Waiving parliamentary immunity appears to be a rather common case these days. Currently, the European Parliament is debating IMM/2009/2056 – Request for the waiver of parliamentary immunity of Roberto Fiore.

Usually, this type of activity is pretty rare. But in these days where everyone is talking about the democracy being under attack by terrorists and ministers of interior, such signs should be considered as a clear indication that something else is going wrong.

It should also be noted that I do believe more in the guilt of Fiore than I do in the guilt of Tauss, whose immunity has also been waived by the German Bundesrat. Tauss is being accused of possession of child pornographic material. However, this coincided strangely with his refusal to vote in favor of the party line. Also, incidentally, one of Tauss' working areas was the investigation of child pornography, so fabricating proof would be an easy task.

With these cases at hand we should all ask ourselves the question: what is really wrong in today's politics?

The very positive reactions to Merkels election campaign event in Hamburg were rather disturbing than anything else. At first it seemed funny that the crowd screamed out loudly ”Yeah!“ after the first sentence of Dr. Merkel (stating that the Berlin wall had been crushed 20 years earlier), but the schema continued: every sentence of Dr. Merkel was followed up with a ”Yeah“ by the crowd.

I can only recommend this type of flashmobbing in political campaigns. If it happens at more of Dr. Merkels lectures, people will notice.

In the end, it was all predicted by a visionary with an edding on an election ad:

• Youtube video of the flashmob action

The olympic fever was omnipresent during the past 2 monthes. But apparently, some of the ITU as well as some politicians took the notion of an olympic fever way too litterally and started living a feverish dream. While before the olympic summer games, everybody complained about repression of the Chinese and lack of freedom and liberty, very weird voices are raising now after the games.

The target is clear. Berthold Brecht suggested in his Radiotheroie that giving people the possibility to voice their opinion unrevised, universally, will inadvertedly start to develop an opinion of their own and start to escape state supervision. This is what happened on the Internet, but the state authorities are afraid of losing grip on the situation since it was not planned to track down individual members of such a discussion group.

Like Wau Holland said: «Denen ist Brechts Radiotheorie auf die Füsse gefallen, sie haben es nur noch nicht gemerkt.» (”Brecht's Radio theory came to haunt them, they just didn't notice it yet.“)

Since in the meanwhile, the radio theory has indeed been noticed, and the Internet is said to be full of terror (funnily in accordance with Brecht's theory), politicians as well as the ITU are monitoring the situation in China very closely. Why? Because China has managed to establish structures to control the information visible in their part of the Internet. This means that evil terrorism – such as asking for a democratic government – will be noticed and the responsibles can be thrown into prison.

This of course causes a lot of envy among our local politicians. The German CSU politician Uhl recently asked for Chinese-style restricted Internet access in Europe as well: ”If the Chinese can do it, we can do it as well. In that case I take pride in being authoritarian.“

And this is not just a single case from a random politician: the International Telephony Union (ITU) recently set up a working group for tracing back IPs. Evidently, the aim is no longer to convert China into a democracy, but rather to turn the rest of the world into a dictatorship.

Or maybe it's all just an olympic feverish dream?

The No DMCA site, which originally showed information and a petition against the Swiss copyright revision, appears as defaced now. Evidently, the owner decided to delete the vhost – for whatever reason.

Unfortunately, this also means that all links to the domain are now broken. More than that, the author originally asked for contributions to a new revision (in accordance with FFII's recommendation. Evidently, all these contributions are now lost along with the site.

Rest in pieces, no-dmca.ch!

The European Commission has launched the next stage of the Digital Restrictions Management consultation. In this stage, the current proposal has been published and is open to comments from all stakeholders until February 29th, 2008.

The time for these measures appears particularly badly chosen, especially in the light of the fact that the big producers, such as Sony BMG or Warner Music, have recently decided that there is no added value in the use of DRM in copyright protection, and no longer DRM protect their media. Under these circumstances, the entire process should be questioned again before pointless measures are taken.

Rumour has it that the RIAA is linking to pirated software. This is an interesting step to take for them, especially because it has been decided earlier in the DeCSS case that even the act of linking to web sites containing legal infringements is a legal infringement.

The impact of this case is going to be interesting. This is not the first time that the RIAA, which is known for their lawsuits against countless users of file sharing software and Linux video players, is itself in infringement of the rights they claim to defend.

Update: This is just a case of cross site scripting, there is no infringement on behalf of the RIAA.

On December 13th, 2007, exactly 26 years after Poland called for martial law in 1981 in order to gain back control over the opposition, the European Union members have signed a treaty which became known as the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. This treaty practically establishes the European Union as a state of its own, along with a new constitution.

Most of the flaws which have been pointed out in the EU Constitution are also present in the Lisbon Treaty, but have not been addressed yet. As an example, the Lisbon Treaty contains provisions that the EU may go to war while individual member states may «constructively abstain» – thus being practically uncapable of preventing having to go to war.

The Brussels Journal has an analysis of the contract by Professor Anthony Coughlan which enumerates 10 major changes the contract is making (while surely going too far to the Eurosceptic direction in suggesting that the harmonization effort in itself is wrong).

1. It establishes a legally new European Union in the constitutional form of a supranational European State.
2. It empowers this new European Union to act as a State vis-a-vis other States and its own citizens.
3. It makes all citizens of European member states also citizens of this new European Union.
4. The same name «European Union» will be kept while the Lisbon Treaty changes fundamentally the legal and constitutional nature of the Union.
5. It creates a Union Parliament for the Union's new citizens.
6. It creates a Cabinet Government of the new Union.
7. It creates a new Union political President.
8. It creates a civil rights code for the new Union's citizens.
9. It makes national Parliaments subordinate to the new Union.
10. It gives the new Union self-empowerment powers.

While the establishment of an European state is certainly a long-term goal to aim for, some elements of this treaty are still not acceptable. The current contract still contains some provisions which are not adequate for the constitution, and should be refined to meet the high democratic standards set by the member states.

The military cooperation charter a rather unfortunate chapter, remembering the controversy of the war against Iraq, which Germany and France chose to abstain. Would such a situation take place in the future, then Germany and France might be forced to participate in the war. This is of course one of the consequences of the harmonization process, but there should be provisions declaring that an unanimous decision is required in order to go to war – the only way to really justify it. An exception would of course be when an aggression against a member state has to be encountered.

This looks like yet another treaty which has not been balanced properly beforehand and needs a lot of further work before it will be adequate for the reason it was intented to.