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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.
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!
They say don't feed the trolls, but.. *sigh* .. it's true.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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.
it isnt' just for the stop downloading copyrighted shit - this can be used and twisted in many diffrent ways..
just the fact that it allows them to get customer info without a court order is sickening..
also the idea that the US would write something that would effect the rights and privicy of people from another nation is also sicking..
there is more than one way for them to get what they want.. and this is the easisest for them and the wrost for us and our rights.
everyday moving onto a sailboat and just live sailing sounds more and more like a reality for me..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Most legislation flies through with barely a comment from most people. Unless it is something HUGE that the media can make a sensation out of -- PATRIOT ACT, assault weapons, etc -- there is no coverage except maybe on CSPAN.
The media is not going to raise awareness of a bill that benefits the media. No one will know about this except people who go out of their way to care, if you try and bring it up, most people won't want to hear it, etc. Maybe, if you're really lucky, you'll get called a "conspiracy nut," like when people try and raise awareness of plans for the "North American Union" and things like that.
Sad thing is, most people don't give a shit and don't want to hear anything that makes them feel more discomfort than they can reasonably handle based on the limits which they have received from the programming received from TV and school.
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.
The way copyright law is right now? Yes, it is an attack on free speech. All any influential(i.e. rich) company or person needs to do is state that they have a copyright over something they don't want distributed, and they can stop anything from being put up on the 'net.
"If you want people to respect the GPL then you must respect copyright law in general."
This does not actually follow, or at best is a mis-stated point...
The GPL is an attempt at copyright-jitsu. It is perhaps an attempt to use copyright laws, which you may or may not agree with, but which you have to live with until they change, to undo some or all of the percieved ill effects of said laws.
So, it may actually boil down to this for some:
"I don't respect copyright laws, but if you want me to respect your copyrights, you need to respect the GPL..."
(I am not trying to accurately portray my personal take in the above.)
all the best,
drew
http://packet-in.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
That would never happen..... oh wait....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
If you want people to respect the GPL then you must respect copyright law in general.
The word "respecting" is such a weasel word, so let's be clear. Conforming with laws doesn't mean agreeing with them. I conform to many laws that I, nevertheless, oppose and want to abolish. Furthermore, copyright law isn't an all-or-nothing proposition; I agree with limited copyright and strong fair use. I certainly do not agree with current copyright terms or fair use restrictions.
So, it is completely consistent to insist that people conform to the GPL as long as current copyright law is in effect, and yet strongly oppose ACTA. In fact, licenses like the GPL are designed to basically make copyright law irrelevant by creating an ever larger body of content to which these draconian restrictions that lawmakers dream up do not apply, precisely because the license itself preserves the freedoms that lawmakers are trying to take away.
And it looks like it's working. With more and more fine tuning of these licenses, big media companies may increasingly find themselves in a situation where they simply can't use the content they want to use because if they do, they have to give up their onerous restrictions on their own content.
This is trying to restrict distributing copyrighted material. This had nothing to do with free speech.
It has a lot to do with free speech, since one of the many things that are bad about current copyright law is that it's being used to restrict free speech.
If you want to say that you think GW Bush likes to have tea parties with stuffed animals nobody is going to stop you.
I can perhaps say that, but GWB might use ACTA and copyright law to keep me from presenting the actual footage proving my case.
What a load of tripe.
Sorry but good software is scarce. How many really good Operating systems are out there? Not that many. How many programs as good as Photoshop, Autocad, or even Office?
Dang few.
The talent and work to make programs of that quality is scarce. Yes once they are made it is easy to reproduce them. But the same is true about books and has been true about books for around 200 years!
This load of dung is simply a want for free stuff that others work hard to make.
IF you don't like copyrighted works like movies, books, and software then.
a Don't use them EVER.
b Create your own and release them under Creative Commons, GPL, or the BDSL.
But don't go around and justify taking away the right of authors.
If I write a program I have just as much right to sell it for $1000 dollars a copy and not allow you to make copies of it as I do two write a program and release it under the GPL.
So cut out this subterfuge. You think because it is easy to copy that you have a right to free stuff no matter what.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This very site you are on, Slashdot, has been forced by the Church of Scientology to remove comments because the CoS has draconian copyright laws at its disposal. The Church also forced Google to remove sites critical of it from its index, again with copyright law.
Not to mention the fact that sometimes copying is necessary to make a point. That's one of the reasons fair use exists, yet it is constantly being eroded. Point out defects in a book by providing an excerpt and currently fair use will protect you. Do the same for a DVD, and you've tripped over the DMCA because you bypassed copy control encryption to obtain the excerpt.
The boundary between copyright and freedom of speech is a lot more blurred than you seem to think.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
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