I e-mailed several of my MEPs (Members of European Parliament) today to alert them of my opinions on a new European bill that could introduce a new criminal offence of copyright infringement. Forgetting the massive implications of criminalizing something that was previously a civil matter, it’s scary that the EU could possibly introduce new criminal offences without the public being made aware.

Within a few hours I got a response from the Liberal Democrat MEP, Bill Newton Dunn, saying that he was following his more technically minded Liberal colleagues and voting for the amendment that CopyCrime supports. Score! However, he also suggested that he didn’t like the tactics used by groups such as CopyCrime as they tended to make the EU look like a bunch of ‘wicked Eurocrats’.

I would blame the necessity of such scare mongering on a total failure to educate the general populace about European politics and, worse, the failure of governing bodies to make clear what laws are under discussion and what is likely to occur. In theory we elect representatives who have similar opinions to ourselves on these issues and trust that they will fight for these issues, but in reality there’s no one candidate who could sum up all of your views in one go, so you have to make a trade-off and trust your politicians.

I have quickly recognized that trying to fight the giant political machine of either the UK or the EU in general is a meaningless endeavor because countless numbers of political theories demonstrate why we won’t escape a two or three party system in the near future. Perhaps this is another reason to support direct democracy to some level, but what party is going to implement that? None of them (they can’t even agree on fair, proportional representation!), so we’re stuck with what we’ve got and we have to trust these guys to do the right thing because we can’t get rid of them or change the system.

The Economist sayeth:

The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.

This seems rather unlikely, and a little alarmist. Anyone got any citations for this statement? They provide none in their article. The day we start locking people up who ‘might’ cause crimes is the day any idea of freedom in this society goes down the toilet (habeas corpus would need to be destroyed, for a start).

This is the episode you didn’t see on TV.

According to UN research, half of the world’s population owns just 1% of all wealth, with 2% owning half of the wealth.