
MEPs accidentally vote wrong way on copyright law - pseudolus
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/mar/27/mep-errors-mean-european-copyright-law-may-not-have-passed
======
sc11
It's not unlikely that at least some of them claim it was a mistake to avoid
taking responsibility for their vote because they're aware of how unpopular it
was. After being in parliament for at least ~5 years, it's hard to believe so
many of them still haven't figured out how the voting works.

~~~
riffraff
it's possible, but there are votes in different directions.

It's also possible some just understood the question incorrectly or confused
it with something else, not just "misclicked".

Without knowing how often this happens in other votings it's hard to tell if
this is unusual.

~~~
dagw
_It 's also possible some just understood the question incorrectly or confused
it with something else_

There are a couple of explanations being floated. First of all there where two
votes, not just one, and if you wanted to vote 'correctly' against A13 you had
to vote NO on the first vote and YES on the second (or vice versa to support
A13), The people who voted 'wrong' voted either NO to both or YES to both.

Secondly apparently the order of voting was changed at the last minute (there
where a whole bunch of things being voted on that day) so people who had
written down what they where going to vote on each issue
(NO,NO,YES,NO,YES,YES,NO etc.) and missed that the order had changed would end
up voting wrong. Ie. they knew they wanted to vote YES on issue 27, but issue
27 was actually the 28th item voted for that day. At least two MEPs in Sweden
are using this excuse.

But basically a bunch of MEPs just didn't think it was that important to pay
attention to the details, phoned it in, and screwed up badly.

~~~
noahl
Yes, paying attention to detail is important.

But you would never say this about an engineering system. If you had to make a
series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to correctly deploy
a bugfix, and someone got that wrong, the postmortem would be about what a
terrible UI that is and how it has to be changed to improve system
reliability. An operator making an easy-to-make mistake would never be
considered "at fault".

That's how we treat things that really matter for _websites_. Voting in
parliament is a lot more important than that. I'd rather see a real postmortem
and plan for improvement, not blaming the users.

~~~
nitrogen
_had to make a series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to
correctly deploy a bugfix_

Unfortunately this is not uncommon. Tools like Jira are sometimes configured
with a maze of steps and jumps around the UI (buttons, fields, dropdowns,
popovers in various orders) to get a ticket into the correct state.

------
i_am_proteus
I'm not a citizen of an EU member state. But from an outside perspective, a
significant number of MEPs "accidentally voting the wrong way" seems to
indicate a severe and systemic problem with the European Parliament.

Failure of one the fundamental mechanisms of representative democratic
government calls into question the legitimacy of that government, _and of that
system of government._

This is ammunition for the advocates of illiberal systems.

~~~
clarkmoody
You're implying that a representative democracy is a liberal system, which
does not follow. Maybe you could argue that it has the best _potential_ to be
liberal, but history is replete with examples of huge violations of individual
liberties under these governments.

Perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of democracy is a good thing?
Indeed, why is it legitimate to violate an individual's liberties through a
vote of 50% + 1 of her peers?

Edit: I'll echo the peer comment that a reasonable compromise could be smaller
units of government, which better represent the people. Smaller states also
the limit the scope of abuse of the people within and the threat to people
without.

~~~
anoncake
> Perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of democracy is a good thing?
> Indeed, why is it legitimate to violate an individual's liberties through a
> vote of 50% + 1 of her peers?

Someone has to decide what these liberties are. You can require a greater
majority than 50%, but replacing democracy by something else does not help.

------
Deimorz
I looked into this in a little more detail yesterday after the Techdirt
article was posted. It's a lot harder to format nicely on HN, so see here [1]
if you want the details, but it looks like the vote about amendments would
have changed from:

Official vote: 312 for, 317 against, 24 abstained

Corrected votes: 320 for, 314 against, 20 abstained

It seems very rare to have that many corrections. Out of the 191 separate
results in the voting record document, the only other one with more
corrections was the actual vote on the directive right afterwards (but the
corrections couldn't have flipped that one).

[1]:
[https://tildes.net/~tech/brp/europes_controversial_overhaul_...](https://tildes.net/~tech/brp/europes_controversial_overhaul_of_online_copyright_receives_final_approval#comment-2wxl)

------
tomohawk
Is anyone really surprised that a politician would make an excuse like this?
Whether the politician actually made a mistake or is just saying so after the
fact really is immaterial. When it counted, they did the wrong thing. Trying
to make excuses after the fact says a lot about the politician.

------
zihotki
13 MEPs accidently woted wrongly. Well, how often such accidents happen in the
parliament? Was it actually an accident or it's just a way to recover their
faces in front of their voters?

~~~
trickstra
I've seen it happen virtually EVERY TIME there is a big controversial law.
It's more of a rule than a coincidence.

~~~
aitchnyu
Have an example where votes were reversed and laws were tempered? And were
there any upsides for the defectors?

~~~
trickstra
the EP website states that even if there are any "corrections" from the MPs,
it will not change the outcome of the vote. So the MPs really do that only to
"save their face" on twitter

------
latexr
Reminder of how dysfunctional the voting in the European Parliament is:
[https://youtu.be/lzigiPUXNzI](https://youtu.be/lzigiPUXNzI)

~~~
DoingIsLearning
I am unclear how biased or factual this account is but it really seems
negligent to accept this current process.

I have seen far less critical processes with far more safety checks and
redundancy in place to minimize human error.

~~~
seba_dos1
> I am unclear how biased or factual this account is

Let's say that I'd be very careful.

------
coldcode
Easy solution, hold the vote again. Of course that won't happen.

~~~
return0
i m not sure it would not pass again

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The bill as a whole would definitely pass, but the specific issue (whether to
vote on the link tax and update filter separately) passed by only five votes,
and 13 people said they meant to vote the other way.

Whether either or both of those amendments would pass on a separate vote is
unknown.

~~~
return0
there were also many people who were absent or "absent". they can easily be
swung

------
AllegedAlec
What a surprise. Politicians step out of their bubble to find out that people
hate the laws their sponsors are pushing and try to backpedal.

~~~
vetinari
Also, elections are coming. 23-26.5.2019. Their electorate remembers, and will
send them packing.

~~~
AllegedAlec
Jokes' on the electorates. They probably don't even know who's representing
them in the EU councils.

~~~
CamperBob2
Hopefully, when the European people find themselves firewalled from services
ranging from Wikipedia to eBay, they will learn _and remember_ who's
responsible.

~~~
lenticular
It could also lead to more discontent with the EU in general. The bloc is just
not under sound economic leadership.

I'm not exactly a euroskeptic (I love the Schengen area), but the EU has had a
number of very severe missteps, such as their continued flogging of austerity
that has kept southern European economies from recovery.

------
olivermarks
[https://europa.eu/european-union/eu-law/decision-
making/proc...](https://europa.eu/european-union/eu-law/decision-
making/procedures_en)

It's a pretty arcane system with laws drafted by the (unelected) commissioners
and the EU HCoJ and sometimes (as in this case) ratified by MEP's who all too
often have little understanding of what they are voting on because they
weren't involved early on in their creation.

------
dagw
Earlier discussion about this here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499104)

------
contravariant
>Despite the updated record of votes, however, the initial result still
stands.

Well fuck me.

------
netsharc
I'm wondering if Article 13 is a trick. The EU is probably afraid of right-
wing/Euroskeptics winning big in the coming elections. How to get the youth
vote? Well, what about threatening their beloved Internet?

~~~
mrweasel
I've tried to read the law, but it's hard when you're not a lawyer or a
politician. The sentences are weird, the words are weird and just like all
other in the law making business version control is apparently magic that are
not allowed to be used.

Anyway, yes, I think it's a trick, but not in the way we anticipated. There's
a ton of weird language about collective licensing and collective licensing
management organisations. For the most part it seems to revolve around
ensuring that libraries and archives have access to what ever they need to do
their job. A lot of places on the other hand it seems to be something that
anyone can make use of. So if you want to make a streaming service, with old
Hollywood movie and licensing the movies are impossible or prohibitively
difficult, for example if it owner of the movie can't be tracked down, you can
just license the movie from the collective licensing management organisation
in your EU state. Or license a whole bunch of movies in one go, because
licensing the right individually seems to fall under "prohibitively
difficult".

I don't know, I can't read legalese, but it seems that there's a bunch of
stuff that allows for easier licensing deals across Europe and I think that's
what the EU is really going for. Breaking large parts of the web is just
collateral damage.

Really, some lawyer need to translate this into something we can all read and
understand.

~~~
justinmchase
It would be nice if all laws were just .md files in a git repo and all bills
were pull requests where the legislators get to :+1: or :-1: the PR.

------
ngcc_hk
Can you vpn outside ie from eu to say USA to do things. Like great e-wall of
china or legal wall of eu?

~~~
justinmchase
I'm sure you can technically speaking, it probably wouldn't change the
legality of what you're doing... if you get caught.

