The prompt removal was after the authorities made Google aware of the video. Even if people had been complaining in the video comments, you cannot expect that Google would actually have a human read all comments for the countless of videos that are uploaded.
The e-commerse directive is clear on this, there are to be no requirement for monitoring in member state laws, and a hosting company is free from penalties in the case they act swiftly after becoming aware of the illegal materials. Google did delete the video 2 hours after they where notified by Italian authorities.
Whether or not it was on the site for 2 months or 2 years doesn't really matter as long as they acted swiftly when they where finally made aware of the situation.
The prosecutor apparently failed in his European Law studies.
Article 15, paragraph 1, e-commerce directive: Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.
If the video was uploaded to a "normal" pay for web hosting ISP, they are also making money from you for serving the video. The point with this is that what you say does not really make any sense in terms of an argument.
Yes, they control the front-page, but does it matter if the front page looks pretty to compared to for example an FTP site where you just would get the file listing?
The e-commerse directive, articles 14 and 15 are very clear on the situation, some argue that they where written with ISPs in mind, but that doesn't really matter because it speaks only of hosting and, until there is a new directive written with cloud like services and not ISPs (though I fail to se the difference), the directive will be the one that is deciding what should be done.
Google acted as soon as they where notified by the authorities about the video and removed it within 2 hours. This fulfils their obligation. And no, google does not read the video comments for all the 50 billion video clips that they host, so claiming that Google was notified because someone wrote a comment that they wanted it to be removed does not hold.
At one place I worked at we had to pass a rotating gate that only opened for one person when he swiped his badge. If you where in a car you had to hand your badges to a guard, and if someone did not have a badge, they had to check in with the security guards.
While it may have been technically possible to cheat the system by faking temporary badges and hope the guards would not look at your face, I think it would be to risky and to much hassle to bother.
No fingerprints needed. By the way, I think it should in general be illegal to use information that is left behind everywhere for normal identification and security purposes. Besides the obvious privacy implications that people raise with fingerprints and DNA (which is a bit of a social issue, though still very important for me), there are several concrete issues related to the problem such as, if fingerprints are left behind they can be faked with relatively little hassle. I recall that the Chaos Computer Club managed to capture a german ministers fingerprints and they produced a cheap kit that could be used to fake it. If added biometric security is needed then stick to face-recognition, iris or retinal scans. The later two are safer and more secure than fingerprints and have zero of the privacy implications since you don't leave behind iris or retinal prints on everything you look at.
"Not saying it is perfect, a big point for criticism for example is that the parliament (AFAIK, still) can only accept or reject the proposed commission as a whole."
Legally yes, but de-facto, the parliament has the last two times said: If these individuals do not go, we will not approve. So, that is not really a big issue.
I think you undervalue the fury from the parliament on the fact that the Council snuck the deal through the day before Lisbon went into effect (had it been done the day after, the EP would have had the right to add their amendments to the deal).
Lots of MEPs are really really pissed at the Council for this and they really want to flex their muscles against the Council (which I think is a good thing since the EP is accountable to the citizens).
It is reasonable that individual requests for banking data in the EU can be done by the US, but as should always be the case, this should go through proper channels, which means a court decision with human beings taking decisions. Secondly, if a person is investigated and not found to be involved in anything, he should be notified and given compensation. Further, if the US should be given access to EU banking data, then the US should grant the EU authorities access to US data (hah... that will never happen...).
From a procedural point of view, this was one of the few real fuckups by the Swedish presidency of the Union. The deal was approved by the Council the day before the Lisbon treaty went into effect. This meant that the Parliament could not have anything to say in the contents (which they would have had if it had been passed the day after). Now, the Parliament cannot amend it, but they can reject it which I think the Council did not think of, now they get what they deserve:)
And for all those who dislike Lisbon, can you tell me what is the problem with parliamentary influence over the additional areas given in the treaty?
"It's bad enough that partial nudity is starting to be considered porn. But, the 'cartoon porn' court ruling should be thrown out, and the supreme court judge(s) should be removed from the bench."
The whole thing certainly makes no sense, but that is NOT HOW A CIVILISED STATE WORKS.
What happens, if the supreme court is interpreting the laws in a certain way that is not really what was intended, but because the law was written in a certain way is that the legislative authorities MAKE AN AMENDMENT to the law, clarifying the situation, the previous convictions by the law still stands however.
It is not the fault of the judge if the law is not clear on the topic. I am sure they did not really define child porn as being between two natural persons, just some other vague description that also included cartoons. This is the fault of the law, not the judge who interprets the law as it is written.
This is called rule of law and is one of the most important foundations for a free society and civilisation.
The handwriting classifier tests I have seen (included a number of variants such as ANNs and SVM kernel machines), in general faired better than human beings on handwriting recognition.
Apparently, licensing in the EU is horrible since collection "agencies" only have mandates in their home state and cannot issue licenses for use in other states. The upcoming commission have promised to patch the system so that an EU-wide license can be granted without any fuss, but as expected the national collection "agencies" are upset...
I say "agencies" within quotes since they are normally set up as a company.
I am not defending it, I am just simply saying that those reasons are basically the only ones that hold at all for having copyright extended after the death of an author.
I do agree with you, but if you want to reform the copyright system you need to come up with ideas that can gain acceptance from more than the slashdot readers. Saying 25 years with the motivation that it covers the children until they start working is pragmatic in the sense that it would be possible to accept it, even for the copyright mafia, since there are virtually no reasons that they can come up with for extending it. 25 years is also a lot less than 50/70 years as in the EU, and 90? as in the US.
The only reason to extend after the death is to ensure that the husband/wife receives a pension and the children are supported until they can start working by themselves. For the first part, 70 years is most likely a bit excessive for most cases, and for the second case definitely excessive. How about: lifetime of spouse or until the youngest child is 25 years, whichever is greater. This may be difficult to administer, in that case, just make it 25 years after death and you have covered it in 95% of all cases.
I did that when I was 8, I ignored the order in the math-book saying that "If you cannot compute the numbers put an x in the answer box", apparently that was someway of saying that "if the result of a - b is negative put an x in the answer box". I completely ignored the order from the math book and wrote down the actual answers to the question, only to find out that this offence resulted in a teacher yelling so high, screaming that I was a bad child because I refused to follow the instructions, that even the pupils in the next class room heard it.
Granted, this happened in EU around 20 years ago, but in any case, it seems that times have not changed, only the means in which you suppress smart students.
Well, if the project is late, your company will be fined a percentage of the agreed price and you will not get your christmas bonus, or maybe even made redundant because of the company getting less money and being unable to pay their employees.
I was expected to work overtime, and I accepted that without question. But, the company I worked at before gave us compensation in terms of extra free time after deliveries being completed.
Note that, programmers in general should not work longer than 40 h per week due to QR issues. Any more than that and the quality of the product will suffer severely as prolonged workdays make the programmers exhausted (not physically, but mentally). Thus, as a programmer you can expect to occasionally go in and work overtime, but on most occasions, you can expect a 40 h week. When overtime is done occasionally, you can usually ask for flexi leave after the deadline.
During the initial referendum on the treaty of Nice in Ireland, a lot of money were flowing from some christian fundamentalist groups in the US to the no-campaign in Ireland.
The Commission is independent from the governments it is appointed by the governments and then approved by the EP, the Council however consists of the government members.
Since Italy is in the EU, they are bound by the directive of e-commerse, especially articles 14 (hosting) and 15 (no obligation to monitor) are important:
Article 14 Hosting
1. Where an information society service is provided that consists of the storage of information provided by a recipient of the service, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service, on condition that:
(a) the provider does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and, as regards claims for damages, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent; or
(b) the provider, upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information.
2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply when the recipient of the service is acting under the authority or the control of the provider.
3. This Article shall not affect the possibility for a court or administrative authority, in accordance with Member States' legal systems, of requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement, nor does it affect the possibility for Member States of establishing procedures governing the removal or disabling of access to information.
Article 15 No general obligation to monitor
1. Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.
2. Member States may establish obligations for information society service providers promptly to inform the competent public authorities of alleged illegal activities undertaken or information provided by recipients of their service or obligations to communicate to the competent authorities, at their request, information enabling the identification of recipients of their service with whom they have storage agreements.
There is no discussion about it, they cannot be found guilty under EU legislation, and if Italy still sentences them, the Italian government can be dragged into the European court of justice, where they will most likely be found to be in violation of the e-commerce directive.
The European Community (EC) still exists as a part of the EU, but from December and onwards it is gone as Lisbon merges all the pillars under the EU umbrella.
Agreed, I have for a long time bitched about the council and how impossible it is for it to fall in its whole, since that would mean that the member-states' governments would all fall at the same time.
I hear a lot of complaints of the commission, but the commission has fallen when it lost its parliamentary support and the commission rules at the parliaments approval. The council however, are not accountable as such, have the right to make law (the commission do not have that right, they are just implementing the EP and ECs decisions in accordance to the treaties) and are not directly elected.
The council is problematic and should as soon as possible be replaced with a directly elected senate, that is disjoint from the member-states' governments. But then, we are talking about the "f-word", so people will scream like stuck pigs.
They are not out of touch. But people seem to think they are, this comes in the combination with the fact that the general population has a very bad knowledge of how the Union works.
I saw one comment in the line of: "damn the commission for forcing the Lisbon treaty on us", while it was in fact the European Council consisting out of the prime-ministers of the member-states who 1) took initiative for it and 2) signed the document.
Now, the other rather amusing thing is that, during previous EP elections, there was a poll in Sweden, where they asked people of whether they wanted the EU to grow into a sort of USE or whatever, in any case, the yes sayers where in the line of 15% for this (not really a majority, but still way over a million people), but when you start asking questions on the specifics and how they think the EU should be run, the solutions are almost always federal in nature.
The main point here is that people has in general no idea what they are talking about, and that the "out of touch" thing being that the top are using fancy words that their opponents have managed to get very charged from a political point of view. This include for example the word "federalism". In the now defunct constitutional treaty, the word "federal" was used in an early draft, but some head of state (think it was Tony Blair) in the negotiation got them to change the word to "supernational", technically they mean exactly the same thing, but the f-word is so charged with some people that they would not be able to stomach seeing it in a treaty.
You may of-course say that this just mean that the council is even more out of touch, but ask yourself:
The council consist of ministers from the member-states (executive officials who suddenly are law-makers), who are indirectly elected, do you think it is better that the directly elected parliament have more to say about any formed law?
Most people, even those who are opposed to an USE type organisation, say yes to the question I just wrote down, this is rather interesting, as that is basically support for a federal EU. A powerful council on the other hand makes the Union a more confederal styled organisation.
I passed through one of these at Schiphol, this was about 2 years ago when no one know what they where. It was there as an experimental deployment, but nowhere did it say that the machine would look through your clothes. For all I know, it looked like an advanced metal detector.
Although, while there was one queue that went to a place where there was a normal metal detector and a guy frisking you, you had to pick a queue at the start, and then you usually picked the shorter queue.
I was mighty pissed when I read about the machines and realised that they where literally peeking under your clothes.
Slashdot Mirror
The prompt removal was after the authorities made Google aware of the video. Even if people had been complaining in the video comments, you cannot expect that Google would actually have a human read all comments for the countless of videos that are uploaded.
The e-commerse directive is clear on this, there are to be no requirement for monitoring in member state laws, and a hosting company is free from penalties in the case they act swiftly after becoming aware of the illegal materials. Google did delete the video 2 hours after they where notified by Italian authorities.
Whether or not it was on the site for 2 months or 2 years doesn't really matter as long as they acted swiftly when they where finally made aware of the situation.
Article 15, paragraph 1, e-commerce directive: Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.
Yes, they control the front-page, but does it matter if the front page looks pretty to compared to for example an FTP site where you just would get the file listing?
The e-commerse directive, articles 14 and 15 are very clear on the situation, some argue that they where written with ISPs in mind, but that doesn't really matter because it speaks only of hosting and, until there is a new directive written with cloud like services and not ISPs (though I fail to se the difference), the directive will be the one that is deciding what should be done.
Google acted as soon as they where notified by the authorities about the video and removed it within 2 hours. This fulfils their obligation. And no, google does not read the video comments for all the 50 billion video clips that they host, so claiming that Google was notified because someone wrote a comment that they wanted it to be removed does not hold.
Put in a rotating gate that only let one person pass at a time, then it will be more or less impossible to swipe two badges at the same time.
At one place I worked at we had to pass a rotating gate that only opened for one person when he swiped his badge. If you where in a car you had to hand your badges to a guard, and if someone did not have a badge, they had to check in with the security guards.
While it may have been technically possible to cheat the system by faking temporary badges and hope the guards would not look at your face, I think it would be to risky and to much hassle to bother.
No fingerprints needed. By the way, I think it should in general be illegal to use information that is left behind everywhere for normal identification and security purposes. Besides the obvious privacy implications that people raise with fingerprints and DNA (which is a bit of a social issue, though still very important for me), there are several concrete issues related to the problem such as, if fingerprints are left behind they can be faked with relatively little hassle. I recall that the Chaos Computer Club managed to capture a german ministers fingerprints and they produced a cheap kit that could be used to fake it. If added biometric security is needed then stick to face-recognition, iris or retinal scans. The later two are safer and more secure than fingerprints and have zero of the privacy implications since you don't leave behind iris or retinal prints on everything you look at.
"Not saying it is perfect, a big point for criticism for example is that the parliament (AFAIK, still) can only accept or reject the proposed commission as a whole." Legally yes, but de-facto, the parliament has the last two times said: If these individuals do not go, we will not approve. So, that is not really a big issue.
The European governments already approved the deal in the Council. It is the the Union itself that is fighting to protect the citizens in this case.
I think you undervalue the fury from the parliament on the fact that the Council snuck the deal through the day before Lisbon went into effect (had it been done the day after, the EP would have had the right to add their amendments to the deal). Lots of MEPs are really really pissed at the Council for this and they really want to flex their muscles against the Council (which I think is a good thing since the EP is accountable to the citizens).
It is reasonable that individual requests for banking data in the EU can be done by the US, but as should always be the case, this should go through proper channels, which means a court decision with human beings taking decisions. Secondly, if a person is investigated and not found to be involved in anything, he should be notified and given compensation. Further, if the US should be given access to EU banking data, then the US should grant the EU authorities access to US data (hah... that will never happen...). From a procedural point of view, this was one of the few real fuckups by the Swedish presidency of the Union. The deal was approved by the Council the day before the Lisbon treaty went into effect. This meant that the Parliament could not have anything to say in the contents (which they would have had if it had been passed the day after). Now, the Parliament cannot amend it, but they can reject it which I think the Council did not think of, now they get what they deserve :)
And for all those who dislike Lisbon, can you tell me what is the problem with parliamentary influence over the additional areas given in the treaty?
"It's bad enough that partial nudity is starting to be considered porn. But, the 'cartoon porn' court ruling should be thrown out, and the supreme court judge(s) should be removed from the bench." The whole thing certainly makes no sense, but that is NOT HOW A CIVILISED STATE WORKS. What happens, if the supreme court is interpreting the laws in a certain way that is not really what was intended, but because the law was written in a certain way is that the legislative authorities MAKE AN AMENDMENT to the law, clarifying the situation, the previous convictions by the law still stands however. It is not the fault of the judge if the law is not clear on the topic. I am sure they did not really define child porn as being between two natural persons, just some other vague description that also included cartoons. This is the fault of the law, not the judge who interprets the law as it is written. This is called rule of law and is one of the most important foundations for a free society and civilisation.
That sounds a bit derivative :)
The handwriting classifier tests I have seen (included a number of variants such as ANNs and SVM kernel machines), in general faired better than human beings on handwriting recognition.
Apparently, licensing in the EU is horrible since collection "agencies" only have mandates in their home state and cannot issue licenses for use in other states. The upcoming commission have promised to patch the system so that an EU-wide license can be granted without any fuss, but as expected the national collection "agencies" are upset... I say "agencies" within quotes since they are normally set up as a company.
I am not defending it, I am just simply saying that those reasons are basically the only ones that hold at all for having copyright extended after the death of an author. I do agree with you, but if you want to reform the copyright system you need to come up with ideas that can gain acceptance from more than the slashdot readers. Saying 25 years with the motivation that it covers the children until they start working is pragmatic in the sense that it would be possible to accept it, even for the copyright mafia, since there are virtually no reasons that they can come up with for extending it. 25 years is also a lot less than 50/70 years as in the EU, and 90? as in the US.
The only reason to extend after the death is to ensure that the husband/wife receives a pension and the children are supported until they can start working by themselves. For the first part, 70 years is most likely a bit excessive for most cases, and for the second case definitely excessive. How about: lifetime of spouse or until the youngest child is 25 years, whichever is greater. This may be difficult to administer, in that case, just make it 25 years after death and you have covered it in 95% of all cases.
I did that when I was 8, I ignored the order in the math-book saying that "If you cannot compute the numbers put an x in the answer box", apparently that was someway of saying that "if the result of a - b is negative put an x in the answer box". I completely ignored the order from the math book and wrote down the actual answers to the question, only to find out that this offence resulted in a teacher yelling so high, screaming that I was a bad child because I refused to follow the instructions, that even the pupils in the next class room heard it. Granted, this happened in EU around 20 years ago, but in any case, it seems that times have not changed, only the means in which you suppress smart students.
Well, if the project is late, your company will be fined a percentage of the agreed price and you will not get your christmas bonus, or maybe even made redundant because of the company getting less money and being unable to pay their employees. I was expected to work overtime, and I accepted that without question. But, the company I worked at before gave us compensation in terms of extra free time after deliveries being completed. Note that, programmers in general should not work longer than 40 h per week due to QR issues. Any more than that and the quality of the product will suffer severely as prolonged workdays make the programmers exhausted (not physically, but mentally). Thus, as a programmer you can expect to occasionally go in and work overtime, but on most occasions, you can expect a 40 h week. When overtime is done occasionally, you can usually ask for flexi leave after the deadline.
During the initial referendum on the treaty of Nice in Ireland, a lot of money were flowing from some christian fundamentalist groups in the US to the no-campaign in Ireland.
The Commission is independent from the governments it is appointed by the governments and then approved by the EP, the Council however consists of the government members.
Huh, the deal is about to be agreed within the Council, not the Commission. Please explain what the hell you are talking about.
Article 14 Hosting
1. Where an information society service is provided that consists of the storage of information provided by a recipient of the service, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service, on condition that: (a) the provider does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and, as regards claims for damages, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent; or (b) the provider, upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information.
2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply when the recipient of the service is acting under the authority or the control of the provider.
3. This Article shall not affect the possibility for a court or administrative authority, in accordance with Member States' legal systems, of requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement, nor does it affect the possibility for Member States of establishing procedures governing the removal or disabling of access to information.
Article 15 No general obligation to monitor
1. Member States shall not impose a general obligation on providers, when providing the services covered by Articles 12, 13 and 14, to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor a general obligation actively to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.
2. Member States may establish obligations for information society service providers promptly to inform the competent public authorities of alleged illegal activities undertaken or information provided by recipients of their service or obligations to communicate to the competent authorities, at their request, information enabling the identification of recipients of their service with whom they have storage agreements.
There is no discussion about it, they cannot be found guilty under EU legislation, and if Italy still sentences them, the Italian government can be dragged into the European court of justice, where they will most likely be found to be in violation of the e-commerce directive.
The European Community (EC) still exists as a part of the EU, but from December and onwards it is gone as Lisbon merges all the pillars under the EU umbrella.
Agreed, I have for a long time bitched about the council and how impossible it is for it to fall in its whole, since that would mean that the member-states' governments would all fall at the same time.
I hear a lot of complaints of the commission, but the commission has fallen when it lost its parliamentary support and the commission rules at the parliaments approval. The council however, are not accountable as such, have the right to make law (the commission do not have that right, they are just implementing the EP and ECs decisions in accordance to the treaties) and are not directly elected.
The council is problematic and should as soon as possible be replaced with a directly elected senate, that is disjoint from the member-states' governments. But then, we are talking about the "f-word", so people will scream like stuck pigs.
They are not out of touch. But people seem to think they are, this comes in the combination with the fact that the general population has a very bad knowledge of how the Union works.
I saw one comment in the line of: "damn the commission for forcing the Lisbon treaty on us", while it was in fact the European Council consisting out of the prime-ministers of the member-states who 1) took initiative for it and 2) signed the document.
Now, the other rather amusing thing is that, during previous EP elections, there was a poll in Sweden, where they asked people of whether they wanted the EU to grow into a sort of USE or whatever, in any case, the yes sayers where in the line of 15% for this (not really a majority, but still way over a million people), but when you start asking questions on the specifics and how they think the EU should be run, the solutions are almost always federal in nature.
The main point here is that people has in general no idea what they are talking about, and that the "out of touch" thing being that the top are using fancy words that their opponents have managed to get very charged from a political point of view. This include for example the word "federalism". In the now defunct constitutional treaty, the word "federal" was used in an early draft, but some head of state (think it was Tony Blair) in the negotiation got them to change the word to "supernational", technically they mean exactly the same thing, but the f-word is so charged with some people that they would not be able to stomach seeing it in a treaty.
You may of-course say that this just mean that the council is even more out of touch, but ask yourself:
The council consist of ministers from the member-states (executive officials who suddenly are law-makers), who are indirectly elected, do you think it is better that the directly elected parliament have more to say about any formed law?
Most people, even those who are opposed to an USE type organisation, say yes to the question I just wrote down, this is rather interesting, as that is basically support for a federal EU. A powerful council on the other hand makes the Union a more confederal styled organisation.
I passed through one of these at Schiphol, this was about 2 years ago when no one know what they where. It was there as an experimental deployment, but nowhere did it say that the machine would look through your clothes. For all I know, it looked like an advanced metal detector.
Although, while there was one queue that went to a place where there was a normal metal detector and a guy frisking you, you had to pick a queue at the start, and then you usually picked the shorter queue.
I was mighty pissed when I read about the machines and realised that they where literally peeking under your clothes.