Techcrunch reports that the European Parliament have called for an audit of Facebook’s systems in the light of reported data breaches. Will Facebook be added to the long list of US Tech companies successfully regulated by the EU albeit mainly over monopoly issues. (Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle). This is shared power, that the UK will lose should we leave the European Union. …
A failure to serve fans
The European Parliament sent the Copyright Directive to the trialogue process, where the views of the commission, the council and the parliament are negotiated; the final words agreed by the parliament are basically the words lobbied for by the large corporate press and content companies aided at the last gasp by the sports industry. To understand why this is shit we need to go back to basics. This article is quite long and continues below, or overleaf … …
Big Copyright strikes again
This time in the European Parliament. They want upload filters and to tax ISSP’s reuse, but you can do something about it.
Last week a committee of MEPs voted 15 – 10, reported here by one of its members, Julia Reda, the sole Pirate Party MEP, in favour of the EU Copyright Directive’s disastrous Article 13. This misguided measure will introduce upload filters that would change the way that much of the Internet works, from free and creative sharing, to one where anything can be removed without warning, by computers. They also voted in favour of Article 11, which Europeanises a German & Spanish law and places a monetary liability on internet software service providers who use snippets of news articles originally published by for-profit publishers.
This article explains why the measures are wrong, and points to the campaign sites. It was amended on the 5th July after the vote to report the result, which was that the Parliament voted to re-open the discussion in plenary.
Everything went better than expected pic.twitter.com/ykVfad3Lfr
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) July 5, 2018
Here are the votes, interesting splits. …
One Person, One Vote
Writing about the representation of the UK Parliament, reminded me of some work i did in 2014, when looking at the results of the last European Parliament elections. The chart below shows the number of people represented by an MEP by country, the Spanish are the least represented and the Luxembourgois the best, varying from 850,000 to 77,000; that’s eleven times better for Luxembourgois. It should be noted that the 77,000 population it takes to earn an MEP in Luxembourg is similar to the number that the Tories propose for British MPs, except the Tories are planning that MPs only represent electors, not the total population.
We can see that the system benefits the smaller nations, and that to be fair with the same rate of representation as the Luxembourgois there would need to be over 6,500 MEPs. It would be very difficult to run plenary sessions of such size as the amount of time available to talk would mean that many would have to remain silent. …
Europe’s winding road to Copyright Reform
This one of my recovered Storifies originally published in 2015. Over the last six months things have been moving on Copyright Reform in the European Union. On the 19th February, the new Copyright Directive’s rapporteur, the now sole Pirate Party MEP, Julia Reda, released her report, on which the JURI committee and later EP debates will take place. If you look at posts here and on my wiki published in 2018, you’ll get an idea as to how things changed.
New Copyright Laws
The EU is considering a new Copyright law, its scrutiny committee is JURI (Legal Affairs) and the JURI Rapporteur is the sole remaining Pirate Party MEP, Julia Reda. She has posted her report, on her website here, and commented on a blog article here. She has also posted it to a collaboration site. This immediate debate has shown little support for Reda, which may suggest she has it right, or that her priorities are the troll friendly jurisdictions. …
London Labour in Europe
I attended the lunchtime meeting hosted by three of London’s Labour MEPs. They started by saying thank you to the members at the meeting for the efforts made to secure London’s fantastic result in the Euro elections. The meeting was framed as “How to fight UKIP?” The old canard, started by Farage that London is inoculated from UKIP, because we’re young, liberal and cosmopolitan, the truth in my mind is that London’s multiculturalism is its UKIP anti-body. One of the attendees, spoke on dealing with UKIP, which I summarised in this tweet, …
Sort orders and Strasbourg
I thought I’d share some more thoughts on the European Pariament Election results. The article looks at some sort order silliness on the London ballot paper and then looks at the success or otherwise of the European People’s Party and the gains and losses in the European Parliament by euro-party. In London, the Liberal Democrats came 5th, failing to win a seat, but next after them was a party called 4Freedoms. This was the first on the ballot paper. It was in fact the slate of the European People’s Party, a role once held by the Tories but Cameron had the Tories walk out of the EPP, thus denying them the opportunity to win votes in the UK and denying them another 20 seats on top of their No. 1 spot; they won 214 seats. This may become important as the European Parliament votes and elects its leadership. The reason for putting themselves on the ballot paper is twofold, one, some expatriate Europeans may prefer to vote for a Christian Democrat slate rather than the Tories and it gave their lead candidate, Jean Claude Juncker the opportunity to collect votes, if not seats. …
And the results are in
Due to the delay in the count at Tower Hamlets, I didn’t get the London results for the European Parliament until the following morning. Labour have four out of eight seats in London. In 2012, after the London Mayoral’s I had hoped that Labour would get four seats, but had come to assume this was beyond us. Obviously not, Labour’s 36% gave it four seats, the Tories two and one each for UKIP and the Greens. The LibDems losing their one seat. Labour won the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th seats. …
It’s looking good in London
So while we now have some solid data about how people will vote in the European elections i.e. how they voted in their locals, amassing this data into regions is a lot of work. Even the London Councils site is only reporting seats which is not helpful for predicting a proportional counting system. A number of sources have commented that London has rejected UKIP and that my last predictions were based on them getting 21% of the London vote. Both the elections and newspapers poll reporting suggests that the UKIP vote will be lower than that. The papers are also underplaying the size of the Labour council victory. I think London is going to be better than I predicted. …