Current Events Conversation

The academic even that I attended was Sam Stelnicki’s current events convo on March 28th. We met in one of the glass classrooms that can be found on the Smith side of the Smith-Steeb residence hall. The primary idea of this conversation was based around business news, and business is inherently internationally linked in this day and age. For most of the specific topics we talked about, they also took place outside of the U.S. These specific topics that we were to talk about based on Sam’s prepared presentation were European copyright laws, Uber, Huawei, and Boeing.

European Copyright Laws 

This has been a highly contentious point of discussion in Europe for many months now as this has a massive effect on not only big corporations, but individual internet user alike. While in theory it sounds like a good idea to prevent theft of intellectual property, I believe it will be abused and create a form of censorship. It gives the ability for content creators to claim anything that is created by them, but used by others, even if it would have once fallen under the guise of fair use. The big issue would be for social media sites as a lot of material and jokes spread throughout Youtube or twitter are spread around with a sense of freedom, but this would allow for the take-down of almost everything if any aspect of it is not fully original even if it was not posted for monetary gain. While going through the European parliament when it this Article 13 was introduced, a lot of people had an early fear for their memes as many would be subject to being taken down. This also makes business extremely difficult as this would only apply to European Union countries, so corporations would have to decide to roll out a complete overhaul of automatic filters specific to geographic location or save money on an already costly project by making it site wide. Without a doubt there is going to be a lot of fighting over this policy when countries begin to implement it into their legislature as many people see this as the beginning of the end for freedom of speech.

Huawei

Another big political debacle that relates to the business world is Huawei, and the arrest of their CFO, Meng Wanzhou. She was detained while in Vancouver for a layover per request of U.S. officials. She was detained as it is believed Huawei used a shell corporation from Hong Kong to sell U.S. containing goods to Iran in contravention of sanctions. Obviously it is a big issue to arrest a foreigner under any circumstances, but it is a more intense situation when you arrest the CFO of an enormous company that works closely with the Chinese government. Not to mention her release has been refused despite the Chinese government demanding for it. This is a huge issue as America and China have been having a tough relationship, and this only adds to the struggles of finding a way to come to better terms.