It's disgusting, but not surprising. US has been desperately attempting to export it's draconian grip on copyright to the rest of the world at all costs for quite a while now.
A lot of these changes actually go beyond what the copyright industry has been able to do in the US. There's no data retention provision in the US, for example.
I think some of this is a two part play against domestic policies. Bully foreign interests to implement, and then push the same policies domestically, using the foreign implementations as part of the argument. ("Compliance", "even they're doing it", "parity", "protect domestic interests", etc....)
This is just one of the reasons I got out of politics several years ago. Simply put, things don't work the way most people think they do.
Policies are decided behind closed doors, by people with vested interests, and then presented to the public - who are by and large uninterested, uninformed, insufficiently educated and unwilling to consider anything but their immediate short-term interests.
As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "If voting changed anything,they'd make it illegal."
Thus the interest that many of us have in reducing the size of government and in general the concept of limited government. Unfortunately the general direction seems to be in increasing the size of government and the rationale seems to be 'so it can fix everything'.
Bless your heart, I truly and sincerely sympathize with the concept of limited government, no joke. However, limited government is to political science what perpetual motion machines are to physics.
Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign. What limits that body? Are written constitutions supposed to limit the power of government? Who implements those provisions if not the government?
The concept of limited government, as it is typically expressed today, had its origins in the Enlightenment. It was all the rage among the cool people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That idea deeply influenced the constitutions of nearly every nation in the West. Look around. All of those nations now have large and growing governments. The idea of limiting the scope and reach of government by popular will or by written charter has had a track record of perfect failure.
A government of limited and specifically enumerated powers is too weak to resist pressure to make it larger. The best way to get big government is to start with a small government.
I had an idea yesterday, it was, basically, crowdsourced politicians. You'd have a number of politicians, as many as you could get elected in parliament, and you would have a website detailing every law currently under vote. Anyone could vote on these laws on the website, and the politician(s) would all have to vote the way the online poll went.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse and corruption (one website controlling an entire country), but interesting idea nonetheless.
Sounds exactly like the Senator Online party that ran in the 2007 Australian federal elections. They did pretty poorly (according to Wikipedia) but still...
Would it be possible to build a party with the sole intent on producing transparent government and the eventual ability to open all debate to the public via the internet.
In essence, the reason for representatives is that historically people could not take the time out of work to participate in a debate. Even more so if this meant travelling to a debate.
You're supposed to debate locally, and have your representative go represent your area, but what really happens is that your rep is party of a party and the party agree a line and they vote regardless of local voices.
So... if voting was open on all debates for the people to partake in... what's the worst that could happen? Where would it fall down?
Initially I think security issues would be interesting, could they be open and transparent?
And everyone would initially vote for NIMBY policies, so it would grind a lot of stuff to a halt.
The big question, are people able to think of big things that benefit the whole of society even at the cost of them as individuals.
But then, that's the crux of a lot of political issues.
I read once that originally, politicians were not paid by the government. Their only form of income was from the people that that person represented: if the constituents believed that the politician did a good job representing them, then it was up to the individual people to pay that politician what they believed s/he was worth.
I guess the idea was that if you don't do a good job, you don't get paid. On the other hand, if you don't pay the representative fairly, then they won't run the following year. "You get what you pay for".
Would this work in the grand scheme of things these days? I always think that there are too many 'key people' and too many companies with so much financial clout that the money they give would overshadow what the constituents would pay privately. The one saving grace there, I guess, is that at the end of the day, the person still needs to be voted back in...
Government salary is not necessarily their main source of income...
* They often own businesses, which often benefit significantly from government contracts
* Direct or indirect kickbacks from other business owners/lobbyists in return for more favorable legislation
That's a good point about them owning their own businesses: I guess it didn't matter so much back when the majority were farmers and landholders.
Kickbacks etc. are going to be a problem no matter how they are 'officially' paid. This comes back to voters paying attention and caring, I guess, so...
>And everyone would initially vote for NIMBY policies //
I think this shows the problem, the tyranny of the masses. Basically as I grow older I'm more inclined to think that pure democracy won't work because people won't make short term sacrifices for long term gains or sacrifice there own benefit for the larger benefit of more others.
That said I do think we (I'm in the UK) need more representation for the demos. That, for example, we should have a system like Suisse where a proportion of the population can force a referendum.
My personal opinion is that a country works better if some of it's forces can operate covertly too.
This tends to work great in theory, but voters are extremely fickle. You can look at California as an example of this. The populace have voted on referendum after referendum to pass new laws without passing the budget to match (since budgets are hard but single sentence laws are easy). Now they face a massive budget shortfall and have no idea how they are going to pay it.
That's a great lead in for something that contrasts fact and theory. Unfortunately....
> You can look at California as an example of this. The populace have voted on referendum after referendum to pass new laws without passing the budget to match
That's simply not true. The referendum-required spending is a small fraction of CA's budget.[1]
The closest thing to an exception is that 50% of the budget has to go to education. However, that doesn't mandate a level of spending.
Even if CA had a huge amount of voter-mandated spending, that doesn't justify or require other spending.
CA has a budget problem because its income tax system is fairly volatile because it is very progressive. (Property tax receipts, thanks to prop 13, is actually fairly stable.) That's a problem because the governor and legislature see good years as opportunities to increase spending, which can't be paid for when bad years come along.
When I lose income, I cut back. CA govt doesn't. (And no, increases in unemployment compensation aren't the problem.)
[1] I'm ignoring the bond measures because they're put on the ballot by the legislature and required for all significant borrowing. The relevant projects aren't referendum-spending.
> Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign.
Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance.
The catch is that this isn't really possible if the entire system of government is organized on democratic principles - we currently have too much democratic process to achieve appropriately democratic outcomes.
Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off.
> Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance.
The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. Medicare. Medicaid. An enormous military. The Drug War. Social Security. Proposing serious cuts to most of these programs is electoral suicide. Look at what happened to Barry Goldwater. This holds even more true in Europe.
> Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it.
Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest.
> If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off.
The courts themselves have given their stamp of approval to legislative and executive over-reaching. The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court was the last stand for judicial limitation of the government. Besides, who decides what judges sit on federal benches if not the legislative and executive branches? Again, conflict of interest.
> The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular.
But I think this is the product of a feedback cycle. Increasing government intervention erodes civil society, creating pervasive problems that society can't solve on its own, thereby generating pressure for more government intervention. We can halt this process by making the deliberate attempt to address social problems within society, without turning to the state.
You can't treat the public as a monolithic entity here; a small group of like-minded people can work together to build self-sufficient social structures on a small scale, and establish a feedback cycle that gradually erodes the support for state intervention by making more people less willing to rely on government. Social entrepreneurship, with good leadership and a long-term strategy, can start to reverse the process.
> Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest.
You're thinking in too short a time scale. It's worked quite well over the centuries. Look at the progression from Magna Carta to the US Constitution. I'm not saying that we need a new constitutional settlement - and if we tried to in the modern era, it'd be too heavily influenced by people who want to treat society as a machine to be administered from the top down, or who equate the state with society - but that doesn't mean we can't set up some better second-order constraints within the generally good set of constraints we've already got.
> The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter.
Only because the courts have bought into the modern notion of democracy, which blurs the line between the state and society, regards the formal legislative process as being the true consensus of society, and regards universal prior restraint as the solution to most problems.
This modern concept of democracy is what's undermined the balance and effectiveness of our political system. That's what we need to start challenging, and make people understand that democratic process is necessary but not sufficient to keep the political system working properly.
The problem with limited government is the management of the commons. Everybody wants safe water, safe air, safe food, etc. Also you need to make investments in the future such as infrastructure, science research, education, etc. Once you have a huge economy with powerful competing interests you're going to need a big government to manage it all. The "small government" types say that we should let the free market somehow make the choices on all these things, but I think that is just naive thinking.
Leading off with a hyperbolic statement like "every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests." -- I can only take the whole thing with a grain of salt.
I'm quite willing to believe that the US government exerts a large influence. I'm absolutely unwilling to believe that the Swedes are angels, and never do anything wrong on their own; that every problem in Sweden is a self-inflicted wound as directed by America.
International treaty obligations, negotiated on the basis of some advantage perceived for Sweden. A lot of what countries do in law enforcement protects the nationals of other countries or protects the interests of another sovereign state. The usual reason for that is mutually negotiated agreements.
The US wields all kinds of influence over a nation like Sweden. If the US raised a few barriers to trade with Sweden, it would have a drastic effect on Sweden's economy. Many Swedish industries depend on exporting to the US, and while US citizens could just import similar goods from elsewhere if Swedish goods became more expensive, Swedish businesses would lose a gigantic and wealthy market that they depend on selling to.
I'm sure that Sweden depends on the US as a military ally as well, it provides visas for many Swedish citizens regularly, and much more. At the end of the day, Sweden just needs the US more than the US needs Sweden, and that's why the US can argue from a position of power for its own industries.
I think Sweden might overestimate their dependence on the US. The military threat to Sweden is currently rather low, (and there's always the rest of NATO).
Countries just need to all agree to start ignoring the US. I bet doing so would be a positive gain for economies in the long run.
Ignoring the US effectively means shutting yourself off from the global culture, because like it or not, America's entertainment industries are the biggest in the world. American movies play everywhere. American music is heard everywhere. Last I heard, America is about half of the video and computer games industry. And even the Internet is dominated by America unless you're Chinese or somewhere similarly insular (this site you're on right now? American).
Some examples of things you'll have to boycott to truly ignore America:
You don't need to ignore products of American companies to ignore the American government. I'm sure Google or facebook won't stop refusing service to Sweden, no matter what happens in politics. Physical products will still be available through other countries, if you really need them. Of course other products will be probably easier to acquire, hence the boon to friendlier economies.
Furthermore, if countries start doing this en mass, like I'm suggesting they should, one of two things would happen:
1) Companies would move their Corporate HQs outside of the US. Most already have significant resource outside the US (like for instance, their factories..).
2) or, Enough lobbying pressure would be put on the government that the bully-tactic legislation would stop. If other nations stop responding the way that American corporate lobby groups want them to, they will have to change their tactics or suffocate.
"America's entertainment industries are the biggest in the world."
Well that's kind of the point of this discussion isn't it? Just let your people download what they want, and give the US the finger.
Don't forget, there are many reasons why American businesses are so successful. Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. You may disagree, but there's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement. Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. If getting everything for free is more important to you, then only consume open source content.
America doesn't want to force Sweden to obey copyrights just because Microsoft needs Swedish business, it does so because Sweden backing pirates sets a standard for the rest of the world that could very easily lead to a global breakdown of copyright law and less high quality content for everybody, whether they can afford it or not.
"here's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement"
>Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. //
In the UK I expect a lot of it is to do with mobilisation of GIs in WWII.
>Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. //
Well actually it's more like £15 GBP which is >$20 ($25-23 this year, I think being out by a factor of 2 is notable) for some of us.
That aside it's not exactly an efficient process and the capitalist system appears to have no interest in making it more affordable. Why do actors get paid multi-million dollar sums for doing a movie, why do we support this sort of thing through copyright. Yes I know that's not the limit of it, there's much much more to copyright but you picked on big-budget movies.
If the copyright term on a blockbuster movie was 10 years do you think that movies wouldn't be made any more? Absolutely not. There would be more of them IMO with more drive to creativity. Why on Earth do we protect movies to such an extent when inventions are limited to c. 20-25 years.
I think you have it backwards. To not comply with US diplomatic interests doesn't mean the US stops exporting into the country but means that US will make it harder for the country to export to them. The US is a huge factor for every country whose economy is based on export, like Sweden. The reverse is not true: Sweden (or every other small country) is not a crucial market for the US economy, which makes it possible to ignore them as long as they act on their own.
In recent years the US Congress has had a lot of success bullying other countries through the use of the banking system. By putting restrictions on the ability of US banks to do business with the target country's banks they can put a lot of stress on financial interests in that country.
It's disgusting, but not surprising. US has been desperately attempting to export it's draconian grip on copyright to the rest of the world at all costs for quite a while now.