NYT: Europe's Antipiracy Proposal Draws Criticism

"One of the world's largest record companies is owned by Vivendi Universal, a French conglomerate whose chief executive is Ms. Fourtou's husband, Jean-René Fourtou.

Ms. Fourtou [the Parliament member shepherding the proposed law through debate] said that when she was given charge of the proposed law in March, neither she nor her colleagues in Parliament saw her husband's job as a reason for her to recuse herself. "There was a plenary session of the Parliament in July last year," when Mr. Fourtou took the post at Vivendi, she said. "My colleagues all saw his name and his photo in the newspapers. It was not a problem for them. My conscience doesn't have a problem with this."

That's "democracy" at work in the EU. If your conscience doesn't have a problem with a blatant and major conflict of interest, you must not have much of a conscience in the first place. European politicians don't even need to be corrupted by the media cartel to get laws custom-made to their interest, since the former are literally in bed with the later. Disgusting. Who are you to tell young people about what's right and wrong, when your husband's company violated antitrust law and screwed music consumers?

I just wrote an infuriated email to François Bayrou, the leader of the political party Janelly Fourtou belongs to (the centrist UDF). Not that I love these guys, but Bayrou at least is on the side of actually asking what people think of a European Constitution by way of referendum.