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Rick Falkvinge writes that on October 10th a committee within the European Parliament will vote on future copyright law in Europe. Former MEP (2009-2014), Christian Engström, provided a description of how to provide feedback to the European Parliament. Polite, clear, to the point feedback from EU citizens and residents would be most useful.
In particular, there are two really bad proposals and three really good proposals that warrant special attention, mixed in and buried in all the words. The good propoals are the mandatory freedom of panorama, the freedom to remix, and the freedom for anybody to datamine. The two bad proposals, quite dreadful actually, are to require sites to carry out mandatory upload filtering and a link tax which makes it impossible to link to articles in the legacy media.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:05PM
Okay, this thread got cynical real fast. Yes, there's a lot of corruption. Yes, copyright extension clear out to 75/95 years was deeply unpopular, and should never have been voted into law.
But there are other ways to fight. And the first thing to keep firmly in mind is that government's power is extremely limited. They can't make water flow uphill, the sun rise in the west, or pi = 3. Copying belongs to the masses now, and no government backed edict will ever change or undo that. That whole 2nd Amendment Right to Bear Arms stuff misses a crucial point: the pen is mightier than the sword. Free Speech is much more important, and ought to be expanded into a Freedom of Knowledge right specifying that content may not be owned, you can't throw people in jail just for making a recording, and accusing half the world of theft will get you slapped back hard with a libel and slander class action suit.
Protest, sure. Got to let doubters know where the people stand. But ultimately, should they pass some idiotic copyright strengthening measure, so what? Those bozos who lobbied and bribed intensely will have only wasted their money, and that's good. The law will have no teeth, be unenforceable, and we can freely ignore it. Eventually it may be repealed, or the courts may strike it down. Meantime, support your local Pirate Bay, aka the public library. And someday, even the content ownership cartels will come to their senses and figure out that lawmakers took them to the cleaners, accepted their bribes to pass their stupid laws.