Relatively short copyrights are good for culture. You need a common understanding to build upon to produce new works. A long time ago, Europe moved to have lifetime-plus copyright terms.
Its not all bad though. For a long time, the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material was expensive. Digital media and the internet mostly solved those issues.
Long copyright terms remain a problem, but there are plenty of opportunities for smaller parties to distribute content.
I admit to not fully understanding the intricacies of the EU system but, on the surface, it does appear to be setup for much lower friction when attempting to pass sweeping legislation like this one.
That protects established injustices as much as it protects established freedoms. Perhaps more, since the fundamental structure incorporates a number of injustices.
Not really. The legislature had to pass a law creating slavery, the executive had to sign it, the courts had to uphold it. Any of them could have said no. The same was true of laws prohibiting women from working, or Jim Crow laws, or laws excluding same sex marriage, etc. To enforce any of these things required broad assent, as designed, and they mostly fell to individual branches having enough. Lincoln unilaterally ended slavery, the courts struck down laws against same sex marriage, etc.
There is only a very thin range of things checks and balances actually prevent. First it has to be something the government has to act to prevent rather than merely cease to prop up, which as injustices go is pretty rare in its own right. Then you need at the same time enough support to prohibit it in a simple majority system but not enough support to prohibit it in a system of checks and balances, which crosses off all the most egregious ones -- there is >80% support for laws requiring schools to accept black students, so checks and balances don't prevent those laws from existing, and they do.
What you're left with is the things with 50%+1 support but not e.g. 67% support. But that's what checks and balances are supposed to do -- prevent you from passing laws against things nearly half the country doesn't support having a law against. If you want that law then you need to convince more people first. Is that really so bad?
Um, no. They didn't have to do that under the system established by the US Constitution. Because slavery predated that system, and was protected by it.
What would have taken positive action under the Constitution was abolishing slavery. But not only were there explicit protections for slavery in the Constitution (the first clause of Article I, Section 9; the next to last clause of Article V), but indirect protection against abolition was also provided by the mechanism the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives (where having slaves gave extra representation), by the allocation of seats in the Senate (equal per State representation gave disproportionate power to the enfranchised citizens of slave states (who chose the government that chose the Senators, prior to direct election of Senators), and the electoral college (which as well enfranchised citizens in any state that disenfranchised any people through indirect election, blended the apportionment systems of the Senate and House, both of which favored slave states.)
> Lincoln unilaterally ended slavery
No, he didn't; slavery was ended (as a matter of law, and aside from penal slavery) by the 13th Amendment, which not only wasn't a unilateral Presidential act, but it wasn't even an act in which the President has a formal role.
And the abolition of slavery didn't abolish all of the structural injustices put in place to protect it.
> What you're left with is the things with 50%+1 support but not e.g. 67% support. But that's what checks and balances are supposed to do -- prevent you from passing laws against things nearly half the country doesn't support having a law against. If
The system the US has allows control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency without majority support of the voting population, especially easily if the geographic distribution of your support favors small states. So not only does it not require supermajority and not prevent laws which have a mere majority support, it actually facilitates laws with minority support as long as it is the structurally favored minority. And it creates a very high bar which requires broad active support by the strucurally favored minority to reverse that arrangements, as it requires a Constitutional Amendment, a process in which the disapprobation of citizens of smaller states is even stronger than their disproportionate power in choosing the political branches of the federal government, and thus setting federal legislation.
Predating the constitution doesn't preclude violating it. Lese majeste laws predate the constitution but have been clearly unconstitutional since at least the Bill of Rights, arguably even before (since enacting them was not an enumerated power of the government). Moreover, it still only takes one branch to knock it out. The courts can refuse to uphold it, the executive can refuse to enforce it, and a sufficient majority in the legislature can repeal it even over a veto.
> No, he didn't
He did, most famously in this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
The executive branch can also do so by not enforcing the law, as was often the case with the Fugitive Slave Act. The governments commonly spent no resources looking for runaway slaves in Northern states.
But what one executive branch administration does the next can undo. What the 13th Amendment did was to make it stick.
> And the abolition of slavery didn't abolish all of the structural injustices put in place to protect it.
Because now you're talking about racism rather than slavery, which isn't a single problem, it's many separate ones. But we've been chipping away at them for more than a century now, making progress, and mostly as a result of individual branches -- Brown v. Board of Education in the courts, the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the ouster of mayors and governors who turned firehouses on protestors in favor of those who now don't, etc.
And the remainder of your objections are not about gridlock or checks and balances but about apportionment of representation. Those are reasonable complaints, but you could still have three branches of government and plenty of gridlock even if the President was elected by popular vote and each Senator's vote was in proportion to the number of constituents represented.
No he didn't; The Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish slavery.
> Because now you're talking about racism rather than slavery,
No, I'm talking about the distorted structures I listed that are features of the design of our political system that were placed in the Constitution to protect slavery. The ones that directly dealt with slavery were removed; the ones which were put in to tilt the balance of political power to resistance abolition were not, even after abolition, which is why our federal political system is still heavily tilted toward voters in less populated slates and still heavily rewards the remaining voters in states which effectively disenfranchise other citizens (though, to be fair, the last part was in theory directly addressed by provisions in the 14th Amendment directly calling for loss of representation for doing that, which would counteract that effect, but those provisions have never been enforced even against the most blatant systematic disenfranchisement, leaving the old imbalance fully in effect.)
Racism is a different problem (though one that frequently is involved in leveraging those systematic imbalances.)
Such as?
Freedom of speech in Europe is not just an EU question, but also - and mainly - up to constitutions and legislation of the member states. So of course it varies. But there is less surveillance in Europe on what citizens say online, European media is less centralized than American, there are more parties with opposing views in parliaments, much less political correctness in both politics, business life, and social life. Most importantly, European courts is most member states uphold the protection of the individuals' freedom of speech.
This is legislation aimed at Google and Facebook, and other large companies, yes. Go back 15-20 years, and nobody would have thought that Google would get away with using the creations of content providers without paying a fair share. I don't see anything wrong in Google or Facebook being forced to apply filters. We have gotten used to what is truly an disgusting situation where creators of music, journalism etc. don't get paid and their works are put out on Youtube, Facebook etc. I would have liked to see a higher threshold so that only truly large companies had to worry about filters, but again; these filters will likely be easy to find in 10 different versions for free on GitHub in a couple of years, and better ones you can license for a small fee.
But I agree, Europe should finally start to tax Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.
It is absolutely not. That's a preposterous assumption. If it was the case then no European state could send people to prison or fine them for having an opinion, yet look at France, where insulting the president is a crime and denying "official" history has landed people in jail (I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle).
There is absolutely no equivalent to the US first amendment anywhere else on the planet.
I know the U.S. is big on their "freedom of speech" since it's one of the few things all citizens agree on, an All American Shibboleth, so to speak, but National Security trumps everything.
There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places. That's about treason, you might say, but with enough restrictions any speech can be classified as treason.
Speech in the U.S. only seems to be free when it doesn't matter. If it matters there are a lot of restrictions and there can be dire consequences.
> There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
Do you mean there are things that non-citizens can say at the border of entry to the US that might prohibit entry into the US? That does not seem like a limitation of free speech within the US to US citizens to me.
> There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
What a convenient, non-falsifiable "rebuttal" that takes no position on the matter.
> Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places.
I'm a defender of Edward Snowden and think it's sad that he has to live in Russia to avoid prosecution. And yet, this doesn't seem like an argument about "free speech" made in good faith, particularly the relative merits of free speech. Which country permits their citizens to disclose highly classified information with not repercussions, however unjust those repercussions may ultimately be?
Yeah, its free speech, as long as it doesn't fall under some bullshit definition of "classified" (how convenient that the classified information also includes unilateral infringement of another country's rights, e.g. the downright creepy snooping on the phones of world leaders who are supposed allies). And of course, you should also understand that you _might_ die saying certain things, but hey, otherwise its free speech. And finally, as long as you understand the "relative" merits of the case (i.e. one rule for me, another for you), we can all agree that free speech is what is being practiced in the USA.
Which is not really the same thing as being fined or imprisoned.
> There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret.
And there's a fair argument that doing so is unconstitutional and will be found as such once the ongoing challenges to it have concluded.
The law doesn't protect you from criminals, even when they work for the government. At best it punishes them after the fact and allows you to recover damages. And some people never get justice, but that only means they were the victims of a crime that the perpetrator got away with, not that they weren't entitled to it under the law.
> Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places.
What Snowden would be charged with is the government equivalent of violating an NDA. The main reason that law is messed up is that with a normal NDA (i.e. a contract), contracts covering criminal activity are generally unenforceable, but the security clearance system doesn't work like that -- which is problematic when it's then used to cover up criminal activity.
But the reason he can be charged is that he agreed to those terms to begin with. It's a matter of contracts being [too] enforceable, not a matter of punishment for speech. Notice that the newspapers that published the Snowden documents weren't convicted of a crime, because they never agreed not to.
> There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home.
That's a really bad example. If you get send home you are not an US citizen and you might not have the rights US citizens enjoy, which is what they are talking about when freedom of speech is referenced.
> Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places
Snowden leaked secrets. The USA is very bad in protecting that, right. But it's not a simple question of freedom of speech, it has a a lot more with how authoritarian the government is. It's not surprising that a war mongering USA that tries to achieve complete surveillance, tortures prisoners and and kidnaps citizens of other and allied countries to put them without trial for forever into the hellhole that is Guantanamo might have a limit on what dissident actions it accepts. But that does not mean that the protection of freedom of speech in a general area is stronger than elsewhere.
That's blatantly incorrect. Name a bunch of examples of that please. It's the very rare exception that you can't publish something in the US.
You mention Snowden: he was able to publish the documents in the US. Numerous US media outlets published documents from the Snowden cache. It got non-stop coverage for most of that year in the US as the reveals rolled on. That the media can publish such doesn't mean the action of stealing classified documents from the government should be legal, that would be absurd.
The US Government is almost entirely powerless to prevent very embarrassing things from coming out, such as Abu Ghraib as one dramatic example. If they could do what you're claiming they can, they would have shut all of that down immediately and it would have never been published across basically all media in the US for a year.
Nixon, watergate and the pentagon papers is another obvious example where the substantial US protections for the press won out.
COINTELPRO and the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI is another example. The US media was able to publish the stolen documents.
We're got a President that is at 'war' with the press on a daily basis. They hate him, he hates them. He's almost entirely powerless to do anything about them. It's clear that Trump would heavily restrict the media if he could, what greater proof could one possibly need of just how potent the protections for speech / press / expression are? Trump's administration has been leaking like crazy since day one, and the media has been publishing those leaks at will. The government can't do anything about it. They have no power to stop the Washington Post or NY Times from publishing such leaks.
The US is the only country on earth that can support a Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress or Hacker News, precisely because we're free to say all sorts of disagreeable or hateful things on most of those platforms. And if not, I can always build my own new site or platform. Even the most liberal speech supporting nations in Europe don't allow what the US does when it comes to speech areas that involve things such as religion, government and politics.
I can insult the police in the US on HN, and I won't be arrested for it. That isn't true in the UK as one example. They put people in jail for insulting the police on social media there.
I can insult the US President in any number of various ways across countless US platforms. Snoop Dogg killed him in a music video; they made his wife a stripper in another music video. You can mock-up his chopped off head and put it on the cover of a magazine, you won't go to jail for that. There are very few countries that afford you such expression luxury, even when it's detestable expression (the most important kind to protect).
Online in the US I can disagree with Islam, Christianity, Judaism, their followers, their practices, and so on, at will, in almost any manner I see fit. There are few countries where that remains true other than the US. Most of Europe now categories such as hate speech, or otherwise restricted speech, and will arrest you for it.
The reason the US dominates online platforms, is precisely because the US is the sole country where they can thrive when it comes to aggressively enshrined freedom of speech & expression. You can't build a Reddit in Europe and will never be able to. With the draconian copyright laws the EU is passing, it's only going to get that much worse.
That was a while ago, but it just goes to show that the US 1st amendment leads to equally preposterous scenarios.
> I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle
But being respectful to people at funerals is also a principle. By which I mean "it's about principle" is not at all a clear signal on whether something should be allowed even when not condoned.
Personally, over the years I've taken an interest in this, I've seen the US's extreme stance on freedom of speech hurt more often than I've seen the EU's more relaxed stance on freedom of speech hurt. But even then I suppose you could argue the principle of the thing, that the one time our "loose" freedom of speech does hurt in the EU, it's going to hurt disproportionally more. Except I'd argue against that, it's a risk that is always there and it's not strictly controlled by strict freedom of speech, that's just one symptom of things going south.
I don't understand why so many people think this isn't protected. The courts ruled it was.
Like, literally nothing.
There won't be "10 different versions" of these filters on Github for free. How do you even imagine that will work? There will need to be a constantly updated and massive database of signatures for all copyrighted materials. That's not something that can be done for free and you can guarantee it will have a significant price tag attached
Free speech in the EU is not as protected as in the US. Full stop.
There is no surveillance of what citizens say online in the US. People in the EU are arrested for mean tweets.
There are many uses of copyrighted material that are covered under free use in the US. You can, for instance, critique a movie while using segments of that movie.
Journalists aren't not getting paid because Google has a small blurb underneath a link to their article. Google is driving traffic to their articles.
Europe should tax Amazon? Huh?
We've had copyright protections for some time, they're now being enforced.
I don't agree with it, but neither this is not about free speech or 'media spin' on the story.
Short of making a call to violence, I will never hear from an authority about anything I say or post online. The same can't be said for much of Europe. In fact, didn't the EU courts just rule that criticism of Mohamed should be banned?
No.
https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/10/26/q-have-e...
It's legal to call Hitler a murderer in Austria, but not to call Mohammed child molester.
This should be terrifying to anybody who supports free speech. The ECHR is supposed to be a human rights court but they are allowing member states to convict people for blasphemy.
I'd say the case was good to highlight the absurdity of it. And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.
|And sometimes speaking your mind has a cost.
Wait, you think this was acceptable? The fine for speaking is outrageous, and it will only get worse if it turns out it's not enough of a deterrent.
> Let's not conflate fundamental rights with programming languages
If you r_smart you should have noticed the jest in this statement
It's my name. I make no claims about my intellect :)
It didn't read like a joke to me, and rereading it as a joke, it seems like, at best, a quip. I stand by my previous sanctimonious tone.
edit: Oh, and lastly, a small curtailment on free speech is the first step to a large one. Why wait until it's illegal to complain?
As an American, this example tells me very differently. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
This is a really strong statement, and one that seems incredibly difficult to defend.
It is a good point that free speech is a matter not only of what is legally permitted but what is possible to carry out; online privacy and varied, independent media are major factors in speech actually being heard. Both regulatory and economic factors have done real harm to the US media landscape, although the claim that online speech is less surveilled in Europe is depends on exactly what one checks - and is largely a matter of US companies rejecting foreign subpoenas, not a lack of effort on Europe's part.
Beyond that, though... a strong context for speech isn't enough either, if speech isn't actually legal. Europe falls far behind the US on legal speech protections of all kinds. In the general case, libel and defamation rules are extremely narrow in the US, and far broader in most of Europe. In terms of specific speech, I pretty often see people suggest that EU countries haven't banned anything except hate speech, and more specifically that Germany banned Nazi iconography without restricting speech in general. Let's ignore those cases, and ignore the usual debates around when criticism of religion crosses into hate speech.
Even so, the First Amendment is genuinely unique:
- France can assess high fines and years in prison for the "positive presentation of drugs", and regularly uses this law against drug reform advocates, including politicians. Meanwhile, the US refused to implement Article 3 of the UN Narcotic Drugs Convention (banning promotion of drugs) on Constitutional grounds.
- At least four countries (and until recently Germany) have general lese majeste laws protecting all heads of state from insult, which is about the clearest restriction of legitimate and valuable speech I can think of. Several other countries ban insult to their own heads of state. The Netherlands in particular actually enforce their law regularly, in excess of the protections accorded to any non-royalty. Meanwhile, heads of state are not only not specially protected in the US, but receive less libel protection than nonpublic figures.
- Poland past a law against making factually-accurate statements about the history of the Holocaust in Poland, and only after international outcry did they remove criminal penalties for those statements. Enough said.
- Germany convicts more than 20,000 people per year under its ban on 'insult' alone. §86a, its widely praised law against Nazi iconography, also bans not just Communist iconography but Kurdish military symbols. It was repeatedly used against anti-Nazi content containing broken or crossed-out symbols, a practice that ended only in 2007, after a lawmaker reported herself to the police for the offense as a protest.
- German internet law is uniquely restrictive. It includes a list of several thousand banned websites, judged by an unelected agency to be harmful to minors, many of them mislabeled or improperly banned. The errors have gone unchallenged because there's no appeal process, and in fact the list itself is aggressively censored. Discounting national security letters, I believe that's the only standardized secret law censorship in any developed country. The 2017 ban on fake news, 'NetzDG', has been condemned as unconstitutional and unethical by virtually every academic or free speech organization to address the topic, with the UN singling it out as "endangering human rights".
This is not a happy list, and those are only brief highlights. Privacy and free media are valuable for making speech visible, but so is permitting free speech. Intrinsic rights to speech aside, that list includes an awful lot of moral, pro-social things which can't be said.
Yeah, no. This (blasphemy laws) would be unthinkable in the US:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
The EU is a legal entity. Europe is the continent/area. The EU does not protect freedom of speech more than the U.S.
Also, the EHCR is an organization of the Council of Europe which is entirely unrelated to the EU. This is a weaker association of states including Turkey and Russia.
So the EU could have a directive that guarantees freedom of speech across the board? Seems like your just arguing semantics.
Also, the EU cannot regulate everything. I think that a directive about free speech is not possible. However, there is the Charta of Human Rights that is signed by all member states of the EU that guarantees freedom of speech. Again, this construct has the wrinkle that this charter demands the individual states to uphold these rights. It institutes the European Court of Justice as the highest court in matters concerning this charta.
I mean, there is a difference between criticizing an idea - or a person - and being purposefully insulting about it. Surely there is a way to draw a line in between that preserves free and civilized discourse.
I fully agree. I think we should start jailing all the people who called Trump an idiot or a racist. That's no way to talk about the President!
I must be able to say whatever I want, and you must be able to ignore me or openly disagree.
No sane government will prevent you from generally moving around. But try to run around the town naked, and see how long it'll take before you get in trouble. Being naked is a form of expression too - one that's almost universally frowned upon when not confined to private spaces in presence of adults only.
(Also, no reasonable government is tone-policing discourse in general. Some governments choose to demand respectful behavior towards the institution of government, including in particular towards officials while holding office. That's a far cry from being oppressive or constraining the marketplace of ideas.)
Are you in favour of direct democracy on every single vote of every single law at every single level of government?
Then you mitigate populism creating ill-conceived laws, because the legislature has to introduce and pass them first, but then the legislature can't as easily pass corrupt laws because they can be challenged and shot down by the people.
It would also be pretty great if you could challenge existing laws in this way, e.g. for any that hasn't been challenged this way in five years and you get the signatures again, it can be used for repeal.
I have yet to see even one example of that, given how many opt-outs the UK was granted and how much the UK actively encouraged the expansion of the EU.
Heck, the mere existence of Article 50 as an option puts it ahead of the behaviour of the federal government of the USA in the American Civil War.
It’s not the fault of Brussels or Berlin that the single largest party in Westminster:
* Invoked article 50, a 2-year process, a few months after it’s own Permanent Representative to the EU wrote that it would take ten years
* Followed this with a surprise general election, which unnecessarily lost them seats
* Set a bunch of “red lines” which were incompatible with their own goals
* Made no attempt to win over any skeptics in their own party, or in their opposition, after losing seats
* Spent 18 months trying to negotiate a withdrawal agreement, where the “Irish backstop” was their own solution to the RoI/NI border, because of their own red lines and the red lines of their supply and confidence partner, the DUP, who they only needed the support of because of losing seats in an election they didn’t need to call
* Chosen as Foreign Secretary a man who later said “fuck business” because they didn’t like his plan
* Were then surprised by the Westminster MPs, who had fairly consistently been ignored and lied to by the UK government, voting down the agreement by the largest margin on record
* Was unable to agree with itself if it did or didn’t need to plan for no deal because the conversations typically went “they need us more than we need them” “no” “that’s just project fear”
* Only seriously considered “no deal” in December 2018, describing it as “unforeseeable” despite having been warned of it for about two years continuously; and as a result contracted a ferry company with no money and no ferries who copied their terms and conditions from a fast food delivery company, to run services between a mothballed UK port that needed dredging and an already-at-capacity EU port
* Just had 3 (plus 8 opposition, total 11) MPs resign, including one Tory from a Tory safe seat, whose goal is now the destruction of the Tory party
What the EU has done is, apparently, start planning to send food parcels to the UK. The Express newspaper apparently calls that plan “blackmail”. I don’t even understand how anyone can say that without breaking into laughter.
The Irish backstop was the EU's solution, not the UK's. The talking point you're probably thinking of is that the UK-wide backstop was the UK's doing, which is technically true because the EU wanted the backstop to apply only to Northern Ireland - the UK negotiators objected because this would make a huge mess of the Good Friday Agreement (not to mention pissing off the DUP). I can't say I blame you for getting this wrong, since the whole point of this talking point was to leave people with the false impression that the backstop was the UK's doing.
“None” was ruled out by making it a red line to leave the customs union and single market even though that was originally something quite of leave campaigners thought was a silly idea. And it was ruled in by the WA backstop if the UK couldn’t figure out how to leave the Single Market without violating the Good Friday Agreement.
NI/RoI seems to violate the Good Friday Agreement. People argue about if it really does, but ultimately what matters is if the situation no longer satisfies the parties involved, and Sinn Fein says it doesn’t.
Irish Sea enrages the DUP because they want to be identical to the UK mainland (except for abortion laws and gay marriage etc).
It’s a mess.
One “solution” I’ve seen leavers suggest is for RoI to re-join the UK. The is generally met with derision by RoI commentators.
The fact that they're trying to package it as some sort of well-deserved revenge against silicon valley big tech is just tasteless. The EU's big gripe against these companies is their tax situation, if they really wanted to change that then they'd be looking into a unified approach to taxing companies within the EU borders, not hitting the final nail into the coffin of fair use in Europe.
I really envy the US for its constitution sometimes.