Slashdot Mirror
Another ACTA Leak Discloses Individual Country Data
An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of the earlier leak of various country positions on ACTA transparency, today an even bigger leak
has hit the Internet. A new European Union document [PDF] prepared several weeks ago canvasses the Internet and Civil Enforcement chapters, disclosing in complete detail the proposals from the US, and the counter-proposals from the EU, Japan, and other ACTA
participants. The 44-page document also highlights specific concerns of individual countries on a wide range of issues including ISP liability, anti-circumvention rules, and the scope of the treaty. This is probably the most significant leak to date since it goes beyond the transparency debate to include specific country positions and proposals."
I can understand why diplomats tend to like their meetings and discussions to be private. It's a hard enough dance between a few select people in a government that it doesn't need to be complicated by the public getting involved.
However, in this case, this is hardly a private conversation. Business is involved, pretty much all the world's governments are involved, and the only group not at the table is the largest and the one with the most to lose: actual people. I'd like to see what kind of justification politicians will come up with to argue that corporations can make suggestions, governments can provide input, but god forbid the people actually have a say in the way this sausage is made.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the end of the Internet as we know it is near. Too many organizations with too much clout have too many reasons to see the current Internet go away. I don't know what will come in its place, but I'm pretty sure I'll look back at the 90s/early 00s with nostalgia.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement Means and the Internet"... ...really? the internet too? I thought it was just gonna shut down my warez BBS, but now they've gone too far
This is probably the most significant leak to date...
Seems like people have forgotten about the R Kelly incident already.
Time to slashdot some diplomat's webpage? "We have taken your homepage hostage. Surrender your ACTA and come out of your meeting room hands up."
Anyone else think anticircumvention is stupid?
Basically, they are saying:
"We can't write working code because the only people willing to write this kind of code are incompetent morons. Skilled engineers think this type of code is a bad idea, and won't touch it. Rather than rethinking our position to be more in line with reality, we want laws that make illegal to circumvent the swiss cheese code that we can actually hire someone to write." ...and now we are trying to foist this stupidity off on the rest of the world?!? No wonder they get upset about their dirty underwear going public.
-- Terry
Neighborhood wireless BBS? Somebody put up a tower and let people in the neighborhood connect to it with subscriber units?
Group of people rent the fire hall for the weekend and throw down some gigabit switches?
I doubt strongly people will just accept dropping file sharing. Do we start wasting actual police resources in raiding swapping parties and neighborhood wifi meshes?
Any Oregonians, call Senator Ron Wyden. He is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and the US Trade Representative Ron Kirk (lead US man behind ACTA) is scheduled to testify before the committee this week, discussing the US trade policy agenda. In January, Wyden sent a letter to Kirk inquiring about the lack of transparency and questionable provisions in ACTA. Ask Wyden to grill Kirk on ACTA!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I don't think there's much chance of changing the American negotiators views on this, but I'm still going to contact my representatives in Congress. Nothing will likely come out of it. If you are a /.er in a more reasonable country, say New Zealand or Canada, I beg you to contact your MPs and demand transparency in this process. We shouldn't have to find out about the progress of negotiations through leaks.
For good or ill, I sense history being made here, folks. Basically the world is coming to grips with a global communications system, and is hammering out an accord on how it can be used.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
How can you explain your children that they are 'criminals' if they download music or video?
Even for addults it is difficult to understand that downloading a nice song for your music collection has a very high fine.
does anyone else find it comic and rather ironic that almost exclusively
because the countries involved have tried to keep this a secret, that ACTA
negotiations now get far more attention than they would otherwise?
I feel this needs even more attention, and more clearly explained and broadly
disseminated explanation of what is at stake both for individuals and for
emerging cultures as they join the ranks of "western" strong-copyright regimes.
Business culture has saturated government to the point where it can only communicate via the means established by business. People in government are more comfortable in business meetings and negotiations than they are listening to and communicating with the electorate.
When they have to communicate with the electorate they resort to pure pr or advertising strategies.
I fear this is the only action that content owners will pay any attention to, and I do not mean, stop buying and continue pirating the media. Ignore their new products, on the Internet and in real life. Put pressure on your favorite artists and writers. Tell your friends.
I've been following the whole ACTA fiasco for a while, and was getting increasingly nervous about the whole "behind closed doors" thing. Of course, many of the proposals, particularly from the US, are obviously big-corp-funded crazy talk, and the secrecy of the whole process is abhorrent. However, now that I've seen an official document for the first time, I'm actually pleasantly surprised, in that it's not as bad as I expected.
I find it reassuring that there are quite a few notes where the EU has explicitly disagreed, apparently even indicating that this is not a point on which they will give way in some cases, e.g., on restricting any damages for infringement to actual damages and rejecting any notion of punitive damages entirely, or where they want to insert wording with the anticircumvention provisions to provide for safeguarding the benefits of certain limits on IPR (which would presumably leave open the door to excluding otherwise fair use from the anticircumvention protection).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For those of us who love what the internet has to offer in terms of information, entertainment and news the very idea of the Internet becoming "the CorporateNet" is depressing.
After the takeover we will still be able to do many things - after we have logged in with our credit card.
Then CorporateNet can charge us for every download and access (and it will not be cheap!)
What can we do? If we fight like hell we can delay things for a while, but eventually money will rule out. So be prepared.
This article has been posted more than 2 hours ago and only 60 comments so far.
That leaves me voiceless.
I've contacted my Senators on a variety of issues and almost every time I get a response. On this issue, however, I have sent the EFF form in to them about 20 times and have not once received a response. I take that back, the first time I sent it, one of them responded with an email about health care.
It always happens in these sorts of situations. Australia's clean feed filter, Iran, the list goes on.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
It makes me proud that of the whole world apparently we are the ones fighting this.
I imagine various EU members have the most to be pissed about looking at this document. The birthplace of PyratBiran and no outcry? Lots of liberal countries there that have remained silent. I'd be pissed.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/ACTA-6437-10.pdf_as_text
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I think we need to make sure the general masses are aware of these closed-door shenanigans, and one vector is the likes of social networking sites. I assume there's already something like a "Stop ACTA" group on Facebook? If not, someone should make one.
It might be one instance where geeks have legitimate cause for using such marketing-demographic-trawling sites as Facebook, twitter, bebo, etc.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Here's how to restore real democracy world wide. First, we need to create a web-based lobbying organisation to lobby for our views. What we need are lobbyists world wide who will actually go in a bribe the senators and congress people like the corporate ones. Not meaningless PACs that send in worthless petitions. We need a system where all of us could contribute say, $30, and that hires the lobbyists. That's the carrot. Now for the stick. There are scandals everywhere in politics. There are likely scandals "in waiting" hidden in the politics. So, we tell the senators "if you don't do what we want, we will bring up X during the campaign." There's nothing they can do about it, because if they sue us, we just launch the scandal, and their career is over. Now, what if they try to make the lobbyist organisation illegal? The bribe/scandal machine goes into overdrive to defend itself. This is not the best form of democracy on the planet, but it works.
Second, we must destroy the music and media companies. They are a big threat to freedom world-wide (organised religion and moralism is in front). We need some kind of advertising based model for media delivery, over the internet. Think about if there was a website where you could play any song you wanted - like pandora or whatever. You could submit your music and it would get voted based on "views". Once it hit a certain number of views, we would create a CD of your music and sell that in stores or wherever. Young people (who buy music), often hate corps like Monsanto or whatever they see as bad. So lets use all those stories about teenagers sued by the RIAA to create a negative PR campaign, so the Obama voter types will hate the RIAA go for the service as an alternative.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Look around, there's plenty of things to do. Write your MP's. Join our "We need 5m people to prevent the labels killing internet freedom with ACTA" Facebook group. (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=213704134963) Join your local political party and yell at the town meeting that it pisses you off. Tell your friends. Only by sitting on your ass do you achieve your aforementioned goal.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
It's a typical Microsoft-style injection attack. No one fesses up to having been involved in making the alleged decision or even naming when, where or by who the alleged decision was allegedly made.
Want some fun? Find a department trying to run Microsoft Exchange in place of a mail server and try to track down who made the decision and which other products were evaluated.
Typing? Why not use OCR? I was able to convert the PDF to text in less than a minute (losing formatting.) If I wanted to preserve formatting, it would take maybe 20 minutes.