EU Strikes Down French "3 Strikes" Copyright Infringement Law 271
Erris writes "Opendotdotdot has good news about laws in the EU: 'EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading ... [and instead pushed] for "a fair balance between the various fundamental rights" while fighting online piracy, first listing "the right to personal data protection," then "the freedom of information" and only lastly "the protection of intellectual property." [This] indicates that the culture ministers and their advisers are beginning to understand the dynamics of the Net, that throttling its use through crude instruments like the "three strikes and you're out" is exactly the wrong thing to do.'"
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the weight of "evidence" required is normally zero.
*drafts 3 fake copyright complaints to stonecyphers ISP*
Go back a decade or 2 and a crafted packet "ping of death" could knock someone using windows 95 off the net for a few minutes, now 3 specially crafted packets encapsulated inside envelopes can knock someone off the net for weeks or months no matter their ISP.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The complete lack of due process probably had something to do with it.
Depending on how technically inclined they are, the realization that things would swiftly move to encryption only (if only because nobody not using encryption would be left online), and that even with due process the courts would be relying on the assumption that all P2P is piracy may have played a part as well.
Not completly good news (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not completly good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? In this case, at least, the EU has shown its worth. I think the EU can be the voice of reason, much like the British house of Lords. It may introduce bureaucracy, but I will take that for protection of my human rights, privacy and a more open Europe.
The Free Culture Principle (Score:5, Insightful)
* Seek culture, but not at the expense of liberty
* Seek liberty, but not at the expense of truth
* Seek truth, but not at the expense of privacy
* Seek privacy, but not at the expense of life
* Seek life, and enjoy free culture.
Re:Not completly good news (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, there is no need to be a member of the EU. That's what was democratically decided in those countries.
This is also the reason why Switzerland isn't a member of the EU - it was declined in votes (by the people). One of the big advantages of the half-direct democracy we have here.
Danger to freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Any business model that depends on preventing what people can do easily in the privacy of their own home is (1) impossible to maintain and (2) detrimental to freedom as it requires an oppressive legal infrastructure and a brutal enforcement mentality.
Oh "good news" (Score:2, Insightful)
Now we can throw them in prison instead of just cutting off their Internet. I don't get it; how is forcing stronger measures good news?
Re:Not completly good news (Score:1, Insightful)
On the other hand, a multi country has superseded the laws of a single, albeit member, country. I am no fan of these type of organizations.
Are you a fan of the USA, on the federal level? One could say the same thing about the individual states and the federal government.
Or, for that matter, one could say the same thing about the counties and the states. Or the municipialities and the counties. Or the neighbourhoods and the municipialities. Or the individual homeowners and the neighborhoods.
Seriously, what IS the difference?
What the EU needs is more democracy - or, rather, some democracy at all. But that's a matter of implementation, and the basic idea is not just sound, it's in fact no different from ANY kind of government on any other level, either.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like all civilised countries, Australia does not have the death penalty.
To me it is the touchstone of civilization that the state does not kill its citizens.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say we have a vastly more effective police force: That could account for it.
Say we have stricter (draconian?) drug laws: That could account for it.
Say we have slower due-process and the majority are merely pass-throughs: That could account for it.
I could name any one of hundreds of reasons why the U.S. prison population is so high. Yet, without demonstrating the % of those attributed to any one factor, I'm not going to jump around calling 3-strikes laws crude on the basis of that.
Re:All countries take heed: Shows power of EU (Score:3, Insightful)
Countries can't make laws contradicting treaties they've signed up to, or laws they've helped bring into being across the whole EU.
What exactly is the problem with this? It's the EU doing what it was supposed to do.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect the ACTA process to include the 3-strikes again, both for the US and the EU. Trade policy is completely different and shielded against democratic influence.
Re:Not completly good news (Score:5, Insightful)
The EU is roughly the size of the USA in population and area.
Perhaps it is not so different to think of the EU as a large country with a number of member states?
The EU doesn't have jurisdiction over every elements of members' law, but safekeeping democracy and liberties in all of its member states is part of its charter.
This is good, no? Recently, even in highly technical areas like patents and telecommunications, European representatives have erred on the side of preserving liberties. This is amazing, not?
Re:Not completly good news (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't be so sure. France relies so heavily on farming subsidies from the EU they'd be a far weaker nation than they are now otherwise.
France is in a situation like Britain was in the 70s and 80s, back then Britain had a massive mining industry but it simply wasn't profitable, it was held up by subsidies and it was holding the country back. Thatcher realised this and whilst it was immensly unpopular, she let the mines close. It resulted in large amounts of job losses but the country was better for it. France is in the same position but has no politicians with the balls to commit political suicide for the good of the country and accept that their farming industry simply doesn't make sense anymore.
Of course, yes this means France could do without the EU if it had any politicians with the balls to do whats right for the country but it doesn't and even when it does it'll take a decade to fix up the damage done by these subsidies and start moving these farmers into jobs that actually benefit the country.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow... just... WOW.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the facts are that the death penalty does not work as a a deterrant as you claim.
Take for example terrorists, they would rather die and go to heaven than live in a jail.
I cant be bothered looking up the figures, but there have been many cases where DNA has taken someone out of death row. How many innocent people should be allowed to die so you can feel good about the death penalty being applied?
Executing even ONE innocent is intolerable.
In a deeply flawed justice system it is unfogiveable.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:5, Insightful)
Basicly you have no clue how death penalty works out in reality.
The Soviet Union in the late '70ies introduced the death penalty for rape. What was the result? The number of rapes did not go down. But the number of rapes where the victim got murdered afterwards shot up.
People defending the death penalty often seem to be under the impression that crime in the most cases is carried out because of lenghty thoughts and careful weighing of the pros and cons. It is not. And that makes the whole "deterrence" idea void.
The death penalty does not deterr crime. Period.
Re:Huh? Heu???? some precisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I guess my karma will suffer from the opinion above but please, could someone explain we what would be a balanced approach that would enforce right of creators and freedoms of Internet users?
I think you've managed to ignore a far more important point. Why should government enforce the rights of creators? If they don't like what people are doing with their creations, then sue them. Oh, people are doing it by the millions and there's no practical way to sue them all? Tough ... time for societies and content creators to adjust to a new reality, and not try to force the old one upon the vast majority of the world's citizens: people that don't want it.
Re:Huh? Heu???? some precisions (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between this and road regulations, is that breaking the road rules can result in people being killed or seriously injured, as well as significant costs to individuals.
Copyright infringement on the other hand, typically only harms large corporations, and the actual level of harm it does is often massively overstated (most people would never have bought all the media they copied, simply due to cost if nothing else).
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Repeat offender laws are remarkably effective in normal crime control; what makes this different?
What makes it different? The court. The independent court that has to prove that you've committed the crime. The proposed French law would be about possibility to punish anyone without any court involved, without any proof.
Re:Huh? Heu???? some precisions (Score:5, Insightful)
> Secondly, the ability to sue file transfer software editor is just ridiculous. It violates the principle that software is neutral and that it is individuals that perform the acts.
With some regret I must point out that in the EU, this is not without precedent. Germany has banned 'hacking tools':
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259 [slashdot.org]
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/13/0218246 [slashdot.org]
It would appear not everyone agrees about the 'software is neutral' thing.
Re:Huh? Heu???? some precisions (Score:4, Insightful)
Your ideas about about ten years ahead of where most people are and they will sound extremist to them. Many politicians still see copyright as property and therefore infringement as theft. Copyright as a government granted monopoly to create scarcity is far too complex for them. They see redressing copyright in favour of fair use as being government intervention in a free market of creativity rather than appropriate regulation of a resource to encourage economy and free speech. They still see it as balancing the majority rule with minority rights, and that copyright infringement is minority rights infringement as the mob seek to steal and in response civil rights must be suspended.
Instead it's much better to talk about fairness and the right to trial, and due process being removed by 3 strikes than anything you're talking about. Your ideas are too extreme and are not persuasive right now.
The best communication builds upon existing ideas and directs them in compelling ways. Communication is about having a sensitivity for your audience and where they're coming from. Understanding the law makers and the public is the difficult part and going too far at once will scare them off.
Be smarter.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's worse than that, most information these days is transferred over the internet.
It would be the same as prohibiting someone who made a bomb threat from ever possessing a phone or a pen again. Freedom of expression is not something that should be so trivially and easily revoked.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the problem lies somewhat deeper.
For a deterrence to work, you have to be able to imagine the penalty to you. It's no problem to imagine paying a penalty of $1000 (and also to imagine the stuff you can't buy instead). It's also no problem to imagine being locked in a prison for a certain amount of time and not being able to walk where you want or get up when you want and choose the clothing you want etc.pp.
But it is psychologically impossible to imagine being killed. Because then you would have to imagine not being able to imagine anymore. So the death penalty is just a big abstractum to you. It has no touchable meaning for you. As long as you can remember, you were always there, and as long as you will be able to remember, you will be there. From your experience, you seem to have eternal life.
If you actually fear the afterlife, if you really fear being in Hell or Eternal Damnation or whatever your religion defines as the Big Bad Thing that gets the evildoers, death penalty might actually work work as a deterrence. But that requires you to be deeply religious and devout. And then it can work also in reverse: You just have to imagine that your planned deed is somehow holy and just. And then instead of a deterrence, sure death might even look positive.
That's for instance why the Taliban can muster so many suicide bombers. Probably not many of them are ready to go to prison for life. But confronting them with the big abstractum works, because you can fill the nothingness that is death with anything you want, also with 72 virgins. Instead of a deterrence the death is actually attractive to them.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:1, Insightful)
p>People defending the death penalty often seem to be under the impression that crime in the most cases is carried out because of lenghty thoughts and careful weighing of the pros and cons.
Also, in the unlikely event that a crime is thought out, the thought process is similar to: "I'm smarter than the cops, so they are never going to catch me"
Once that has been established in the criminal's mind, what is the relevance of any threat of penalty? "They can't do anything to me 'cause they won't catch me".
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never been able to work out any useful function of patriotism.
It allows the army to recruit more easily.
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
I think he was referring to the 3-strikes-and-your-out drug laws, so it's a perfect analogy.
You've shown a great number of U.S. citizens are in jail, that's it. Unless you're going to bring concrete numbers regarding the % of people in U.S. prisons who are, in fact, there because of 3-strikes laws, you might as well vomit random numbers--what you're saying is meaningless in the context of this conversation.
Say we have a vastly more effective police force: That could account for it.
Say we have stricter (draconian?) drug laws: That could account for it.
Say we have slower due-process and the majority are merely pass-throughs: That could account for it.
I could name any one of hundreds of reasons why the U.S. prison population is so high. Yet, without demonstrating the % of those attributed to any one factor, I'm not going to jump around calling 3-strikes laws crude on the basis of that.
Better to be accurate than alarmist (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of half-truths here...
"Many years ago? Steamboat Willie is still under copyright! The man has been dead for half a century, yet his first work, written when cars needed to be started by hand and antibiotics were even a dream in a doctor's eye, is STILL under copyright! Is there ANYONE here that can stand up and with a straight face say that is fair?"
I'll take that action. Here in Canada it's life plus 50 years - that's long enough for the children and grandchildren - in short, the family members who knew the creator in life - to enjoy the legacy. Then it is turned over to the public domain. And it is fair for your children and grandchildren to enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In the United States, it's life plus 70 years, if I remember correctly (it could be life plus 75). That was put into place to account for the increased lifespan...well, not quite true. It was put in place in Europe to account for the increased lifespan. It was put in place in the United States because European legislation stated that length of copyright would be determined by country of origin, and that meant that any American intellectual property would go out of copyright sooner, and make it harder for Europeans to invest into American IP (such as a movie, etc.).
"But thanks to the outright bribery of politicians all over the globe it has long since quit being a contract and has become instead a way for evil multinational corporations to print money for all eternity."
You've fallen into a common trap here - you're mistaking abuse of a law for the law itself. They are not the same thing. You're also misunderstanding the importance of copyright. So, I'll explain it here.
Copyright is a set of laws that provide a legal framework that allow creative artists to negotiate with those who would distribute their work, providing protection to both sides to prevent one from screwing over the other before a contract is signed. However, if a creative artist signs all of their rights away, they lose that protection. Hence the ability for abuse by the RIAA, etc. It's a horrifying situation, I agree, but it is not endemic to copyright. It is far more endemic to sociopathic corporations, and copyright is only one of many laws that get abused.
"When copyrights exist for longer than most humans lifetimes they cease to be anything more than a complete stranglehold over our entire culture."
Very wrong, particularly when looking at the Internet, of all places. We are drowning in content. And once something is under copyright, such as a book, or play, painting, song, etc., it is always in the best interests of the copyright holder to keep that work available as long as possible. A book that is out of print cannot generate any revenue.
What determines the availability of a book, song, film, etc., is nothing more than simple economics. It costs money to produce and publish a book (I know - I own a small publishing company). So long as the sales of the book will make money, the book will stay in print. Once the book stops making money, it comes out of print. In fact, if you go to your local bookstore and look at all of those new books, most of them will have an in-print lifespan of less than ten years.
In fact, the technology that has done more than anything else to maintain culture in the literary world and keep books available is print-on-demand technology, which means that a book can be kept available for sale without requiring warehouse space. That revolutionized the book industry. And it had very little to do with either copyright or the Internet.
To misquote Serenity, when it comes to the alarmist views of the copyright debate, nothing is as it seems. Copyright is not the grand arena, the pirates are not scrappy heroes against terrible odds, and our culture, far from being under a stranglehold, is bursting at the seams. We are drowning in content, and never has it been so easy to create. The copyright abolitionists and reformers keep referring to some mythical golden
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better to be accurate than alarmist (Score:2, Insightful)
"So if a person lives to be 90, which is quite doable with today's tech, we are talking 90+50 for Canada, or 90+70 for the US. And a century and a half+ is actually fair to you? I'm sorry, but are you high? And as for the "children and grandchildren" I have a concept for them: It is called WORK! I know,it is amazing, what a concept! Give me a break!"
Boy, this is so close to a Morbo moment...oh, screw it. Morbo?
"THE ECONOMICS OF CREATIVE ARTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!"
Thank you Morbo.
Let me lay on a few facts here:
1. Very few creative artists EVER get to give up their day job. In fact, most creative artists live pretty far below the poverty line. Stephen King is the very rare exception. Their children and grandchildren don't get to live in luxury because they were creative artists - they get a bare trickle of money, if they're lucky.
2. The lifespan of a work of creative art is frequently under ten years. Most creative artists don't get to profit from their work for their entire lifetimes - they get to see it fade into obscurity.
3. This may come as a shock to you, but most of the creative artists out there are NOT in the film and music industries. In fact, there are also photographers, painters, sculptors, and writers. And guess what - they do get to keep most of their work. For that matter, what do you think happens to the copyrights of all the original work that goes onto Youtube, Daily Motion, etc., from gifted amateurs?
"And in case you didn't know we already have a way to pass that legacy on to your children and grandchildren: It is called inheritance!"
Yep - and copyright allows creative artists to pass their own work and legacy on to their heirs. Now, you might think that is terribly unfair, but as somebody who actually has stuff he wants to pass on when the time comes, my opinion on this is that you can go and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
"And if the public refuses to play your little copyright game then it kind of becomes moot, doesn't it?"
And if you'd been paying attention to one of the most important parts of my post, you'd have noticed that the most important parts of copyright have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the public. It has to do with contract negotiations. In fact, most of the action of copyright takes place before the work is ever seen by any member of the public.
You talk about the abuse of the law, but you're talking about abuse of the smallest part of copyright law. The minute an author comes to me with a book proposal, copyright law kicks in. It keeps the negotiations on even ground, it ensures that I don't screw over the author by taking his work and just publishing it with somebody else's name on it, and it keeps them from screwing me over by handing first publication rights to somebody after they've just signed a contract giving them to me.
For that matter, ALL of the interaction between the author and the publisher is governed by copyright law, from the editing to the marketing of the book. The public sees the end product - they don't see all the steps that got the book there. Copyright was the framework for every single one of those steps.
So, whether the public decides to "play my little copyright game" or not is completely irrelevant for almost the entire process. The public simply isn't involved.
And oh yes...one last point:
"A good 90+% of the artists don't have the rights to their works, because the cartels make you sign those away if you want access to their media outlet monopoly."
Have you been paying attention to the news lately? Those media cartels in the recording industry are scrambling because they're in the process of losing their monopolies. Whether an artist signs his/her rights away to his/her work is a choice, and always has been. It's just taken this long for musicians to start seeing past the record label snow job.
Re:Not completly good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually most of the European directives go in the direction of ensuring free trade, freedom and democracy. Just look at them. All these directives need to go before the European parliament which is democratically elected. The European council is indeed made of national ministers which are not necessarily elected, however they represent the majority in their country of origin.
The proposed constitution would have given more weight to the parliament and less to the council, which is probably good. This is not the reason it was rejected.
Your post illustrates the fact that in Europe member states like to blame Europe for all the ills of their economy. One day it's the Euro being too expensive, another the rules about government spending, some other time it's a rule that say a member cannot locally optimise its fishing laws to the detriment of another neighboring state. You name it. If you repeat something enough time it become "true", so people are starting to blame Europe for everything.
In fact recently the president of Europe, currently Nicolas Sarkozy, complained loudly that Europe was preventing him from doing "politics".
However in crisis times everyone thinks the Euro and its stability is grand and the necessity to harmonize financial policies is a definite bonus. Without the European framework it would be a free-for-all, fuck-your-neighbour disaster.
Re:How do you get membership? (Score:3, Insightful)
But it is psychologically impossible to imagine being killed. Because then you would have to imagine not being able to imagine anymore.
This is nonsense. If people didn't fear death they'd be dying all the time. If breaking the speed limit was punishable by death, there would be a lot less speeders on the road.
If you actually fear the afterlife, if you really fear being in Hell or Eternal Damnation or whatever your religion defines as the Big Bad Thing that gets the evildoers, death penalty might actually work work as a deterrence.
The primary role religion plays for most people is to get over the fear of death by promising an afterlife.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The true irony is that Steamboat Willie was a parody of Steamboat Bill Jr., which was released a few months earlier. In fact most Disney films are based on copying existing stories, from Peter Pan to Jungle Book, from Robin Hood to Snow White. Disney owes its existence to fair use laws.