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
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Julia Reda (a Member of the European Parliament from Germany) writes in her bog about upcoming censorship legislation in the European Union and a call to action for those most affected, specifically the Free Software community.
The starting point for this legislation was a fight between big corporations, the music industry and YouTube, over money. The music industry complained that they receive less each time one of their music videos is played on a video platform like YouTube than they do when their tracks are listened to on subscription services like Spotify, calling the difference the "value gap". They started a successful lobbying effort: The upload filter law is primarily intended to give them a bargaining chip to demand more money from Google in negotiations. Meanwhile, all other platforms are caught in the middle of that fight, including code sharing communities.
The lobbying has engrained in many legislators' minds the false idea that platforms which host uploads for profit are necessarily exploiting creators.
The fight affects both sides of the Atlantic because once bad rules are enacted on either side, it is not uncommon for calls for "harmonization" to come from the other.
Earlier on SN:
Mulled EU Copyright Shakeup Will Turn Us Into Robo-Censors
EU Parliament's Copyright Rapporteur Has Learned Nothing from Year-long Copyright Debate
European Commission Hides Copyright Evidence Again
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:40AM (11 children)
There should be a regulation that whenever it can be shown that important evidence showing negative effects or lack of positive effects of a regulation was actively hidden before the regulation was installed, that regulation automatically gets invalidated.
Yes, I know that will never happen. But one can dream.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:57AM (9 children)
Add in that the legislators automatically get charged with something like criminal negligence and/or corruption.
While we're dreaming, I mean.
(Score: 5, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:12AM (8 children)
While we're dreaming, add that this corruption and lying leads to such a huge public outcry that the dirty politicians are forced to resign, and the donors who backed the position are exposed, tried for corruption, found guilty, and imprisoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:45AM (7 children)
One better,.....
Lynch all professional politicians. Anyone doing politics as a profession is per definition a money-grubbing, untrustworthy thief.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:52AM (6 children)
AC misjudges tone of thread; posts idiotic comment. More at 11.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:39PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:49PM (4 children)
Eh. It's not always stupid to mention Nazis, but it's always stupid to say "hang all politicians".
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:10PM (3 children)
Hmmm... why? (see sig :)
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Friday January 19 2018, @12:54AM (2 children)
What next? The Spanish inquisition?
Or the Pratchet solution [wikipedia.org]? (read it - you''ll recognise the politician connection)
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday January 19 2018, @07:14PM (1 child)
Well, that was unexpected.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:42AM
It's amongst our weaponry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @05:57PM
IANAL, but was actively hidden seems brim-packed with a weaseling out potential. After all, it is not that the politicians, lawmakers even really care about the evidence, they just need a little bit of an excuse to cover their asses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:46PM
Either a reporter with a ax to grind
and/or
Regulatory capture with a missing feedback path.
It may be that 'regulatory capture' is the new, nice sounding word for the process leading to the replacement of democracy with an oligarchy.
If so, then is the EU leaning East?
(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!
(Score: 3, Informative) by meustrus on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:04PM
Without any explanation of the issue the European Commission is hiding evidence on, this is nothing but a dumb hit piece. It doesn't even achieve the goal of generating public backlash against their policy, because the summary and the whole first half of TFA refuse to explain what that policy is.
But luckily, the second half of the article, after the words "Now let’s look at why the EC actually tried to sweep this study under the carpet", actually digs into the issue, which is immediately summarized thusly:
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:52PM
You seem to under the mistaken impression that the EP is a fair, open, and honest democratic institution.
Let me rid you of any such delusions. Have some Kool-Aid.