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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."
Considering it uses p2p for patches.
Sneak it in the back door via treaties that trump sovereign laws.
Im glad our collective governments have all the real issues of the world solved ( like famine, disease, terrorists , etc ) and can focus on such important things as saving some corporate entity from having to adapt to the future.. ( and make us all criminals in the process )
Can you say 'one world government by proxy' ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People will substitute away into another technology that will get around the requirements of the treaty if enacted. It's a nice thought though, isn't it ;-)
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
I swear to God, if Harper signs this, I am going to skull fuck him.
Bring it on CESIS, I'm ready and waiting!
"How can we outlaw P2P? A lot of people use it for legitimately trading legal content."
"Exactly. We make legally trading content illegal, then we'll catch those copyright infringers."
"But if you outlaw legal file-sharing you set a dangerous precendent and risk a horrific backlash from the populous."
"Look, you want this kickback or not?"
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
\begin{comment}
It might well put a damper on piracy efforts that rely on decentralized distribution to stay afloat, but it will seriously hurt the (few) legitimate uses of peer-to-peer distribution. Imagine the strain on software development if the the good will and bandwidth of end users disappeared from their distribution model. At the end of the day somebody has to pay for the $n$ million downloads at 700MB apiece; I seriously doubt the paid development, marketing, sales, and support staff want to see it reallocated from their budgets.
\end{comment}
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
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)
can someone come along and say "you can serve", and "you can request", and keep and monitor that separation? seems rather daunting
otherwise, if the status quo is two way traffic flow, p2p traffic can be obfuscated in such a way that it is hard to detect and hard to isolate from "acceptable" traffic
so i think all these laws do is breed stronger p2p apps
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can we gather a list like this and ask candidates to comment on it, like the groups interested in abortion or taxes or the environment do? Or is that outside the scope of
Corporations used to write laws, but that turned out to be really inefficient. Why bother when you can write treaties instead?
And like I've said before, there's no bribing going on: the people writing these laws and treaties believe with all their hearts that the good of the nation -- nay, all humanity is served by maximizing corporate profit through physical force.
I wasn't always like this. And in fact, lest you mistake me for a turtle-suit-wearing WTO protester, I'm actually all in favor of free markets. It'd just be nice if we ever actually saw an actually free market in my lifetime.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
"...The agreement does not cover currency fraud..."
So that's still OK because it's not a copyright violation.
"Who is really behind ACTA? Follow the money:
Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)[4]
Top four campaign contributions for 2006:
Time Warner $21,000
News Corp $15,000
Sony Corp of America $14,000
Walt Disney Co $13,550
Top two Industries:
TV/Movies/Music $181,050
Lawyers/Law Firms $114,200
"
Can we outlaw these groups from the internet? kthx
I honestly can't imagine what the pretext would be if, asked point blank, somebody needed to justify doing this sort of thing in secret. Obviously, it is secret to keep the dirty proles and rabble-rousing journalists away; but I can't even imagine a plausible sounding excuse.
How could doing this sort of thing in secret possibly be justified?(I'd honestly be curious to hear plausible sounding answers, my usual arsenal of quips is exhausted)
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)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Problem is, the Constitution doesn't give a ranking for treaties when they're unconstitutional, and it's been treated that they supersede it.
...if this gets signed, will it kill off MediaDefender's business model?
What is speech, if not the transmission of information from one person to another?
This is a first amendment issue, and I am pretty sure a court would see it as such. Interfering with the distribution of "works that are legally available, like... books" is interference with the press.
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...
Well, of course a phone conversation is a P2P interaction. You can't ban all phone conversations. That is anti-industry. I'm sure the lawyers will sort this out. It should be just a matter of allowing content free conversations to take place. So allowed would be:
'Wazzup?' 'Dunno.'
Whereas absolutely illegal would be: 'Help. Help. The building is on fire.' Not only does that convey data, it is also spreading despondency and alarm. However, it could become legal to phone movie the fire, transmit it to a TV studio, and once they have the royalties sorted out, they alert the authorities who in turn ring the fire department. (On a B2B or blob to blob basis. Blobs have area and are not points. Blobs are not lumps of data. Blobs have CEOs running them. Blobs are good. Points are bad....)
... is that this "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" has taken aim, directly or indirectly, at a number of currently legitimate practices. Of note, I see fair-use being all but completely shut down by this.
Many people even download software to "try it out" before they commit to purchasing a full license. It seems that is about to be criminalized as well...
And what is this *expletive* about ex officio authority to act against suspected infringers? Now we've gone and devolved the international copyright system's legal arena to the level of the Salem witch hunts.
Bravo, society. Bravo.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If I use P2P of any kind for any reason, legal or not, I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
If I get for free, legally or not, what I could PAY for, I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
If I don't spend every last penny I make on what corporate America tells me to, I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
If I don't purchase a gas-hogging SUV every three years, I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
If I ride a bicycle because gas is so expensive, I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
If I don't consume, consume, consume, and CONSUME, I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
I object to having to live in a fucking nanny-state, so OBVIOUSLY I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
If I don't live exactly like EVERYONE ELSE, then I'm a terrorist/terrorist sympathizer.
Know what? The fucking bastards can fucking drop me in an oubliette in Gitmo then, because I guess I'm a fucking terrorist. I don't do everything I'm told to do, believe everything I'm told to believe, and keep my mouth shut because my opinions aren't "politically correct", so that makes me an "undesirable", worthy only of societies' scorn, and I should be treated like a dog.
Let them sign their fucking little treaty. It's all paperwork bullshit anyway. I say it over and over again like a mantra: You can't stop the signal, goddamnit! Outlaw BitTorrent? Let's see them try, and if they do, someone will re-tool it into something completely different. Make the public internet unusable for anything other than their corporate bullshit? We'll find a way to subvert it into doing what we need it to do, or we'll tell them to go fuck themselves and go back to SneakerNet -- or maybe we'll just start creating a mesh network of our own and SCREW the ISPs!
</SOAPBOX>
Then you'll need a license to use encrypted traffic. Looks like investing in a good tinfoil hat is increasingly attractive.
Cynical Idealist
ACTA also has the effect of requiring that all traffic (and transactions) be routed through central points so that infringing content can be tracked back to the source. Pretty much a puts us back in the old Mainframe & PBX days. This not only impacts P2P traffic, but anything that is decentralized, which means the internet as a whole, along with email, IM, IRC, Skype, etc.
-- Supreme Court majority opinion, Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 17 (1956)
If P2P is outlaws, then we've got bigger problems on our hands than copyright.
Cynical Idealist
Just think of Kyoto, anti-personnel mine and Non-Proliferation, etc... I'm sure this is one is even easier to enforce.
Typical ... Sneak it in the back door via treaties that trump sovereign laws.
Treaties do NOT trump federal law or the Constitution.
When a treaty requires some internal law change to implement its provisions, that can only happen if congress passes such laws. Congress is not obligated to pass such laws or refrain from repealing them. Laws implementing a treaty are just as subject to being struck down as unconstitutional as any other law.
The idea that treaties are a way to effectively amend the Constitution by an easier procedure comes from a common misreading of the "supremacy clause" of the Constitution. What the clause ACTUALLY means is that the Constitution, federal law, and treaties, each trump state/county/local law when they conflict (and the laws or treaties are constitutional).
The supremacy clause from article VI:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwith-standing.
But see also article III Section 2:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Note how, in both, the treaties are subordinated to the Constitution and how in article III they're also clearly subordinated to federal law.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When I was in school, we were taught about Francis Cabot Lowell, who heroically copied machine plans in England to use in the US for textile mills.
England was so worried that their monopoly on their mill technology would be taken that they would search ships, cargo and passenger for hidden plans.
Fortunately for the US, Lowell memorized the plans and was able to build his own plants in the New World. His business was the beginning of the industrialization of the New World. Without which, the United States would have continued to be merely agrarian in nature. Does anyone know if they still teach this lesson in gradeschools, or was it killed when they started teaching kids to respect copyrights more?
Where do you want to run?
Do you think that European governments aren't listening in to everything you do or say? British police records and retains license plate information all over the place, as well as having installed massive video surveillance. Germany has passed a data retention law, and the main German phone company (and possibly some other companies) have been using stored data to spy on their employees and journalists. In addition, they tried out massive facial recognition screening in public places. It's pretty much the same thing in all Western nations.
And European governments have been falling all over each other trying to pass DMCA-like laws. That's in addition to already fairly draconian copyright laws and more limited "fair use" provisions.
And in the others? They screw you the old way: secret police, secret evidence, secret trials, informants, etc.
I guess one minor advantage of Europe is that they can't pass the death penalty for copyright infringement (since they don't like the death penalty) and that the prisons are apparently cleaner. And in Japan, at least you'll be bigger and meaner than everybody else. Beware of caning in Singapore, though.
But, really, you can't run away. The only way to fix this is to fix it at home.
Technological innovation in communication by definition expands the ability of the people to freely communicate as they wish. If we accepted your argument that P2P does not expand one's ability to express himself, then what is to prevent government from outlawing any form of technological innovation? Imagine if the internet, radio, television, telephones, etc. were all made illegal. Would this not constitute an abridgement of freedom of speech rights? Why is P2P any different?
legitimacy
a very important concept
the law must hew closely to an actual concept of fairness. the law must not just serve a few well-placed economic interests. otherwise, it undermines the entire relationship between the law and its citizenry should it be understood that the law serves a special economic interest group at the detriment of the rights and freedoms of the people at large
if the people begin to see the law as illegitimate, as serving a special class of people rather than the public at large, this undermines society in subtle ways, large and small
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's clearer if you quote the whole thing:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
It doesn't say treaties trump the constitution, or even are peers of it. It says that the hierarchy is Constitution -> Federal law -> Treaties -> state law.
It's even clearer in article III section 2:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Treaties themselves have no power internally without enabling legislation. Congress is not obligated to pass enabling legislation, to make it conform to the actual treaty language if they do pass it, or to refrain from repealing it. Courts can strike the enabling legislation (or any attempt at direct application of treaty language to the international activity of US citizens or entities) for unconstitutionality, interpret it into impotence, or set up impossible enforcement roadblocks, as easily as they do the same to federal law.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A deeper, less hysterical, and non-intellectually dishonest analysis than Doctorow's chicken-littling is at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080602-the-real-acta-threat-its-not-ipod-scanning-border-guards.html
Seriously....the govt obviously has no ear nor idea of representing the population any longer.
I guess everybody, needs to incorporate themselves, and band together to lobby to try to get some individual rights again....
Apparently, the individual citizen doesn't matter as much as the corps...so, lets lawyer up and suit up in corporations...to fight on more even ground? Heck why not....you can pay less taxes that way at the very least....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Have you ever considered why those are your only options? (And, btw, isn't law in the US made by more than a single person?)
:-).
I am pretty tech-savy (having a Ph.D. in Computer Science helps), and I am also active in politics, both national and local (I am a member of my city council in DK, approx. 45000 residents, and was a candicate for the last national election). And, while one of my major motivations for joining politics was to work for better laws in the tech area, I quickly realised that in order to have any influence, or getting elected to anything you need a much wider scope. Tech stuff simply does not interest enough people to get you any votes. This is OK, by definition, the voters have a right to focus on what interest them. The problem with that however is, that in order to stay sharp on the issues of "the masses", in order to get any votes at all, you lack the time to work on/stay updated on "fringe" issues. But I digress.
Now, what pisses me off in your sentiment, which is echoed by many, is the inherent "it does not matter anyway" attitude. It does freaking matter what you do. But laying on the couch, waiting for a perfect candicate to get enough exposure that you discover him, and can vote on him, will never help. For the candicate it is a chicken and egg problem: As long as he can not demonstrate that tech issues has the interesst of a sufficient number of voters, he/she gets no leverage on the party. For fringe candidates (and most that are tech savy are that), you simply can not get any leverage on these issues. The candicate needs you to get off that couch and take part in the public debate (and, no, that is not Slashdot, believe me) and make this an issue that engages influential people or the media. Then, you will see tech savy candidates to your elections. So, get off that couch right now. Find the local candidate that are tech savy, and support the one that matches your overall political profile best. And by support, I mean: join his party, call him, go to meetings, write letters to the newspapers, let your neighbours, friends and coworkers know that this is something that matters to you. Join your local branch of whatever passes for a digital rights group in your area (EU: http://www.edri.org/).
As long as the political parties are made up of people that couldn't give less about IP and tech stuff, it is simply to hard to get any leverage for these issues, and the companies that are able to post large amount of money into professional lobbyists will get their way. Sure they will. But, you _can_ make a difference. And if you do not try to make a difference, quit complaining - you are wasting bandwitdh, really. (On satelitte here, btw, so I am entitled to complain about bandwidth