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US Embassy Sanctioned Lawsuit Against Aussie ISP iiNet
New submitter Elenor writes with this story (excerpted) from TorrentFreak, another nugget gleaned from the cables made public by WikiLeaks: "The Canberra Wikileaks cables have revealed that the U.S. Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers. Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate." The cable describes no overt action on the part of the American embassy, but the wording is telling: "Mike Ellis, the Singapore-based President for Asia Pacific of the Motion
Picture Association ... said MPAA did not see any role for Embassy at this
time, but wanted to keep us informed."
And this is why lobbying and campaign contributions need to be outlawed.
So, american embassies are MPAA's bitches ?
Not quite - More like the entire US government will bend over for the highest bidder. The fact that embassies serve our interests abroad, and the MPAA can bid pretty damned high, counts as merely an incidental fact in this situation.
Ironically enough, as a consequence, we may do better with the personally-richer candidate in any election, because it will cost more for them to take any potential buyer seriously. But at this point, it looks more and more like we have only one of the traditional "boxes" of democracy remaining.
Seriously? We have Hollywood publicly admitting an expectation of quid pro quo for its "campaign contributions" and now this, and the government doesn't give the least bit of a flying fuck. Welcome to the end of the modern experiment. At least we went the "Marie Antoinette", rather than the "thermonuclear global holocaust", route.
They might want you to call it 'lobbying and campaign contributions', I call that outright corruption.
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
It totally should, although until then I think that iiNet's court victory coupled with the un-earthing of the clandestine activities of the record company & US embassy will hamper any cases brought by the recording industry in the near future. Or is that just wishful thinking?
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Other industries certainly possess as much power. The defence industry is involved a lot when it comes to foreign policies (who gets to buy which weapons, which decides the fate of entire countries).
Big oil companies too can get what they want easily, for example rights to drill wherever they want.
But in those cases it is real power, created by the scarcity and importance of their products. They don't need to push for laws, or do extreme lobbying, because they already wield that power and no one is going to take it from them soon.
The power of media companies is mostly artificial. No on really needs them, they created the demand for their services themselves.
That must be why they push so hard for laws. It's a desperate move to tie themselves into everything, so they can't be easily disposed off.
Regardless, it's things like this which makes Wikileaks absoloutely a very very important web site for the entire internet. I'm very glad this information has been revealed.
Against the US military? Are you KIDDING? Guns won't do anything productive other than cost lives. IF this country somehow manages a revolution, it will NEED to be nonviolent.
Well keep in mind that iiNet, in the end, won its case. If they'd lost, and then this was revealed, then perhaps there would be a bit more of an outcry. So our least our courts gave the MPAA a bit of a smackdown...
(Not to mention the fact that I'd read this story in the newspaper at least three or four days ago, Slashdot is slow on the uptake!)
Give us a year or two - for now we still buy a little bit of stuff from the USA instead of directly from Asia where it is made. As you guys keep outsourcing it won't be long before there isn't anything we want to buy from the USA.
You can keep the military hardware. We've been conned into buying crap as part of political deals - notably some obsolete but expensive torpedoes that didn't fit our subs until we modified the subs (stupid for torpedoes that are not made any more), some ancient Sea Sprite helicopters that were rubbish in 1975 let alone 2006, and some tanks that we can't even use within our own country without tanker trucks following them around. And don't get me started on the JSF. You may have some good equipment but politics and corruption means that instead of supplying it to your military allies you simply drain their military budgets into the pockets of big contributors and make your military allies buy expensive crap as part of a package deal.
So there you go, you've fucked up your economy so badly that there's nothing much that we want that we can actually buy from the USA.
You can't buy a vote, this is illegal. However you can buy a Congressman outright and tell em' what to do. This is infinitely worse.
God spoke to me
By far the biggest hurdle to overcome is people's apathy.
There is revolution talk here in nearly every YRO story. Does anything comes out of it? Maybe Slashdoters are passionate, but we are the minority compared to the population at large. Not to mention that noone outside of tech circles gives a shit about the functioning of Internet or the government policies towards it. Do you honestly expect people to put their lives on a line because of government regulations towards these computer thingies?
Until the police state will start to really affect everyday basic living, don't expect to see anything changed. Hell, TSA are molesting people in airports and asking for papers on roads and trains and I haven't even heard of any protests against it!
Another annoying thing about these revolution threads is that they keep going on about the fighting, but never what happens after. What happens after you shoot all the current authority figures and their pets?
What will be the new policies? Who will be the new leaders and how will they be different? What will be the new safeguards that will prevent the same issues as the previous ways? What things will be changed? How is the new regime be better than the old? What are the detailed plans for the new governement structure? Why are your ideals worth dying for? Etc.
If someone can come up with extensive, comprehensive and thorough answers to the above questions and have some charisma, then you might have a start to try to work on people's apathy and conservatism. Without this it is all just talk that can go on without any change for decades.