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How the EU Copyright Proposal Will Hurt the Web and Wikipedia (wikimedia.org)
Wikimedia, which operates Wikipedia, chimes in on the EU copyright debacle: Our movement is working to promote freedom online for the benefit of all. Our efforts in this public policy realm are all the more important in an era of increasing restrictions on free speech and free access to knowledge across the globe, which directly threaten the mission and vision of Wikimedia and its projects, such as Wikipedia. This is why we strongly oppose the proposed EU Copyright Directives and urge the Members of the European Parliament to reconsider proceeding with the version recently adopted by the Legal Affairs Committee. We are concerned because these flawed proposals hurt everyone's rights to freedom of expression and Europe's ability to improve the welfare of its citizens online. Next week, we expect the European Parliament to vote in plenary on whether to proceed with the version adopted by the Committee. If the Members of the European Parliament reject it, there will be another opportunity to fix much of the current proposal's broken requirements. Now may be the last opportunity to improve the directive.
The requirement for platforms to implement upload filters is a serious threat for freedom of expression and privacy. Our foundational vision depends on the free exchange of knowledge across the entirety of the web, and beyond the boundaries of the Wikimedia projects. A new exclusive right allowing press publishers to restrict the use of news snippets will make it more difficult to access and share information about current events in the world, making it harder for Wikipedia contributors to find citations for articles online. The proposal does not support user rights, is missing strong safeguards for the public domain, and does not create exceptions that would truly empower people to participate in research and culture. We believe that enactment of this copyright package will significantly decrease in the amount of content that will be freely accessible to all across the globe.
The requirement for platforms to implement upload filters is a serious threat for freedom of expression and privacy. Our foundational vision depends on the free exchange of knowledge across the entirety of the web, and beyond the boundaries of the Wikimedia projects. A new exclusive right allowing press publishers to restrict the use of news snippets will make it more difficult to access and share information about current events in the world, making it harder for Wikipedia contributors to find citations for articles online. The proposal does not support user rights, is missing strong safeguards for the public domain, and does not create exceptions that would truly empower people to participate in research and culture. We believe that enactment of this copyright package will significantly decrease in the amount of content that will be freely accessible to all across the globe.
Cut Europe off from the Internet.
THIS is what they really want.
$15 a Minute phone calls to Italy and only Government approved newspapers.
Galileo for navigation and no GPS.
Unpossible! We're told time and again it is only the dictatorship that is the USA that can restrict speech and promote hate, and that the anointed in Brussels are only pure and holy and love freedom for all...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
... right here:
... content that will be FREELY accessible to all across the globe.
Emphasis mine.
The content was not generated "freely."
Sources of information, particularly involving resources such as reporters, information systems, infrastructure, should be fairly compensated for expenses.
News and other content aggregators are doing little to no work and making money off other's IP.
We recently had discussions here on /. about copyright law that views this matter from a different perspective.
Lawrence Lessig Criticizes Proposed 140-Year Copyright Protections
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Probably not "communism", the "People" is of no importance *at all*. It's more like a form of textbook fascism.
> Wikipedia is it considers the cult games Osu! and Kid Pix as not notable and sent its deletionists
I see that there are Wikipedia articles for both. The Kid Pix article has been up for at least 13 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...!
I also see that for the past SIX YEARS it's been flagged as needing references. Each page has only a single reference, and the Osu page consists of a single sentence.
If you think these topics are important, important enough that they've been written about, spend 10 minutes on Google to find a few articles and add them as references. It's really not hard.
If you actually take the 20 minutes to READ the articles, you can then type some information from those sources into the Wikipedia article, so it'll be an article instead of a sentence.
You've had six years notice, how long do you need in order to spend a few minutes adding a couple links?
Brussels are only pure and holy and love freedom for all...
Fascism and a love of money is a cancer that is spreading throughout Western civilization. Europe is not immune and will be consumed immediately after the United States falls.
The information age brought a new kind of power that we're only now understanding. Viral media, memes, fake news, social media, doxing, data aggregation, market research, 21st century terrorism, cryptocurrency scandals, and the erosion of our personal liberty are all related. It's the end of us if we don't get a handle on it, repair our broken politics and our fractured society.
What we are likely to see is world wide civil war equivalent to the Spanish Civil War scaled up to a field the size of every nation within cyberspace. World War III won't be the US vs Russia atomic warfare turning cities to hot glass. It will instead be a collapse of society within, and be a lot more like the fall of Rome and a redrawing of borders. The new governments that survive any length of time will be military dictatorships that fiercely defend their newly claimed borders. Lady Liberty will sleep for generations.
You know.. it just dawned on me when I read the name 'Wikipedia' in this headline: All this 'copyright' business isn't just about 'protecting IP' and monetizing everything in sight, it's mainly about controlling access to information, putting it behind access barriers that require money to bypass. This is essentially no different than what the Catholic Church would do in pre-renaissance times: if you were rich, you could learn to read, therefore you had access to education and information, and as we all well know, 'knowledge is power'. Now in the 21st century, which has the Internet, and where most everyone is literate, there is unprecedented access to information and self-education -- and knowledge is still power. While The Rich, Dominionists, and other so-called 'special interest groups' work in the non-digital world to limit access to higher education, all this 'copyright' action going on works to limit access to information and self-education in the digital/Internet world. Nicely played, Rich People, nicely played. That's the real reason why this needs to be fought against.
Probably not "communism", the "People" is of no importance *at all*. It's more like a form of textbook fascism.
Historically speaking, communism and fascism are forks of a GUI for a totalitarian operating system. Bringing this up tends to get both pissed off, which is part of why both are in (hilarious) agreement about glossing over the early history of fascism and its political roots, which is sad because a lot of historical irony is involved. (The main reason the fascists snagged support from the conservatives was more than anything else because the fascists rejected the idea that class warfare was necessary; it doesn't really look like anybody was particularly expecting capitalism to survive to the 21st century.)
Official Response to Concerns Raised, from Copyright Holders and EU Puppets:
Dear Wikimedia,
Womp womp.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're focusing on the trees and ignoring not just the forest, but the entire Amazon Basin.
How Wikipedia handles things is completely irrelevant to the situation. This legislation affects literally everybody, possibly even outside the EU depending on how far they try to wave their reproductive pseudopod.
It's a shockingly stupid piece of legislation that in one move can easily make it not worth the effort to run *any* service *at all*. ESPECIALLY if that might even vaguely involve interacting with the public, cause you'll risk liability for anything any user does.
It is overwhelmingly cost prohibitive, puts too much burden on the service providers, and destroys free speech. With legislation like that, you may as well not even bother having the internet at all.
Why say in two screenfulls what you can say in two sentences. /s
E
Fuck off ivan
I agree that fascism has often prospered under a banner of communism - but can you cite even one instance of a nation that was actually even remotely communist, rather than just using the name as a convenient mask?
Remember, one of the key tenets of communism is that the workers own the means of production, and that is wholly incompatible with the government owning said means, unless you can make a strong case that the workers truly own the government.
Personally, I can think of only a small handful of countries (Iceland comes to mind) that could make an even remotely plausible claim to having a government truly owned by the workers. Certainly China, Russia, the United States, etc. could not.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Chile. The "not true communist" argument is an utter lie. All these nations have been as "communist" as can be.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your copyright law and patents are still much worse than Europe's.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Bye bye communism.
If you look closely at the Brussels regulatory regime, it's actually more like Californism. It's just that the sacred untouchable 'refugees' are a different ethnicity.
Personally, I can think of only a small handful of countries (Iceland comes to mind) that could make an even remotely plausible claim to having a government truly owned by the workers.
And when I visited, they still complained about the asshat banksters having gotten off easy in the Great Recession.
Stalinism is the word you're looking for.
It's difficult to say what true communism is or should be, because Marx never really defined what should happen after class warfare in order to be successful. At least in theory practical implementations of communism range from anarchy to totalitarianism.
However I strongly suspect that Marx would have hated what those countries did in his name. All they did was to replace the old bourgeoisie with the state and turned everyone else into their proletariat. And since all the power was in fact not in the hands of the people but centralized, the end result was more akin to a monarchy than anything else.
I agree that fascism has often prospered under a banner of communism [...]
I don't know who you are agreeing with, but it isn't me. I did not claim that fascism has been passed off as communism. Here, let me put some emphasis in the key words in the first line: "Historically speaking, communism and fascism are forks of a GUI for a totalitarian operating system."
Or, to use your phrasing, I said that totalitarianism has often prospered under a banner of communism and fascism .
The No True Communist fallacy rearing its head.
Net neutrality has existed for like a year. The World Wide Web has been around for almost 30 years. Please explain how the lack of net neutrality destroyed the Internet.
Well said.
> But it does raise the question of whether it is actually possible to implement correctly or not, since each failure to do so makes that seem less likely.
It certainly does raise the question. But if an incoming regime never had any intention of being communist beyond riding the banner into power, does that really count against its possibility, rather than more specifically to the credibility of those claiming to be its champions?
Let me put it this way - given the track record I would be vehemently opposed to *anyone* rallying support on a communist platform. But I also think the basic ideals of the relative worth of the working class are worth holding up as a counterbalance to the Gilded Age ideals inherent in unregulated free market capitalism. Either extreme seems to lead to the masses being miserable, and that when we balance somewhere in between everyone prospers. But that's hard to do when one ideal has been demonized.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Anarchy itself would evolves to a form of totalitarianism. All human social interaction structure are hierarchical in nature and a variant of a D/s model, there is no mythical social structure where everybody (as in EVERYBODY) is equal.
So? It's one extreme on the spectrum of possibilities. That's the point here - there's an entire spectrum. In theory communism could even work in a libertarian society if there was a consensus on handling their economy exactly that way.
Stalin certainly wasn't stupid. He surely realized that giving all the power to the people wasn't going to work. People tend to be irresponsible and embracing cheap comforts. But Stalin didn't go for something in between, he essentially choose to make himself the new czar with unilateral control over everything and created a personal cult around him that celebrated him much like a good in the name of Marx's economic theories and labels like "people's republic" or "democracy" where all you can choose is one single party, perhaps there's also some other fake opposition. As far as I know their official position wasn't that they're communist, but that they were trying to get there through socialism. Of course they never really did what would have been at least the bare minimum to actually get there. Like teaching people to think independently and that all actions have consequences. If people were able to do that, they could question what was actually going on in those states under the guise of communism. So Stalin had to keep his people ignorant enough to not turn against him. And in order to do that there have been a lot of distraction tactics like fanning fear of bigger enemies (capitalism that came from the West) and practically blaming it for all their woes. Those that weren't convinced so easily needed a bit more help, maybe through lethal force. And it worked pretty well from the perspective of those in power (for a while at least).
I can see how other would be tyrants could get behind the idea of this "communism" and mostly copied what Stalin did, which more accurately should be described as Stalinism.
Of course don't get me wrong here. I'm not postulating that communism could work on such a large scale under different circumstances. But the "as communist as can be" just isn't correct.
I reject any system that promotes labor. We are a technologically advanced society on the cusp of a post-labor capability. Any attempt to focus on laborers is missing the point.
That's a third position that does indeed bear discussing in the face of the potential elimination of the need for manual labor within a few generations. I'm not even sure what you'd call it, and it's very different from the other two. Capitalism says the bulk of the value generated by society rightfully belongs to the organizers, those who have shown they can most effectively manage and accumulate capital. Communism says to the laborers, those who actually did all the work to make it real. And this other, I suppose, that no work had to be done, so everybody should benefit from the value.
Let's be clear though - the creation of art, the governing of society, the organization of production, the advancement of science and technology - that's all still work, and somebody has to do it or it won't get done. The only way we get a truly post-labor world is if we create fully autonomous self-maintaining robots sufficiently advanced to effectively reduce humanity to house pets, without actually being conscious (because then they would be people performing labor). And I would hope that very few people would actually want that if they took the time to really consider the implications.
What we are actually approaching is a world where one person with the right skills and assets can easily provide for all the material needs (and big slice of the desires) of hundreds, maybe many thousands others, and thus the vast majority of the population will find themselves becoming rather superfluous, while a tiny handful find themselves bearing the responsibility of maintaining the system for everybody else. It's going to be an interesting problem to deal with. I can hope that the working class will end up somewhere on the spectrum between rock stars and monks, while the fallow class will be well-managed, and discouraged from breeding excessively.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes. Slavery is the result of Communism, because you can't base a government on a lie about human nature.
Humans are fundamentally flawed. A theist would say its because of Original Sin, or the Yin/Yang duality of good and evil, or just because humans are bad. A psychologist might point to the Id as the ethics free core of the human psyche.
The point is that most people when put in a position of power unfettered by external constraints will abuse that power. For every Washington or Cincinnatus there are hundreds of Stalins or Robespierres or Duvaliers.