ownership of it is not “private property” in the sense of “basic communist dogma” (in communist theory, “private property ” is exclusionary ownership of the “means of production”, and the “means of production” are physical instruments to which human labor is applied in the production process.)

Even if you pay Google €0.01 per click, you still can get an impression under certain conditions.

I think its all stemming from the same response as a portion of people who voted for Trump, or why the GPDR was enacted. The status quo was being abused by the major players and now they are going to do _something_ to shake up the system. Whether their approach is the right thing to do is up for debate

Definitely an example of mandated censorship, corruption, and maybe some kind of conspiracy. Maybe protecting politicians' and Saudi's interests at everyone else's expense. Even if it kills a bunch of us. If that's how they use the power, they don't deserve to have it.

"4. The SESTA/FOSTA bills are a recent (but again somewhat controversial) example."

Where exactly is that private censorship?

Combining them is another, sharing them is another.

We basically have no concept of personal use in our copyright.

[0] if they were broadcast you can record but only for time-shifting, you can only watch once (alone!) and then are obliged to destroy the copy; you aren't allowed to format shift.

The lack of any remaining semblance of balance in copyright between the rights of the demos and media interests shows how badly distorted our Western democracies have become from representing the rights of people in general above the rights of the rich.

It was representatives (MEPs) today that chose to vote in favour of this directive. They could have voted differently and rejected the proposal outright. Can you elaborate on how this is a "democratic only in name" institution?

Publishers: "You steal our content and are unwilling to pay, so we need a law!"

Google: "You're right, please do the law, because it would harm our competitors!"

But there are many, many lobbyists active in the EU, and some of them have a surprising amount of influence over politicians. There has even been a case where two different parties, independently from each other, introduced the exact same bill, which had been written by a lobbyist.

The Congress shall have Power To... ...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

and

Congress shall make no law... ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;

So it's implied (by the constitution not being tautological) that there's a balance between the right of the people (free speech) and an power of congress (to implement copyright). Note also that that defamation/libel are not protected by the first amendment, but the theshold for proving it is high - information has to be known to be false to the speaker, and inflict an actual injury. For public figures and politicians, the speaker has to have "actual malice". These are not often proven. For example, "sell more newspapers" would not rise to the level of "actual malice".

No it doesn't, it means that if you get dragged to court because you got the email at 1AM and you were asleep, then you're not guilty of anything.

No judge will put up a fine for that.

In this scenario, I'm not sure if society should encourage little mom and pop scrapers to spawn while leaving the people who actually created the content with any way to protect their work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_cash_for_influence_scan...