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G8 Summit Aims To Kill International Piracy
arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?"
If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?
Not a matter of impractical... You have a stegosaurus trying to step on all those pesky little rats that recently appeared on the scene.
The stegosaurus can do whatever it wants, and the rats can't stop it. The rats, however, will last far longer than the dinosaurs.
the internet is useful because it provides two way communication. if you make the internet a one way system, you basically have nothing more than a fancy form of television. you also therefore strip the internet of all meaning and value that you can think up examples of yourself: email, chat, interactive content, forms, etc.
so as soon as you accept the fact that the internet remains a two way medium, you begin to understand that the gig is up. policing the traffic that flows from one node to the next is an arms race. every single thing that those who wish to police traffic can do, can be routed around, obfuscated through, etc.
in other words, the gig is up, the effort is futile. piracy is permanent. all you can hope to do with your efforts is breed more hardy pirating applications. hardly what you seek to do
so the thing for a proper world leader to do is accept the inevitable, and recreate the legal structre surrounding intellectual property to accomodate the new technological reality we find ourselves in. the new technological reality we find ourselves in has simply antiquated copyright and other aspects of intellectual property as we know it, circa 1985
or wage war against technological progress. your choice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am glad that the war against the G8 is now in the front cyber-lawn and so many people are saying WTF? Seems that a lot of folks here don't think *they* have a chance. Let's see if attitudes change when the storm-troopers kick down doors of student dorms to search and destroy the wifi routers...
This has been on the go in secret for a while. At the G8 they just rubber stamp the done deal. The wikileaks article is quite scary (RTFA) but what is weird is that you have to go to Wikileaks and download dodgy TIFF files to find out about it. Where's the democracy in that?
Bring on the stormtroopers. I am going to see how many peers, seeds and leeches drop off over the next month. Just fear alone might shut down P2P viability. Let's see... Virgin media subscribers are going to tidy up their act, Google/Youtube is going to get cleared up and now this. All the news is in cyber-space today, shame the real economy has fallen off of a very large cliff...
How do we setup a P2P network that goes wi-fi to wi-fi with no need for ISP's, governments and snitches? It's time for web 3.0...
France needs the US's help (just as the US needs France's help) in ensuring that the IP of their companies is respected worldwide.
Well, you can't have the cake and eat it too - it's either you have a net income or a net deficit when you substract the IP you buy from what you sell. Import/export is a zero-sum game, someone sells more and someone buys more, it's impossible that all economies sell more than they buy.
It just so happens that most economies in the world have a financial deficit, and US has an enormous excess, when it comes to the type of bits pirates swap for free (movies, popular software etc). So it makes sense to say that US should lead the "global fight against piracy", and not a smaller country.
Would enforcing foreign copyrights on the French people increase the respect other nations have for French IP ? No, the amount of enforcing a country is expected to do is regulated with bilateral trade agreements. Ideally (egotistically), a country should have no respect for other IP, while claim 100% respect for it's own IP, if only anyone would agree to such an asymmetric deal.
Making an example of your own people is anti-national , you should enforce as little as possible, without breaking the agreements, and thus have the maximum gain - your exports are respected and your imports are minimal. Even more so when you have, as explained above, a net financial deficit from IP.
Note that I'm not trying to imply that intellectual property is bad for the society as a whole, and that we would be better off without it; I make no claim on that issue. It's strictly an economical/diplomatic approach, what's the best course of action an economy should take.