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Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.
Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer. It says "The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to 'national security' concerns, has leaked. It's bad." You can read the original leaked document or the summary. If passed, the internet will never be the same. Thank goodness it's hidden from public scrutiny for National Security.
Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer.
Well maybe Jamie should read yesterday's Slashdot.
I would just like to point out that everyone is getting their information from a single point: Michael Geist's blog. Granted, he's rarely wrong but blogs are blogs. So where is this "leaked document" that the summary alludes to? Every source I find online points back to Geist. Even the articles Geist cites at the bottom of his blog point back to him. Even Wikipedia points back to him. I'm not saying that he's wrong nor am I trying to deflate the severity of this but Geist is even relying on other sources:
Sources say that the draft text, modeled on the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, focuses on following five issues...
Then following that even he says:
If accurate ...
Doesn't leave me a whole lot of confidence that we're getting all the unadulterated facts here. I would seek information better than third or fourth hand accounts of something before I went around screaming about the sky falling (trust me, I speak from experience of being fooled by a single blog post).
Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.
So where is the leaked document so that I may judge for myself?
My work here is dung.
Who owns the copyright on this document?
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I still don't know why everyone acts so surprised that this administration has carried on with the exact same Intellectual property and "national security" policies of the previous one. Democrats are just as much in the pockets of Hollywood as conservatives are in the pockets of big business (meaning BOTH support oppressive IP legislation). And Obama loves his presidential power just as much as Cheney did. So why anyone ever expected things to somehow be different with this administration, I don't understand. Cheney may not have been right about many things, but he was pretty much dead on when he predicted that Obama would keep most of Bush's national security policies in place (the same ones he criticized during the campaign) once he got a taste of that power for himself.
It also doesn't surprise me that they're using a treaty to quietly push this crap through. They did the exact same thing with the DMCA. A lot of people don't realize that the DMCA was just the formal ratification of a WIPO treaty that had been debated and agreed to in secret. The powers that be know this shit would never stand the light of day with the electorate, so they quietly push it through with the kind of obscure international treaties that they know CNN, NBC, et. al. are never going to cover. By the time it actually makes it into Congress, it's already a fait accompli. The mainstream media only notices it when someone's already being prosecuted for violating it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You all laughed at me
Yes...yes we did.
It will supposedly mandate 3-strike disconnection laws in all signatory countries without any reasonable standard of evidence because any ISP who *fails* to disconnect you will become legally liable for anything you may have done.
I call that a bad thing.
If this looks like it should pass then we should push for uniformity in the laws. Make telephone companies liable for anything illegal done using their lines and the post office liable for anything it carries and all manufacturers responsible for how their product is used. Send someone a letter bomb? The post office becomes an accessory to murder. Sing happy birthday into a telephone? The phone company is liable for copyright infringement. Kill someone with a gun or a kitchen knife? Murder charges for the gun or kitchen equipment makers too.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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To link a poster from the geniuses at Despair Inc: http://www.despair.com/government.html
Priceless.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
at least here. I don't know in the US, but here in Brazil (and I guess in most countries) it is simply impossible to have a "law" or treaty be secret and have any legal value. Of course, given enough money, these laws might be approved anyway, public scrutiny and all, and that is the sad part.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Whenever you hear that something is being withheld or denied for "National Security Interests", you can assume you are being screwed. Pretty much without regard to context. This was true in United States v. Reynolds, and it's true today.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
This isn't the end of the internet when passed. But it may be the end of the open wild west attitude on the net. I hope it doesn't come to pass where everyone is afraid of uploading videos because they may have a coca cola logo in it and whatnot. What it won't do is stop piracy. It will move to darkets, or people posting massive gb thumb drives around. A bit of a backwards step but pirates will find a way. Hell, it might even increase it as you'd be generating a community spirit for pirates. All this fuss over Lily Allen CD's isn't worth it. Musicians should move to live performances to make money and accept that they shouldn't be millionaires for 1 album. They should work for a living like the rest of us. DVD's should be released much later after a film's release, and so move people to get back into the cinema. Live performance is where you make the money. Backup and copies should be let go for free (ish).
The thing with US Federal law though is that treaties override constitutional laws. Laws Constitution Treaties. So any major unconstitutional idea that Has To Be Passed For Your Safety will be written and signed as a treaty with another country if it is too controversial for the public to accept.
Orwell was an optimist.
"I'm agreeing with most of the intent, and certainly all of the purpose. Supporting copyright is far more importantto me than supporting fair-use, and I'd certainly sacrifice the latter entirely in order to improve the former."
Sorry. You are a minority. A corporate drone without creativity and/or life. Please, move along. Don't let the door hit you.
And yes, I'm a corporate owner with intellectual property to protect. No, I do not support neither software patents (even though I hold some), nor this treaty. My software is sold as a service and as a product, I do lose some sales due to pirates (not much, really). But I would rather lose more sales than lose more freedoms.
We should call this the War on MP3s. It will be about as effective as the War on Drugs.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I didn't think they'd be any different. I just knew the alternative was even worse.
The only shocker to me is that it's gotten to the point where I can't hate politicians and large multinational corporations enough. Like there's not enough vitriolic words and energy contained within the human brains and body to express adequately what monumental bastards they are. They're fucking blights on society. They're massive drag on the intellectual and economic progress of a country. They are the arch-enemy of freedom and free expression. They are absolutely opposed to anything that advances the state of the average man that doesn't grant a pile of money to the elite in the process.
Fuck these people and institutions. To quote Joe Pesci in Casino: "Don't fuck me in the ass and tell me it's a blowjob!"
for once.
From TFA: "That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material." ISPs will be fighting this one pretty hard. There's no way they want to invest their resources to trying to patrol the internet. It's not their job, it's likely illegal and it's expensive.
I do, in fact, think that copyright holders have every right to defend their legal rights but they absolutely must not step on the rights of others in so doing. Take-downs without due process, ISPs acting as police and blanket anti-DRM-violation rules are all measures that stomp on the rights and freedoms of the public. This treaty will infuriate everyone other than the content producers and I think will spark some lobbying from groups that haven't previously been seen on the side of openness.
The general public (that means a broader public than /.) must become aware of the issues here. Most people simply aren't concerned with IP law even if it should concern them. That said, a threat to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter will spark a response. Here's what I propose: start a group that issues indiscriminate take-down notices of all sorts of media. If there is no punishment for frivolous DMCA notices then there's no risk. Start pissing people off, the service providers that have to deal with the requests and the content producers. Piss people off until legislation to prevent such action comes in, then we've own.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It's an attitude thing.
There are people like yourself who feel you should be able to produce something and continue to profit off freely/easily replicated copies of that effectively meaning you can over time make a fair bit of money for relatively little work.
Then there are those who realise that strong copyright isn't needed, they are the ones who accept that people should work for a living, they're the ones who produce IP as a service- musicians who perform, programmers who write bespoke software and so on.
Really, this is what the copyright battle comes down to- those who want to do very little work for a decent payoff against those who think that's a rather lazy viewpoint and so work for a living, whilst copying material of those who are too lazy to do so.
Effectively if you want an easy life, don't be suprised if those who accept that nothing is free disagree with you and pirate your stuff. If you haven't done much work to produce your IP other than the original work involved to create it, why should anyone pay you?
Yes, there are plenty of people who have filed to run their business as a corporation. You arent a 'corporate owner', that phrase drips with sanctimonious self-importance. I certainly hope you hire a lawyer very quickly to handle your copyright, as you obviously have zero idea what copryright law actually is.
When 'your friends' create a mix from someone elses music, or use video clips for school work, they are NOT violating copyright. If your friends took someone elses creation, did nothing, and then made a million copies of it to sell for profit, THEN they are violating copyright.
Seriously, get a lawyer. If you proceed in your misinformed thoughts you are going to find yourself on the receiving end of whats called a 'declaratory judgment' from someone who your all-encompassing ego sent a threat of copyright litigation.
How do I know this? Well some self-important ass clown tried to send me a cease and desist letter claiming copyright infringement. So instead of backing down, I hit back harder and filed for a declaratory judgment against them. They obviously lost, as their understanding of copyright is about as accurate as yours. When you dont have any idea what the law is, you better not be making legal threats against people, or spending your time looking for people who you suspect of violating something based on your own inaccurate understanding of the subject.
If you ever crossed paths with me with that BS in public, I would hang you out to dry in the court system so fast, you wouldn't know what hit you.
So *you're* the guy who did that! :)
This sounds tongue-in-cheek, but is really a serious question. On one hand, you have the notion of ignorance is no excuse although there are precedents now stating if you're famous, that's okay. There are precedents for secret treatises for national security, like the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey at the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But how would the mechanics of enforcement work?
Will the FBI kick in your door, shoot your dog, and haul you off for breaking a secret law?
Would they need a secret warrant?
If you ever got your day in court, would that court be secret too, to protect that law?
----
Now for Canada: A judge last year tossed out a RIAA style copyright suit because the defendant had made CDs. As everyone knows, Canada has a special tax on blank media to reimburse the copyright holders for piracy that may or may not happen. Kind of like paying a partial speeding ticket before you get into your car each day. Since this implies guilt, the defendant was deemed to have been punished already, and was so exempt from being convicted again.
How would the secret treaty work in Canada? Change the laws secretly?
- - - Non Caffeine Drink or Drink Error
*I* voted for Osama bin Laden. Sure, he would put me to the sword, but at least he wouldn't raise my taxes!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I'll wager that the lobbying industry working for Big Content are filled with the same dishonest, shady and corrupt characters that shilled for Big Tobacco decades ago when they tried to deny links between smoking and lung cancer for purely selfish business reasons; or the corrupt rightwing shills who effectively conned the US government in waging wars and terrorism against Latin American countries to "protect US interests" (e.g. United Fruit). The same morally bankrupt individuals who staff lobbying companies and populate rightwing think tanks that are blitzing the world with climate denialism.
Perhaps it's time for society to start asking who these people are, who they're working for and what they're getting paid. A public open database of paid lobbyists and shills might be useful. Perhaps these weasels might be less keen on trashing our liberties for profit if they know that light is being shone on their corrupt activities.
Chances are, there will be only several dozen key individuals, who if pressured enough, and "encouraged" to find a more legitimate and honest lines of work, would make a big difference in fighting the onward march of vested interests in eroding our rights for profit.
A lot of what we have seen so far on this is second hand, conjecture, etc. The "leaked document" in this case doesn't seem to exist -- it looks like Michael Geist's blog entry is what is being referenced. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the blog entry may be accurate, but we don't really know that it is.
So what do we know? What conclusions can we draw from the information we have?
1. It is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The word "counterfeiting" in there seems like an important data point.
2. It has been quashed by citing national security. National security has certainly become an extraordinarily loose standard, but it still means something.
3. Lots of copyright bigwigs have signed the NDA.
4. Three Google representatives have signed the NDA. (not sure what that contributes to this post, but I think it is worth noting)
5. The Obama administration has appointed a number of high ranking RIAA lawyers to the DoJ. I think that they are prohibited from being involved in official court duties related to copyright issues for two years from leaving the industry.
Item 5 leads me to wonder what those lawyers would be up to if they can't participate in actual proceedings. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that they might be working on ACTA, and combined with item 3 above makes me tend to think that the conjecture that ACTA is related to copyright is true. Yet its title mentions "counterfeiting."
For years the government has referred to selling fake packaged copies of Windows 95 as counterfeit, which seems fair enough. They are an attempt to pass something off as the genuine article, to deceive the recipient into believing it is the real thing. This is a particularly dangerous thing with money, where the term "counterfeit" is most commonly used, because it devalues the currency. It is also a problem with things like software, in part because the person buying it cannot be confident that they are getting the real product.
In short, the reason "counterfeit" is worse than mere copyright infringement is because its misrepresentation as the genuine article has extra costs to society. It is on this basis that investigation and punishment of counterfeit products is a more serious issue than of copyright infringement alone.
So, that makes me wonder: Is the ACTA about what has traditionally been defined as counterfeit, or might it be about redefining all copyright infringement as counterfeiting? If so, it might make the national security issue make sense; counterfeiting is somewhat reasonably considered a national security issue. So if copyright infringement is redefined to be counterfeiting, then all copyright infringement would become, by a wave of a magic wand, a national security issue and would activate sections of the law created to deal with the more serious problem of traditional counterfeiting.
Heck, if you were sufficiently twisted, you could even think that because this will classify a whole new swath of people as counterfeiters, and because counterfeiting is a national security issue, that disclosing the reclassification of copyright infringement would "tip our hand" to the people who are soon to be defined as counterfeiters. And we wouldn't want to disrupt these enemies of the state before we get a chance to classify their actions as hostile to the state.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
No, this is the same people / same industry lobbyists / same secretive, greed-crazed financial companies who control our health insurance *already*.
If we had a system of publically accountable, transparent entities running health insurance (as we do with health *care*, thank you very much the hospitals are mostly fine,) then it would be crazy to propose a federal takeover. But the groups presently running the insurance scam in this country are the same financial institutions responsible for all the worst excesses of the commerce department.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I voted for Nader.
In 2000.
In Florida.
My bad.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I voted for Kodos.
.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Foo?
-- SouNerd.com
I create intellectual property as well. Every day. Furthermore, I work in a small enough company that copyright is a critical issue. And you know what we found? We can't afford to pay every single idiot who thinks that what they created is so special and unique it cannot be put into the public for 75 years after they die. What do we do? We use stuff licensed under BSD, GPL or CC terms. And we're able to create far more stuff than if we'd have to pay someone like you because it just so happens that what we create might be close to what you created.
What you're doing is nothing more than locking up existing content and ideas. Because if you think that what you create is unique - you're deluding yourself.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Well I for one am extremely happy with the actions of Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
Their ever-increasingly central control via government of private citizens' lives, homes, and communications will make it MUCH easier for me. I and my brownshirts will be able to sweep-in to the Congress, declare emergency powers, turn-off the communication networks, and consolidate power with ease. Thank you Bill, George and Barak.
Signed,
Napoleon the X
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Id gladly make a genetic clone of my dog and give you the copy to do whatever you want to do with it.
Thats YOUR freedom... get it?
I don't want my friends to take my songs and mix them. I'm fully aware that it's legal today.
Look, that makes you a jackass. Worse, you're a profiteering jackass. You care that your friends remix your songs? Some friend you are... Honestly, I'm surprised you have any. With that attitude, I'd be ashamed to know you.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
That is how Article VI of the Constitution is [mis]interpreted. http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Article6
Orwell was an optimist.
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Interesting that you're voted Offtopic while the post that went offtopic was your parent. You are spreading misinformation, but it ought to be corrected instead of simply modded down.
The NPR program This American Life recently had two episodes (391 and 392, found here) on the health care system, and the problems with it are just not as simple as the Democrats or the Republicans are making them out to be.
For one thing, the hospitals are most certainly *not* fine. A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area. The hospitals want that customer base, so rather than standing firm at a reasonably profitable price, they lower prices for the big insurance company and jack up prices for the same procedures when dealing with smaller companies. The example given in the show was of one hospital in CA which charged one company $1600 for a procedure, and charged another $11,000.
There's a lot more where that came from in the shows. I highly recommend them to everyone who wants to open his mouth to talk about health care. Everyone knows it's broken, but too many people are looking solely at the broken parts their party claims will fix the whole thing.
Your brain is not a computer.
I don't care about the reasons for keeping this from us, nor whether the current administration is the same as the old, or more (or less) truthful than the old one.
I care about how to prevent this. What can I do? Are senators and representatives in on this? How can I make an argument about this, over the phone to some staffer, which doesn't make me sounds like a lunatic, or someone who's only upset that they can't torrent the latest movies? What concerns can I highlight which will motivate OTHER people to contact their representatives? How can I pitch this in such a way that my representative will be inclined to listen to my reasoning?
I don't mind calling my reps, I just have no idea what the hell to say.
The media loved Palin too.
...the wars (US involvement anyway) would be *over*, and the troops home.
Those ripoff investment banks would have been forced to eat their own capitalist dogfood and would have been allowed to go bankrupt,(no multi trillion dollar bailouts required) and the financial industry would have realized (like warren buffet has said out loud) that 95% of the derivatives market is pure snakeoil crap, they are "weapons of mass financial destruction". As in who cares if they want to play those games, but they should be allowed to fail when they get too greedy and too stupid. That's *real* capitalism, not this "socialism for billionaires, privatize the profits and socialize the risks and failures" nonsense they keep pushing now.
GM and Chrysler would have gone through normal bankruptcy, as they deserved, and there would be a ton of fresh blood and new ideas running those various factories by now and it would have also nailed Unions with a wakeup call that they need to get real on their economic demands and expectations, along with the stockholders. Something about mules and a club to get their attention comes to mind there.
We would have gotten a major shakeup with the Fed and their insane never ending boom and bust cycle whacko junk science currency theories, along with a vastly streamlined and more fair IRS federal tax structure, both seriously needed, as anyone who cares to look can plainly see they are "epic fail" right now.
And he would have repeatedly vetoed Congress's usual bloated, overly complex, pork laden and mostly out to lunch legislation that couldn't be paid for at all, even theoretically, or wasn't legal under the Constitution, stuff that the Federal government is not supposed to have control over. My guess is he would have outright closed down a lot of agencies as well, as not needed and not legal, and turned those aspects back over to the States where they belong.
And a lot of so ons there, whatever is legally possible at the executive branch level.
Certainly better than what we have received under both the Bush admin and now the Obama admin. Sure there would have been a rough transition period, to be expected when you are lancing boils and cutting away decades of pure rot and corruption.
Ron Paul is the one guy in both houses who *really* understands the Constitution, and that if it was REALLY followed, not just mumbled lip service but truly followed for the well thought out document and plan it was and is, things would be a lot better, as in "all your rights, all the time, and no fed gov tax and control freak big brother BS".