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US Plots "Pirate Bay Killer" Trade Agreement
An anonymous reader sends word that Wikileaks has revealed that the United States is plotting a 'Pirate Bay killing' multi-lateral trade agreement, called 'ACTA,' with the EU, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland and New Zealand. "The proposal includes clauses designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of copyrighted information exchange on the Internet, which would also affect transparency sites such as Wikileaks. The Wikileaks document details provisions that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. If adopted, the treaty would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools."
Remember when the RIAA shut down Napster and declared victory over the music downloaders? Remember when they started their pathetic little lawsuit harassment campaign? Tell me, is there a single person here who has trouble downloading a pirated song today? Is there anyone here who couldn't start up Limewire right this minute and find a copy of virtually any song they could want? For all their heavy-handedness, they didn't even make a DENT.
Times have changed. No law is going to change that. They're just embarrassing themselves trying.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If it's not already regulated, it will be soon!
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Good luck. If one will fall, hundreds will rise. Speaking of, where's my new Oink!?!
And we (the US) are pissed at China for what, now? Sounds like this is taking a page out of their playbook for censorship.
Information wants to be free!
A shift in the way we think about copyright has to happen, or this is going to get out of control in a hurry.
you vote SHIT like these into power, just because they ranted about conservative values, and they make a total crap out of everything.
thats why world hates you. nothing else.
Read radical news here
Whilst I can understand and to some extent sympathise with the desire to take down the PyratByran, Wikileaks is in no way part of the same phenomenon. It's a site exposing what we, the great unwashed, are not supposed to know.
Fuck this!
Love ya!
MG
My blog
When do we head to Boston and Ctrl-Alt-Delete this out-of-control government?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Next step is to tie the passing of this legislation to fighting terrorism or child pornography thus removing the stink of corporate favouritism. Maybe throw in some sort of muttering about intellectual property protecting American workers from having their jobs shipped over seas and this will fly through with barely a comment from most people.
Insert pithy comment here.
The full and unequivical end of file shareing! Don't you think?
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
You just outlawed every search engine!
So, they will move to Norway. Oh wait, the Norwegian police obey US Laws - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen
Finally we'll have the end of government spin merchants putting their garbage on Youtube http://uk.youtube.com/10DowningStreet
As for the other stuff, politicians still don't seem to "get" the internet, whatever law they come up with, there's a way around it. It shows you how dangerously uneducated all those English/Latin/law/history/politics/art degree holding politicians are.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Hey, how about the government screw off instead. I'm not for piracy myself. In fact, I think you're scum if you pirate. But to have the government enforce laws via gun-point is going way too far.
To all the software and media content providers: Use dongles or create "white list" serial numbers to activate your products.
To the US federal gov: Fuck off! I've left my Republican party these past years because they're no different than the Democrats. So until my *trust* is earned, every politician is guilty until they prove otherwise to me.
Kindly, your local Texan.
Life is not for the lazy.
The copyright cartels are already broken. Musicians, moviemakers and other participants of creative industries are already exploiting the Internet as a means of distribution. This genie certainly won't go back into the bottle unless another "trade agreement" enacts a system of strong guilds such as that found in Mussolini's Italy.
Besides, one international agreement does not make enforcement any easier. Millions of people just in northern europe have come to accept torrent downloading etc. as an everyday thing; international agreement or not, no country is going to toss even one percent of their population in jail for something that was not previously a crime. Not to mention actually catching and prosecuting etc. those people... matter of scale, really.
Also, trade agreements such as these don't have the power to override national legislation. Even if the EU signs and ratifies this, it will only be at the level of the EU -- i.e. they can pass a directive which EU member nations are perfectly free to implement as laxly as they please. Remember, the EU is not a federation. Not to mention how this would meet rather stiff resistance in the euro parliament, members of which have lately been strongly turning pro-privacy and pro-free culture.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
First, they killed Napster. So we moved to Limewire. Then we moved to Kazaa. Then, after a bunch of **AA lawsuits, we moved to bittorrent. Now, what in God's name makes them think that we won't move someplace else? They're never going to kill filesharing. What the fracking industry has to do is come up with content that has value and that we actually want to pay for. Piracy will never go away; it's been around in one way, shape, or form since the age of exploration. But, if content is good enough, the majority of people WILL spend money on it. The problem with radio, television, movies, and music today is that they've been feeding us crap since the early 90s, and no one but a select handful of zombies and drones wants to throw their good, hard-earned money at it.
I propose that the service will have to:
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That deserve to be unelected. Two are Republicans, three are Democrats, so, supporting the opposite on all five cases would really be a nearly even deal.
This is my sig.
"Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement"?
These people are dishonest even in naming their legislation. This is the "Anti-Copying Trade Agreement", or perhaps more aptly, the "Anti Fair-Use Trade Agreement".
Even if somehow this ACTA(weird name)destroys pirate bay, something else will move into the vacuum TPB will leave behind, and even if all Torrents and Limewire usage was banned tomorrow, people would still use them, and if they disappeared, something else would take their place.
Doesn't it seem kind of absurd that there is a multinational effort to shut down 1 website?
Really?
Maybe instead of protecting us private media interest we could start protecting private citizen interest; a la leave us the hell alone. There have been few bigger wastes of time this decade.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This is exactly the problem with the world today, corporations have way too much power. Even when they lose under the law, they simply create new laws to suit their needs. They never lose. Thus there is no balance between any power citizens may have and corporations have.
Let's face it, if piracy is as rampant as the content industry claims, then it necessarily follows that the vast majority of citizens do not want such draconian laws protecting copyrights. Why should corporations, who cannot even vote, have more rights to create laws than the citizens governments are supposed to protect?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
That.
This is what Australia signed, the resulting extraditions have been reported here before.
Oh wait, that's not what it actually says. It only talks about infringing material. I'm shocked and surprised that the submitter chose to use such an inflammatory statement in the summary... new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers Document says "Procedures enabling rights holders
.. impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. The document says that they'd like to remove any liability from ISPs to encourage them to cooperate with copyright holders in the removal of infringing material. Hardly "strict enforcement".In short, I find you to be exaggerating. A lot. Unless you have another document up your sleeve to back up your assertions, which I doubt.
As I have been saying all along the WTO is the most insidious thing to come along in generations. This only is another example of why i think this way.
It usurps a countries sovereignty and will force the entire world down to the 'lowest common denominator' in all things, not just the veil of 'commercial trade' that the treaty hides behind.
If we keep pushing this, it will come back to bite us in the end as another country will demand the same thing, and negate our laws.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And it's a country.
Antigua.
Considering how even the WTO considers the US is way out of line, and the US refuses to make the reparations, or hold it's end up of the 'fair rules of trade', Antigua currently has a lot of leeway to act as a hub for this kind of thing. And if the US wants to make a trade treaty that'll stick, first they have to open up a lot of markets to Antigua that'll cost billions.
So, this bill gets put live, and every site suddenly stops paying their local ISPs and relocates to Antigua inside 24 hours.
Net result, no difference to the file sharing, loss of money to US/EU ISPs, and Antigua gets better investment in it's infrastructure.
The usual "big stick" the US uses to bully people into submission on this (the WTO) won't bat an eyelid about Antigua doing this.
First of all, yeah, I agree that legislation like this is NOT about "free speech". (That's, unfortunately, a mistake people OFTEN make about laws restricting various actions or behaviors. They jump to a flawed "It violates free speech!" argument, instead of looking at it all logically. Maybe that's just because in the U.S., the right to "Freedom of Speech" is the one people are generally most aware of and can most easily comprehend the importance of?)
I don't agree that laws like this also "keep you from taking GIMP, making a few changes, and reselling it as closed source" at retail outlets.
What I saw, quite clearly as a bulletin board system operator in the 1980's through mid 90's (when my BBS was forced to shut down due to an FBI raid and seizure of all my equipment), was the VAST difference between violating copyright *for profit* and NOT for financial gain.
One of the WORST things the DMCA legislation did was to effectively cancel out any such distinction. All of a sudden, an issue which was really only a CIVIL matter between a software developer and another individual became CRIMINAL in nature.
Ever since the year 2000, the U.S. has decided it will waste taxpayer dollars criminalizing random citizens, using this bastardized version of legal statutes originally designed to stop COMMERCIAL COUNTERFEITING.
Actually it's now EASIER these days to get what you want online LEGAL or NON LEGAL. Killing napster just made people find new and creative ways to juke the system. Napster made way for Morpheous. Morpheous made way for Kaaza. Then new technologies like *some based on old* Like limewire and bit torrent came about. Then came rapid share *groans* and all it's cousins. Not to mention technologies like Hotline and IRC trading. When Supernova was shut down that was the DEATH OF TORRENTS. Yet look what we have now. There is always someone willing to step up. It's never going to go away. The best way to curb it is thru using technologies for better legal distribution. Set a fair price for your product. Then let the public pay. Look at Itunes and even Amazon now.
The groundwork was laid the first time one person handed another person a floppy to make a copy. Online distribution made way the first WAREZ BBS came to be. I just wish they could accept this. They never will. As long as CEO's see this as LOST MONEY instead of, they were never going to pay in the first place. I am sure the actual losses *People who would have paid but didn't* are something like a percent of a percent of the Statistics tossed out by the MPAA, RIAA, and every software company on the planet.
Let me show you an example... RETAIL STORES. They know shrink is part of the game. They do everything reasonable they can to stop it. Failing to stop it, doesn't cause them to strip search the patrons. It's written off every quarter at inventory.
In closing *because this is becoming rambling* Yes it's stealing, yes it's wrong, and yes I am as guilty of doing it as EVERYONE of you. If I was them I would be pissed too. Though I would take my lumps and do the most sane things to stop it. Learn to live with some loss. Then live happy on my big damn pile of money.
you didnt vote for the other guy, who might have been better by even a little bit, and we have this on our hands now.
life is always a choice between the better of worse.
Read radical news here
I'm not saying it WILL happen or is even likely, what I am saying is that P2P is just one part of the equation - however, with bandwidth development and collapsing prices of storage, just putting together a searchable "big closet full of downloadable goodies" (viz iTMS) is becoming an increasingly trivial effort. And all it takes is a small group of dedicated and protected people to blow the lid off intellectual property.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Who do I write to here in Australia to ensure that we dont sign on to crap like this?
Kevin Rudd? My local federal MP?
Although somehow I think that all the letters in the world wont make one iota of difference once Hollywood says "we will not shoot a single frame of film in any country that does not sign this treaty"
19th century was a difficult time for american writers because there was no international copyright law. Publishers often just pirated the works of authors rather than paying them.
".. imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools."
So this starts out as a copyright issue but once it's against the law to use online privacy tools, even within certain uses, it becomes more easily actionable to use them at all.
The RIAA/MPAA/xyAA are smoke screens for what's really going on with our rights and our privacy.
Make an agreement with EU. That means that now each country has to put it in its local laws, after interpretations that make it compatible with their own constitution. If such an agreement is signed, count several years before Sweden redacts it as a national law, and expect them to have a heavy debate around this. There are no federal courts in EU. If a regulation (that's not a law) exist in EU, it doesn't impact citizen of the countries that didn't implement it as a local law.
So good luck killing the pirate bay with an EU agreement. I surely hope Brussels will get cash from this deal.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you notice I did say that the DMCA is in my option an abuse of copyright law.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If there are people out there that think this is going to make a dent or even stop file sharing and p2p. Well..they have another thing coming to them. Its too late to go back, file sharers won the battle. The government needs to give up already.
I was worried upon reading about this and thought it was time to contact my representative and senator again. Then I realized that there's no one to really contact about this. So that would be why people are upset about the whole international trade situation.
Oh, and this is AWESOME. We can't even only mess up our own country, we have to ruin everyone else's also?
Yeah, it's the latest fetish for swedish IP fanatics. Except that noone can give you licenses for *all* you can download of the net (well, government could, but they won't, as they are mafiaa puppets just like everyone else), uploading will still be illegal (so if people followed the law, the system wouldn't work) and the money will be distributed to all the wrong people (sortof like STIM, if you know what that is).
Broadband tax is not a solution, sorry.
Since the US have been condemned and keep on refusing to apply the WTO decision to allow online gambling in the states... Antigua will have legally the right to become a PirateBay Heaven :)
So keep your movies and music and books private.
See how much money they bring in.
They only have value because of letting people know. Your SSN/DoB/etc are only valuable because you can keep them mostly secret.
See the difference?
No, probably not.
Governments (Well, mostly the US right now) pull this sort of stuff all the time. Come up with a "noble cause" to push through a bill which purportedly can further the noble cause, and bring perpetrators to justice.
In fact, as many here have pointed out, there are a huge number of reasons this won't work. However, the MEANS by which it is supposed to work, that is the tools it places in the hands of the government, will have been put into law. This is how every anti-terrorism bill has failed to prevent terrorism, but has succeeded in reducing civil liberties.
Furthermore, by signing an international agreement they can then pressure other signing countries to limit freedoms of _their_ citizens, and also use that as a stick against non-signing countries. ("Your policy doesn't match international standards--fix it, or we'll all have to impose sanctions.")
Pirate Bay, wikileaks, any of these 'undesirable' sites are merely (a) the excuse, and (b) collateral damage.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Considering how many people worldwide are involved not just in the actual downloading/uploading of such material, but also the number of folks involved in indexing P2P, writing software for same, and creating and marketing those "online privacy tools," if they are going to criminalize such activity, I hope this treaty makes provisions to allocate funds for a whoooole lotta new prisons.
That's why this is a quixotic fight. When you have so many people involved in an "illegal" activity, any attempt to enforce laws against it becomes a lost cause. But then, such logic has yet to mitigate the "War on Drugs"(TM) -- yeah, how's that working out for everyone? They'll make a few high-profile busts of Pirate Bay-ish sites here and there (and those will probably just relocate their servers to a country that is not a party to the treaty), and maybe hit a few random private citizens to try and throw a scare into everyone, but most file sharing will go merrily on, unimpeded. What's that quote about insanity consisting of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Nice to see that our government has run out of real problems to deal with.
When your product isn't tangible and is easily copied, the only way you can keep any semblance of control over is by convincing everyone else that they need to pay for the product rather than copying it.
This is an immediate consequence of an "information economy" that deals in intellectual property rather than tangible property.
Oh, wait, bad analogy since he really just became a ghost that didn't seem to be able to do much besides spouting motivational speeches.
But it sounds good in this context.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
If Roe v. Wade means we have a fundamental right of privacy, wouldn't any treaty which infringed upon this be unconstitutional?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well no need to keep paying for that extra fast connection then lol, if all I can do legally is surf and check my email. I can do that for $20 bucks a month and save $100.
Capitalism is the dangerous cult. Consider: thick holy books written by a mysterious class of people supposedly gifted with hidden understanding of how the world works. These books are written in language that is not understood by the layman, who are in fact discouraged from attempting to read them without being sufficiently enlightened -- otherwise they would reach the "wrong conclusions".
Based on these continually evolving writings we are told by the economicianist priesthood what to do and above all why we behave like humans usually do. According to them, a mother will breastfeed their child because it offers her an economic incentive: she will put the child to work as soon as it is possible and thus gain financially. Yet has anyone ever met a mother whose stated motivation is this?
If the economists' instructions are not followed, they say, terrible consequences will result as a direct consequence of disobedience to God's will. Such as the Sun being extinguished and the Moon turning into a hairy dark sack of bristles. Above all, these are not consequences produced by people but by "the unseen", i.e. God.
Of course they will never mention God explicitly: instead Adam Smith's Invisble Hand, the Spirit of the Markets, is alluded to. Much like the god of the Abrahamic religions, the Invisible Hand promises great rewards for those acting in its favour and dire punishments for heretics who do not. Like God, the Invisible Hand occasionally demands (through the priesthood) war, conquest, suspension of justice, torture and murder.
Whenever the holy books turn out to not predict the future, they are revised so that they always predicted the past with 20/20 hindsight. Thus it continues to be possible to justify any proposition from those writings as they have never been wrong.
China/Russia etc. joins...
But then you, writting an article in Sweden can be prosecuted by the Chinese government.
The irony in all this is the bigger picture. Our founding fathers in the US escaped England for its goverments control of trade law and fiscal policies. Our trade agreements to managage music and video downloading will just annoy the crap out of the public. It is NOT a solution to pirating. Sounds familar? The US is becoming the UK. Although we don't have cameras on our streets, were gonna have them in our asses soon. As another slashdotter pointed out, this is the governments way of getting legislation passed for a completly different reason than to regulate piracy. It will be used to regulate much more... My fellow slashdotters, its time to start an open source project to build our own manmade island/space colony that we will declare as a soverign nation...one nation, under gpl, for liberty and porn for all...
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Web 1.0, the Empire Strikes Back
Web 2.0 have no way to survive if you gets penalized for something an unknown person post in your site, and along with it, anything that puts visitors content/comments on it (including slashdot, of course)
Is nice to see America invading/blocking/penalizing/whatever other countries to give them freedom... like this.
Is this law designed to protect the creators of the IP or the people who own patents for legal distribution of music via a medium such as the Internet?
Unfortunately, this trade agreement....will pretty much do just that, it will unify laws to what the US, and the other top IP countries want.
In THHGTTG trilogy, there is the "third ark" ship with its hairdressers, fashion designers, telephone sanitizers, and other useless members of Golgafrinchan society who crash land on prehistoric Earth. They decide to use tree leaves as money, making all of them incredibly wealthy. However, it causes a huge inflation problem, which the Golgafrinchans solve by burning down the forests.
A digital file is like a tree leaf. They cost nothing. To pay for one is madness, to try to use them as a medium of exchange (trade for other goods) is even greater madness. The only sane use of digital sales is sale of the physical medium the file is stored on - like a CD or DVD.
For a country to base their entire economy on digital files is supreme madness, as stupid as the Golgafrinchans' use of tree leaves as money.
The heavy handed attempts to stop the sharing of something that is entirely cost-free to everyone is as stupid as the Golgafrinchans' torching of the forests.
MP3s didn't and couldn't kill CD sales, but the switch from CDs to "selling" DRM-infested downloads instead of physical media certainly might.
My legislators are morons and my country is on its way down.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Is what worries me the most. If applied broadly, that could apply to many types of software, that have legitimate purposes. e.g Anonymous proxies, OpenSSH, Freenet, etc. Basically anything that hides or obscures your communication from eavesdropping could become illegal.
The folks at I2P say it's not ready yet... but I think it's about time we start using that service to protect our freedom.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Search wikipedia.
...that simply doesn't seem to be the case in my history.
...[means] receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works."
0. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Article I, Section 8, US Constitution.
1. Dowling v. United States 473 U.S. 207 was ruled in 1985
Copyright infringement is NOT theft!
2. United States v. LaMacchia 871 F. Supp. 535 was ruled in 1994.
Copyright infringement must have financial motivation.
3. No Electronic Theft Act, 105th Congress, 1997
"Financial Gain
4. Copyright Term Extension Act, 1998
"Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication"
5. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003)
"As long as the [copyright term] limit is not 'forever', any limit set by Congress can be deemed constitutional."
The major fines are very recent as well. This bull is recent and funded by an organization that knows they are out dated and working on a business model of the past. P2P is the future, and not a future where companies like Disney, Sony, and Universal can control people and their culture. They know they are dead in the water, but they are going to spend every last penny on a war to slow their death. Disney made their money "stealing" (by their definition) popular works of the times and remixing them Disney style, quickly making them a powerful empire. The problem is that Walt is dead and now virtually anyone with an internet connection can DO WHAT DISNEY DOES!
They are fighting like a cat in a wet pillow case. They will use all their money to damage as many lives they possibly can, and wage war against every country that won't acknowledge their rule. This is not old, this is new and it has all started in our lifetime. Please follow the link in my signature if you question the MPAA regime. This is one of the most important things I think we can be doing to save our culture from these dying Monarchs. Also, for something short and cute, search "Fair Use" on YouTube for a great explanation of copyright law / fair use through a remix of quite a few Disney clips.
Ok, i'll fix my sig in a sec, but here is the link: http://www.opensourcecinema.org/lessigfinal
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
In my opinion, moves like this have less to do with protecting corporate profits than with locking down the only truly open media outlet left to us. Governments and corporations are much more interested in controlling and restricting the flow of information to the masses.
The internet threatens their control over our minds because it allows the people to easily counter the propaganda of the newspapers, radio and television. Any and every excuse is being used, from stopping piracy to protecting innocent children from the supposed hordes of online predators lying in wait to corrupt every youth who mistakenly looks at a display screen.
Governments and corporations don't need the power to physically enforce their will if they control what we see and hear and, by extension, what we think.
I hope this wasn't off topic.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
this will only go away when the people in charge are the same people that were using the internet as teens meaning in about five to ten years either that or when the IT department is in charge.
Replying to your own post complaining about the moderation is such a douche move.
Maybe we can join causes.
Am I to assume that is what you meant by cannot make a rational contribution to this discussion in part? With double negatives? By contrast, one of my favorite quotes of recent is "You cannot question the government unless you are willing to listen to the answer". Lobbyists have a lot of power through money. I feel or hope to believe that congress works in the best interest of the people, and they do listen. It is just very hard for them to hear over all the voices of the lobbyists; their voices quickly drown out those of the American that can't spend their life up on Capitol Hill. Big media has a lot of money to drown out our voice, not to mention I think that while people may not be deterred from downloading from this oppressive regime, it may stop us from publicly voicing our opinion, and from the looks of it, even voicing our opinion anonymously as this would outlaw things like Tor. One thing is sitting at home, encrypting and re-routing your traffic through proxies to circumvent a bad law, it is another to get out there and yell to the police and lawmakers that you are breaking a bad law that should be changed.
Would you vote if you knew that who ever got elected would execute all those that voted against them? Amnesty to those who didn't vote. What if you were pretty sure your candidate could not win?
What is the moral thing to do? Risk your family, your life, take amnesty, or vote for the worst thing that couldn't be avoided?
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
I'm getting really tired of the executive branch trying to bypass legislative process by signing international agreements that "obligate" them to do what they wanted to do anyway, then shoving those "obligations" down the throats of legislators.
Piracy and to a lesser degree theft of food,shelter&art should always be deemed morally okay, for those you can't afford them.
As I believe it is inhumane to deprive people of food, shelter and art.
And further to this, the balance of societies' riches is not hinged intellectual property or copyright law. Nations have never respected either of those ideas, and therefore why should morally guided citizens when for the most part they are so ill-conceived.
----
What ever happened to Art for Art's sake.
Greed is the virus of society &
Money is the root of all evil.
Another nail in the coffin of sensible laws. This is why people ignore laws that are insane. To put it succinctly, fuck you guys. /me continues torrenting
you're just pissed the good trackers don't like you
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
The best way to defeat these thugs is to adopt encryption tools to make our file transfers invisible. Tools like Tor are a good start. But we need to get enough people using secure protocols that the government won't be able to single out and prosecute individuals for using them.
So if you care about your rights in the future, start using secure protocols. Contribute code to open source projects. Make these systems work. Use it or lose it!
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Does anyone else think this is inappropriate usage of the word "perfunctory"?
According to the wikileaks article on this trade agreement was never brought to the attention of watchdog organizations!
Send email to the aclu, eff, and other groups to put pressure on these organizations before it's too late. We have one month to act!
If possible, send email to specific staff rather than general inquiry.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The more common form of thievery — when actual physical objects are stolen — has been with us for thousands of years. You can say, it has proved itself to be indefeasible much better, than the theft of intellectual property possibly could over the relatively short period that it mattered.
Are we to stop outlawing burglary, because there will always be burglars?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The post and thread here appear to be very US-centric -- they assume that any trade agreement that the US decides to offer to the world will be immediately accepted by other sovereign states.
The United States has a history of pushing its laws on other nations through binding treaties. A binding international treaty typically trumps domestic laws in a signatory nation. This is explicitly true in the USA: an international treaty supersedes US law and the US Constitution and Bill or Rights.
One good example of this practice is the way the United States exported its (insanely stupid and misguided) drug laws to the rest of the world. The United States pushed for the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which required that all signatory countries 'toe the line' by criminalizing drug possession. This treaty prevented any signatory country from treating (certain types of) drug use as anything but a criminal offense. The same thing could be done with copyright infringement.
Here's a quote describing this from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation:
"The 1961 UN drugs convention marks a key turning point in global prohibition - enshrining prohibition in domestic law across the globe, and closing down any possibility of regulated models of production and supply for the proscribed drugs (anomalously excluding alcohol and tobacco)being introduced by individual countries even if they democratically determined to do so. An entire avenue of policy options was closed."
www.tdpf.org.uk/Policy_Timeline.htm
This looks very much like what the **AA wants to implement with regard to copyright infringement. Such a binding international treaty would make it impossible for any country to opt out of enforcing standardized laws against copyright infringement. Such an international treaty would, effectively, export US law and policy globally.
with new ISP provisions, would this not kill off newsgroups?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Why is this modded troll.
It lists congrescritters responsible for this horrendous FTA
it deserves +5 informative!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The berne convention holds that all expression is copyrighted upon creation.
This means that internal memos posted to wikileaks by whistle blowers are copyrighted, and corporations can use the provisions of this FTA to have wikileaks taken down as a facilitator of widespread copyright infringement.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Better start talking with your representatives if your country is in the list, have you read the article?, section 3 talks about legal framework for this operation, which would include CRIMINAL SANCTIONS in addition to civil sanctions.
C-x C-c
Now, of course, I could illegally download those songs from any number of pirate sites and services. But there aren't many options if I actually want to PAY for them, if I actually want Sabbath to get their cut (I do). The music industry has made it impossible for me to NOT be a pirate if I want those songs. Unless I want to order the overpriced physical CD and wait a week or more to get it (since there aren't any music stores left around here), I don't have any choice but to either forgo the music altogether or pirate it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
if they didnt count on having cooperative people in the nations they are dealing with, (like the pirate bay raid last year) they wouldnt go ahead with it.
Read radical news here
You realize, of course, that the motion picture industry is one of the few that actually generate an international trade surplus? With other industries failing, do you think the US is NOT going to do anything and everything it can to protect the remaining cash cows?
When an industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in trade, safeguarding that income becomes its own "very real and very serious problem".
Translation: it's NOT going away.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Is that they want the US laws enforced in every country, not just theirs.
When something is illegal in Germany all sites are required to ban german IPs from, say, the download section. When something is illegal in the US, they want it erased from the face of the earth.
I lost my sig.
This IP protection nonsense is just an excuse for our governments to assume control of the Internet.
Everybody doing it gets a small payout, for a tiny risk of a huge bill. I like those odds a lot better than Powerball...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
What?! No, there is no such law. We turn over Finnish criminals to foreign states all the time.
(The reason behind this "no turning over finnish citizens" law is, surprise surprise, those few hundred jews and communists and such that were turned over to Nazi Germany. Bit of an embarrassment to say the least.)
What?! No Jews who were Finnish citizens were turned over to Nazi Germany. For the story on Finnish Jews during WWII:
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=194
The embarrasment is about the authorities turning back some refugees and exchanging Soviet prisoners of war, including some Jews who then perished in the camps. That's embarrassing, but hardly as ludicrous as deporting our own Jewish citizens into Nazi Germany would've been!
Where did you come up with this stuff?
Besides, the most embarrassing deportations of Finnish history are the Soviet defectors who were turned back after jumping the border - demanded both by those communists (and the moderate left - can't have people walking around telling the truth about the socialist wonderland).