Slashdot Mirror
Trick Used To Pass French "Three Strikes"
Glyn Moody writes "France's 'Loi Hadopi' — better known as 'three strikes and you're out' — was passed by the National Assembly late last night when only 16 deputies were present (the vote was 12 in favor, 4 against). Most politicians had left because it was expected that the vote would take place next week. In this way, President Sarkozy has sneaked his controversial legislation through the French parliament — and shown his contempt for the democratic process. So now what?"
While my initial thought is "Shame on those people who subverted the democratic process" I can't help but think.. "Shame on the faulty system with such a stupid loophole." Did they subvert the democratic process? Kinda. But did they do things within the boundries of their law? Apparently so.
So shame on those living in France expecting anything different from their dumb system.
It's like having an insurance policy, and when the insurance company decides to be assholes and use their technicalities to avoid paying you, well, shame on you for signing on to such an obviously flawed contract.
(Please note, I'm not claiming my country is any better.)
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Ever heard of Quorum? The French should add that to their rules/constitution to prevent that crap Sheesh
So now what?
revolution!
Sounds like sour grapes to me. News Flash: Politicians use these procedural tricks all the time, why do you think that said tricks exist? At someone point, some other guys slid laws through on the same deal. Look at the absurd things the US does - the Patriot Act, Obama's "bailout" plans, that nobody ever reads, but people vote on.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I was thinking the same thing... How was anyone at work at 2200 hours? Aren't they all supposed to stop working after 6 hours and only have 4 day work weeks?
It's a joke, laugh.
The people who showed "contempt for the democratic process" were the people who left early.
Don't forget: Shame on the worthless motherfuckers who stayed and voted aye. Sarkozy is a prick; but 12 people in that room last night were the ones who actually made a mockery of the process of representative democracy.
In a juster world, they would be hanging from the lampposts this morning.
As a Brit, I hate to have to defend our old adversaries, but I have to step in here, as I think you're being a little unfair. You say the French are lazy, but I can tell you that they are more than willing to work quite hard. As long as it isn't August of course. Or one of their many holidays. Or within 30 minutes of their official close of business. Or anywhere near lunch. And so long as they aren't on strike. But other than that, absolutely nose-to-the-grindstone tireless hard workers for sure.
Oh no... it's the future.
Unpopular legislation is almost always passed in such ways. And now the blame for its passing is limited to a select few. I have to wonder if these loopholes and subversive means aren't there to protect lawmakers from having to make decisions that would get them booted from office? That is to say, while they support the legislation, they wouldn't want to be on record as having voted for it... so they "look the other way" while a team of patsies come in to do the dirty work for them.
A country with a 577-member body that allows 16 people to constitute quorum? If that's actually the case, that country deserves what it gets.
Say it ain't so.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Like the UK.
Best Slashdot Co
Here's an AP article, which is a little more reputable than a blog.
And here's some commentaries that zdnet rounded up.
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/internet/0,39020774,39390853,00.htm
Yeah right. Talking nonsense again, right?
European surveys have proved that French people actually work longer hours than Brits.
Don't believe me?
Check this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/mar/31/uk-long-working-hours
http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/ewco/surveys/ewcs2005/index.htm
I have seen Brits and Swiss jerks leave their office at 5:00pm while I stayed at my desk until 10:00pm past. So that kind of "joke" is truly lame.
And yes, I work in France.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
If it's a three strikes law, use it to your advantage. Keep reporting all the incidents everywehere - Sarkozy hums a copyrighted tune? Report it. Flood the government or whatever bodies with reports on all potential copyright infringement by the members. After all, don't we already have proof that they do this? It should be trivial to just report that their children have broken the law as well. Keep reporting them and get their internet connections cut off.
Sort of like "work to rule" campaigns - you make the rulemakers suffer under their own rules as well.
Heck, bonus points for those who can get the Internet cut off at no only their personal residences, but also to government buildings also.
The US Senate(?) did almost the exact same thing in 1913 to get the Federal Reserve Act passed. We seem to learn little from history sometimes...sad :( ...if you haven't seen it yet, movie - Freedom to Fascism, by Aaron Russo
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for quorum.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I do not live in France, but nevertheless in my own country, where there are supposed to be checks and balances, I believe there aren't enough of them. It is possible, if a single party gets more than 50% of the House and Senate, for that party to do almost anything with impunity. Sure, it takes effort to pass a bill into law since it must pass in both chambers of Congress and then get signed into law by the President. But because government is an entity that tends toward corruption and total control, I think the Constitution should have thrown a few additional monkey wrenches into the gears and added the following requirements to the mix:
1. A mandatory waiting period of one year from completion of the writing of a bill until it can be voted on by legislators. The bill must be made available to the public at the start of this waiting period. This forces a review and comment period. If the text of the bill changes, the waiting period restarts.
2. More eyes. After a bill passes both houses, it must be shelved until at least 50% of the members of both houses have changed. Once that happens, the bill must pass both houses a second time. Only then does it land on the President's desk. This means that the passage of bills into law requires the NEXT Congress to agree with the current one.
3. "One subject matter." In other words, you can't sneak a failed bill regulating commerce into the bowels of another bill regulating something else.
4. "Plain English," and "Reasonable length," meaning an eighth-grader should be able to read and understand the bill. As a bonus, instead of "Reasonable length," the Constitution should have defined a hard length limit of, say, 200 pages in a bill, where each page may only contain up to a maximum of a certain number of words. No more bills so long they need all of Google's storage capacity to store them and vote on them without reading them. Not to mention, if you can't explain it in 200 pages, it's probably too complicated to be understood by the public, which will be expected to abide by it.
5. A Constitution-defined ceiling on the total number of pages in law. Once that limit is reached, they can't add pages until other pages are repealed to make room. Repealing should be as complicated as enacting, by the way. Say, 100,000 pages total maximum number of pages in law. This is a HUGE number! To put things into perspective, the federal tax law takes up 70,000 pages. That's just ONE law. There must be millions of pages of complicated, convoluted law. This is ridiculous! You are somehow expected to know and abide by the law, but it is impossible for any person to actually know so much. Laws are misunderstood, and this allows lawyers and other corrupt people to take advantage of normal people. There should be a hard limit.
After almost 42 hours of continuous discussion (i bet most of it was around the same wrong and boring arguments repeated over and over by the proponents) and when the actual voting was supposed to be next week?
What you want? Robolegislators? The 12 that voted for it could had known of the sneaky move... the 4 that voted against should be treated as superheros.
Obviously stupid, but a lot of people will lose internet access just like a lot of people sitting in jail could be living productive lives just like cigarette and alchohol vendors.
Three strikes and you are out is a ridiculously low standard, so you can be sure that it will not be enforced on the elite. If it ever is, the law will be revoked.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
What this slashdot post needs is:
1. A description of the law that was passed. 'three strikes and you're out' isn't very descriptive. I'm assuming it has to do with file sharing and cutting off people's internet connections?
2. How many deputies were supposed to be there? 18? 100? 300?
Sarkozy has been using MGMT's wonderful song kids without permission. He did offer one euro to settle.
the fallacy is in thinking that the government has any ability to enforce the laws they create on the topic of intellectual property. any law in regard to file sharing is akin to trying to herd cats two states over: does anyone really think that some chinese or russian or brazilian teenager with a broadband connection is aware, or even cares?
and if they don't, then for western teenagers in western nations with retarded intellectual property laws, its simply a matter of dipping into this transnational bounty of filesharing that is forever beyond the reach of idiotic national laws
so go ahead france, australia, the usa: pass your ridiculous 3 strikes law, dmca, whatever. who fucking cares?
intellectual property law was a gentleman's agreement from a dead era when there were only a few publishers (oh, you thought ip law was for the benefit of creators? ha!). but now ip law is now a conceptual dinosaur in the age of the internet. western nations depend heavily on the idea of intellectual property. well: get used to losing the concept
all that has to happen, all that is going to happen over the next few decades is that western nations have to get used to the extinction of intellectual property law as an enforceable concept in the age of the internet
when someone loses something dear to them, they go through 5 stages of grief. the first stage is denial. that is where western legal systems are now at in reliation to the death of intellectual property law as a valid, enforceable idea
its over
ip law is dead
everyone just shrug at france. the laws you see passed will get only more ridiculous and more desperate in the west, until finally a critical mass of legislators in western nations begin to wake up and take notice that its all just a giant fucking joke
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The majority, esp. under Emperor Naboleon Sarkozy, has quasi tyrannical powers, and can employ various tricks to make sure the minority can't pull a trick like showing up en masse when the majority's away.
Furthermore they employed various procedural tricks -- they tend to do that almost all the time now actually -- to ram their laws through parliament without leaving any chance for the opposition to delay or discuss.
Now this certainly does not excuse the main opposition party for not showing up, with few exceptions such as my own representative Mr. Bloche, but it couldn't possibly have made any difference in the legislative process.
I watched most of the debates on this law in the lower chamber, and the majority never even responded to very precise, technical questions asked by critics of the law, including members of their own party.
An interesting side note: the very few opponents of the law in the ruling party are the only IT professionals, such as Tardy who owns a small IT consultancy, and Dionis du Sejour who used to be the CIO of a major company. All their colleagues had no fucking clue what they were talking about; take for instance the minister herself, who believes OpenOffice is or has a firewall. I shit you not.
From the article over at The Register:
"The law is also referred to as the loi Hadopi, because it creates a "High Authority" ( Haute autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet ),"
Sig this!
French rifle for sale. Dropped twice. Never fired.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
This has nothing to do with EU. It's a bloody French bastard who uses all the dirty tricks to get what he wants.
EU has already stated that this won't be tolerated.
I suggest we implement the "Three Strikes and you are out" for politician. Considering the French past it might actually be a great fun.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Over at The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/03/french_three_strikes/
Sig this!
Which leads to the question "Why does a vote have to be an immediate thing at all?" I think that votes should remain open until everyone has voted. This would make it so that sneaky politicians who want to vote yes but can't because their constituents would not vote them back into the office can't get away with that crap anymore.
I have seen Brits and Swiss jerks leave their office at 5:00pm while I stayed at my desk until 10:00pm past.
Hmm, and who exactly is the winner here?
And you haven't read a single word of what I posted, right? Lame.
From the same article you dismissed:
Longest hours worked in Europe (31 countries surveyed)
1 Turkey: 54 hours; 29 UK: 35 hours (EU average: 39 hours)
UK is 29th out of 31 countries surveyed.
I rest my case.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
and I think my health suffered because of it. At first I was annoyed. Then I got mad. And then I was completely flabbergasted.
The opposition asked thousands of extremely well informed and technically pointed questions. There was at times a hundred time more people watching the video stream than usual. They got tons of emails, which their staff would parse, print and bring to them during the discussions. They mentioned that several times. The majority never ever did, just sticking to their ridiculous talking points or, towards the end, not even bothering to reply.
The law is unbelievable. Its entire purpose is to circumvent the judiciary and castrate any right to a fair trial, because as soon as a normal legal recourse is available, the sheer mass of defendants would topple the rotten thing instantly.
This alone explains the many bizarre provisions of the law. For instance, when you get (or not, there is no hard requirements of delivery) an email warning, it doesn't mention what you were allegedly (or actually, what your connection was used for) downloading. That's right, they don't tell you. They just say, on that date and time, your connection was used to pirate shit, make it cease now, and here's a nice list of legal websites.
The official purpose for this non-disclosure is because the download might be pornographic, and that might cause problems for families if, say, the spouse finds out. I'm not making shit up, that's what the retarded sponsor Frank Riestert (a car salesman) said, it's in the record. But the real purpose is so that you can't easily dispute the allegations. In fact, it's almost impossible to find out what's been reported against you at the "warning" phase, you can only do so when the decision to cut you off has been taken.
Furthermore, the law explicitly limits the possibility for the accused to find out who detected the alleged infringement and how. You get to know (eventually) the copyright holder, but not which private policing outlet it had mandated for that purpose. Obviously this aims to limit the possibilities of suing for libellous accusations, or at least delay so much as to make it useless and therefore remove the incentive for the victims to sue so that this is not a bottleneck.
Said outlets' employees will have to swear an oath to be truthful in their reports, but the law says nothing about any due diligence. In other word, as long as they don't blatantly lie, it doesn't matter if the evidence is as flimsy as a mere IP address being advertised in a Pirate Bay tracker. As you may know, it only takes *one* HTTP request to put *any* IP in there.
This whole thing is insane. It is extremely likely to be thoroughly censored by the Constitutional Council (~ Supreme Court in this case) but that doesn't mean the end result won't be a disaster. The only hope is in the European Parliament, and if they finally pass their anti-3 strike amendment, it's on the European Court of Justice.
Oh please, if this was a just law, they shouldn't have to resort to such trickery to get it passed.
The translation says, "While the vote was not expected until next week, the few members in the chamber at the end of the discussion on the Creation and Internet law ..."
Wouldn't a Creation and Internet Law be all about copyrights and author-created materials being published on the internet? I don't see where this is about "three strikes and you're out."
Surely someone out there knows more than we've been told by this article.
Somalia is just about the only country which is truly free. You can do just about anything you want there.
But I doubt most people would want to live there.
The problem is, most people don't want true freedom. True freedom is truly dangerous. Realistically all these pseudo-anarchists want rules for everyone else, just not for themselves.
I wonder what they would do if someone came and busted out their windows and torched their cars?
I wonder if they would call the "police state" they are protesting?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Does anyone find it amusing that after all the ridicule the French heaped on Americans for electing Bush that they went and elected somebody even worse?
Only certified private entities can report violations.
Why can't the reasonable law makers come back and just pass a rescind to this legislation?
There is a quorum at the National Assembly, but a member of the parliament has to explicitely ask it to be checked in order to enforce it. And even if it happens, the session is just aborted and takes place again another day, where you can be bloody sure that the government will demand all of his member of parliament to be present. Anyway, Sarkozy's party and its allies have an absolute majority in the assembly, and Sarkozy and his government are known to be demand an extreme loyalty and servility to members of the parliament of his party. They can pass almost any law. The opposition made plenty of sensible comments and amendment proposals, but the government mostly ignored them, so they got pissed off and stopped wasting their time. I can definitely understand those people.
Well, I'm English, and I thought I'd better stand up for our much maligned workforce, including myself, getting shown up by the French like that.
Well, I would have. But I was delayed a bit getting into work today. I was going to drive, but it's in the garage, and they're waiting for parts. Since last week. The bus turned up half-hour late, but that's OK as we were got stuck in the roadworks that mysteriously popped up yesterday, but didn't have any workmen on.
I could have worked from home, but my landline was broken by BT last week, and the engineer is a bit behind, so my internet is out of order. But then again, they've just started throttling VPNs, so it wouldn't have been great anyway.
I tried calling in on the mobile, but was out of coverage - I'm sure they'll put up some more towers round here some day.
Well, I did finally get to work, but they'd all gone down the pub for lunch, so they didn't need me anyway. Then I remembered I need to pop down into town to run some errands.
I went to the bank first, but forgot they've just closed the branch - had to make some savings after making dodgy investments apparently. I did get to the post office ok, but they only had one counter open, so I was a bit delayed in the queue.
Finally got down to the council office, but found they'd all gone on strike, some furore over pensions I think.
I would have gone back to work, but since they all knock of at 4.30, there didn't seem much point...
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.