To people getting their knickers in a twist: Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Portugal, with all due respect, are hardly beacons of anti-copyright maximalism. Chances are that most of them simply couldn't be arsed to write the relevant laws, over a timespan that included such facetious events as a 2-year-long global pandemic. If I had to prioritize lawmaking, I would also put some copyright bullshit at the bottom of the pile. Now they got their ears pinched, so they'll come around doing it - or not, in which case they'll pay a fine.
True. Also a lot of other EU countries are being sued for not transposing other sets of laws. I think almost every EU country is being sued for something like this.
You can’t be serious. After the clusterfuck of brexit other countries will be very, very careful even thinking about leaving. And if some country decides to leave the union it wont be over a inconsequential fine and lawsuit.
"Rightsholders", "stakeholders"... I cringe every time I read those words. Euphemisms for monopolists lobbying and weaponising the state in the defense of their monopolies.
There is a problem with any legislative process that begins with the executive obligating the country to adopt certain specific laws, and only then asks the legislature whether those certain specific laws should become the law of the land.
I don't fully understand the logic of this kind of legislative process. If the EU can make it binding on member states to introduce a certain law, why not perform the entire process at an EU level? If there is some benefit to delegating the task, then why not include the possibility of a national veto at implementation stage, when the nation is more fully informed? It seems to be a process designed and intended to cause conflict and euroscepticism.
The US has entire classes of financial instruments that are sold exclusively to the Chinese government.
You can't solely be linked by physical goods and it can't be one-sided. That results in trade imbalance which results in war. See the Opium Wars, for example.
The China/US link is frequently overestimated it’s only 14% of total US trade. China isn’t even the US’s largest trading partner, it’s 3rd after Canada and Mexico, with a small lead over the EU. Really though the top 4 spots are all fairly close to each other.
Look into the influence the Chinese gov has on Hollywood and video games. The fact that the Chinese market is a economically profitable one makes all of our media kowtow to them, I would call that a social integration.
> That can't work because a deep economic integration is... surprise, surprise, a deep political and social integration.
That's not really the case. Many countries have economic ties with other coutries but no political or social ties. For example, the US imports most of the Uranium that it uses, but that doesn't mean political and social integration between the US and Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Russia or Namibia. [1]
Introduce new laws (into operation) or introduce new bills (into the agenda)? I thought it could introduce new laws that were directly applicable so long as they were related to certain matters. But the bills for the laws have to be introduced by the commission. The whole thing is sufficiently confusing that I could be wrong.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure that it is a standard EU compromise. The governments wrote the rules in the context of what must surely be constant disagreements between the parliaments and the governments (at least if the politics of my own non-EU country is anything to go by). I can't believe they didn't know what they were doing - taking power from their own colleagues in parliaments.
This went through the EU Parliament. It was not an instruction handed down as dictat by an unelected bureaucrat or executive.
The same process is how every other EU wide regulation goes into effect. EU passes it, the member states get their input during the EU process, and the member states are then obligated to abide by the rules.
An analogous process, which is not a perfect analog but is similar, is how US federal rules get passed down to the states. The states get their input on federal legislation at the federal level, but then must abide by the resulting federal law.
I'd also add that giving every country a veto on any legislation would basically guarantee nothing gets done.
That's not how the US federal system works at all. It's not even similar. States are free to not enforce federal law and ignore it entirely. States cannot be directly compelled by the federal government to pass laws, though in practice they have done it a couple of times using education funding and highway funding as a carrot/stick.
Another big difference is that the state governments themselves have no representation in the federal government since the passage of the 17th amendment.
> The states get their input on federal legislation at the federal level, but then must abide by the resulting federal law.
States have zero input on federal legislation (except constitutional amendments, which are rare, and not really "legislation").
Until the 17th Amendment, states had input via the Senate, but now that senators are elected directly by voters, states have no formal representation at the federal level.
There was also ambiguity in how the vote was formulated and what yes and no meant.
Many people demonstrated against the changes and they got pushed through by a suspicious voting process by Herr Voss.
You're now a criminal if you offer your webspace for free and someon3 uploads anything unlawful in the broadest sense.
* The EU Commission (headed by commissioners appointed by the government of the members, 1 per member)
* The EU council (makde up of the heads of government of the members, 1 vote per member) - so sort of in line with US senate as originally enacted (where the state government chooses the senators)
* The EU parliament (voted directly by the population, broadly in line with the population, although smaller members get more MEPs per person) - so broadly in line with US congress
in the US, I believe states have to meet federal laws, they can't pass a law saying "murder is legal" or whatever. It's an imperfect system, but so is the US system.
Not quite. It’s overlapping jurisdiction and overlapping sovereignty.
Murder would still be illegal under common law, but let’s take your hypothetical and say that it wasn’t, and say that a state didn’t have a statute against murder: the Federal Government could prosecute under Federal law in the Federal court system.
The States have no obligation to charge under that same Federal statute though, and in fact can’t because it’s not their law.
Great distinction. It's how states get away with making weed "legal" even thought its illegal federal. Today, a federal agent could easily charge with you having a schedule 1 drug on your person in California and it would easily ruin your life. Banks generally won't deal with weed stores for this very reason so California had a vote to make it's on state-run bank but I can't remember if it passed.
That said, I don't think federal agents ever charge anyone primarily for possessing weed though I wouldn't be surprised if they add it on to an additional charge.
A couple decades ago, Alabama had no state law against prostitution, relying on the counties to have such laws, which all of them did. But there were certain parts of the causeway over Mobile Bay that weren't claimed by the adjacent counties, leading to small buildings used for prostitution being erected on some of the built-up land next to the road. Not sure about the outcome, going to guess the state DOT claimed ownership of the land, even if no county exerted jurisdiction, and used state law to have the buildings removed.
Huh. That is interesting and this is why I never take anything for granted in State laws and am willing to only speak in very very broad generalities about “the States”.
A piece of land being outside of a “county” isn’t something that could happen in my State because the counties are effectively administrative divisions that encompass all the lands and waters of the State so where one county ends the next begins up until the State and national borders anyway. Beyond those lines, it’s somebody else’s problem.
> Murder is not illegal under English Common Law, it is unlawful.
Correct, and thanks!
> So have US states actually passed statutes against murder, as opposed to simply setting the penalties for it?
I don’t have a state-by-state breakdown, but if you murder someone in any State, you can be prosecuted for it by that State. You can check Florida Title XLVI Chapter 782 to see what their Homicide Statute defines as “Murder”.
> in the US, I believe states have to meet federal laws, they can't pass a law saying "murder is legal" or whatever. It's an imperfect system, but so is the US system.
Marijuana is illegal at the federal level yet many states have legalized it.
There is no federal law requiring States to enforce federal drug policy. The inability of the federal government to compel state laws has been a source of tension throughout US history.
For a non-controversial, consider the drinking age in the US. To a first approximation, this was set by Congress in 1984 with the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. However, this law doesn't actually set a drinking age. It witholds federal highway funding from states that refuse to do so.
For a more controversial example, consider the medicaid expansion portion of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not compell states to implement it, allowing some states to not do so. For completeness, I should point out that the expansion was 100% federally funded to start with, and dropped gradually to 90% by 2020, where it is set to remain indefinitely.
Another major example from US history is the Fugitive Slave Act, which required non-slave states to assist in returning escaped slaves. Some Northern states refused to coorporate with this law and was part of what led to the civil war. (Ironically, this is probably the clearest way that "states' rights" was a cause of the civil war, but I don't think it is what most people have in mind when they say "states" rights".
I don’t believe the states have to embrace everything the federal government says - see marijuana and enhanced IDs as examples. However the federal government often ties receiving federal funds to passing and enforcing federal policy. So don’t want to issue identification documents in compliance with the real ID act? Loose a portion of the highway funds. Want legal pot? Loose a portion of the highway funds. And so on.
State law can't override federal law. They have just instructed state police to not enforce that specific law. You could still be convicted by the FBI if they were to get involved for whatever reason, such as selling across state lines.
Constitution gives federal government certain rights. Everything else is up to states.
So states could declare murder legal. But would probably fail as a 1st amendment violation. Which is part of the constitution is above federal law.
Now the constitution grants federal government, the right to regulate interstate commerce. Which has been abused horribly to regulate things that have nothing to do with interstate commerce.
It's also worth highlighting that in the US Federal representatives are democratically elected by the constituents whereas EU commissions are appointed. The US has Federal commissions called committees, but they have less legislative power
EU commissioners work in partnership with elected Members of EU Parliament (MEP), for the simple reason that it makes no sense to write laws that MEPs will then veto.
Those aren’t exactly commissions. They’re an organizational and productivity scheme of the Legislative branches through which they subdivide work between sitting democratically elected legislators. If something makes it out of committee, it can make it to the floor, but no committee is committing legislative acts on its own.
There are Executive agencies called “commissions”, but they don’t have bonafide legislative power, so much as a scheme by which they try to reinterpret the legislation that authorized their existence and outlined their powers and jurisdiction to accumulate to themselves more authority such that a Court will occasionally step in and say “naw dawg”.
> why not include the possibility of a national veto at implementation stage
In case of such a veto of a single member, the whole legislative process would in the general case be set back to were it started, because the other members had agreed under the condition that everyone implements the agreement and other countries might want to renegotiate.
The EU's ability to force a country to a certain legislation goes even further: In the early years of the EU every country had to consent to an EU legislation; today, under the Lisbon Treaty[1], EU countries must implement an EU regulation in certain areas even if they voted against it. This is based on the belief that a union of 27 states would otherwise hardly be able to act.
There had been cases were single members had been granted specific exceptions (most notably the UK, during its membership, and Denmark when it joined) or must meet certain conditions before they need to implement something (for example, in principle every EU country except Denmark must introduce the Euro when it meets certain criteria; but the EU tolerates that Sweden deliberately fails one criterium, since it has voted in a referendum to stay out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism II). But these exceptions had been agreed on beforehand and some date from a time when the sovereignty of the individual states was valued more highly. Today, the EU tends to avoid such special rules for general cases as far as possible, because legal fragmentation is seen as problematic.
> There are justifications for using a directive rather than a regulation: (i) it complies with the EU's desire for "subsidiarity"; (ii) it acknowledges that different member States have different legal systems, legal traditions and legal processes; and (iii) each Member State has leeway to choose its own statutory wording, rather than accepting the Brussels' official "Eurospeak" terminology.
> For example, while EU Directive 2009/20/EC (which simply requires all vessels visiting EU ports to have P&I cover) could have been a regulation (without requiring member states to implement the directive), the desire for subsidiarity was paramount, so a directive was the chosen vehicle.
The countries, or their representatives in the EU parliament? Because local elections are separate from the EU ones, so it's entirely possible for their opinions on legislation to diverge.
The directive was approved by the European parliament and the Council of the EU. The Council of the EU is made up of the governments of the member states of the EU. Therefore, when one says "Portugal voted for the directive", one means "the government of Portugal voted for the directive in the Council of the EU". This was the wrong thing for Portugal (or indeed, any government) to do because no government can guarantee their parliament will change the law in a particular way, and the parliament might indeed prefer to eject the government rather than change the law. In this case, it has bitten Portugal and not Germany, but in principle it could bite any of them. It's a very strange process. It seems like provision should be made for a national veto at the implementation stage, or the entire process should be conducted at the EU stage and directly applicable. But the requirement for a translation into national law without the possibility of rejection at that point seems deeply problematic.
My understanding in the US is that the Executive can sign international treaties, and those are not subject ot veto by the Legislative
> In recent decades, presidents have frequently entered the United States into international agreements without the advice and consent of the Senate. These are called "executive agreements." Though not brought before the Senate for approval, executive agreements are still binding on the parties under international law. [0]
An EU law is an international treaty. Can the Senate kick out the US president and refuse to agree to the treaty he signed?
The government of the member states is not the parliament of the member states.
Also between the date something pass at EU level and during the delay to transfer directive governments changes, parliament electives can be reelected, etc.
Not all of them. Regulations and decisions yes, Directives no. This one is a directive.
"Regulations and decisions become binding automatically throughout the EU on their date of application. However, they may require changes in national legislation, and may require implementation by national agencies or regulators."
"Directives on the other hand, must be incorporated by EU countries into their national legislation.
Each directive contains a deadline by which EU countries must incorporate its provisions into their national legislation and inform the Commission to that effect."
I presume countries like Finland and Denmark somehow oppose these rules, while countries like Bulgaria and Poland don't know what they are doing and slacked on the topics in this particular domain.
For everyone cringing at these new rules - just imagine what they would have been without Julia Reda (singular Pirate MEP at the time) who fought this law with everything that she had. We mustn't forget the many NGOs, and the fact that the Greens supported her in the fight. But Reda was something special.
Germans coming both with the disease and a pinch of a cure. What's the role of German publishers and media companies in lobbying for the new rules? Had their activists been so special, they'd keep their copyright lobbyists chained and gagged somewhere domestically.
>Art. 23. Permitted personal use
1. Without the consent of the author, it is allowed to use the already disseminated work free of charge for personal use. This provision does not authorize building based on someone else's architectural and architectural and urban work, and to use electronic databases that meet the characteristics of a work, unless it concerns one's own scientific use not related to a commercial purpose.
>2. The scope of own personal use includes the use of single copies of works by a group of people who are in a personal relationship, in particular kinship, affinity or social relationship.
Most times this kind of thing happens it is _not_ because the member states in questions want to "resist" the regulation or anything like that.
Instead it most times because they just failed to write down and pass a law, e.g. because they forgot, had to handle a pandemic, infighting not specific to the law dragging law making speed down and many similar issues.
One example I vaguely remember was when law makers wrote the country laws for some regulation they wanted to push _beyond_ what the regulation required in a bad way which lead to the law being prevented in one way or another again, and again, and again until the time period to put the regulation into local law was over...
So assumptions about countries being against a regulation, or "that they then shouldn't have voted for it" or similar can not be done without looking into the specifics of the country and regulation in question.
In my lifetime, all copyright changes have either been term extensions or measures that effectively strengthened copyright protections like the DMCA. So if I had to guess...
It's way worse than DMCA actually. With DMCA you can get takedown requests when one of your users uploads copyrighted works. Comply with the takedown requests in reasonable ways and you're fine.
The EU legislation means that platforms are liable beforehand.
Copyright law changes aren't good or bad; they serve certain people's interest and harm others'. Is it a good change or a bad change? That depends on what you want out of the law.
Avoiding things like this is exactly the kind of good thing thah could've come out of Brexit, except that every concievable government that could be elected there is likely to be worse on these issues rather than better.
I haven't actually read the rules themselves, but not the how. How do they do what is enumerated below from the Tweet?:
"These two Directives aim to modernise copyright rules for consumers and creators to make the most of the digital world. They protect rightholders from different sectors, stimulating the creation and circulation of more high-value content. 2/3 #copyrightdirective #article15"
I mean, yes, that is what happens to Member States who don't bring in legislation relating to the EU competencies when passed. That's... y'know, the point.
Under Article 258 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), if the Member State concerned does not comply with the reasoned opinion within the period laid down by the Commission, the latter may bring the matter before the Court of Justice of the European Union. Additionally, under Article 260(3) TFEU, the Commission can call on the Court of Justice of the EU to impose financial sanctions on the Member States that failed to fulfil their obligation to notify measures transposing a legislative directive
Pretty much this. And it's not the first time this happens.
And it's usually not an issue of "we don't want to" (I don't remember if any country overwhelmingly voted against it) but more of legislative delays (kicking the can) and such.
> Today, the European Commission decided to refer 11 Member States to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to notify the Commission of transposition measures under two Directives with respect to copyright.
> The Commission decided to refer Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Portugal to the Court of Justice of the EU following their failure to notify complete transposition measures on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (Directive (EU) 2019/790).
> Secondly, with regard to a more specific EU Directive on copyright and related rights applicable to certain online transmissions (EU Directive 2019/789), the Commission is referring Bulgaria, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Portugal to the Court of Justice for not notifying complete transposition of EU rules to the Commission
That didn't need to be a tweet of a screenshot of some text really, did it?
Also I count six countries there, you can't double-count a country just because there are two charges.
Indeed. And just to flag that this is not at all unusual, rather it is a regular process of EU law making - the European Commission monitors and ensures that the 27 Member States all implement the jointly agreed laws. Most cases never go to trial/penalty stage, rather the infringement process itself serves to resolve the issue.
See here the 'infringement cases ' statistics. 874 such cases opened in 2021.
Copyright reforms pushed by American and German copyright bullies, lobbyists, predators, and stalkers. The days of your entertainment and content will come to an end. Unfortunately the bullies will likely remain unpunished.