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Swiss DMCA Quietly Adopted
roady writes "We have seen a lot of talk over the years about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers ... not even the Swiss people.
The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50,000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law is available online."
How hard it is to strike down the law? If 50,000 citizens some petition or what not, would it be possible to hold a referendum?
Yes, it is certainly hard to understand. In Spain we have a levy on media (which can be bypassed by buying from an international store online), but it is LEGAL to download copyrighted music, if it's not used for profit, only for private use. So, I can download every movie and every song on the internet, and I'm rightfully allowed to do it. To compensate, I have to pay a levy on media. Worth it, in my opinion, as this levy only affects CDs and DVDs for the moment, and not HDDs.
This treats all spanish people as pirates, but says pirates are OK.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
The electoral college is irrelevant. The number of cases in which it changes anything is small, and many people agree with the reasoning behind it anyway.
What would really improve America's democracy is to make it smaller. That is, to shift whatever power the federal government doesn't absolutely need (per its constitutional duties and powers) to the states, and to encourage the states to shift as much power as makes sense to municipalities, where direct democracy works well. The first thing we should do is repeal the 16th and 17th amendments. Go back to requiring the federal government to get its funding from the states, and make the senate beholden to the state legislatures whose responsibility it is to raise the funds, and power will quickly shift back where it belongs.
Instead, we should amend the constitution to apportion the expenses of the federal government to the states proportionally to state GDP (rather than proportionally to population to avoid overburdening poor states), and requiring the states to pay the bill, regardless of the effect on their own budgets. That will shift the deficit spending to the state level and avoid disturbing the funding of current federal programs, unless and until the programs are changed, eliminated or moved through legislative action.
Of course, none of it will ever happen, but elimination of the electoral college won't either, and my suggestion would actually accomplish something.
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