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Europe To Block ACTA Disconnect Provisions
superglaze writes "The European Commission is 'not supporting and will not accept' any attempt to have ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) force countries to disconnect people for downloading copyrighted material, a spokesman for the new EU trade commissioner has said. All the signs are that the new commission, which took office earlier this month, intends to take a hard-line stance against US proposals for a filesharing-related disconnection system. 'Three strikes' is allowed in EU countries, but not mandated by the European government itself, and it looks like the new administration wants to keep it that way. From trade commission spokesman John Clancy, quoted in ZDNet UK's article: '[Ac ta] has never been about pursuing infringements by an individual who has a couple of pirated songs on their music player. For several years, the debate has been about what is "commercial scale" [piracy]. EU legislation has left it to each country to define what a commercial scale is and this flexibility should be kept in ACTA.'"
What makes you think they have failed to agree on the case of Greece?
Not only did Greece cook the books to a degree that only Italy can match, but they also have a huge public sector and pension burden together with a very corrupt system. The damage to the EU if they were to just go in and rescue Greece to 'save' the Euro would be a huge liability that would lead to similar cases happening again.
No, more likely they are agreeing to fail to agree because Greece needs to be kicked into fixing their system. (not to mention that stand is popular amongst the masses despite any depreciation of the Euro)
- These characters were randomly selected.
All this means is that international lobbying doesn't have a nice easy single point they can go to in order to get similar laws to be enacted in all EU member states.
Being as there is no EU-wide proposal to explicitly ban member states from imposing internet disconnection, it follows that the lobbyists will talk to individual countries instead.
I live in Sao Paulo, in a middle class neighborhood where the law sort of works, work in a cyber cafe. I have had policemen, who can barely double click an icon, walk in insinuating they will confiscate everything because there is pirate software. They are often paid to go away, they want money. A cybercafe owner told me he once had all hard drives of the place confiscated for months, because they found a few mp3 files on hard drives. Been to places where downloading *all* mp3 files is banned. All access to CD burners or pendrives is blocked out of fear of the copyright police. Cybercafes typically have no software at all on workstations, only duly-licensed windows xp, costing half a month's pay for the typical worker, and OpenOffice. Nothing else. So what I see is, copyright law results in driving access to digital information underground. Linux is rare in private-run cybercafe's, because of ActiveX, MSN messenger, and user culture hooked on ms-windows. Government-sponsored net cafes do run linux, and are full, mostly because they are free, but there are not many of those. Cybercafes on the outskirts of town, poorer neighborhoods, have all kinds of software, all pirated. everything in these places is pirated, the net connection, the electricity, even the land usually has no title. Result --- piracy = free intelectual property = low costs = competitive advantage. Go China!
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The following excerpts of text are taken from a person's comments in a (then) ongoing discussion in comments section of a CNN news piece about digital 'piracy'. The guy
was arguing with copyright activists and shills, and have made innumerable good points to the ultimate end of silencing almost the most shrill shill. i have taken the
liberty of gathering his comments, and i will be posting it on discussion in slashdot in relevant subjects, so that it will help many people who are having difficulties
in understanding how flawed the copyright business and intellectual property is, and how little sympathy one should have for those perpetrating and enforcing them.
These comments are krehator's comments. they are listed in a last to first fashion, the first comments being at the bottom of the text, and the last comment he made being
on top (directly below
==
The truth anti-pirates don't want anyone to believe? I'll use myself as an example. I have been a pirate for decades. I know more about pirating and the facts behind it
than any of the anti-pirates on this sound-off who spew fallacies without any experience.
I download and share movies, software, and rarely music. I'm not a big music fan but I will admit that music is highly pirated. I have no interest in pirated books and
honestly have never witnessesed a big demand for it, outside of students in college. Plus, there is a lot of free material on the Internet which is better. I also use a
lot of freeware "open source" software, because it is quickly becoming better than commercial products.
I support freeware and open source and I do donate to those causes because they EARN my loyalty. Every Operating Systems I have installed is legal. I use Linux
distributions on many of my computers, instead of Windows, because only computer dummies pay for faulty products! Microsoft should be sued for knowingly selling faulty
products. However, according to anti-pirates, businesses are allowed to do that. Only people must live up to moral standards. Wait a minute......aren't businesses
operated by people? Hmmmmm.
Anyway,
I pirate (directly through me) approximately 100 gigabytes of mixed data each month. It varies depending on what is out there. I don't get it from torrents, P2P, or web
sites. Those are not the most reliable, secure, fastest, or primary routes. Those are distractions for novice computer users and the media looking for a story. The
primary routes for pirated data cannot be stopped. Copy protection is not designed to stop hardcore pirates. It is meant to stop the Average Joe from easily sharing with
his friend. A lot of pirating work is done to enable the Average Joe, who then initiates a wave of sharing. Look, some things are true even if you don't want to believe
it.
The deeper inner workings of the pirate community are secured better than the launch codes for missile silos. The people getting caught are low level people who get
replaced in minutes. Anti-pirates have no idea what they are talking about when they try to uncover the real pirate world or describe our motivations. They are akin to
cavemen describing an airplane as an "evil hungry fire bird". Most of what anti-pirates and the industry tells the media and consumers is smoke and mirrors to defend
their own greedy immorality. Pirates get labeled as evil, while greedy and dishonest companies play victim. "oh poor us, we can only make 1 billion dollars this year".
Shyeah, that wins support from consumers and small businesses living on a real budget (laugh).
Of all the data I download per month, 80% is not even for me, and will never be used by me. It is shared with others like me who may or may not value what I have. Of the
20% that interests me, only a very small portion will be deemed as worthy of keeping, after being thoroughly tested. I may find a single good program out of a 1,000 I
download. If that program is superb, and provides m
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The main reason, not surprisingly, is it is proving quite difficult to explain to German voters why they should have to postpone their retirement age to 67 and bail out Greece, while some Greeks can get out at 53.
[FUCK BETA]