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UK Government Wants Google To Police Copyright
judgecorp writes "the UK's culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will this week ask Google to stifle sites deemed to be pirates, pushing them down the listing and cutting off their advertising revenues. The UK government has already outlined plans to make ISPs police copyright breaches by users."
Google already removes illegal things like child porn. Copyright violating sites are just as illegal, so what's the problem? Like the article states, court order would be required for it. I think it would also only apply to google.co.uk.
Police wants UK Government To Google Copyright.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And thus it silently dies..
Let's just get rid of copyright and replace it with something sane.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Do they think Google is the only search engine?
I can imagine Google saying "Sorry, we don't police the wires. If you're unhappy with that, well, that's unfortunate, I'm sorry you feel that way. Oh look, there goes the .uk domain (click). Oops, didn't mean to press that. Have you considered using AltaVista?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Due to the extensive illegal use of their product, police have asked Remington to stop the Mexican drug trade.
Newzbin2 is an example. The MPA is trying to get the Govt to expand the use of the super secret child porn filter to include "copyright violations" too.
...until the old "typewriter generation" dies off in the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, etc. etc. and the ones who, when they were kid, traded cassette tapes in school get in power (as in: become the largest voting block)?
Right now these parties know that these "digital age" issues don't matter to the Typewriters so they can get away with it. Things will change eventually, after the wind changed direction wholeheartedly supported by these same parties, but it would be nice to speed things up a little.
Google's only job is to offer users a good experience in finding what they are looking for.
This huge push toward strong enforcement of copyright, patents and other IP seems completely inevitable; the government will never stop pushing for ever tighter national and international monitoring and enforcement.
The reason for this is that, as a nation, we really can't afford to stop. We have next to no natural resources that can profitably be sold, our labour is too expensive to compete as a manufacturing base and the days of sailing around exploiting our colonies are long behind us. The only two things we have left that we're good at are financial services (for which London was a powerful centre due to historical reasons as much as anything else), and developing new technologies that we can sell or license to others (e.g. the arms fair currently going on in SE London). A world in which IP rights are not strongly protected is one in which British companies have nothing to sell.
Now, I know that patent and copyright are very different things. However, as many of the big Western economies slide further from having economies that rely on selling physical objects into having economies that rely on selling or licensing information (patented designs, copyrighted films, etc), I can see them becoming strongly linked. For increasingly information-based economies, the fight to establish all forms of IP as sacrosanct is really the fight to still have a place in the world economy in a couple of decades' time.
I have to say, that the UK is by far the worst country in the West. Aside from North Korea, Burma, sub-saharan Africa and the islamic hell holes, I don't think there's a country I'd rather not live in.
I believe that one becomes liable for damages and prosecutions if one edits traffic at all. The best defense is zero editing and zero viewing of what flows from your server. Think about it. Must the phone company be held for any traffic that violates a porn law or any other restrictions? Obviously the phone company has no control and hopefully no knowledge at all of my conversations. How is the net or web site any different? Even a commercial truck driver has no guilt if he has a huge box full of dope in the back of his truck unless it is proven that he knew it was in the truck. The reasoning behind some of these proposed laws is very much aimed at only some of us and not all of us. They may take your car if a passenger has dope in his pocket. But when was the last time a cruise ship, commercial jet, or large building was seized simply because one occupant was doing something illegal?
It's already been long-established that most of the weapons that are being used by the cartels are actually real military weapons. Not "military-looking" like the AR-15 which is just another semiautomatic rifle that just "looks scary," but the sort of automatic weapons that the only efficient American channel for getting them is the US Government funneling them to Mexico where they "just so happen" to fall out of the Mexican government's hands only to reappear in some enterprising criminal's hands.
What is absolutely ridiculous about the "90% myth" with the Mexican cartels and American guns is that the best the ATF can figure out is that the most of the weapons being smuggled across the border are being sold illegally to ordinary Mexican citizens because buying and transporting weapons is nearly impossible in Mexico. The black market exists because ordinary Mexicans are getting sick to death of being caught in the crossfire between a corrupt-as-heck government that can't/won't protect them and the cartels.
Can anyone other than a white liberal living in an upper class part of town their entire life blame them?
This shows the ridiculousness of trying to go after vendors and service providers indirectly. Usually it's caused by the government not doing its job.
I'm willing to bet that the law they write will not include a clause that says the isp's hve to do this free of charge. I'd bill the gov't for all they were worth. If they are going to make me be their enforcers, then they will pay me to do it.
What is Inevitable is all these self-ish, money hoarding and progress inhibiting ways going the way of the horse and carriage. How can we find a balance with our planet and with each other if our primary form of trade involves striving to screw everyone else out of their money?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
One of the reasons UK (and the other colonial powers) couldn't exploit her colonies any more is because they tried to exploit too much, and the colonies finally said "enough is enough"
If the governments try to clamp down too hard on copyright, it may just backfire and they end up losing it all. People may stop caring about some far away copyright owner (read: not necessarily the content creator) like the colonists stopped respecting some far away government who "owns" the colony
So, now the government can't even be bothered to enforce the laws it feels are important and wants to foist law enforcement duties onto google.
Or, maybe this is an admission the government is such a bunch of dorks that they couldn't do the job anyway.
This huge push toward strong enforcement of copyright, patents and other IP seems completely inevitable; the government will never stop pushing for ever tighter national and international monitoring and enforcement.
I completely agree. But its a natural reaction and counter push to what has become a society norm; freely taking what you don't own. Just as with any rampant crime, inevitably you wind up with a police state until the crime is brought back under control. Generally speaking, the people who cry the loudest for these types of moves (and the push yet to come) are the exact same people who are creating the entire need to push back. Basically, while wildly unpopular, you can almost exclusively blame the pirates.
Like it or not, pirates like terrorists, empower those who seek to reduce and/or eliminate freedoms. While many people see pirates are a "freedom movement", the sad fact is, pirates are almost the sole reason for continued loss of freedom and rights; just as terrorists have done for Americans post-9/11. Long story short, to support piracy is to support the loss of rights and freedoms. Ironically, pirates are the very thing they are fighting against. Pirates are their own worst enemy but continue to blame everyone else but themselves.
This is about controlling information and making money off of it more than anything else - But if they just dropped the controlling part the making money would make itself evident later on.
All of this legislation is pushed by people who have fallen behind the times, people who cannot adapt to today and get more and more desperate to keep their desired revenue stream going. Innovation is stifled because of this, as is the development of new industries that could actually 'fix' the problem of Western economies.
Any economy that seeks to profit soley from IP is completely doomed. Countries that make things completely have the upper hand, long term, as far as generating new IP is concerned.
Google already does this. There are country specific warning messages, which appear at the bottom of the page when search results were ommited.
So nice sentiment, but you're too late.
And we can only blame ourselves for being asleep behind the wheel letting our economies that once produced exports shrivel up and become services and 'IP' based.
The West's 'Spring' is coming I hope.
Interestingly enough, I liken the push for strong IP protection to be a new form of colonialism. Think of it this way, the countries that are pushing for strong IP laws want to have a lock down on culture, with these international agreements they can force all developing countries to buy culture from them because to create their own would be infringing (cause everything builds off what is already there). Meanwhile, raw materials "eg cheap shirts, cd players, toys etc" are sent from the developing countries to the big powers. In a similar way to colonialism where unprocessed goods were sold to the industrial powers and processed goods were sold back to the colonies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...I mean c'mon! The title has 'Google', 'copyright' and 'police' right in it!
Oh wait...I suppose people are off making fun of hillbillies, arguing about the merits of climate change research or mooning over Windows 8.
Never mind.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
The beginning of the end.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
His name goes on the list with David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Theresa May and others who simply don't have the first faintest idea on how the Internet works and how the 15yr old kids in school are experts at breaching any firewall (they get out of the firewall jail their senior schools impose - they'll do the same for any British firewall).
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
The libertarians should love this, the very idea of privatizing the police force is very much in line with a smaller government. Perhaps we can privatize the court systems next. Then we can have private Police, Courts, and Prisons.
This is coming from the Brits. If a corporation puts something up on line to profit from, then let that corporation make the neccessary decision to protect their interests and stop using the governments around the world to do their work for them. Google? This makes sense to let one of the search engines search for violators and leave the governments to police themselves. But Google? They will lose their ass!! Go Google..
That's kind of funny, I've seen Warcraft malware sites on Google paid advertising right up the top.
[needs citation]
Are you really that disconnected from your world that you cannot see the resources? You are standing on them. You can do lots of agriculture if you do not poison the soil and deplete it with monocultures. But in the UK, I have a feeling you already know. in the US, complete countries of cotton are considered normal. Being an island, you are literally blown away with energy. And that will increase. It already does.
And yes, you don't want to pay for labour. It is the same here in the Netherlands. And our society is suffering from it. There are no craftsmen anymore. No bicycle repair man can even repair a bicycle anymore. We buy "fair trade" products while starving our own farmers. Or we fancy child labour a hemisphere away over our own craftsmen. Maybe it would time for our governments to realise that local economy should not be sacrificed for the global one? Rather than export our destruction, this time in the form of copyright laws, we should work on reconstructing our own society. The world cannot live on trade alone, however much western governments want it. And it is totally insane to try to make a whole country live on trade alone.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Perhaps this will result in alternative search engines having niche uses. An Open Google if you will... focused purely on providing an unbiased, unaltered, unfiltered search engine of the web that is as useful as google without the prospect of monetising it.
Rather than running backed by a profitable company, this could be an engine focused on minimal running cost, with distribution of both resources and data among it's users for financial feasibility and decentralisation making it less susceptible to potential moderating forces such as government and copyright holders.
I suppose the challenge (other than making an engine as good as google's of course) would be effectively moving the majority of server side processes involved in indexing websites to a distributed network of users. Distributing a query-able database might be even more tricky. Then on top of all that for this to be really accessible it would need to be browser based... so effectively a distributed search engine that runs on javascript O_o
You know when I first saw the headline, I read it as "UK government wants Google to copyright police." As in, the UK was looking for a way to copyright policemen. Maybe nobody else would be able to call their police "bobbies."
Don't look at me like that - it could happen.