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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.
No, it's money vs. the serfs. Didn't you get the memo?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
The mainstream media only notices it when someone's already being prosecuted for violating it.
I agreed completely until this statement. Mainstream media isn't that oblivious- they simply don't have YOUR best interests at heart.
I'm sure most news networks themselves do notice it, but their parent companies are the very entities lobbying/pushing for more legislation. CNN = Time Warner, NBC = Vivendi Universal, FoxNews = News Corp, ABC = Disney, etc... These news companies (either through affiliates or parent corps) own most of our music, movies, TV shows, and other media, so it's only natural for them to protect their interests by trying to distract us from the draconian laws they're currently pushing through the governments of the world.
Sadly, it seems that blogs and independent news are our only hope.
Sigs are for losers
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?
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.
*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.
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.
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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.
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.