ISP Filters & Copyright Extension Defeated In EU

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Last November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking at how culture affects the economy and recommended a 'balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property' saying that 'criminalizing consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution.' Industry lobbyists, of course, immediately sprang into action to try to turn that around, writing amendments that would set up mandatory ISP copyright filters and extend EU copyrights to match the USA's life-plus-70 term. Thankfully, the committee rejected all of those amendments: 'Clearly, they're not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).'"

Comments

Good news

[Husgaard]

Although this is far from as important as a vote on a EU directive, I think this is good news.

Unfortunately there is no information on exactly which amendments were rejected. In particular I was worried about amendment 80 (which TFA implies is rejected), amendment 82 (extension of protection time for related rights), and amendments 81 and 83 that looks like a requirement that educational institutions should proliferate the propaganda of MAFIAA.

As for the extension of copyright protection time: This is the same in Europe as in the USA. But in the EU the protection of recording artists and whoever makes the recording is limited to 50 years. There has been big pressure in particular in the UK to extend this, but this has been rejected as not being helpful to cultural development. I am glad that this first attempt by the copyright lobby to force EU member countries to adopt legislation they do not want has failed.

Oh, BTW here is a link to the prosed amendments voted on tuesday.

Re:As a US citizen I find our government lacking

[webmaster404]

Next time I see a senator wanting copyright reform I will be sure to vote for them. However almost none will state their stance on the issue. Writing to them doesn't ever seem to get a clear answer and most are swayed by what the **AA says. So far no congressman has really ever been a solid freedom supporter.

Re:show as much spine as the French

[ppanon]

The unaccountable segments of the EU, the EU commissioners, are the ones that keep putting forward the motions to "harmonize' copyrights with the USA entertainment lobbies' demands. The accountable MPs are the ones who, so far, have been shooting the law proposals down.

Up until now, the xIAA thought to save money by just lobbying the commission. I expect that during the next EU parliamentary elections, the entertainment lobbies will try to shift the power balance in the elected parliament to get their way. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.

The local European movie industries aren't as interested in DMCA restrictions: the DMCA is about controlling distribution and the MPAA member corporations' grip on US and European theatre and distribution channels has smothered local production in many countries. The MPAA don't do enough European filming to have the associated fiscal/employment clout they do in North America. Let's face it, the US Dollar doesn't go as far as it used to either, so that's not going to help either situation. The music business has similar issues outside of England.

Because there isn't as much justifiable financial European interest in copyright changes as there is in the US, MPs who support those changes will be vulnerable to charges of corruption by US interests. The US is currently perceived quite disfavourably by many in Europe, so that's likely to limit change for quite a few years even if a Democrat gets elected President and starts undoing the damage done by the Bush Administration to the USA's overseas reputation.

On the other hand, there's always hope that, before the European political landscape can shift, the financial clout of the RIAA and MPAA will be much diminished.

Re:Life+70 is just obscene

[Gideon Fubar]

According to this, the white dots you're seeing are likely an artifact of the way your TV renders the image.

If you're really interested in preserving those tapes, i'd suggest using a TV tuner/video capture card.. an old SD card will do fine.. you just have to be able to make sure that you can manually configure (or disable) the gain control. Of course, i imagine some cards will just ignore the macrovision system..

unfortunately, YMMV Wildly... I recommend reading this.. should help a bit.

Re:Heath Ledger: buttfucking in Heaven

[Kjella]

Seriously, what the fuck is up with this shit? Can't we do something about these 'nigger' trolls OTHER than reading at +1 only? Believe it or not, but this is what most online forums look like. The only difference is that most other forums have a "report this" button with moderators that'll nuke it. Not editors mind you, usually some kind of recruited user moderators and that brings a whole new level of noise as well. I like the fact that the worst you can do with a comment on slashdot is mod it to -1, which means there's still a chance people will see it. Still, I'm sure there's way to tweak it, maybe differentiating mod points for ACs and normal users or something. Still, is that terrible to browse at +1? I regularly browse at +3 to only get the registered+karma bonus+modded up comments, and drop it down when there's an interesting discussion going on. If you're walking in the sewers, it's not much point complaining the walls are dirty.