EU Considering Regulating Video Bloggers 351
Aglassis writes to tell us that recent proposed EU legislation could require anyone running a website featuring video content to acquire a broadcast license. From the article: "Personal websites would have to be licensed as a "television-like service". Once again the reasoning behind such legislation is said to be in order to set minimum standards on areas such as hate speech and the protection of children. In reality this directive would do nothing to protect children or prevent hate speech - unless you judge protecting children to be denying them access to anything that is not government regulated or you assume hate speech to be the criticism of government actions and policy."
Re:Never going to work (Score:5, Interesting)
On the up-side (Score:4, Interesting)
On another note, it seems very interesting, timing-wise, that this would come up so soon after Google acquires Youtube.
How? (Score:3, Interesting)
Enforcement is going to be the pain here...are they going to go after hosting services that aren't located in any EU country? Or just after the originator of the material? Or the person holding the domain registration?
Unenforceable laws do nothing but weaken the entire legal system, and it doesn't matter what nation or group of nations sets the law up. My advice, unasked: don't bother. 'Nuff said.
Re:Taxman! (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime [wikipedia.org]
Next thing you know I'll need a licence before I can hum a tune in my head.
They can have my videoblog when they pry it from my cold dead server.
Re:The current face of censorship: "Hate speech" (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that's necessarily true, historically. Look at the history of free speech in the United States: in the last century, we've seen net progress in the scope of what people can say and write without fear of government interference. The obvious example that comes to mind is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger [wikipedia.org]
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be vigilant about our rights--support the ACLU, and don't vote for Joe Lieberman.
Flash (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This will discriminate against he deaf (Score:2, Interesting)
I have no numbers to go on here, but... SURELY the written word continues to be the primary way that deaf people communicate online? IMs, e-mail, and web content? I have a hard time imagining that people would rather fire up the webcame and sign at each other to send an asynchronous message to someone
Re:The current face of censorship: "Hate speech" (Score:2, Interesting)
*public schools notwithstanding
Re:This will discriminate against he deaf (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, a lot of people prefer firing up their webcam or their videophone over textual communication, often for similar reasons why hearing people prefer the phone, but not limited to these.
Also, there are a lot of deaf people who feel far more comfortable with signed languages than with written text. Sadly, literacy is still a big, and contentious, issue in deaf education.
Several examples to back up my point:
Re:The only thing without frontiers is (Score:3, Interesting)
1: We don't lose the right to habeas corpus. You do. An enemy combatant - which can be anyone - can be put in prison indefinitely, and subjected to any act that does not meet a very narrow definition of torture. Habeas copus is an option if and only if the person is a US Citizen. The theory is that anyone else is essentially an enemy soldier, and doesn't deserve it.
2: Habeas corpus is actually in the original Constitution, not the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments). As for the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion and petition are still intact. The right to bear arms was already long gone. The one you got is fine. The freedom from search and seizure is gone as such, but you can still have gay sex! No double jeopardy or self-incrimination, although due process is out. No public trial. Excessive bail is still illegal...but you can be tortured. The last two are procedural and basically forgotten...man, this is depressing.
3: Ben Franklin was never President. He just wrote a lot of books.
4: I lost all faith in the EU when they started imposing fines for advertising in Imperial measures. For the man on the street, that's worse than what the US is doing. This is even worse.
Re:Not a Bad Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Never going to work (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. is in good company, if you compare the FCC's treatment of sexuality & language on television with that of various second & third world theocracies.
Religious Fundamentalists are essentially the same everywhere.
Re:The only thing without frontiers is (Score:2, Interesting)
You could indeed, and I am pretty sure you are. See there's Amendment 6 which says:
See it just says "the accused", not "the accused, so long as they're American". There's also this other article "Amendment 5", which says:
Again, "no person" is pretty clear. That's not "no American citizen" - it's "no person". This is no accident, you know - the founders of the US were firm believers in human rights; their ideology was firmly based on the absolute equality of individuals. This constitution, as it makes clear in Amendment 9 and 10, does not purport to "grant" rights to citizens - on the contrary, people's rights are held to be innate, or at least gifts of God, not the Federal Government; indeed, rather than granting those rights, the constitution purports instead to circumscribe the ability of the State to put limits on those human rights.
The American Declaration of Independence is a beauty in this regard too. I don't know if it has any legal status in the US, but as a historical document it contains some real pearls, such as this bit:
... but especially in its detailed denunciations of the crimes of King George, such as:
Can you say "designated enemy combatant"?
George's other crimes included:
Would that be Guantanamo?
Re:The US Constitution and Citizenship (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Taxman! (Score:3, Interesting)
37% of our income is taken in taxes on average, which may be acceptable to pay for free health care and a decent society. What is not acceptable is that new ways of collecting revenue are being dreamed up every day. If you want to regulate hate speech then put the perpetrators in jail, don't impose yet another tax collection scheme and jail those who don't get the paperwork right.
I'm heartily sick of state sponsored scrounging that this represents which is entirely different to tax breaks for families on minimum wage with children to bring up. The state is growing fat and lazy.
Re:I think your post is racist (Score:3, Interesting)
And, speaking as a UKian who has always thought of the UK as being part of Europe, really rather funny. There's also more than a grain of truth in it; England and France, for example, were at war with one another on and off for centuries. Pretty much every European country has invaded at least one of its neighbours at some point.
Time to wake up... (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is, EVERY day they add one more reason to hide and conceal everything you do.
Re:The only thing without frontiers is (Score:1, Interesting)
Please don't take this comment as an insult - it is intended to help provide some perspective. It's important to recognize when you're starting to go past the fringes in paranoia thinking. One of the greater challenges for intelligent people is dealing with unreliable information. Whom do we trust? How do we know what they say is true? More fundamentally, how do we define truth? How can we even ever know it?
All tough issues that ultimately resolve to "faith" - yes, an ugly word for some, but if it bothers you, take it in its non-religious definition. You're left to make assumptions in incomplete and often highly inaccurate and imprecise information.
What helps balance this out is expanding your data set through historical comparison, and using other tools like empathy and alternate solution finding. Considering the above example of "Bush secret torture hitler" delusion:
- Empathy and alternate solution seeking: What would you do as an alternative? The options are pretty limited. Put them into the criminal justice system where intelligence data cannot be provided and they end up walking the streets in the US? No alternate suggestion has shown any viability when the goals are obtaining intelligence information to protect innocents and then hold the bad guys until their own nations will take them back (which all are refusing to do because they know their "court system" model will end up releasing the terrorists back on their own streets).
- National Comparison: Has the EU or any other Western nation ever treated terrorists in the criminal justice matter? Of course not - not the threatening ones. France has former colonys to help "disappear" the real bad guys. So does the UK. Turkey, the western-most Islamic nation? They openly torture you and help you expire. Dead bodies don't pose any further threat. And what about the rest of the world? China's known for their execution bus fleet, Indonesia and Malaysia execute you for minor drug possession, so forget about mercy for terrorists. You're a fool if you believe Guantanamo is such a bad place - it's in the top percent of Western nations for handling this kind of prisoner, and you cannot even imagine what the rest of the nations do.
- Historical Comparison: FDR disappeared tens of thousands of Americans - Germans, Japanese, etc. My kids school just had a German internment camp visiting exhibit come by as they were predominant around our part of the country. They were slaves for the war - forced to work in the camps and had their liberties removed. Many were snatched up without notice, and all received no due process. Once the war was done, they were released back into society. Evil? The greatest Democratic president did this. Clinton used Syria and Egypt to interrogate terrorists and this practice existed since the cold war began. France, Germany, Italy and the UK are insincere when they feign moral disgust - look at their own behavior in their colonies for the answer.
So yes, reality's a bitch, but don't go down the paranoia path. There have always been evil SOBs, and there always will be. The hard part is you have to decide on incompete information.
Jose Padilla (Score:3, Interesting)
It failed. The courts correctly shot them down, and right before the USSC was going to rule against them, the Executive branch basically gave up and remanded him to Federal prison for conventional (civilian) charges.
I don't think that case supports your argument very well; it seems to me that it is an example of the court system functioning correctly. The Executive branch overstepped, the Judicial branch stepped in and said (or was about to say) 'no way,' and as a result he got sent to Federal prison. Since then, the Bush administration has basically given up on that strategy and has been dealing with U.S. citizens through the conventional court system -- for example, there's Adam Yahiye Gadahn (who was recently indicted for treason in civilian court, by a Grand Jury). One branch of government attempted something that would have been illegal, they were stopped by another branch, and now they're doing it (more) legally.
Seems like the system worked the way it's supposed to: the courts have allowed the Executive branch to assert some authority over foreign detainees (implicit allowance; by declining to hear certain cases -- although they did reverse the Administration in certain respects), but stopped them when they began to do the same over citizens. You may disagree with this interpretation, but then your beef is really with the Federal and Supreme Court judiciary, not really with the Executive branch alone.