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European Parliament Blocks Copyright Reform With 113% Voter Turnout
New submitter mcmadman writes "In a bizarre turn of events, the legal affairs committee of the European Parliament, voted to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works. What is surprising is that the voter turnout happened to be 113%. That there were three votes too many, and that these three votes determined the outcome, was pointed out to the committee. Unfortunately, when this was done, along with formally requesting a re-vote, the re-vote was denied."
Putin's approval rating has plummeted to 112% in favor.
Or at least, a visible proof of it. Perhaps it ended long ago, but now there is no possible denial.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
It's worth pointing out that it's only a preliminary committee. It being voted down in this committee won't necessarily prevent it from seeing the floor the full parliament, but it won't come along with the backing of the special committee.
There was a member of the Swedish Pirate Party in the committee and he's been the one agitating for a re-vote. The frightening thing about this is that there are only 24 members on this committee and one was absent, so with 23 possible votes, the final vote was 12-14.
BUT, if 12 people actually voted in favour of the bill, that would leave only 11 against.
Keep in mind, this isn't highly corrosive stuff.
The bill is talking about "orphaned works" which are those works that will never again see the light of day because no owner claims them. It is likely that when the copyright expires in 70 years, with nobody to preserve them, or assign their rights to a publisher who can, these works will be completely lost to humanity. This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.
Nobody is arguing that this is a bad idea, but the recording industry lobbies see it as the "sharp end of the sword" when it comes to copyright reform, so they will fight against it vehemently.
If you live in Europe, write to your MEP. Vote fraud is no joke.
You americans with your puny 99%. This parliament goes to 113!
Meep.
Hold on fellas, you've got it all wrong. Math is different in Europe (they've got their commas and periods all backward in many places), especially when it's attorneys doing the counting. Folks just have to understand this, and fortunately there's a great instructional video available for those in need of further tutelage.
Very true. For a start - we call it Maths
So that's where the vote count went wrong! They were counting plurals where there should be singulars!
A re-vote was requested, immediately when this discrepancy came to light. Which I may assume is the moment the results are given - it's not that hard to add up.
This re-vote was denied however, leaving two important questions open. How come the votes were counted so wrong, with so small numbers? And why was this re-vote denied?
The reason is that Diebold was responsible for the count.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
Better question: Why isn't a re-vote automatic in this kind of circumstance? Or, why is it even possible to deny a re-vote after such an obvious error? This is why politicians fail us...anyone with half a brain would implement more sensible procedures.
Plus , we use metric. 1 Metric vote = 1.13 US votes.
Yes they adopted the amended proposal. But the vote this article is about is a vote on an amendment, not the adoption of the proposal.
It's a case of who watches the watchers. When you corrupt an organization it is best done in-depth and it is most successfully done from the top.
We "Americans" (e.g. the United States of part, but we are working diligently on spreading our scheme to the rest of America) have a system of Checks and Balances. That is it doesn't have to Balance if you can make sure nobody Checks. We use this system for nearly every purpose. It's nice to see Europe following our lead. Or perhaps they deeded it to us as some point, which doesn't matter, we will take the credit.
As to this being the end of democracy, well you are using the wrong definition: Democracy is the means by which we ensure we are governed -no- -better- that we deserve.
Seems to be working out pretty much "as expected" here.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Video of the voting is available on the EP website. The agenda item starts at 10:27, and the voting runs from 10:31 to 10:51. The amendment in question appears to be "Compromise 20", voted on at 10:39, which is indeed rejected by 12 votes to 14. This was an all-party amendment that the centre-right EPP party then withdrew support from, because they were not entirely happy with the wording, according to one of their MEPs at the start of the meeting. (10:29). As the video shows, the EP tends to machine-gun through amendment votes, which are held in one swoop after months of discussion. You really need the papers for the meeting and your preferred faction's voting guide to turn them into an acceptable spectator sport. One of the extra votes could perhaps have been the chairman's casting vote; but it's not clear how there could have been two.
mods, please see this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2728627&cid=39375277
then mod this down.
The freezing point is that of Brine (IIRC) at saturation. Since small impurities in *pure* water make a huge difference in the freezing point, but bugger all difference in brine, brine water is a lot easier to see freezing reliably to calibrate your lowest temperature. And a saturated brine solution is easy: keep adding salt until it starts precipitating out, then decant off the top.
Simple. You don't need a pristine chemistry lab to set that.
And as for "boiling point of water", well, what pressure?
Celsius is directly related to Kelvin, just offset so that 0C is the freezing point of water instead of Absolute zero. It's easy to convert between the two, just +/- 273.15 depending on where you're going. 0C - 273.15 is 0K.
It's the other way around, but yes. Celsius was calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of distilled water, and for Kelvins, they said "hey, that's an easy to calibrate scale, but let's set 0 at absolute zero".
I believe Fahrenheit has an equivalent called Rankine, whereby 0Ra is absolute zero and the difference between the two is a fixed value, however that does bring the question - what's the point of 0F? What does it represent? Aside from the benefit of having "more" values between boiling and freezing water, is there a benefit to Fahrenheit that Celsius doesn't have?
0'F is the freezing point of salt water. Which salt water... unknown. It has different freezing points for different salt densities... I think it was supposed to be sea water, but again, sea water has different saline densities depending on where in the world you're taking it from, and also how deep you're taking it from.
100'F was supposed to be the human body temperature, but it was calibrated against somebody who was running a fever that day. Normal human body temperature is supposedly 98.6'F, but it does actually vary from person to person, depending on their health and metabolism at the time.
Ultimately, Fahrenheit is a completely arbitrary scale, calibrated to completely unrelated points in nature, some of which aren't reproducible outside of the human species. The reason it still exists is because it was proposed earlier than the Celcius scale, and it caught ground. Also because the only country that still uses it absolutely refuses to consider anything metric, because the French are using it, and that would be wrong.
You guys have it all wrong. On matters relating to the music and video industries, duplicate votes are worth exactly as many as the originals.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I took part in the vote as a Member of the JURI Committee in the European Parliament, and I can correct you on a few points. The amendments to a report can change its meaning completely, and the amendment that we lost was a rather important one. Therefore it is wrong to say that it was and "obscure" amendment, and imply that it was not important. The report is a legislative report that will turn into a binding directive and then national law once it is adopted, so it is not the question of a non-binding (or "own initiative") report this time.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden