Guy In Charge Of EU Copyright Directive Claims He Didn't Know What He Voted On, Needs To Fix Things
from the well,-that-builds-confidence dept
Following the decision earlier this week of the EU Parliament to vote for the destruction of the open web by putting in place some pretty awful copyright proposals, people began highlighting more and more problems with the bill. Most of the focus before the vote had been on two particular articles, Article 11 and Article 13. But there are many other problems in the Directive as well -- it was just getting to be overwhelming to get into the weeds on all of them. One area of concern was in Article 12, which included a special new form of copyright for sporting events. Specifically, with no debate or discussion the legal affairs committee of the EU Parliament added in text saying that sporting event organizers would gain absolute control over recording, sharing and presenting any film clips -- even those that would otherwise be deemed legal in other copyright contexts. And yes, the law implies that if you're at a sports event, you can't even film anything from your own seat as that is reserved solely to the event organizers.
Incredibly, after the vote approving the directive, reporter Emanuel Karisten of the Swedish publication Breakit, asked Voss about this and Voss gave a fairly astounding answer, stating that "this was kind of a mistake" and that "no one had been aware of this." Later he states that he didn't know it was in there and he'll have to fix it:
Voss: This was kind of mistake I think by the JURI committee. Someone amended this. No one had been aware of this.
Reporter: But it was passed...
... discussion by someone with Voss saying that it's really about gambling/betting operations before Voss jumps back in ...
Voss: I didn’t know that this was in the proposal so far, so of course I have to deal with it now.... I do not consider that the commission and council will have this inside the proposal.
Later he says "because of the time and pressure" they concentrated on other areas of the bill. Which... does not seem like a good excuse.
You can listen to the exchange here:
Meanwhile, MEP Julia Reda is calling bullshit on the claim that Voss was "unaware" that this was in the proposal, noting not only that she had written about the issue prior to the vote, but that she had raised it directly with Voss and his colleagues:
It’s not true that nobody noticed it was in the proposal. Not only did I write about it before the vote, I also raised it in the last negotiation meeting before the vote, so did @lidiageringer. It was proposed by group colleagues of @AxelVossMdEP and he voted for it. Twice.
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) September 13, 2018
There are a few possibilities here, none of which make Voss look any good. He either voted for an amendment he hadn't read and/or didn't understand, or he's lying to this reporter. It also suggests that rather than taking the concerns of critics like Reda seriously, Voss just tuned them out and happily voted away for such horrible proposals.
We've raised questions before about Voss's views on all of this, as he seems almost hysterically uninformed about how actual copyright policy works, even as he drives forward such a horrible policy. This seems to be yet more evidence that a few special interests made it clear to Voss what they wanted to do, and he just agreed to do that, no matter what concerns anyone else had.
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Filed Under: axel voss, copyright, eu copyright directive, julia reda, sports
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The fix is a broken approach
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Ah... the good ole game is afoot
Which is worse? A politician passing a law they later admit they were ignorant of or a politicians willfully lying about what the law was intended to do?
Only an utter fool would accept the premise behind Hanlon's razor.
In government it is the complete and utter fucking opposite! These fucks have teams of lawyers and think tanks explaining and writing shit for them. Not only are they aware of the problems the law will cause, they are aware of why they want those problems to surface.
got you by the short and curlies? no... they have you by your very soul!
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Many indies rely on copyright protection as well, and the relatively small amount of sales can earn them a living, precisely because they don't need the big-company intermediarie to market for them.
Nothing stops someone from marketing their own work. To claim that only big publishers or media companies benefit is disingenuous and/or a strawperson* argument.
*The new, more inclusive, gender-neurtal term.
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These proposals are regulations governing the distribution of copyrighted materials, and the way they are written show that the are based on, and intended to ensure that only big corporations can distribute copyrighted works.
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They will never take complete control of the Internet and that something Anonymous will never understand.
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They will never hand complete control of the Internet over to the copyright industries and never stop ordinary people from being able to do what the Internet was designed to do.
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All it ever does is take stuff away from us and turn us into criminals for stupid things that shouldn't be illegal like this.
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Are you willing to give it and which army do you bring? Every war fought is over this problem. There is no other reason for war, but wealth/power and land/resources.
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Hey clown shoes, everyone saw how poorly attended the protests were so good luck with your rebellion
And Julia Reda belongs to the “Pirate Party” so of course Masnick fawns at any declaration she utters lol
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Liberatarians don't realize that we had their deregulatd utopia in almost every cas where we now have laws. We tried it their way, and it didn't work. The government that governs least governs best unti a hurricane hits or a contagious disease enters the population.
Public water fountains are socialist! So is FEMA. People need to take responsibility for choosing to live in the path of a hurricane!
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It isn't abusive/trolling/spam, last I checked, just probably foolish to some degree when talking about copyright (individual contracts can be CC-based or use a "copyleft" style license) and assuming that everyone can actually afford to move out of the path of hurricanes, or even predict how far inland the next huge storm will be and move accordingly.
I disagree with him, but I'm not threatened.
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Actions have consequenes
Unfortunate assuming they actually make an honest statement or argument at some point, but they've only themselves to blame.
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Re: Actions have consequenes
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Well if it's too difficult for you...
Giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he's not lying(which I don't believe is the case, I think he's lying through his teeth), he basically just admitted that he's willing to vote on laws with massive impact on the public without knowing what's in them.
Or in other words, his one job, making laws and voting on them, is something that is apparently just too difficult a task for him to manage.
That being the case certainly seems like he needs to be given the boot and replaced by someone for whom reading the proposed laws before voting on them is not a herculian task, and is instead treated as the most basic part of the job.
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Re: Well if it's too difficult for you...
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Men are pretty stupid, too, though. They earn much less than their co-stars in straight porn. Definitely not equal pay...
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Do something, get paid. No need to have any idea what you're doing. Let someone else figure things out.
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Im just skipping to the "shut down internet operations in europe look for other markets to hold ths wound" at this point. I cant deal man I cant deal.
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Because it should be news due to how rare it is. That it isn't is itself newsworthy, even aside from the individual in question.
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Just one
Voss, (sigh) you had one job.
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Re: Just one
That job was dependent on him not knowing what the hell he was doing.
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Should be viewed by everyone at least once.
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Not surprised
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It's just a skim job to keep their kangaroo court of a government alive after the UK's money stops funding half of the EU's coffers (hopefully...).
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It's onlyh right that this money should go back to those who earned it, not those who stole it.
The era of arrogance, intransigence, and hubris is over.
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If it cost Google $60 million dollars to make Content ID to just identify video and audio data, what would it cost the EU to cover multiple kinds of media in addition to that: text, images, video, audio, all of it accumulating in likely billions of user submissions that need to be moderated a day?
I swear we need remedial courses for politicians who don't understand technology. It inundated our lives before we knew what it was really doing. Either that, or they know it's a rubber-stamp operation and just got a nice "bonus" for "ruining Silicon Valley".
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The money can come from the increased sales that come from NOT HAVING OUR WORK STOLEN!
My main objection to the opposition here is that they claim to be looking out for my interests when they are not. I's like having Burglars explain why home security systems are unnecessary and should be illegal.
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Increasing and expanding the reach of copyright such that it further tightens down screws that your society obviously isn't supporting to begin with, evidenced by the huge number of Average Joes posting and watching music videos and movies on Youtube and torrent sites, isn't going to stick it to Google, who's the real target of this legislation. It's pyrrhic at best because it won't stop anyone, all it will do is enlarge the black hole in Europe when even more companies decide doing business in the EU is more trouble than its worth while any home grown alternatives will be overly burdened by compliance costs and technology that doesn't even exist (automated compliance checking).
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Say I have a way for you to save $10-12 a month on your electric bill, which also saves $3-4 a month on your heating bill, and $1-2 a month on your grocery bill. What is my incentive to put this in a book?
The second I publish it, it will be pirated, and 99 percent of my audience will be people who didn't payf or it. The fairytale that an appreciative audience will pay for it is generally refuted by the lack of appreciation a similar video "life hack" would make on YouTube, fromonations. Once pirated, other publishers and internet marketers would take over, and distribution would crush the indie.
o make much as I could out of the intellectual property, I would still make it as a YouTube video, and make about $1-3 per 1,000 views (CPM), and still get paid somewhat, so I'm not totally impacted, though even that is not guaranteed. My options for making money w9ould be limited by piracy, however, and tis anathema to the purpose of copyright law, plus it shows how publishing how-tos is nowhere near as profitable as "perishable" articles like here on Techdirt, where by the time anyone would pirate them, they are no longer fresh (news copies each other all the time; ever see 100 tweets from different news accounts with the samie text?).
This is just a small example. Bigger serets, like hoto makemoney in the stock market, wind up "given" away by scam artists who are promiting high-priced seminars, or the good information is restricted to a single customer or patron, or exploited by the author rather than thrown into the "pirate bay."
This is also why many "golden geese" from the 1990s (god information) was not replaced by better information in the last twenty eyars: those who fed the good information assuming they'd be properly rewarded were not, so they jumped ship, leaving the scam artists and internet marketers to dominate the landscape.
The public did not notice the difference, or care, because they were still getting "free answers" to their problems, h te fllacy that "all infrmationd qual.," even if, in one casek, the audience went from makg ncredible profits to screaming about being conned a decade later, due to this subtle erosion of the landcape. It's also why today's music absolutely tinks:no one is getting paid to make quality music.
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Too bad thousands and thousands of people manage to make money off of their expert knowledge every single day, including by selling books.
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'We will punish them by hitting everyone BUT them.'
Europe is definitely determined to kill the golden goose just to spite Google and Facebook.
Which, assuming that is one of the main motivations here, is all sorts of funny because Google and Facebook are in the best position to handle this latest idiocy(what with having pools of money), whereas competitors to Google and Facebook, current and future, are going to get absolutely hammered, giving those two companies even more power and leverage.
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Justa Thought
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