iansjack wrote:
Free trade doesn't mean you are free to rip off other people's copyright material.
I don't think that this was McMillan's intent, though I can see why it might read that way. That having been said, I think that the issue of the legitimacy of the EU parliament is somewhat irrelevant in this conversation - especially since my understanding is that McMillan's statement isn't accurate, or perhaps I should say, would be just as accurate if applied to (for example) the UK's Minister of Defence, or the US Secretary of State - while that aren't elected positions, nut the appointment is made by a person or body which are (by the Prime Minister in the UK, or by the President in the US, and both with the agreement by the larger elected bodies they lead). The positions McMillan seems to be referring to are (IIUC) selected by the
elected members of the EU Parliament, making those positions slightly
more democratic than the two I mentioned (as there isn't a single main individual doing the appointing with permission, but are rather voted on by the body as a whole).
Admittedly, one might argue that any of these positions
ought to be elected positions, but that's its own can of worms.
I would ask for confirmation on this, but frankly, it seems outside the scope of the thread (and my own view of politics doesn't really accept the premise that the official leadership of large organizations actually have decision-making input they nominally exist to have). If anyone wants to discuss this further, I suggest creating a separate thread for it.
That having been said: the key issue here is not with the existence or enforcement of copyright, but rather, with how the enforcement is implemented - and specifically, how the rules of how private organizations bear the burden of the enforcement, and the basic problem of how to enforce the laws at all given the scope and scale of the problem.
Basically, the recent experience is that most of the efforts to do so have been too coarse-grained, too sweeping, too heavily automated with little oversight, and too easily abused. This has been a learning experience, to be fair, but the problem is that the wording of the laws (especially the DMCA in the US) has not really given the companies in question the room to learn from that experience - and as a result, flawed processes stay in place, and so far most attempts to fix them make the problem worse.
A key part of the problem is that most copyright laws have provisions for 'fair use' - that is to say, that some parts of a work may be used for the purpose of reviewing the work, quoting the work for illustration of a point, for parody, or for works which use the IP in 'substantially transformative' ways. A big part of the Fair Use doctrine revolves over whether the use is directly competitive with the original. Further, another aspect of this whether the alleged infringing party made a 'minimal use' of the original - that is to say, that they use exactly enough to suit their purposes, and no more.
All of these require a certain amount of mindful judgement is needed in order to determine whether a piece actually is infringing. However, when the concept of copyright was introduced in the mid-19th century, no one foresaw the sheer scale of something like the modern Internet, or the ease with which copies could be made (which, contrary to what some seem to think, is a fundamental aspect of electronic data - it is not possible, even in principle, to prevent someone from viewing data if you can physically access it, at most you can make it impractically difficult). At the heart of it, the problem is that the enforcement methods used in the past simply do not, cannot, scale.
(Yes, copyright was introduced pretty late in the day. There had been patents before then, but the legal basis of patents is completely different - they are an issued monopoly, not a fundamental right of the creator.
Trademarks also arose around the same time as copyright, but they too have a different legal foundation, being primarily a type of consumer protection law. IIRC, two of the biggest advocates for the original copyright laws in the UK were Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll, who had seen several unauthorized versions of their novels published, which meant they weren't realizing any royalties on them.)
This video does a good job of discussing several of these aspects, at least in regard to US law.
While the immediate problem can be laid at the feet of Google and similar companies, the core of the problem has been due to the laws being poorly written. I don't know if the EU regulation is better or worse than the US laws in this regard (I haven't really looked at them), but the consensus seems to be that the only way to enforce them is to outright ban anything that
could be interpreted as infringing. This basically would result in either the Fair Use doctrine being abandoned, or else lead to both the companies' legal teams and the courts being flooded by copyright cases.