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."

Comments

Re:Can't put that genie back into the bottle

[rfroberg]

The music industry around here are talking about that they want to start an experiment with voluntary broadband-tax, starting this autumn, which will allow you to, for a small fee, download all the music you want from Pirate Bay or wherever. Uploading will still be illegal.

That is not only wrong, it is contradictory as well. It is far from decided what form the experiment will take and even what music will be included or with what technology.

Contradictory because you say uploading will be illegal and yet you are allowed to download from The Pirate Bay... how do you do that without uploading while downloading? If it's illegal to upload, from who should the participants in the experiment download their stuff? From criminals?

In fact this proposition has been widely criticized, particularly in the blogosphere. One of the main problems with the experiment is, how to measure what music is downloaded, who are the rights holders and how to locate them and pay them. One suggestions was to install a piece of software in each participants computer that would monitor every download. Now, why would that meet any resistance?