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."
Because without it they couldn't stop you from breaking the DRM and disseminating the How-To to a wider audience, who would then be very hard to catch actually infringing. With Anti-Circumvention laws you can both discourage people from breaking the DRM (or at least telling people about it) and take legal action against anyone who does, whether they've actually done anything "illegal" beyond circumventing the DRM or not.
Anti-Circumvention laws are "Attempted Copyright Infringement".
That these documents have been purposefully leaked and there is indication of opposition to it's content is proof of the exact opposite. It is pretty much certain that in most modern democratic countries that most of the conditions of ACTA would be opposed by the general public and result in disruptive public opposition.
The reality is, it is too late to try a force this through, to force the will of the corrupt minority against the will of the democratic majority. Not that this effort should be ignored or the the perpetrators of it should be publicly exposed and called to account for their corrupt activities, their intent to purposefully subvert the growing public expression of democracy.
A full public investigation should be made of who was involved, who sponsored and supported that involvement, who actually wrote up those bits of proposed corrupt legislation, what private interests were involved whilst 99.99etc percent of the electorate were specifically excluded and, of course what criminal prosecutions need to be considered.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Agreed, but unfortunately that won't stop them from financially (and/or by incarceration) ruining the lives of anyone they can catch doing it. Things like justice and sound policy are the least of their concerns.
It's like the way the Inquisitors obviously did not believe in the power of their religious message, but that didn't stop them from threatening and torturing (and worse) anyone whom they found inconvenient.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.