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The Internet

Euro-Parliament Trying to Ban Caching? 71

Posted by Hemos from the attack-of-the-idiots dept.
Luca Lizzeri writes "The Europarliament voted with a two thirds majority to include temporary copies in a sweeping new copyright protection blunder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H act. Go see And MEPs lament the fact they don't have enough power. I for one am not going to advocate giving them more now." This is related to the Euro-Parls trying to deal with copy-right protection on the Internet-the 2/3 majority voted against amendments to the bill that would excluded caching. So, from what I can tell, it will be illegal to cache in Europe. Some people's children, I tell ya. The good side is that this will still have to be presented to the member nations, and UK is already saying they will argue against it. Update: 02/10 04:01 by S : The motivation and the actual result are explained in more detail by the BBC. Ireland and Luxembourg also oppose the strengthening of copyright laws.
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Euro-Parliament Trying to Ban Caching? More

Euro-Parliament Trying to Ban Caching?

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  • What about browsers?? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But browsers make temporary copies when they view stuff. And browsers have caches also. How are you going to outlaw browser caches??

    This is ridiculous, is it not?

    -BenRI
    bredelin@ucsd.edu

  • Who is the initiator? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does anybody know who startet the discussion at the European parliament?
  • I continue to be consistently horrified whenever I hear of legislators who just plain DON'T UNDERSTAND technology and try to regulate it anyway.

    Gee, does this mean future "International" versions of the Netscape browser will have caching disabled?

    If proxies are outlawed, only outlaws will use proxies.


    -double_h (with comment #1!)
  • Yes -- the UK is in the EU (since about 1970). Its
    not, however, taking an active role in the *Euro* (currency) which is probably what you were
    thinking of.
  • Well, we only joined in the 1970s. Not that long ago I suppose. Do you get /any/ international news over there? How could we opt _out_ of the Euro if we weren't in the EU in first place?
  • You don't listen very well, do you? The UK has been a part of the EU for a long time now.

  • strike (Score:1)

    by davie ( 191 )
    The idiots are taking over the world.

    I wonder what would happen if just 10% of the world's nerds called in sick twice a week for a couple of months? This seems to be having quite an impact for the AA pilots.

  • blehh. (Score:1)

    by vertigo ( 341 )
    The euro parlement is the slowest, most bureaucratic, corrupt clueless bunch of morons on the face of this earth. :(
  • Posted by Assmodeus:

    who gives a shit. wooo so we have guns. and try telling larry flynt that he cant do what he is doing with hustler without approval from the state...
  • If you are reading this from Europ, then you may be suing my copright rights. You have a copy of this document in your browser, and in your video driver, and quite possible on swap space. This is ignoring the countless copies of the document that temprorily resided in the numerous routers between your machine and slashdot.

    I might be persuaded to forgive you, but if your an MEP I will sue until you are thankful for the shirt on your back. ;-)
  • Britain is a member state of the European Union, and has been for a while. That's why it signed the Maastrict (sp?) Treaty, joined the ERM, has all those European trading agreements, scrapped Duty Free for trade inside the EU, etc.
  • Er, I guess whoever brings you food to the bomb shelter is bringing newspapers that are several decades old...
  • Damn... the stupidity of people never ceases to amazes me. What the hell benefit does this provide for owners of a copyright? Cacheing should be considered fair use. I mean, hell, you can mark your pages as non-cacheable can't you? If you don't want your page cached, just mark it as non-cacheable.
    --
  • I am truly amazed by the incompetence shown by european politicians in this issue. Banning caches will make the net considerably slower, and what will they gain?

    Two major concerns:


    1) Lobbying groups (with strong opinions) really rules the ground. (The politicians are too easily influenced, don't have an opinion by them selves.)

    2) The form the Europeean parlament has today, where the voters are not able to throw out incompetent politicians in the next poll, since the politicians are chosen by the individual governments, and not by European polls.

    I have been fluctuating back and forth in the EU issue as a Norwegian. (We are NOT members of EU).
    If this gets through, I am glad we still are not members.

    Nils Ulltveit-Moe
  • The UK joined the EEC in 1973. The EEC became the EC, which became the EU. Easy.

    Perhaps your thinking of the EMU - the European Montary Union, aka the 'Euro' zone, which is the single currency now spanning large chunks of mainland Europe.
  • This is what happens when you have people who are ignorant about technology making rules about it.

    All those Netscape cache files will be yet another thing to bust you for. (Along with having to maintain proof that you own every piece of software you have installed. I am lucky to find my CDs.)

    What I expect it will do is just generate more contempt for the law and lawmakers and little else.
  • You probably messed this up with the Euro-using
    countries. No Euro so far in the UK, but they
    are part of the European Union.

    Regards,
    Traxus.
  • this is incopetence in practise

  • Rascism (Score:1)

    by sjf ( 3790 )
    I can't believe the ignorant racist comments in this thread.

    There is not a government on this planet that has not passed an ill thought out law.

    Could someone remind me which country is currently spending millions of dollars in order to find out wether or not its leader had an extramarital affair ?

    Raciscm is racism. Just because the majority of Europeans are white doesn't make a shade of difference.

    Some of you children really should think before making such foolish comments. It reflects poorly on your country.
  • Next time flame the right group of people.

    EU!=Europe

    Iceland, for instance, is in Europe and outside the EU.
    --
  • our glorious VP came out with a white paper once that included this -- and specifically mentioned "temporary copies".

    as in the phone line.

    as in the phone company being legally responsible for what was being transmitted through their lines.

    they wanted it monitored.

    needless to say, quite a few people raised quite a hue and cry about this. let's hope it happens again! who are the knuckleheads who write these things?
  • the same thing happened with Al Gore...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • to fall of the face of the earth, its interesting to see democracy at work. I mean when was the last you heard of an American politician swayed by a leaflet. Unless your leaflets are printed on $100 bills :)
    --
  • And the euro-parliment is about to get hit with a clue-by-four. This could be the high point of stupidity that pushes the average net.user over the edge into political activism.

    Slashdot the parliment! Slashdot the parliment!

  • If they're going to regard a copy in memory as an extra copy i have to purchase everything twice because I usually forget about deleting applications after loading them into memory.

    Hell, why can't politicians leave their hands off things they don't understand????
  • Obviously the patent office has its employees on vacation, and they are in Europe doing some consulting work.

    Guess with the European Union coming along, someone had to find a method to gimp their economy.

    Just using sarcasm, but would'nt this be a great method for any country to do to the EU? Get their ministers (the EUs) to vote on something so stupid as too cripple themselves...

    Screw Europe, they're where the patent office descended from.
    .
    .
  • Sadly, I had hoped that European talking wigs were more intelligent than this, were a little bit less influenced by the talking-wallets of big business. I thought only the US made humongously idiotic deceisions like this, but I suppose even microsoft doesnt have a monopoly on that.

    -Laxative
  • > I take it the Euro-Parliament isn't part of the
    > EU then?

    The European parliament is the elected legislative body of the EU. It doesn't have much power, which is due to the rather peculiar process by which "European legislation" is taken.

    The United Kingdom is indeed a member of the EU, albeit it has managed to get exemption for lots of issues. Also, the Conservative governments that have ruled the UK during the 80 and 90's and a significant part of the UK press have been playing a lot with nationalistic feelings against the EU.
  • When I grow tired of the idiocy in our own legislature, I only have to read a story about European government to remind me how good we have it.

    -josh
  • If this is a 'deep cut' regulation, browser caching will be the least of our problems.

    Mirror sites are, technically, cached content of their master sites.

    Routers routinely maintain routing tables in RAM caches, to expedite performance.

    Bridges between LANs must cache data packets to map 802.3 to 802.5 and so forth.

    Networks are inherently dependent on cached information, and this will become even more critical when IPv6 and it's encryption/security features are introduced. Hell, even Kermit 'sliding windows' are, technically, a cache. So is the wire through which the information passes, if you want to take the matter to an obscene level.

    Every PC has a built-in cache, for memory, and resident on the processor.

    This regulation will die a painful death. Or it will be clearly defined - likely by the same people that brought you the OSI standard.
  • Well, considering the previous EU Presidency to the current one WAS the UK, it's pretty clear that the UK is part of the EU.

    You're probably thinking of the new currency (Euro), in which the UK is not joining.
  • All true, they even have tv detector vans for those who dont have out side sriels(help cant spell)
  • The Uk is part of EU. The Euro-Parliment is the parliment of the EU, with little real power though.
  • But this is getting out of control. These people aren't just ignorants; they're ignorants with power. Think of the world's rulers as two-year-olds playing with handguns, they haven't got a clue... even if they do, they seem to suffer from Stupidity Syndrome (SS)... Yeah that's it... They're just stupid... How did we let them get to their positions? This is just another of those stances... one of these people hears stuff about how "techies" (BTW they have no clue as to what that means) are going on with their "anti-copyright schemes" and how Big-Business is suffering from it (I have to pause now and REALLY laugh my head into oblivion... ... ... OK.) So they decide to do something about it just to please some corporation or another in order to perhaps get a little boost in their next campaign (the monetary and influential kind). So here comes the strange definition of what the evil "techies" are doing... they don't quite understand... it sound a lot like Xeroxing stuff... copies... cache...hummm. Then they figure that it sound vaguely like copying stuff on the internet, and then one of them realizes that the local SysAdmin once told him that to improve efficiency they had a proxy server (cache, or whatever you choose to call it) which did just that, *COPY*, "so that must be what people are going on about", they think... and BOOM there comes a STUPID law for which STUPID people voted, people who see themselves so much as the bearers of truth that they forget to even interview someone who actually knows the "techie" community, just to see if their initial assumptions were correct.

    To sum it up these people are STUPID, they should realize that in order to do their jobs correctly they have to know what they're going on about! I mean if we (I too am a SysAdmin) screwed up as many times as these *SSHOLES we would've been fired a long time ago!

    See you in the future!
  • First of all, this only applies to copyrighted material. The point is that you aren't permitted to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. Technically, copies could include network caches, local disk, and even main memory. What the EU is doing is letting the copyright holder consider such temporary copies--they now have the right to restrict such usage.

    In practice, most copyrighted material for which there is no license fee would be released under terms that allow copying into caches and such.

    Furthermore, if the material is on the web and is not flagged as being non-cachable, then implicitly, the publisher is authorizing proxy caches and local disk caches to keep a copy of the material.
  • ...that our Czecks will not cache any more

  • I could see making it illegal to cache pages marked no cache. (I know that there are ways to do this to some pages, but I don't know how. This could even add a requirment that the web add a cabibility) But universially? I don't mind my page being cached.

    I'd even except that pages could be marked cacheable, which I belive html doesn't provide, to give permission to have a page cached.

  • That the UK is complaining! The British Universities have to pay per packet transferred to the US and can only afford to be on the Internet because of the JANET caches. No caching, no .ac.uk domain. Simple as that.
  • If I lived in Europe, my opinion would be: "I'm using caching, come and get me!!"

    I would think that finding and prosecuting everyone would be way too expensive to make the law usefull.
  • I take it the Euro-Parliament isn't part of the EU then? Because last I heard, the UK wasn't part of the EU.
  • Proof positive that the European Union *CAN* compete with the US of A... just not necessarily in money terms.

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