The flipside of this are things like the banana regulation, more commonly known as Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94.[1] I believe it's now rescinded under ridicule but there are people who try to deny it even existed. It's well worth reading in full on eur-lex for riveting prose like "the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis".[2]
Regulations over the official ingredients of jam, battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages, the list goes on. It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
If your comment about "right to make certain types of sausages" refers to the various protections around food actually coming from a particular area I actually think that is a good thing.
After all (to pick an example from the news today) - if something is described as "Stornoway Black Pudding" I'd like to believe it actually came from Stornoway:
You mean like the traditional Croatian wine Prosek being banned from sale because it sounds too similar to prosecco which was developed long after (and they are different types of wine).[1]
Or the feta cheese I buy from Germany that can't call itself feta and that anyone in day to day conversation will refer to as feta.
>Or the feta cheese I buy from Germany that can't call itself feta and that anyone in day to day conversation will refer to as feta.
And that anybody that has eaten actual feta will tell you immediately it's a bad imitation (often with the wrong process and/or ingredients).
(Same goes for any "feta" sold in American supermarkets, at least Kroger, Walmart etc that I know of (as in the US the point of origin protection doesn't hold). Also real feta is NEVER sold in crumbles, as you often find it there).
Whereas American may like their food standardised by restaurant chain (I can walk into any X chain and get the same food), in Europe it has traditionally be standardised by region (local cuisine, etc).
So think of it the same as Burger King being unable to name a product "Big Mac". Only instead of protecting/benefiting just some private chain, it protects/benefits a whole country/region where the food was first developed.
Those protections, besides having rules for the "point of origin" also have strict guidelines on the ingredients etc. So you know your feta is X% milk etc, fermented for Y time, etc, and not some random cheap knockout.
Of course, nothing stops a company from selling the same product, or a different mix. They just can't name it feta. They can include a sign like "feta like product" though.
>bad imitation (often with the wrong process and/or ingredients).
But who is to decide? Imagine if the same thing happened to hamburgers or endless other common things. although understandable the reasoning is already flimsy when it's a region but when it's applied to generic names which have been around for a very long time then who is to decide?
For example, I come from Melbourne in Australia where we have the world's third biggest Greek speaking population after Athens and Thessaloniki. Many came before Greece's entry into the European Communities. Feta means slice, "φέτα", so they can't sell a slice of cheese in the EU, made perfectly in the traditional manner, calling it a slice in their own language as they have always done? They are Greek citizens (as well as Australian), they speak Greek, they've been making that cheese since forever I can't see how you can retrospectively then say people can't call it that. As with the case of the Croatian wine, it's vandalizing history and existing linguistic practice.
In Europe it's easy: the region that created AND named the stuff is to decide.
>Imagine if the same thing happened to hamburgers or endless other common things.
It already happens, just not in a regional level but a corporate one. You cannot call your burger a "Big Mac" or "Baconator".
Also remember that the names we're talking about are not generic as "hamburger", but specific. Feta is a specific product, whereas the analogous to your hamburger example would be if a region has a monopoly on "cheese".
>Feta means slice, "φέτα", so they can't sell a slice of cheese in the EU, made perfectly in the traditional manner, calling it a slice in their own language as they have always done?
Feta is the word for slice, but is also a specific name for a specific cheese -- not to be confused.
(The fact that they are Greek citizens doesn't play any role, the right for Point of Origin protection went to Greece, not Greeks in general. Else any company worldwide could hire some Greeks or some French, and say it makes Feta or Champagne, etc).
>they've been making that cheese since forever I can't see how you can retrospectively then say people can't call it that.
Well, that "forever" is merely a century or less, since most of them weren't longer than that in Australia. Compare this with over two millennia of Feta tradition in Greece.
In any case, it's an EU law to protect the regions that create specific stuff and the consumers. Without it our supermarkets would be full of crap sold as "X", made for cheap in some foreign country with no quality control, and sold as genuine X.
We love our original, and quality/origin protected food a lot to let that happen.
I do think the current situation around feta is better than the previous confusing one, where lots of products which were clearly not feta were allowed to be labeled as "feta". But I personally would prefer that methods/contents be regulated rather than location of production.
I do think it's a good thing that what used to be called "Danish feta" is now "salatost" ("salad cheese"), because it is simply not feta. But I sympathize with the French, Israeli, and New Zealand feta that's no longer allowed to be called "feta" in the EU, because those countries do produce some genuine feta, in every sense except being produced in the wrong location. On the other hand, I think the same of champagne, and I doubt France would be willing to trade the exclusive right to the word "champagne" in return for getting to call some of their cheese "feta"...
I see what you mean, but I find it also helps protect traditional regions that came up with the thing first, so I'm for it for that reason. Sometimes other places can duplicate the methods/contents, but they still lack the definitive knack than the region that invented the stuff has.
And since the product was also named in the region, it's only fair for them to be able to use it. Now, the French might not get feta but they get Champagne protected, and generally everybody region benefits somehow.
And it's not like patent laws, where you cannot put out a competing product. It's merely like a trademark: you have to name it differently. So, if the french feta is OK, it still has a chance to catch on, just under a different name.
> They just can't name it feta. They can include a sign like "feta like product" though.
No, if the name is a protected name it can't appear on the label or any advertising. Champagne is from Champagne. There's no such thing as 'wine produced to the champagne method', even though some Cava (etc) are produced to that method.
Most of the feta cheese you buy as "feta" that tries to be and still isn't real feta is actually cow milk cheese. The taste and texture is different, so the product shouldn't be called feta. The fact that people colloquially refer to things by the wrong name shouldn't allow producers to mislead me by labeling things with the wrong name.
What if someone followed the traditional methods and ingredients of real feta, made the best feta cheese you ever tasted in your life, BUT it was not made in Greece. Should that be allowed to call itself feta?
I am against monopolies generally, and this geographical indicator stuff around products that have existed for centuries (Champagne, Bordeaux, Bourbon, Parmesan, Chablis, etc) rubs me the wrong way. It's granting a small region a monopoly on a descriptive word that everyone uses to describe the product, with no indication of quality anyways.
What if Diamonds had to come from Russia or else they were not allowed to be called diamonds? Or if sugar had to come from America or else it had to be called something else?
Confusion would reign. Its unfair competition, really.
* Champagne is a sparkling wine made with a specific method from a specific kind of grapes grown on a specific soil in a specific climate. You can reproduce the method elsewhere and use the same grapes, but you can't reproduce the soil or the climate. Hence, the end-result is different. It's a sparkling wine and there are a lot of sparkling wines that are equal or better than a mediocre champagne, but they're still champagne.
* Bordeaux is nothing more than a regional specifier. It encompasses the climate and the soil found there. It neither indicates quality nor taste - though many people associate it with both due to some of the best wines being produced there. What would any consumer win if all of a sudden wine produced in Berlin could be labeled "Bordeaux" - the one person winning here would be the seller. Is that fair?
* Cheese is even harder. Roquefort derives much of its taste and character from the microclimate found in the caves around the town of Roquefort. Something similar is true for Parmesan: Each cheese labeled as parmesan must be made by a specific recipe and is checked by a local authority. So I guess you could make the same product and ship it to Parma and have it certified - but would that be worth it?
Neither of the words is a descriptive word such as "Diamond" or "Sugar". The descriptive words in your cases are "Sparkling Wine", "Red Wine", "Whisky", "Hard Cheese". It's a brand name, like iPhone is Apples particular type of smartphone and Nexus Googles type.
All in all: What would the consumers gain if all of a sudden all blue cheese was roquefort and all hard cheese parmesan, all red wine Bordeaux, all whisky Bourbon and all sparkling wine Champagne? Pretty much nothing.
(*) Sidenote: Wiener Schnitzel must be veal in germany. If it's made from pork it's "Schnitzel Wiener Art". Now, that's stupid.
Yes, that's a truth-in-labelling law rather than an exclusive right to make a product. "Champagne-method sparkling wine" can come from California, "Champagne" has to come from a particular region of France.
The lack of a requirement for truth in advertising, labeling, news, etc drives me nuts.
*"After being fired, the couple successfully sued under Florida’s whistleblower laws. However, Fox won on appeal as courts found FCC regulations against news falsification was a policy, and not a law. Fox then countersued in 2004 for court fees and legal costs."
Meaning it's perfectly fine to knowingly lie. Some tortured rationalization about free speech. I'm sure that's exactly what the founding father's had in mind while writing Second Amendment.
I'd take the free market zealots a lot more seriously if they were spear heading the fight for consumer protections as a precondition to deregulation.
The "geographical indications" are a simple trademark landgrab (pun intended). The geographical regions are trying to recapture exclusive use of a genericized term. Think trampoline, escalator, zipper, and aspirin. The goal is to exclude competitors and increase profits.
Next up: France will assert control of the terms french bread, french toast, and french fries, but only to eliminate them as inferior food products.
It's rarely "exactly the same". Champagne made in France and Feta made in Greece has specific ingredients, requirements etc, defined by law.
In places where those laws don't apply, they make cheap knockoffs with different ingredients mix, laxer process etc, to sell cheaply. Danish or American feta, for example, is nothing like actual feta. At least Denmark cannot name it "Feta", whereas US companies can, thus misleading the consumer.
Second, even in cases where it's exactly the same, it's a "point of origin" protection, meant to protect the original region that made the product.
The same way that BK cannot name one of their burgers "The Big Mac", but for a whole region/country, not just one private company.
In the USA, you can't sell onions as "Vidalia onions" unless they're a specific species grown in a certain part of Georgia where the soil has very low sulfur content. It produces a sweet onion that you could only get with specially prepared soil anywhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidalia_onion So, you can imagine with something like sausage, where there are many ingredients that are subject to local conditions, it would be impossible to regulate all the criteria for being identical to sausage made in that region, and it's easier to just limit by geography.
I've always viewed it as similar to a regional copyright protection in that a region is allowed to advertise that only it produces the "real" product. Much like any shoe manufacturer can create a shoe exactly like Nike, but only Nike can advertise as actually being Nike.
For context, you always have to keep in mind why those laws exist.
What is the goal that is towering above all else for the EU? The one it has actually been relatively successfully implemented? Creating a common market, of course!
For a common market to exist it is obviously not enough to open up the borders to people, labor, goods and capital. It is also necessary to have common rules and regulations for the goods and services sold throughout the common market. If that weren't the case, individual countries could easily erect trade barriers between them (through rules that are mutually exclusive, e.g. so that a Spanish manufacturer of wine harvesters can't export her Spanish harvesters to France, at least not without massively changing the production process and in essence opening two manufacturing lines, one for Spain, one for France).
So the EU parliament gets this stack of laws on fruits from 27 countries and is told to turn that into one unified law for the whole of the EU. That's basically what's happing. The EU is not so much in the business of making new regulations, it very often just unifies.
Now, it's important to stay vigilant throughout this and pay attention and tell the EU when it screws up, but I do not see any kind of systemic issue. I think it all works pretty well for what it is.
For Europe to not even want to have any war among themselves, for Europe to find the idea of war among themselves to be completely ridiculous and idiotic, it is necessary for Europe to be meaningfully interconnected and interdependent. Treaties have again and again shown to be not up to that task. Bilateral or multilateral treaties of the olden times are mostly political in nature, and anything that is just that can also be reversed through a mere political process.
That interconnection and interdependence has to be created on a deeper and actually meaningful level. The economy is really the obvious choice here, since no political process can even attempt to reverse interdependence of that kind easily.
Plus, it’s sort of obvious. Just as the industrial revolution was hindered by the many tiny kingdoms in what is now Germany (and the huge amount of borders you had to cross and tolls you had to pay if you wanted to ship a product from anywhere in what is now Germany to anywhere else in what is now Germany) – that is, until Germany was unified in 1871 – the many borders in Europe could have hindered Europe globally more had that process towards a common market not existed. It’s the same thing, really, only that I don’t think political integration (beyond creating a common market) has much of a future.
Sigh. I feel like you didn’t quite understand the point I was making. I don’t think ridicule is in any way an appropriate response.
On a basic level this is not about regulation. It is, of course, in some way, but only a roundabout one. Regulation in EU countries already exists. National regulators have been regulating stuff here forever.
EU regulators very often do not wake up in the morning and think "What laws can I add today?”, they mostly think “How can I best unify those complex and already existing laws into one cohesive whole that makes some sense, taking into account the interests of all 27 member nations?”
Now, that’s a hard problem to solve, but it is very often not driven by any sort of desire to create more regulation. In fact, if you are a company operating EU-wide (or just a number of EU countries) the complexity of laws you have to adhere to may even go down with a unified EU law, even though the EU law may be more complex than any single law in any single EU member country.
It’s a messy process and it’s far from optimal, but I think it’s pretty much an EU wide consensus that the goal of the EU is not to abolish regulation in any kind of grande way. So unifying it is.
(It is, of course, also through that through now more and more unified laws the decision process on regulation now moved to the EU level. Where laws are already unified, decisions about future regulation are made on the EU level.)
Old Europe strikes me as a place that is great for oligarchs with political connections and lots of capital for regulatory compliance costs, but bad for low-capital scrappy startups. I guess that's why most people in Europe get a job working 40 hours a week for The Man where they can't be fired and take lots of vacation.
battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages
What do you mean? There are people in England who think that the EU is going to ban British Sausages being called "sausages", forcing them to be called "emulsified high-fat offal tube".
It was actually a joke from the political satire show "Yes, Minister" from 1984 (watch the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzeDZtx3wUw ). There are a lot of euro-scare stories in England of similar levels of ahem reliability.
Most of all, all "german sausages" sold in britain show how much the brits still hate us krauts. Each and every one is an insult to every living german - and probably to the dead as well.
Rather than trying to ridicule the "banana regulation" and "sausage naming rules" you should do a bit more reading on the true advantages for consumers of classifying fruit and vegetables by quantifiable and tangible aspects (size, shape, colour, etc.); and stopping scams by implementing designation of origin legislation on produce such as sausages. The economic impact of these are measured in billions.
I too would find it naïve at best to think that the EU was perfect; everyone knows that it isn't.
I don't understand your complaint about civil law, though; why is common law better than civil law? Civil law has the added benefit of being fairly simple and court rulings not making precedence.
Regarding the Greek cafe, there are plenty of crazy regulations like that in the US, usually centered around alcohol.
For example, in Virginia (where I live), ordinary stores can sell beer and wine, but nothing harder. Liquor can only be sold in state-run stores. I suppose the intent is to discourage consumption of hard liquor... and it seems to work on me. The state-run stores are inconvenient enough that I go for softer fare instead of tracking one down.
I knew a couple who bought a gas station and turned half of the convenience store part into a restaurant, while keeping the convenience store part open as well. They had a license to sell alcohol, but not a license to serve alcohol. You could go over to the convenience store half and buy a six-pack of beer, but you couldn't get a beer in the restaurant, and you couldn't bring the beer you had just purchased.
I recently moved into a newly-constructed house. One of my neighbors had to delay their move-in date by a couple of days, because the builder forgot to paint the curb yellow behind the house to indicate that it was a fire lane, and the county wouldn't give them an occupancy permit. This street has plenty of "fire lane" signs, has very little curb at all (it's mostly driveways), and nobody in their right mind would park on it, but it had to be done. The builder rushed the job, and a few months later, basically all of the paint has flaked away and nobody seems to care. Somehow, this was unacceptably unsafe when we were moving in, but it's fine now....
The Greek example sounds worse, but of course a singular example is hard to draw a lesson from. I imagine we'd all benefit everywhere if regulations were treated as a means to an end rather than ironclad law, in any case.
Alcohol laws in America are crazy. In Kentucky, there's a joke about how you know you've crossed a county line when the potholes end and the liquor stores begin.
I live in Minnesota, where our liquor laws date back to the era when being a liberal meant you were for women voting and against ANYONE drinking. It was a big deal when we finally got to keep bars open til 2am, a few years back. We can't buy alcohol in stores on sundays, and grocery stores can't sell anything stronger than 3.2 "near beer". You have to go to a real liquor store for even wine and beer, much less hard liquor.
I never really understood how certain political factions can go on and on about supposed government control over our lives, all while completely ignoring pervasive crazy alcohol laws. Why can't I order beer over the internet? Why do I have to go to a state-owned store to buy vodka? Why don't these people who complain about "big government" ever bring it up?
Most of the small government crowd is partially libertarian. They ain't perfect, but you can get their votes on a number of libertarian issues.
They get a bad rap on the internet because the Republicans (whom they normally vote for) need religious conservatives to make a winning coalition, but they still do good. For example, the only obstacle to the internet sales tax is the House Republican caucus.
My understanding is that incumbents have interests in keeping things the way they are. Some states ban stores buying liquor directly from the manufacturer (in theory to make sure liquor stores don't cheat the state out of tax) thereby creating a state granted monopoly to certain lucky distributors. There are industry lobby groups that oppose liberalizing alcohol law (as are certain conservative lobby groups).
>A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
To be fair, that's a greek thing and not an EU thing.
> "the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis"
Oh, look, a good definition in a legal document. Don’t people normally complain about ambiguous laws leaving interpretation open to the courts[0]?
> Regulations over the official ingredients of jam
So that consumers can buy jam everywhere in the EU and get more-or-less the same rather than (possibly annoying) surprises. The problem here arose because the word ‘jam’ (or more precisely, ‘marmelade’) was used differently in different parts of the EU prior to regularisation. I am happy about it.
> battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages
Everybody can make any type of sausage, what they cannot do is claim that said sausage was made somewhere else. What exactly do you find unreasonable about that?
> It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
So you prefer to have such regulation spread not only over a defined body of laws but also over each and every court decision made within the last n hundred years? On the contrary, I would argue that civil law is inherently superior to common law, as it puts the legislation where it belongs (the legislative, i.e. parliament, and, by extension, the various ministries) and gives consumers and businesses security that, if they follow said legislation, they have a reasonable chance of doing everything correctly, rather than having to take into account court decisions on the other side of the country or hope that the court in question will invent new laws according to the way they want, rather than their legal opponents.
There is absolutely no reason to impose a total word count limit on the body of laws. There is a reason to keep that body of law reasonably organised, accurate and easily understandable, which is usually the case, and more so in the EU than the US (otherwise, legal fees would be much higher in the EU, as people would require more help understanding the law, right?).
> A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
Well, that’s what you get for becoming less and less competitive and instead extending bureaucracy more and more to accommodate more and more public officers, paid for by cheap credits, assumed to be backed by more sanely operating economies. Greece’s fault, you could only blame the EU for allowing them in.
[0] Or are you just annoyed that this is measured in millimetres rather than imperial attolightfortnights or similarly ridiculous unit?
>Oh, look, a good definition in a legal document. Don’t people normally complain about ambiguous laws leaving interpretation open to the courts
Yes you have a "good definition" in the law there, but what is the law for? It can't have been too important if they repealed it and some people deny its existence.
>Or are you just annoyed that this is measured in millimetres rather than imperial attolightfortnights or similarly ridiculous unit?
The anti-British sentiment in this thread is astounding (I use metric by the way).
The sausage name is shared across regions due to a historical legacy, people who have traditionally enjoyed it should not have language and culture taken from them for the purposes of profits. See my post above on the feta rule being historical and linguistic vandalism.
Ensure a given standard of quality in a consumer product.
> The anti-British sentiment in this thread is astounding
Britain has in the past been perceived as a nation first bullying its way into the EU and then hindering any further integration. That such sentiments crop up in a thread on EU regulation (a pet peeve of Britons, apparently) is not surprising.
> (I use metric by the way).
Yay you! And really, I was just looking for something that could be considered wrong with that sentence you found so amusing.
> The sausage name is shared across regions due to a historical legacy, people who have traditionally enjoyed it should not have language and culture taken from them for the purposes of profits. See my post above on the feta rule being historical and linguistic vandalism.
Firstly, let us clarify that the sausage case has been resolved, with Slovenia having their (Slovenian) word protected, and the German analogue accepted for the sausages in Austria, cf. [0].
Secondly, I agree that feta is somewhat of a edge case, were I would prefer to see the recipe rather than the place of origin protected, as the latter is not immediately obvious from ‘feta’ (contrary to Champagne, for example). However, even then does the idea of ‘regional trademark’ make some sense to me – but, as I said, this is an edge case and doesn’t really have to do anything with the thickness of bananas or the hygiene requirements of chicken.
Yes you have a "good definition" in the law there, but what is the law for? It can't have been too important if they repealed it and some people deny its existence
AFAIK, that law was actually a protectionist scheme to favor African (ex-colonies) banana producers against South American ones in EU markets.
Something that most people forget about the fruit and vegetable standards - gradings other than the finest can still be sold to the public. Just most supermarkets chose not to.
There is nothing ridiculous about that regulation. 80% of it is common sense written down. The line you quote is describing where to measure the thickness, since it varies across the length.
According to the article this regulation is still in effect.
Regulations over the official ingredients of jam, battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages, the list goes on. It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No_2...
[2]http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLE...
[3]last three paragraphs http://economistmeg.com/2012/02/27/note-from-athens-feeling-...