Slashdot Mirror
MPAA Asks If ACTA Can Be Used To Block Wikileaks
An anonymous reader writes "With the entertainment industry already getting laws to block certain sites, it appears they're interested in expanding that even further. The latest is that at a meeting with ACTA negotiators in Mexico, an MPAA representative apparently asked if ACTA rules could be used to force ISPs to block 'dangerous sites' like Wikileaks. It makes you wonder why the MPAA wants to censor Wikileaks (and why it wants to use ACTA to do so). But, the guess is that if it can use Wikileaks as a proxy for including rules to block websites, how long will it be until other 'dangerous' sites, such as Torrent search engines, are included." Note: TechDirt typically has insightful commentary, but make of the original (Spanish) twiiter message what you will.
Did they ask if it could be blocked because they wanted to, or because they think it could mean backslash for using ACTA as a censor tool instead of enforcing copyrights?
I'd imagine the MPAA and government have similar interests in forcing ISPs to block certain websites. The MPAA is probably making a calculated move to suggest they would be the watchdog going after Wikileaks if such a censorship method could also be used to protect their copyrights.
Frankly, it looks like they're trying to show to the government that they have aligned interests. As the TechDirt article notes, the MPAA could merge The Pirate Bay with Wikileaks in the eyes of the government and then from there it's guilt by association. Personally I think this is the MPAA fishing for how extensive they can make ACTA by appealing to the United States government's emotions. Think back to the DMCA and Patriot Acts and how following their passage into law we all sat around scratching our heads wondering WTF was going on with some of the prosecution that was falling under those acts. Wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA ran a campaign saying that passing ACTA into law worldwide will stop terrorists, child porn, small arms traders, drugs, wildfires, Satan, etc.
I'm guessing the MPAA would love to prosecute cases of copyright infringement under the same law (and maybe even penalties) as cases of threats to national security.
My work here is dung.
This is a dangerous path to follow because the MPAA would have strong backers for something like this, like the US government. Torrent search engines would be small potatoes, how about people/websites that show what your doing is wrong? Again, like WikiLeaks, but others like the EFF? Don't like that they show your dirty little secrets? Just use the ACTA on them and claim something like "they were using illegal software".
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Ever notice how governments actively seek to forbid citizens from actually -using- their rights? Sure, lets give them freedom of speech. What!? People are critical of the government?! How dare they not use our freedoms to only spread their love of big brother! Lets pass the Alien and Sedition Acts/McCarthyism/ACTA/etc. to stop them from using their freedom! After all, who in a free country would speak out against their government, its like people think the constitution is to protect people who dissent against the majority opinion or something!
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I can think of at least two reasons:
1) Wikileaks has leaked details of draft ACTA proposals, and these have somewhat politically embarassing to the politicians who are doing MAFIAA's work.
2) MAFIAA hates it when people singing songs with lyrics like "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" and they really hate that funky sequel that begins with "6692d179032205".
The MPAA (probably) isn't asking about WikiLeaks for its own interest -- it's asking because it wants the US government on board, and the US government is far more concerned about WikiLeaks than movie pirates.
This is a lesson to all you slashdotters about how to lobby - convince people that you have the solution to their problem. (If it solves your problem, great!)
Ok. Now Party A is your doctor/hospital worker, Party B is a data mining company, and the information is your personal health files.
By your definition, it's censorship too, right? It's all just 1s and 0s?
People have rights over certain data, and protecting them isn't censorship. If authors should have rights over their creations - even at the expense of others' rights - is another matter.
Dilbert RSS feed
Every government wants to write their laws in secrecy, hence why international "treaties" have gotten so popular. Every government's dream is to control every aspect of their citizens' lives without the citizens realizing it. Sure, the government extols the "right to free speech" in every high school classroom but dreams of a world without it. The government loves movements like the tea party that while saying they want to reduce the government's power but give the government power over subjective things like morality and things that are "un-American", any government would take a "loss" of some tax dollars to be able to control something like that (and with fiat currencies, they can just print more worthless notes).
Every government wants to make politics so "boring" that the masses ignore it. Every government wants to make a country with rights that are never exercised.
The ideal state for a government is where the people are cattle, a cow doesn't feel imprisoned, after all he can walk around this whole big pasture, and if he really wanted to he could jump the fence, but why jump when there is all this free food...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's high time the citizens of the U.S. work to dissolve the Motion Picture Association of America. This is an organization that actively works against the best interest of all Americans. It must be destroyed. The freedom and liberty of all Americans -- even much of the world -- is under attack by this organization.
END THE MPAA
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Next up, MPAA will seek the blocking of dangerous sites that speak up for copyright reform... then it'll be websites that talk about movies in a fashion that hasn't been pre-approved by the MPAA...
It's a slippery slope when free speech is censored.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
While I mostly agree with you, I think you lay the blame at the wrong feet.
The UN itself has done no such thing. The ones defrauding the US public of their constitutionally guaranteed rights are the elected representatives in the US government, and by extension their financial masters (a.k.a. "donors"), using the UN and other international groups as cover to get what they want. Though given the state of voting in the US (black-box hackable e-voting machines, gerrymandering, overly large constituencies, etc. etc.), the term "elected" might not hold much meaning here.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
And the revolution already came and is called the Internet. I've started to not care about ACTA and how it'll mandate capital punishment for file sharers. The bird has flown, the horse has left the barn, the cat is out of the bag, time can not be turned back. They can just make copyright infinity - 1 day already and I still won't care. I still won't think it's wrong. So they can shut down Wikileaks, will it really matter? I mean seriously, in how many kazillion copies is the HDCP master key now? We could do the same with anything wikileaks wanted to publish, there's no way they can win over a huge number of people spreading it over a huge number of channels. They can try legislating away reality and reality will laugh at them.
Their copyright == theft campaign is a huge failure. Despite the Pirate Party not making a good election, the percentage of Swedes who think so is down to 30%, down from 38% last year. They've lost 8% of the public opinion in one year. There's not been a single round of mass copyright lawsuits, nobody wants to take another shot at taking down The Pirate Bay, they get services like free Voddler that is very close to a giveaway. They're not even in fight mode anymore, they're in damage control mode so it doesn't spark the copyright revolution and they can keep making money in the rest of the world. It's really too bad that the Swedes don't have a public referendum system like in Switzerland, or it would already have happened.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wanting to stop free speech/freedom of information and suing children/computer illiterates/grandparents without internet/the dead for copying movies. All from one group. It is like they have the copyright on being evil dickheads. I mean, I thought they were greedy pricks before. But with this bit of news it pushes them into 'fucking evil' territory.
But here is the possible up side. The MPAA have been around since 1922. And by my calculations that means that their copyright on evil will run out by around 2200. At which point mad rioters can burn down all the CEO's homes slaughter them like pigs and give them as a blood offering to Satan.
So at least there is something to look forward to.
If they block the Wikileaks site then some volunteer will post the information on 4chan and then they'd have to block that, and a whole bunch of other sites because volunteers can basically post the information to random websites. This is a complete and utter waste of time.
Not really. No license is as free as public domain, but the BSD license is way more free than the GPL. Of course a lot of semi-literate people will claim that the BSD license allows code to be "closed", but it doesn't. Once BSD licensed, the code remains BSD licensed, even if it gets used in a proprietary project. The GPL is more a spite move than a real freedom move. It's just a way of "sticking it to the man", i.e. "if they wanna use this they have to forget about making their software proprietary". That isn't real freedom.
Nonsense. Code that is BSD licensed stays BSD licensed, even if it gets used in a proprietary system. When Microsoft chose to use the BSD networking stack in XP it didn't affect the BSDs. When Apple chose to base OS X largely on BSD same. So please stop repeating that canard, it's not helping.
How the fuck is this even modded insightful. It doesn't even make any sense.
Every government wants to write their laws in secrecy, hence why international "treaties" have gotten so popular. Every government's dream is to control every aspect of their citizens' lives without the citizens realizing it.
Actually I just don't understand why this would be any governments dream. Why would they give two flying fucks about controlling every aspect of my life. This is just an idiotic statement.
Sure, the government extols the "right to free speech" in every high school classroom but dreams of a world without it. The government loves movements like the tea party that while saying they want to reduce the government's power but give the government power over subjective things like morality and things that are "un-American", any government would take a "loss" of some tax dollars to be able to control something like that (and with fiat currencies, they can just print more worthless notes).
There's a little bit of sensibility in this statement, but it's so drowned out by the rest of your fear the man post that it's barely even relevant.
Every government wants to make politics so "boring" that the masses ignore it. Every government wants to make a country with rights that are never exercised.
I hardly think the big, bad, government made politics boring.
The ideal state for a government is where the people are cattle, a cow doesn't feel imprisoned, after all he can walk around this whole big pasture, and if he really wanted to he could jump the fence, but why jump when there is all this free food...
And what the hell are you saying here? That if your government provides you with everything you need, they are somehow doing you an injustice? GTFO.
OS-X may be based on BSD code, it's now closed-source and highly protected. You may not redistribute it, even though a lot of it is based on BSD coded. Those parts may be redistributable, however that will not result in a working system. And forget about having a look at the source code.
So a lot of freedom has been lost: the freedom to look at the source, the freedom to modify the software, the freedom to distribute it.
Otoh look at Android: this system is based on the GPLed Linux kernel. Therefore the Android kernel is still GPLed which means you can get the source code for the Android kernel, and that you can redistribute it. No freedom has been lost there.
Stop being pedantic. GPL is just as much a copyright license as Microsoft's EULA.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Vote, encourage others to vote - for anyone, just get out and vote. Don't buy into the bullshit that is often repeated: "my vote does not matter, anyway" - this phrase is music to radical-wing political parties ears for it means that their small band of supporters, who will certainly be voting, will have a great piece of the smaller voting pie. With voting rates trending lower as laws get more draconian - the media of various countries has sold their populations on apathy (more on this here).
Create websites to profile politicians, track what politicians say vs what they (and gov employees) actually do on the ground. Make funny viral video "ad's" encouraging young people to vote, how it is their one and only opportunity every few years to actually change shit. Instruct and show people how easy it is to vote.... the list of creative things that can be done is long here.
Apathy is the enemy and the mainstream media has helped to paralyzed the population well with it... making yet another public forum to discuss it will get you lost endlessly debating hypotheticals. Instead, pick a well defined task like the ones I have suggested above, start the project and try to get others to join up to help.
No, you have missed the point. OS X contains some stuff based on BSD code and some stuff that was developed in-house at NeXT or Apple. You may distribute all of Darwin, which includes some Apple extensions to BSD code. This does, contrary to your claim, result in a working system. You can take the code from Darwin, modify your kernel, libc, or any of a number of other libraries or programs (e.g. libdispatch, Launchd), and then replace the ones that were included with OS X with your modified version.
You can not, however, modify the stuff at the GUI layer. You are correct when you say that, however you are incorrect in claiming that this stuff is based on the BSD code. If Apple had used Linux and glibc instead of XNU (with code from FreeBSD) and a modified FreeBSD libc, then the situation would have been exactly the same.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
twiiter message
And after careful analysis - no, wait, the merest glance - I've concluded that "editor" timothy is utterly fucking incompetent at editing.