Posts by Lakanal

Interesting that Switzerland also had its own Reformation and is fiercely independent.

But are the UK and Switzerland against integration because they are Protestant, or are they Protestant because they are against integration?

The GDPR is a prime example of why the EU will continue to lag behind the US commercially. Instead of recognizing that the Cloud renders the old fortress Europe approach under the existing Directive quite impractical, the Commission's solution was to extend the EU's (paper) jurisdiction over the entire world. The UK should have good data security standards, but the laxest possible controls on the processing of non-confidential data. There is of course a need to enable data flows from fortress Europe to the UK, but subject to that the frivolous data protection industry should be kept as small as possible. What I tell you about me is not my data - it is yours.

Politicians are lobbied by both sides. This is not necessarily a corrupt process, but a necessary interaction between citizen and government. Google has the deepest pockets in this game.

To my mind, "net neutrality" is a brilliant piece of naming-as-propaganda. It is actually a kind of nationalisation.

The EU's Data Regulation was always misconceived

When the first draft of the EU Reg was leaked I thought it showed very well why Europe is so uncompetitive. Data protection (apart from data security rules) has done very few people any good and imposes massive costs.

It also proceeds from a strange Continental notion that data that you have about me are my data. Actually they are your data. If you seek to conceal your drug addiction but choose to be seen coming out of a treatment centre, hard luck if the press publish the fact (yes, that's you Naomi Campbell, no doubt a keen reader of The Register: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3689049.stm). It was difficult to explain to US colleagues that private data in the EU are not confidential data, but non-confidential data on an elastic that I can zap back if I do not like what you are doing with them. It is a concept basically hostile to the open society.

EU data protection law is and always has been nonsense on stilts. Every protection of my public, non-confidential data is a limitation on your freedom to receive and publish information. Confidentiality is one thing, "privacy" (in the special EU non-private sense) is quite another.

Spot on

The reason why a UGC exception is not needed (at least if the objective is economic growth) is implicit in ScottME's comment: "If getting rich had been my objective, I would not have uploaded it to YouTube."

Most UGC (Downfall subtitled clips etc), however amusing, is of so little value that it is not worth encouraging with an exception. It is on YouTube because it is not exploitable. But it should be up to the creator to decide whether to upload or not, and if you give that right to the creators of derivative works, you can hardly deny it to the creators of the works on which they rely.

The Content ID system has been worth its weight in lobbying gold to Google. Few commentators seem to realise that it is a protection racket.