Trick Used To Pass French "Three Strikes" 488
Glyn Moody writes "France's 'Loi Hadopi' — better known as 'three strikes and you're out' — was passed by the National Assembly late last night when only 16 deputies were present (the vote was 12 in favor, 4 against). Most politicians had left because it was expected that the vote would take place next week. In this way, President Sarkozy has sneaked his controversial legislation through the French parliament — and shown his contempt for the democratic process. So now what?"
Re:Shame (Score:3, Interesting)
What can an independent citizen do, other than vote for their representation? What politician has ever shown they wouldn't do their best to try to implement and than take advantage of such a system?
the most important freedom of a democracy or a republic is not the freedom to vote for the candidate (though that is important) -- it the freedom the freedom to run for the office.
that is easier said than getting elected (especially in my most-money-means-most-likely-elected nation-state), but without it, you live in a place where the leadership decides the candidate. and, that is just a rigged game.
Re:Quorum? (Score:5, Interesting)
At least in the US, the house and senate typically assume the presence of a quorum unless someone calls for quorum and demonstrates that there isn't a quorum. However, any one congressman can do that
Yeah, but that doesn't always happen. The Hughes Amendment [gunlawnews.org] was passed on a late night voice vote when the House Chamber was virtually empty and everybody who would have opposed it was gone for the night. Isn't Democracy grand?
Re:Shame (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, but let's focus on the situation at hand. Why should a legislative body not require a quorum of some sort to act?
Sure, sometimes you have to rely on people to act honorably. Sometimes your system can't be "good enough" to prevent abuse if someone's clever enough to abuse it. This doesn't look like one of those times; this looks like a case where the system is inexplicably broken.
Reminds me of the DMCA (Score:5, Interesting)
Unpopular legislation is almost always passed in such ways. And now the blame for its passing is limited to a select few. I have to wonder if these loopholes and subversive means aren't there to protect lawmakers from having to make decisions that would get them booted from office? That is to say, while they support the legislation, they wouldn't want to be on record as having voted for it... so they "look the other way" while a team of patsies come in to do the dirty work for them.
Report 'em all... (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's a three strikes law, use it to your advantage. Keep reporting all the incidents everywehere - Sarkozy hums a copyrighted tune? Report it. Flood the government or whatever bodies with reports on all potential copyright infringement by the members. After all, don't we already have proof that they do this? It should be trivial to just report that their children have broken the law as well. Keep reporting them and get their internet connections cut off.
Sort of like "work to rule" campaigns - you make the rulemakers suffer under their own rules as well.
Heck, bonus points for those who can get the Internet cut off at no only their personal residences, but also to government buildings also.
Similar to Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (Score:2, Interesting)
More checks and balances needed. (Score:2, Interesting)
1. A mandatory waiting period of one year from completion of the writing of a bill until it can be voted on by legislators. The bill must be made available to the public at the start of this waiting period. This forces a review and comment period. If the text of the bill changes, the waiting period restarts.
2. More eyes. After a bill passes both houses, it must be shelved until at least 50% of the members of both houses have changed. Once that happens, the bill must pass both houses a second time. Only then does it land on the President's desk. This means that the passage of bills into law requires the NEXT Congress to agree with the current one.
3. "One subject matter." In other words, you can't sneak a failed bill regulating commerce into the bowels of another bill regulating something else.
4. "Plain English," and "Reasonable length," meaning an eighth-grader should be able to read and understand the bill. As a bonus, instead of "Reasonable length," the Constitution should have defined a hard length limit of, say, 200 pages in a bill, where each page may only contain up to a maximum of a certain number of words. No more bills so long they need all of Google's storage capacity to store them and vote on them without reading them. Not to mention, if you can't explain it in 200 pages, it's probably too complicated to be understood by the public, which will be expected to abide by it.
5. A Constitution-defined ceiling on the total number of pages in law. Once that limit is reached, they can't add pages until other pages are repealed to make room. Repealing should be as complicated as enacting, by the way. Say, 100,000 pages total maximum number of pages in law. This is a HUGE number! To put things into perspective, the federal tax law takes up 70,000 pages. That's just ONE law. There must be millions of pages of complicated, convoluted law. This is ridiculous! You are somehow expected to know and abide by the law, but it is impossible for any person to actually know so much. Laws are misunderstood, and this allows lawyers and other corrupt people to take advantage of normal people. There should be a hard limit.
Re:Shame (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not what happened. When a vote on an issue like is needed, and everyone agrees with the new law but don't want to be on record saying so, an after-hours party like this is arranged. Everyone who agrees goes home with a wink, a nod, and plausible deniability.
Re:Don't leave early. (Score:3, Interesting)
What you want? Robolegislators? The 12 that voted for it could had known of the sneaky move... the 4 that voted against should be treated as superheros.
MGMT doesn't like his use of 'Kids' (Score:5, Interesting)
Sarkozy has been using MGMT's wonderful song kids without permission. He did offer one euro to settle.
It doesn't really work that way (Score:3, Interesting)
The majority, esp. under Emperor Naboleon Sarkozy, has quasi tyrannical powers, and can employ various tricks to make sure the minority can't pull a trick like showing up en masse when the majority's away.
Furthermore they employed various procedural tricks -- they tend to do that almost all the time now actually -- to ram their laws through parliament without leaving any chance for the opposition to delay or discuss.
Now this certainly does not excuse the main opposition party for not showing up, with few exceptions such as my own representative Mr. Bloche, but it couldn't possibly have made any difference in the legislative process.
I watched most of the debates on this law in the lower chamber, and the majority never even responded to very precise, technical questions asked by critics of the law, including members of their own party.
An interesting side note: the very few opponents of the law in the ruling party are the only IT professionals, such as Tardy who owns a small IT consultancy, and Dionis du Sejour who used to be the CIO of a major company. All their colleagues had no fucking clue what they were talking about; take for instance the minister herself, who believes OpenOffice is or has a firewall. I shit you not.
Re:Shame (Score:3, Interesting)
Even when we've had a full vote it's clear no one had read the whole thing. See bailout package 1/2. I wonder who has read the entire budget that's working on getting passed?
Re:Shame (Score:3, Interesting)
Ditto for HOA's. Many of us sign in to them thinking we pay a monthly fee to maintain common land and community facilities (pools, tennis courts, etc.) seeing the long list of boiler-plate rules believing they'd only be used against egregious offenders...but all it takes is one petty person in the neighborhood and suddenly the entire community is getting sent notices threatening eviction and your hard earned money is being used to pay for lawyers, litigation and enforcement.
The reality is most people just don't care, and want to be left alone and send their $$$ in to have something taken care of for them. The few that DO care, end up dominating the rest.
Re:The European way... (Score:2, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with EU. It's a bloody French bastard who uses all the dirty tricks to get what he wants.
EU has already stated that this won't be tolerated.
I suggest we implement the "Three Strikes and you are out" for politician. Considering the French past it might actually be a great fun.
Re:Shame (Score:2, Interesting)
Rise up against the oppressors and execute them. Nothing sends a government a clearer message than a well armed, angry mob that has had their rights trampled on. Well, at least that's what we did here in the USA. It served us well.
Unfortunately over the last 230+ years, we the people have become afraid of our government, and our government is no longer afraid of "we the people."
Re:Shenanigans (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Shame (Score:2, Interesting)
Chopping off heads worked for the French in the past ;)
Do you think? All it did was replace one hereditary absolute ruler with another. Then they kept swapping between the old royal line and the new one. In what sense did it "work"?
Somalia (Score:4, Interesting)
Somalia is just about the only country which is truly free. You can do just about anything you want there.
But I doubt most people would want to live there.
The problem is, most people don't want true freedom. True freedom is truly dangerous. Realistically all these pseudo-anarchists want rules for everyone else, just not for themselves.
I wonder what they would do if someone came and busted out their windows and torched their cars?
I wonder if they would call the "police state" they are protesting?
Re:Shame (Score:2, Interesting)
I have certainly worked for over 40 hours when it was required of the job.
And certainly my job is less important than making laws that will govern my fellow citizens.
Re:More information (Score:1, Interesting)
The number of deputies didn't matter, the ruling party has enough deputies, they would have majority anyway.
The law creates an obligation to "secure" you internet connection. After three accusations you demand contest, else your connection is suspended for 1-12 months.
The interesting bit is that you can protect you from accusations by installing an authorized software that "secure" your connection. Except that they know nothing about how internet works, and that they have no way to know if the hypothetical software is installed on all the machines connected. :D
So, as it is, they are creating softwares that give you a permit to download as much as you want
Writing a law on internet with such an absence of knowledge about how it works is pathetic.
Re:Shame (Score:4, Interesting)
The one right that a US citizen has that is often neglected, is the right to revolt. We've even had a few minor revolutions - the IRS was curbed when they got to carried away with taking people's homes and property. (Not that it really stuck) California had a taxpayer revolt some years back. Maybe it's time for a few more revolutions? It's certainly time for one in Frnace.
Re:Shame (Score:3, Interesting)
Clothesline are very ecologically friendly.
What a wonderful excuse for any wrong doing. Can I have your car towed away and crushed because driving is ecologically un-friendly?
Yeah, that's proportional to stringing a clothesline across your own back yard.
Undo it (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the real problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Shame (Score:4, Interesting)
He has 1) put up a shed on a .2 acre property,
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
2) parked his camper alongside his garage,
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
3) erected a 6 foot fence around his 4) above ground pool
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
5) strung up a clothesline.
And this affects you how? Mind your own business.
It is in my best interest, and those of my other neighbors, to ask the HOA to sue him and get him to resolve these issues if he doesn't do so after asking politely because it has a detrimental effect on the value/selling prices of our homes.
What are you all, a bunch of Donald Trumps, "flipping" your houses for profit every month? A home is not an investment. It's thinking like that that got this country into the economic shitter that it is in. A home is a place to live, and unless your neighbor is doing something to prevent you from living in your home, you need to STFU and let live.
I moved away from my HOA controlled "neighborhood" because of nosy ninnies like you.
Re:Shame (Score:3, Interesting)
> the most important freedom of a democracy or a republic is not the freedom to vote for
> the candidate (though that is important) -- it the freedom the freedom to run for the
> office.
At least in the U.S., this freedom is commonly subverted, especially on the national level. For example, Illinois has different requirements for getting yourself on the ballot as a presidential candidate depending on your party affiliation (about an order of magnitude range in number of signatures needed).