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Wikipedia Italy Blocks All Articles in Protest of EU's Ruinous Copyright Proposals (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, Wikipedia Italy set all of its pages to redirect to a statement raising awareness for the upcoming vote that (barring some legislative wrangling) would make the copyright directive law. The statement reads, in part (emphasis theirs): On July 5, 2018, The Plenary of the European Parliament will vote whether to proceed with a copyright directive proposal which, if approved, will significantly harm the openness of the Internet . The directive instead of updating the copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation of all the citizens to the society of information, threatens online freedom and creates obstacles to accessing the Web, imposing new barriers, filters and restrictions. If the proposal would be approved in its current form, it could be impossible to share a news article on social networks, or find it through a search engine; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.
WTF is wrong with your brain that you would think this is about pity? You should have that looked at.
This is about "You voted for more government and here's one of the ways that you're about to get it .. unless you change your mind or at least take action to correct the fucking up of the various details of arbitrarily-expanding government. And actually, you still have time as long as you credibly threaten your politicians right now."
America isn't asking for pity, either, BTW, despite our own disastrous political problems of our own making.
Nope. It's what corruption looks like.
And it's not the government which corrupts itself, btw, it's big business and money. So, the solution is more government - tighter control over lobbyists and bribing of officials - not less, which no doubt would make crap like this even more common. Evidence? Shit like this is everyday occurrences in the US, while it makes real news in the EU - which coincidentally is seen as practically communist by a lot of retarded Americans who have never set their foot outside North Bumfuck but are experts on everything on the Internet.
rofl. government does something bad.
but what is needed is more government.
This is what government controlled by corporate interests looks like. Big or small, left or right; doesn't matter as long as corporations are pulling the strings.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
On one hand, this is a great thing, making people aware of the issues with the new proposed law and the way Government (or, in this case, a supra-government Government) can run roughshod on your rights. On the other hand, this is from the "right wing/extremist" current Italian Government, who we're told is all about running roughshod on your rights. Methinks those on the political left in Italy and the EU will have a bit of cognitive dissonance going on...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree with them; I think they should have done the same for all EU ip adresses and all languages.
EU citizens can still act a little: https://saveyourinternet.eu/
Where i stand, i can donate to the EFF. Which i did. About other laws hurting the American internet.
Italians let a media mogul buy up all the media under the guise of media consolidation.
Then, that media mogul became Prime Minister.
That's the reason they're so screwed.
This is take two on the attempts by the copyright industry to get to loot Google, no more and no less. The Spanish copyright lobby tried to extort Google news, with the catastrophic consequence for them that Google simply closed the service. The German tried to extort them on their turf, and then Google simply stopped linking to them, which turned out so badly for them that they had to come crawling back and make special allowances for Google.
This is about the same thing again, just on another level. It's still about greedy fuckers who can't stand seeing anyone else making any money, even if they have to cut off their own (and everyone else's as collateral damage) noses just to spite their faces. Hopefully sanity prevails over apathetic incompetence though, which otherwise generally is the biggest hurdle in the EU, not outright corruption like in the US.
On July 4th the US celebrates their freedom.
On July 5th the EU ends ours.
I am really confused by this comment. Not sure if I agree with the premise that this is corruption because it seems like "corruption" is an easy answer for the lazy to say "anything the government does that I don't like is corruption".
Even granting that, this is absolute retardation.
Shit like this is everyday occurrences in the US, while it makes real news in the EU - which coincidentally is seen as practically communist by a lot of retarded Americans who have never set their foot outside North Bumfuck but are experts on everything on the Internet.
Everyday occurrences? I assume you are referring to PACs and Citizens United. I find that hilarious because what it comes down to is the US is more supportive of free speech and less government intervention of political speech. God forbid someone make a documentary critical of a politician running for office and release that on the internet around the time of an election! The government should be able to restrict that kind of political speech because anything else is "corruption"!
Maybe there is something wrong with you and your ideas if you think the government has the authority to restrict political speech because it happens to be around an election. Likewise, maybe there is something wrong with the government when it thinks it can pass absurd laws that infringe on the rights of their citizens. The US has it's problems but Europe seems more than content with overbearing government without the need of "corruption" from corporations.
Why wold anyone mod that post informative?
Now that technology is available to quickly access millions upon millions of database items there is not much need to have an implicit copyright system. An explicit copyright registration system that charges a fee, not unlike Internet domains, is feasible. With that registration it is then easy to reference what is copyrighted and then infer what is not copyrighted with some reasonable assurance.
On top of that, if we were to completely revamp our copyright laws internationally we should really considered an appropriate shorter duration for copyright. Should you have a monopoly on your own creation in order to support yourself? I don't see why not. But that does not mean creating something that you leave to your great grandchildren as an income source. It is kind of how we ended up with the gilded age and how a lot of "old money" families were built, I think few of us want to return to that era. If you create something, a story, a software library, a film, you never really created it from whole cloth. You were influenced and inspired by the culture and art in your own lifetime.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"And it's not the government which corrupts itself"
I don't even know where I should start shooting holes in your "opinion" not fact.
Why is thinking "expanding authority" is not the answer to "expanding authority gone wrong" willful libertarian blindness? Are you saying "this time we'll get expanding authority right!"??
This would become UK law one day before the official leaving date. No doubt that was intentional.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
UK citizens should be happy about brexit now. If they can stay out of the EU they may be able to retain their Freedom of Speech if they ever had it.
You can find holes in "free speech" for any country or countries (including the US). Nowhere really has "free" speech.
Sadly, the UK is less free than many when it comes to free speech. I don't think any of us would disagree that racism is a bad thing- but in Britain if you say something racist in public you can be arrested for it. I want racism to die- but I don't approve of arresting people for simply saying something bad- it comes down to a very subjective "what is racist?"
If you're rich, you can block the nations press from reporting certain embarrassing stories on you. You can ask for a super-injunction which prevents the press from being allowed to report on a story AND they're not even allowed to say you have asked for the super-injunction. A lot of embarrassing news about the royal family that might be published overseas is blocked in the UK.
TV, video games, etc, are regulary censored. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had to be released under the name Teenage Mutant "Hero" turtles in the UK because "Ninja" was considered too violent a term for UK children. Songs with explicit lyrics are often blocked from UK airways. Certain pron, such as face-sitting is considered indecent in the UK and is not allowed.
UK might actually have more freedom of speech had they remained in the EU.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Well, what's to stop the companies, like wikipedia, etc....from pulling all servers physically IN the EU, and just serving their content as they please from the remaining servers around the world?
Sure, it might slow some pages loading a bit in the EU, but there would then be fuck-all they could do about them serving the content they wished....?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's not much different than ATT deciding that Google should pay them money so their users can access it uninterrupted. Or in other words the business policy of "it'd be a shame if something happened to your business" line of attack. This isn't any different it's just the copyright companies, in this case newspapers and such that are trying to troll Google for billions, even though Google provides these businesses a HUGE service.
This is just the next round by trying to make it a tax rather than a per copyright fee so that Google can't negotiate their way out of it. I suspect they haven't fully realized how Google can counter this quickly and easily and turn it back around on the news providers by simply not linking to them at all, thereby negating the tax. I'm sure there will be news services that will spring up outside the EU and not subject to the tax that will be happy to take all the internet traffic the big news providers used to get.
... may be that this will strongly accelerate migrations from GAFA services to independent, open and untractable systems like Diaspora / Mastodon / Pixelfed etc. :-D
Initially I thought that only 'slow-throughput' sevices could be dealt with this way, but I even discovered Peertube, a movie service.
Honestly, at this moment the only final push these guys need is... a big influx of new users pushed away from GAFA by the new EU restrictions
Herve S.
Are you certain you are not confusing with what happened in Belgium and (i think Germany). There was such a law about links and of course the day the law passed the newspapers were instantly delisted and they had to explicitly allow a free license to search engines to be reachable again.
In Spain, it was a little bit different. Media companies had not the option of opting out of the remuneration scheme. So some services like Yahoo news were shut down immediately after the law passed.
Some commentators speculated that the true goal of the law was to destroy smaller news company who depended on these search engine services but were much less tender with the government than more mainstream media.
I do not know and i am posting on the top of my head so apologies for the eventual innacuracies.
Because you're expanding authority either way - if the government doesn't run things, then private interests will. It's not a choice between "government" and "freedom," it's a choice between "government I have some tiny amount of control over via my vote" and "pseudo-government that can do whatever they want." Unless you live in the US of course where money is speech and can be used to just buy the government anyway.. I suppose in that case the only real difference is the amount of red tape companies like Verizon have to cut through to screw you. Not screwing you isnt a viable option in that environment.
it.wikipedia.org is an encyclopedia written in Italian. It is not located in, or only for use in Italy; it is not a Wikipedia about the subject of Italy.