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Google Pushes Back Against US Copyright Treaty
Hugh Pickens writes "Internet companies led by Google joined groups representing Web users to challenge the Bush administration's bid to toughen international enforcement against copyright pirates. The companies said the US courts and Congress are still working out the correct balance between protecting copyrights and the free exchange of information on the Web and a treaty could be counterproductive. 'There's this assumption that what is good for Disney is what's good for America, but that's an oversimplification,' said Jonathan Band, an intellectual property lawyer representing libraries and high-tech companies. 'There's also what's good for Yahoo and Google.' The US, Japan, Canada and other nations said last year that they would begin negotiations on an agreement aimed at cracking down on counterfeiting of such goods as watches and pharmaceuticals, and the piracy of copyrighted materials, such as software and music recordings. A leaked draft of the deal showed that the treaty could force Internet service providers to cooperate with copyright holders."
"There's this assumption that what is good for Disney is what's good for America, but that's an oversimplification," said Jonathan Band, an intellectual property lawyer representing libraries and high-tech companies. "There's also what's good for Yahoo and Google."
What about what's good for PEOPLE????!!!!
These same companies would rip you a new asshole if you infringed on anything they copyrighted. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
There's this assumption that what is good for Disney is what's good for America, but that's an oversimplification.
There's also what's good for Yahoo and Google.
Is that supposed to imply that what's good for the economy is good for Ameria? Where does that leave its citizens?
That's all the information I need.
They know it won't get passed if it's done publicly.
No sig today...
Copyright works need protection! Just ask the disembodied computer-hosted soul of Walt Disney, who was decanted to a computer in 1966 to avoid being declared legally dead, so that copyright in his works would never, ever run out.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
was the "safe harbor" provision. It basically kept the ISP's and websites for the most part out of the net-cop business.
btw: When one of the few very profitable American companies in this current economy makes a statement like
"It really could be used as a way of restricting the growth of U.S. Internet companies overseas"
perhaps the US government should listen
A leaked draft of the deal showed that the treaty could force Internet service providers to cooperate with copyright holders.
We don't need another RIAA or MPAA.
copyrights and patents.
Germany used to be quite famous for making fakes of machines used in the British textile manufacturing effort (right down to copying the name of the manufacturer). Many European countries didn't bother with patent protection as it interferred with their ability to make cheap knock offs.
If Einstein had been a chemist, he wouldn't have been working in the Swiss patent office, because at the time, the Swiss believed that you couldn't patent anything chemical. Canada didn't recongize drug patents until the 1960s (if memory serves).
This rich-country enforcement of patents and copyright is "kicking away the ladder" - most first-world countries conveniently ignored patents during their development, when it was to their economic benefit to be able to rip technology off from more well-to-do nations.
Do they ever?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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How we know is more important than what we know.
....hardon and breast size....
as the only thing that will be allowed is spam.
I find myself avoiding products and services from companies that try to crap on my rights. I believe I am not the only one, since over the years many of these companies have withered or died. They can blame piracy, they can make up excuses for their shrinking bottom lines, but in the end the cause of their demise is their hostility to the very people that made them great in the first place.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
"...cracking down on counterfeiting of such goods as watches and pharmaceuticals..."
Does that mean I will stop receiving spam messages for an awesome replica Rolex that will make my penis larger? I mean, it came from a guy called Norman Ledbetter. It just has to be legit.
This isn't about copyright anymore this is about our basic privacy and freedom being taken away if we will have our laptops and ipods searched at border crossing or seized. What about if its your corporate with sensitive files that are NDA. But no the bush administration doesn't care about the ramifications of their actions.
And yah...what about the american people. I love how they say "it's not all about you google" when google is standing up for us!
When Darl spoke we just knew it was evil. When he walked it was with an evil swagger. SCO is an acronym where the S stood SATAN and the rest just didn't matter.
/. ID says they're evil and then we're supposed to block cookies, advertisements, java script and strawberries.
/. has taught me to think like everyone else.
Now here we are with Google who when they do evil it's with good intent and can be rectified by changing the EULA or TOS. When they do good it might just have a little evil intent but they are largely forgiven because it's just a little evil and they still give us monster uber email storage. When they do good it's good and we're supposed to fawn over the company unless someone with a low
I miss those simple days where I knew where I stood because
There's a new poll suggestion here somewhere.
The correct balance would cut copyrights back to 14 years, require disclosure of source code to receive copyright on software, ban business method patents, and ban the use of technologies that prevent a work from entering the public domain. The government is going the opposite direction it should if it's interesting in establishing a proper balance.
My suggestion: One Copyright of 25 years, with two renewals of 25 years each. Then its OVER.
Really, the I would only let Natural Persons have renewal rights. Corporations would just have to live with expirations as a price of doing business. Just like replacing old equipment after a few years, you write it off like a depreciation.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Copyright 2008 morgan_greywolf. All rights reserved.
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My blog
They can pass their little secret treaties, but how long and how seriously do they think people who are not privy to these secret meetings will honor these treaties?
If our rights as common people are being so openly snubbed, then this means the end of the copyright, because no one is going to respect it.
This is already happening, but I am surprised these copyright idiots don't see that what they are doing, these secret meetings and taking into consideration only "powerful" interests is destroying what they want to accomplish. They forget that without people getting on board of this train it is going nowhere fast.
That's what I see here, and that's what's so dangerous about treaties (it's why we never ratified the Treaty of Versailles):
Treaties are given equal status with the Constitution. Which makes this line:
the US courts and Congress are still working out the correct balance between protecting copyrights and the free exchange of information on the Web and a treaty could be counterproductive.
very interesting.
If a treaty spelled this all out, it'd be like passing an amendment and not even the Supreme Court could do anything.
This is why treaties are usually an uncomfortable topic. Passing a bad treaty is a big fuckup similar to a bad amendment.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
And my counter offer would be 10 years, once and no more.
As an alternative: first year is free, second year is $100. Doubling every year thereafter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Congress will likely kick back and let the President invent laws by signing "Agreements" (Treaties) that he has no authority to sign.
"The US, Japan, Canada and other nations said last year that they would begin negotiations on an agreement aimed at cracking down on counterfeiting of such goods as watches and pharmaceuticals"
How dare those sickly peasants get the medicine they need at an affordable price!
..is that companies like Disney are inherently unstable. The same thing can be said of entities like record labels and movie companies.
If you are a company whose main (or even only) assets are so-called "intellectual property", then you are basically a time bomb, and copyright is the only thing that maintains profitability. Once Mickey becomes public domain, Disney is screwed, and they know it, since other characters will soon follow. Sure, Disney has other stuff, but will it be enough? (Disney products can be easily copied if they ever fall out of copyright, and theme parks alone would probably be insufficient to keep Disney afloat) In the case of the music/movie people, they don't even have tangible products to fall back on, so it is even worse for them than for Disney. To ensure profitability, I suspect these companies will at least try to extend copyright to the extreme (something like life+1000 years, eventually, if the companies are still around by then) once the already ridiculously-long current copyrights are in danger of lapsing.
Companies that make tangible goods (like cars, wrenches, computers, etc.) don't suffer from this as much because it takes a lot of up-front investment for a viable competitor to appear, and this keeps most people out of the game. In contrast, lots of people can easily draw Mickey and redistribute movies and music, and only legal threats are able to prevent them from freely doing so for profit.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Google is pushing for Less Evil again.
After the China censorship thing, and a couple of other more recent escapades, I was beginning to wonder.
No, they just don't want to deal with the complaints from the minority of the people they govern who actually care nitpicking at it.
They could do it publicly easily, but they would get bothered more.
im wondering why did such companies like google, yahoo et al didnt readily form into such groups with the advocacy organizations BEFORE crap like acta, copyright cops come up. wasnt it a foreseeable fact that defending important facets of the new information revolution would be a necessity sooner or later ?
Read radical news here
Well, it's not authoritative (I'm at work and don't have time to dig up primary sources), but here's an overview of what happened:
Studios flee to Hollywood[1]
In the early 1900s, filmmakers began moving to the Los Angeles area to get away from the strict rules imposed by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Since most of the moviemaking patents were owned by Edison, independent filmmakers were often sued by Edison to stop their productions.
To escape his control, and because of the ideal weather conditions and varied terrain, moviemakers began to arrive in Los Angeles to make their films. If agents from Edison's company came out west to find and stop these filmmakers, adequate notice allowed for a quick escape to Mexico.
Working without disturbance from Edison, the Biograph Company moved west with actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others, to make their films. After beginning filming in Los Angeles, the company decided to explore the neighboring area and stumbled across Hollywood.
Biograph made the first film in Hollywood, entitled In Old California. After hearing of Biograph's praise of the area, other filmmakers headed west to set up shop.
The first motion picture studio was built in 1919, in nearby Edendale, just east of Hollywood, by Selig Polyscope Company, and the first one built in Hollywood was founded by filmmaker David Horsley's general manager Al Christie in 1911, in an old building on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Movie studios began to crop up all over Hollywood after Christie's appearance, including ones for Cecil B. DeMille in 1913, the Charlie Chaplin Studio in 1917, and many others.
[1]: http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3871.html
[2]: http://webpages.dcu.ie/~flynnr/hollywood_history_1891_-_1917.htm (interesting timeline)
[3]: http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/edison_trust.htm (details on Edison's monopoly, which Hollywood broke)
Primary sources would take longer than I have to dig up, but you get the idea.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Keep in mind the quote was brief and may have been taken out of context. He may have just been talking about the motivation of the pro-buisiness lobbyists.
Perhaps the quote was deliberately ironic. The ideologically blinded would get the exoteric message, and those with some sense of what they're meant to be doing would get the deeper message.
One way of looking at it is that the industry interests cancel out, so why not look at the interests of the people?
I find it amusing that politicians always appear to look to how to keep things overpriced and scarce: surely the opposite of value creation!
Wikileaks, no DNS
No they don't.
Ken Lay: "died".
Enron: Nope.
Banking: Only the Natwest four (from a foreign country, UK).
the few cases are high profile because corporation employees DO NOT go to prison generally, no matter how bad the corporation acts from their direction.
There was a debate in The Netherlands about ACTA today:
http://media.ffii.org/ActaTweedeKamer080924/tweede-or-11h31.wmv
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Get your own free personal location tracker
This is not to be decrypted by anyone in the RIAA or MPAA. -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: http://getfiregpg.org/ jA0EAgMCN3Q5S5K8/stgyW2wpPDp9qolaWLUSeezFjx/U4Qis37YdJcWPiIPC13E DUQfb+94qzZxK7PEWU+GdCUHmCeVf9W1tCsR43HTl1VJKLSIHGwEhcNMT3YQhVSA vt3AIvLVDoMnUff9muZKGdTtVZWzE0/i6BWCgms2 =AUh8 -----END PGP MESSAGE----- This FireGPG plugin is nice!
Hang on - wait - how is this "browser plugin" running programs (gpg) on our local machines?
Get your own free personal location tracker
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How we know is more important than what we know.
ACTA was done in secret
ACTA was done without you to know it was to happen
ACTA is facism and plutocracies at work
ACTA is wrong and destroys culture and makes all things cost more not using markets to put pressure on stuff to cheapin htings
quite random
YOU have to buy what your after eventually.
Better way is to start getting in the faces of suits carrying breif cases and instead of saying good day.
SAY "hows your day mr greedy bastard"
perhaps a million people saying that might get there attention more....
and how about a new phrase
tax predators
Correct me if I am wrong, but |Google have their library project which is in courts as we speak about copyright infringement of artists( writers) works. Isn't this called hypocrisy???
The suits are numb and dont care about your opinion, getting in their face is unlikely scenario, especially since much of the machine is faceless. The money you spend is their lifeblood. It is quite easy to live without spending money on Disney products. It is quite easy to avoid giving money to specific companies and their sponsors. It is also worth while to let companies know that they are cut off from your money because of who they sponsor, thats different than getting in their faces, thats showing them where you cut off their blood supply. In a town where I live, locals were able to put several businesses which were biggoted or enviroment hostile (they continued to dump food wastes by the lake to "feed" the ducks and seaguls) out of business. This is a scaleable concept. Direct your money where it gives you the biggest bank both practically and ideologically. A million people doing that would rock the establishment. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. Thats BE not SAY. Good Luck All!
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Get your own free personal location tracker
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How we know is more important than what we know.
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