Hacker News Reader

Comment by digikata | Hacker News Reader

So there's a lot of coverage about the EU parliament process, but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? There seems to very little coverage on how this directive came about. Whose interests are being represented by these changes?

View on HN

My understanding is the copyright proposals were at least partially thanks to incumbent big media in Germany, and their link tax reaction to Google news.

> but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from?

A similar yet more apt question might be, where did the idea that parliament can get away with such large internet regulations come from?

The fiction of every law making organisation is that they can get away with creating every law they want. If they did not believe this fiction, the whole idea of law as something that applies to everyone becomes meaningless. In practice, the power of a lawmaker is limited by if he can get the law applied.

For example, multiple muslim countries have laws banning women walking around without head scarf. Not only in their country, but everywhere in the universe. In practice, you see many women walking around without one, and the relevant lawmakers dont know or care. But suppose one of these women is in such a country, gets summoned in court for this, and proof is given she violated the law, even outside the country, then the judge has only one option: Guilty. Society runs on hoping this does not happen, i.e. selective enforcement.

For Europe, the situation is clear: They can get away with any law in Europe, as long as it doesnt cause them to be voted out. And it seems the general public is not going to vote them out, so they can easily get away with this.

Economic interests. EU governments are seeing the majority of digital revenues carted off to american coffers and want a bigger slice to remain in europe to bolster its lagging economy.

If this were the case, I think it's much more likely the EU would try and achieve this via changes to tax law for corporations operating within the EU than copyright directives.

There's been a lot of press about how little tax the Google's and Starbucks of the world pay in the places they derive the revenue, and some of the highly creative ways they avoid (not evade) taxation. That would seem to point at issues with international taxation agreements rather than copyright.

> it's much more likely the EU would try and achieve this via changes to tax law for corporations operating within the EU than copyright directives

Top income earning families in many EU states pay shockingly little in taxes. They're able to structure their gross income such that reportable income is virtually nothing. These families are rich and powerful, and go a long way towards explaining why the EU retains its complex tax code.

This directive has been simultaneously criticised for being both a) an outrageous cash grab from the EU, aimed at making money from Google et al and b) an incompetent "poorly drafted" piece of legislation that stops anyone competing with YouTube, hence ensuring their monopoly in the lucrative "boring videos" market.

Corruption: lobbying and corporate money.

Rest assured that there certainly wasn't any democratic majority pushing this. EU is exceptionally good in hiding the regulatory capture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com