Those who start to scratch the surface, such as Julia Reda – German Member of the European Parliament for the Greens/EFA Group – and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), are uncovering how the EC carefully cherry-picked the evidence that supports their ideological policy choices, whilst withholding evidence going against them. The EC officials must have confused policy-based evidence making with evidence-based policy making.
Just before the 2017 Winter break, MEP Reda uncovered another attempt of the EC to swipe evidence under the carpet. Officials from the EC's Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT) where caught in the act, when they 'kindly' reminded a researcher of the EC's Joint Research Centre (JRC) to not publish a study, contradicting the EC's policy choice, on the highly debated press publishers' right (Article 11) at the request of their hierarchy.
Source : European Commission Hides Copyright Evidence Again
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:54PM (4 children)
Is it just me, or was it really difficult to figure out what the heck TFA was about? I mean, yeah, apparently the European Commission is hiding something or discounting studies on something related in some way to copyright -- but it's definitely unclear from the summary what exactly they are hiding, what their position is, or really just about anything about anything.
And I had to read over 20 paragraphs in TFA until I finally got a sense of what this whole business was about. I tend to follow quite a bit about copyright law and disputes, particularly in the U.S. While I know a bit about European laws, I haven't been aware of whatever this particular controversy is about... and it took me 20 paragraphs of an article to even get a good sense of what the EC's perspective might be and what exactly they may be "hiding."
It's as if the New York Times decided to publish an article about the Pentagon Papers and what the U.S. government was hiding, but spent the first 20 paragraphs of the article telling us how bad it was that they were hiding stuff about foreign policy (or something incredibly vague), how it was against federal law 284Q.345989 blah-blah that they were hiding stuff, how some researcher named Jim was annoyed that they were hiding stuff and how wrong some guy named Bill thought it was that they'd hide stuff... blah-blah-blah how awful all of this really is... and the horrible impact it has on foreign policy and the government and how it's bad, bad, bad...
And then, finally in paragraph 21, we find out the government was hiding stuff about VIETNAM. That would be silly. And incredibly bad writing.
I was going to criticize the person who excerpted the summary because the two paragraphs posted here are completely unclear... but the majority of the article is like that. Don't get me wrong: I like reading long pieces and I have an attention span. But burying essential information about what a controversy is about that deep into an article is really weird.
Oh -- and if you want to know what TFA is actually about, apparently there's a study saying news aggregator services may not have as substantial an impact on news revenue as some people claim. And the EC apparently ignored it in some debate over copyright policy. I guess. I really was lost and bored long before I actually got to any substantive info in TFA and had decided it was so poorly written that I couldn't focus anymore.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:02PM (1 child)
So you say, TFA is essentially like your comment?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:14PM
Yeah, that was actually a bit of a joke. I wasn't going to talk about the main concern of TFA at all (since none of the other comments here have yet -- obviously nobody else bothered to read that far), but I thought I'd shove that in at the end, both for information purposes and to make a point through analogy.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:38PM
It wasn't just you.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @02:29AM
i clicked on it just to make sure someone else was going to bitch and moan about it, so good on you!