USTR Publishes Rogue Sites List

bs0d3 writes "The U.S. Government has classified some of the largest websites on the Internet as examples of sites which sustain global piracy. The list released by the United States Trade Representative draws exclusively on input from rightsholders. It includes popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, file-hosting service Megaupload, and Russia's leading social network VKontakte. VKontakte says that company's copyright problems are in the past after a deal was made with the USTR. Also, for the first time in many years, China's leading search engine Baidu has been removed from the list. However, China's widely used online consumer and business-oriented online shopping service Taobao remains listed. The full report can be viewed here. It has no legal implications whatsoever, but may be referred to by policy makers regarding future legislation (e.g. SOPA)."

Comments

U.S. Trade Representative

[Trepidity]

In case you're wondering, the current person filling the post is Ron Kirk, appointed by Obama in 2009. Though it doesn't seem that USTR policy differs much under Republican versus Democratic administrations; sadly this one isn't a partisan issue because both parties are generally on the wrong side.

Re:Modchip.ca and Controlsource

[mirix]

Not for long, though. The corporate appeasement party finally got their majority, and will likely soon pass some fairly draconian measures, that they tried to pass in the past and could not.

Not entirely sure if it would apply to this, but I think it would. IIRC the gist of the bill seems fairly reasonable at first, some fair dealing exemptions and such, the right to transfer to different media, etc. It then goes on to state that if the media/device has DRM it is illegal to break it, therefore rendering all the rights given useless.