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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

There's some similarity between nationality and copyright: arcane, obscure, complex and mean rules that only benefit incumbents and punish everyone else.

I hope we will eventually get rid of both.

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At the rate things are going, even EU and Schengen, areas in which their citizens are blissfully unaware how nice they have it compared to outsiders, are going to come to an end. Far-right nationalists are on the rise over Europe.

They just lost ground in the Netherlands, losing about 1/3 of their voters from last time (down from 24% to 17%)

I like your optimism, but this is likely an outlier. Any little mistake the sitting governments are making will push the far-right to new highs, and there is no reason to believe there won't be mistakes. There will be plenty. So, that's the fuel that keeps coming.

Now you need a lighter to set this all on fire, and we can see it grow in front of our eyes. The bigger the AI bubble grows, the more it will all come crashing down, and the next economic crisis will find all the EU countries (and not just those) ready for a far-right takeover. It's just a matter of time.

In the U.K. the far right are polling 30%. In a sane election system this wouldn’t deliver a landslide

In PR countries the populist right tends to be about 30% - France, Italy, or lower (29% Sweden, 15% Poland)

I don’t think it’s inevitable, but something has to change. Europe can’t take a billion extra immigrants from climate migration, even if they integrated.

Wealth disparity is ballooning, with fewer people owning more and more, and that’s likely to snowball in the next 20 years as the wealthiest keep accumulating and power shifts more to weary and away from work.

The European far right are not exactly fans of the EU, but on the whole they are much more concerned about immigrants from low-trust Muslim societies than from EU countries (high-trust "Christian" societies)

Yes, immigration is the primary outward goal of the european far right. But the european far right has the common goal of stopping the EU from growing closer. I'd argue the far right is working together in the EU to destabilise it, similar to how other authoritarian countries are working together to destabilise the rest of the world to their advantage. The saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" comes to mind.

It doesn't even take the far right winning to unravel the EU. Both France and Germany, the economic pillars of the EU are facing massive budget challenges due to aging populations, high energy costs and trade

Though Germany and France are essentially the pillars of the EU. That's where it started and as long as the far right doesn't make it to the steering wheel, they will keep it that way.

Do you dislike copyright also when it protects your intellectual property, and makes things like software licenses possible?

If I couldn't use the AGPL to force Amazon to release Elasticsearch, but they couldn't use normal copyright to force me not to reverse engineer Alexa and Widevine, would it be that bad?

It wouldn't be bad. We have more than enough resources to reverse engineer most software, yet we're restricted by arcane EULAs and DRM.

And so much "FOSS" is MIT anyway. Abolishing copyright would make literally no difference to MIT-licensed software.

Yes, I do. I think the world would be a better place if there were no Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle. We would still have OSes and databases, we would be fine.

There's hundreds of millions of starving people ready to move to the first country that does it.

Let them!

I often wonder what the world would look like if humans could fly like birds. There would be cages everywhere.

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