Leaked ACTA Treaty to Outlaw P2P?

miowpurr writes to tell us that a draft of the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has been posted on Wikileaks. Among others, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has weighed in on the possible ramifications of this treaty. "Among other things, ACTA will outlaw P2P (even when used to share works that are legally available, like my books), and crack down on things like region-free DVD players. All of this is taking place out of the public eye, presumably with the intention of presenting it as a fait accompli just as the ink is drying on the treaty."

Comments

If your congress critter is on this list

[merchant_x]

Tell them to stop selling out their constituents.

From TFA
Thank you also to the Members present, who have done so much to advance
    the cause of IP protection, including:
            - Rep. Mary Bono (R-CA)
            - Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
            - Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)
            - Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
            - Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

Re:Just as with anything...

[oahazmatt]

It goes further. From the Wikipedia article:

The proposed agreement would allow border officials to search laptops, MP3 players, and cellular phones for copyright-infringing content. It would also impose new cooperation requirements upon internet service providers (ISPs), including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, and restrict the use of online privacy tools. The proposal specifies a plan to encourage developing nations to accept the legal regime.

Bad summary.

[kesuki]

I went to wikileaks, read their summary, dled the PDF and read as much of it as i understood, and this document does nothing to 'criminalize' p2p activity. What it does criminalize is...

"For example page three, paragraph one is a "Pirate Bay killer" clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. This clause would also negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks. "

Basically, not just a pirate bay killer, but a wikileaks killer all rolled in one. Legitimate P2P is completely unaffected. except that there will never be 'open' trackers after this law goes through, in member nations. it's really easy to have a closed tracker, as WOW uses for distributing patches... now if WOW or say, SC2 uses P2P for 'user created content' (custom maps, sprites etc) then they might have to 'kill' those features in a patch, after all you can easily infringe on copyright (especially with custom sprites)

p2p == !DNS

[swm]

Yes, all IP packets are sent from one peer to another.

The defining characteristic of what people call peer-to-peer systems is that the peers find each other without relying on the Domain Name System. A service that relies on the DNS--like a web server--can be shut down by removing its address from the DNS. Wikileaks had a problem like that recently. If you can force everyone to go through the DNS, then the DNS become a single point of control for the entire internet, and you can easily shut down anyone you don't like.

The tricky part is establishing the legal principle that forces everyone to go through the DNS. You have to make it illegal to send a packet to an IP address unless you have obtained that IP address through a DNS lookup. Or something like that...

Re:Guess they don't play WoW...

[Kjella]

Just to throw up a few numbers I found on that:

From 1960 to 1970 the number of Americans who had tried marijuana had increased from a few hundred thousand to 8,000,000.

US Census 1970: 203,302,031 inhabitants So a total of less than 4% of the population tried it through the golden hippie years, ever. It's freaking hard to find good data on P2P users, but the pirate bay has over 10 million simultanious users alone. Never mind all the other public BT trackers, private BT trackers and all the other P2P networks. With all due respect, the P2P movement is far bigger than the marijuana movement ever was.