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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.
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.
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
Right after you head to Washington D.C. and find them in the right town. ;-)
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!
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.
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.
"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".
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.
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
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.