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EU Passes Nasty IP Law
FireBreathingDog writes "This BBC report details a new European Union law that 'allows companies to raid homes, seize property and ask courts to freeze bank accounts to protect trademarks or intellectual property they believe are being abused or stolen.'" Like any bit of controversial legislation, it can change massively just before being voted upon. This legislation, which originally had DMCA-like provisions (protections for technical protection measures on copyrighted works), seems to have lost them prior to passage. (I'm sure they'll be back in some new piece of legislation.) However, it does make "regular" copyright enforcement much more aggressive in the EU, with companies able to raid, confiscate and freeze the bank accounts of those accused of copyright infringement. More information: IP Justice, FFII, FFII background.
this only applies to people who try to make money out of piratism. Not individual persons (the ones who download music to listen to it).
From the article:
"During the debates, the directive was widened to cover any infringement of intellectual property.
The directive allows companies to raid homes, seize property and ask courts to freeze bank accounts to protect trademarks or intellectual property they believe are being abused or stolen."
Time to get some obscure patents or copyrighted material, let it find its way into commercial and government use, and then use the law to raid the business and government offices and seize their assets.
It's called the European Union Copyright Directive and it was enacted into the national law of many member states last year. Imagine the fun if the worst provisions of this Directive get adopted into national law (they may not necessarily be so enacted) and the EU caves in over software patents - could a programmer's bank account be frozen and his house be raided at midnight for unkonwingly infringing a trivial and obvious patent? As has been remarked round these parts, George Orwell was right but out by 20 years...
Maybe one can use this against GPL violations. What does the legislation say about when, oh, Phillips or Vivendi might be violating GPL terms? Can we have their assets frozen?
If you believe there is imminent threat of the destruction of evidence, then yes. But if they're shipping a GPL-derived product without source, then I don't think there's any chance seizing their assets would protect any evidence, as many people would have copies. So the courts wouldn't allow that circumstance.
Actually, a lot of deals have a negative net value. You sell the rights to your music for what amounts to a loan. They give you an advance, but that, and things like marketting, recording studio time, CD pressing costs, and breakages (calculated from the losses caused by records breaking) are deducted from the bands cut of the royalties. A lot of people will find themselves in debt to a record company after a fairly succesful album.
I know exactly what it feels like. I am a practicing illustrator, and copyright is my bread and butter. Until computers transformed anyone with a copy of Photoshop into an "artist" and anyone with an HTML editor a "publisher", your could not exist as a professional without a firm understanding of copyright law. There were few abuses as a result. Since the revolution, theft of images is commonplace. However, as a fledgling illustrator with little to lose but my pride, I braved the web early and learned a lot about intellectual property and business. I learned:
1) Most people are decent and generally ask permission before reproducing my graphics
2) Many people are ignorant of copyright law altogether, but they are not the ones you need worry about
3) Contracts don't mean dink unless you can afford a good attorney
4) The best protection from those who steal intellectual property is your intellect itself. That is, I feel secure that I will survive as an artist even if one of my pieces is reproduced illegally. I can, after all, always make create more work. So I am not militant about copyright enforcement. Trespasses are rare, and do as much to promote my work as they diminish it.
The crooks, on the other hand, need to keep stealing to survive. Those with the most interest in copyright are the non-creators, whose only substinence is their parasitical relationship with creative people. They deal in commodities, exploiting the works of others, and without copyright protection they have no product at all.
Copyright is useful to an artist in the sense that it can permit us to make enough money to do our work full-time. A copyright is actually a bundle of rights, which can be parcelled out to various publishers for far more money than any one publisher is likely to pay. But copyright laws that are two restrictive can also hamper creativity and induce laziness. Personally, I'd love to see the stupid Sonny Bono act (the name says it all) repealed. There is no value in copyrights that last for decades...not to their creators, anyway.
Has it happened to me? Yes, and the law offered me no protection at all. Justice in this country goes to the highest bidder.
Like most parasites, though, I think those who would exploit the creativity of others will soon learn that a good parasite does not suck it's host dry and survive. Already, the RIAA is feeling the backlash of consumers fed up with manufactured music and strongarm tactics. Local animation houses have learned that if Americans can't get quality animation here, they will import it. (Animators are a very exploited breed of artist, who traditionally work long hours for low wages.) Disney is biting at it's own wounds after unwisely deciding that they had no use for traditional artists anymore (Pixar hired most of them...guess whose laughing now?). I think the MPAA and the endless guilds in Hollywood will soon learn that the Independents are numerous, talented and fully capable of distributing their own films, thankyou.
So, how does it feel? It feels lousy, but not nearly as bad signing those rights away to some exploitive corporation who may never get around to cutting you a check anyway.
Screw copyright. Only criminals need rules for morality spelled out on paper.
Eben Moglen says :
We will say to the judge, "Judge, Mr. Defendant has used our copyrighted work, copied it, modified it and distributed it without permission. Please make him stop."
One thing that the defendant can say is, "You're right. I have no license." Defendants do not want to say that, because if they say that they lose. So defendants, when they envision to themselves what they will say in court, realize that what they will say is, "But Judge, I do have a license. It's this here document, the GNU GPL. General Public License," at which point, because I know the license reasonably well, and I'm aware in what respect he is breaking it, I will say, "Well, Judge, he had that license but he violated its terms and under Section 4 of it, when he violated its terms, it stopped working for him."
But notice that in order to survive moment one in a lawsuit over free software, it is the defendant who must wave the GPL. It is his permission, his master key to a lawsuit that lasts longer than a nanosecond.
Full text at Groklaw
I hope that they will do so, it should be sufficient to put an end to SCO and their illegal behaviour.
Not likely. AOL is a public company that cares (or should care) about its image. They have a strong IM product, but hardly a monopoly, given the alternatives (MSN, Jabber, Yahoo... and even ICQ, still). If they sue people who make AIM clones, Joe Blow isn't going to care. If they start suing users they'll just scare everyone off within a year or two and lose AIM as a (not purely AOL-bound) product.
Remember AIM is a network which people use to talk. Consider that if you lose one person in the network because they get sued, all their friends will hear about it, and they'll all get off AIM illico presto. And most of their friends's friends. And a large percentage of their friends' friends' friends... etc. Once large numbers of people are moving off AIM, even AOL users will end up installing some rival product so they can keep talking to their friends.
So, overall, a very bad move for AOL. Even AOL execs will be able to see that.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
The Register, have reproduced a letter to them from Adrian McMenamin, the Press Officer of the European Parliamentary Labor Party.
The letter contains the the particularly juicy quote:
A grep for his name in the 2.6.3 linux source tree does not return anything, so I suspect he may be lying about his kernel modules, just like he is lying about DMCA in Europe. (The EUCD, which is like the DMCA, but stricter in some areas, was ratified in the UK a few months ago).
Does anyone know anything about Adrian McMenamin?. Has he in fact made any useful contribution to OSS?
The UK government (assuming Tory B. Liar to be still in power) would simply find a judge who is about to retire, secretly double his pension, and employ him to conduct a public enquiry.
These [the Holocaust] are crimes of the past and the persons who did it are dead (...) However, the executive branch does not make the laws.
But the executive branch often initiates the laws and passes the proposed bills to the parliament. Just check the case of one Hans Globke, the guy who wrote the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 - these laws were actually the legal framework of the Holocaust. They allowed to gather Jewish citizens in ghettos and subsequently eliminate them, all according to the law (the Nuremberg Law). The very same Hans Globke was appointed Staatssekretaer (State Secretary of the Federal Republic of Germany - the highest administrative post in Germany) in 1953 and he was one of the people shaping the federal German state as we know it today. So of course you're right pointing, that he's dead but... this is the country he has shaped. Many leading public officials of the whole Adenauer era had similar skeletons in closets (technically, not exactly skeletons but rather their Nazi uniforms back from the "good old days"). Therefore there was nothing strange in the fact, that in 1963 German state police seized the office of an indepented weekly magazine - just because it was investigating a corruption case. Yes, I know that the Spiegel Scandal eventually ended in a triumph of democracy - but please observe how lightly the aspect of private property and individual freedom was treated in this case. In Germany it can't happen as well today - this is the same state with the same law. Co-written by Hans Globke and alike.
Wont this now migrate across the pond to the US due to the WTO's 'least common denominator' way of looking at inter-country commerce laws?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, if the corp can come in your home, can they hire someone else to go do it for them? Like...a team of Shadowrunners? Yeah, it may be just a game, but there is a reason the genre is called "futureshock". I can see a corp hiring some ex-Gulf vets from Iraq to head up part of their "IP aquisition" team.
If I was in europe, and a corp stormed my house, I wonder if I could shot them. It's not like their police. In the US, the BSA usually comes with Federal Marshalls.
This is bad bad stuff. Like I told my 20 year old stripper girlfriend: "Every time I'm around you I feel I need to get my leather trench lined...with a nice tight kevlar weave."
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
This just sounds like the EU formalizing the common-law parctice of the Anton Piller order, which is basically a civil (as opposed to criminal) search warrant. In general, Anton Piller orders are very difficult to get and I imagine these would be too.
However, you can for practically all intents and purposes, shoot a stranger in your house as long as they die so there are no witnesses, and especially if they have no reason to be there and have been convicted of burglery before. As long as you stuck to your story that you thought they were reaching for a weapon, no court would convict you of anything. ( I don't know if their family could still sue you for depriving the burgler of their civil right to life. They would only have to get a jury to believe that it was 51% likely that you killed the burgler knowing they were not intent on hurting you )
I can think of many interesting legal/ethical conundrums regarding the right to kill though:
Imagine if there are 100 people about to be killed and the only way to save the other 99 is to shoot one of the 100. Is that legal? Maybe it would be since the 1 was dead meat anyway, but then again we are all dead meat in the long run.
What about if there are 100 people about to die and the only way to save them is to kill an innocent bystander 300 meters away by shooting them? ( maybe they were deaf an facing away, but their body will fall in such a way as to unplug the heavy piece of machinery that is about to crush the 100 people. ) This is probably the most ethical thing to do, but I don't know if it is legal. I wouldn't do it for 100 strangers because I wouldn't want to face the legal issues involved. But were I altruistic enough to sacrifice my own life for 100 strangers ( and some people are ) then I would probably be altruistic enough to kill the innocent bystander and face murder charges myself. If there was someone I cared alot about among the 100 I might do it too.
I suspect killing an innocent bystander to save 100 people is illegal, but what if there were 1000 people in certain to die without a blood sacrifice? 10000? 10,000,000 about to be blown up by a thermonuclear bomb? Would the murder of one innocent be immoral? Illegal?
If you buy that killing one innocent bystander is justified to save New York City from being obliterated by Tsar Bomba, then what about organ transplants? If you know someone's hematocrit etc, you can assemble a list of five or six people who will die soon unless you shoot that innocent person in the head and steal their organs... At how many people is the cut off? Exactly how many bricks does it take to make a Heap of Bricks?
Eat at Joe's.
Sounds like you are the apathetic sheep believing what the british tabloids tell you to believe.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Yesterday I made a post about an article which quoted Blake Stowell (SCO's director of public relations) who replied, when asked the question "will you also sue European firms?" his reply was "Not in the next few days."
I have this horrible feeling that what was meant by that reply is that they were going to see if this was passed or not.
At the moment there is a lot of talk about the high probability of SCO looking to sue companies here in the UK and Europe in general, and to be honest they must like what they see now and if anything will make it more likely.
Its going to be harder to fight them here too. With the US cases, if a company is sued they can at least bring forward the fact about the IBM case and wish to put a hold on the lawsuit untill a decision has been made.
Unfortunatly here we may not have that ability. Where it seems common sense to take the US IBM lawsuit into account and as always it is down to the courts discretion as to whether this is granted or not. But the fact that the trial is overseas makes this a lot less likely.
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Yeah - without a permit. Let's take Finland, a peaceful Nordic country, for an example. 5 million people and over 2 million licensed guns. High-powered hunting rifles, semi-auto AK clones, shotguns, semi-auto pistols, and over 2000 full-auto weapons.
So where does this "civilians in the EU have been disarmed" come from? Or is Finland really an oddity in the EU?
CIVILIANS (which is what those private raiding parties are over there) break into your home by force
There aren't going to be any civilians breaking anywhere. The BBC is writing nonsense. What the directive says is that the infringed party can present evidence of a crime to a court and that the court can order a raid to seize evidence. The directive doesn't actually say who would perform the raid, but it would have to be the authorities, since they're the only people who have the right to do anything like that. This is, I believe, pretty much the situation now in most countries, including the US. I'm pretty sure I've heard the police going in with a warrant and seizing stuff over there.
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
Yes, but, doesn't it seem a little bad to ever suggest that harse measures like these even be considered by the governments in the EU?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In December of 2002 I got to give a presentation over IP rights and the EU to members of the German Parliment and other officials from several soon to be EU members' Embassies as well as officials from the United States and the UK. *now for the karama hit* I was arguing that while technology allows easier infringement, people's copyrights, patents, etc. need to be respected and that they key wasn't in new laws, but enforcement of existing laws.
At that time the EUCD was "Supposed" to be in effect by the 23rd of December 2002, if I remember correctly. For some reason people think of the Internet as something "new" that requires "new" laws for a "new" time, and that is the false primise that I brought up in my 30 minute presentation, well I hope...German is a second language to me and far from perfect, however the professor advising said I did fine.
The Worldsofends.com paper/site whatever it is brings up the very point of what the Internet is: a method of transmission of data. The internet itself is designed to route data packets and that's about it. (that's my summation of their main point anyway...RTFA make sure I'm not smoking anything)
Right now I am doing a study for the local chamber of commerce and downtown development agency about collecting sales tax for internet transactions at least in the United States and basically my arguement is this: A company that uses an online catalog (shopping cart) to facilitate sales of goods that are shipped between state lines is not any different that an existing mail order/catalog business. The only difference is that the paper printed catalog has been replaced by the innovation of an online shopping cart. There is no need for "new" laws, simply enforcing existing laws that govern this industry.
Once you explain it in those terms, people begin to understand that business on the internet is no different than brick and morter. Don't get me wrong, there are some other pressing international issues that are still being worked out like the old Yahoo! Vs. France (9th Circus of Appeals case).
Copyright is really is no different. All that needed to be said in the DMCA and the EUCD or now EUIPsomethingsomething was: "The internet, or anyother electronic transmission method is still subject to the laws of international copyright".
Geesh, maybe after my masters degree, I should start some foundation that attempts to advise people, hold seminars, charge $500 a head and make a lot of money.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Quite simply, the government is a battleground for different powers, be they the populace, wealthy individuals, wise counsel, charismatic leaders, or whatnot.
Traditionally, each of these powers has created its own government, which lasted for a short while. When recognized by a government, the power is controlled, and you don't have illegitimate control over the government by that power.
However, when a power isn't recognized, then it can overwhelm the government, and cause it to fall in a characteristic fashion.
Ignore the populace, and you get a French-style revolution. (We have Congress).
Ignore the charismatic leader, and you get a coup. (We have the President).
Ignore the wise counsel, and you get civil disorder (we have the supreme court).
Ignore the press, and you get a government that loses its grip on reality. (We have a press).
Ignore groups of like-thinking individuals, and you get balkanization (we have the Senate, though it used to function better when economic interest varied more by state than by profession).
Ignore money, and you get essentially bribery undermining every part of the government.
We have nothing to recognize money.
Thus, money is undermining our government.
The solution, perhaps, is to have a 3rd house of Congress, one in which the seats are auctioned off, one per year for a full year, to be filled by a citizen of the choice of the winner, and which has its own power of veto.
But until you have something like that, yes, money is going to undermine your government.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's