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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."
So, american embassies are MPAA's bitches ?
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As I post this, it's almost 10:00am on Wednesday, January 24 in Perth, Australia where iiNet is headquartered.
How many Aussies will take to the streets after reading this? Ehhhh... there's one! Oh, that's just a pedestrian... how about that one?!! Nope. Going to his car.
(sound of crickets)
(fade to black)
Passing laws backed by the MPAA is usually a detriment to the victim country's economy (as seen with SOPA) and the quality of life in that country for it's citizens, which will make them unhappy with their government (as rising anger about these laws indicates).
As such it can be seen as economic and political sabotage of foreign countries.
For the US embassy to take part in that, couldn't this seen as a hostile act by the victim country?
Asking a question for the community here: how did Hollywood get the kind of power and leverage that it has? As a major source of media I can see how it would be valued by government but the stories you hear these days of the lobbying power and secret international cables that surface make it seem like they are constantly overstepping the norms of most other industries.
How did it get to the state that it's now, and why is government working so hard to protect media interests internationally so often? Is it the size of Hollywood and consequent lobbying power, a belief that Hollywood is a/the important industry to protect, or something else? Hollywood seems to receive the most benefit from all copyright laws and protections, so how did they get to this amount of power that they can exert this much control over legislation? Even in the old days I know they had the ratings boards that could strong arm quite a lot of policies.
If anyone has any good histories to relate here or relevant anecdotes, please post below!
Australia has oil... they just consume more than they produce
I would say its worse than that.
I live in the US. Our major exports are IP (movies, recordings, blueprints, and software all together in one group), raw food stuffs, military equipment/aviation goodies, and bad legislation.
Eg, other than corrupt factory farm operations, (why's the park smell so stinky mommy? That's just the columbia meat packing plant on the hill dear.) And aerospace + military industrial (lockheed martin, boeing, and pals), intellectual property is about the only relevant industry the US has, other than bullshit like the bank and loan infrastructure.
This is why politicians are all too happy to take bribes err.... "campaign contributions" from those industries, and why they are treated like sacred cows in terms of regulatory compliance issues, and in terms of getting carte blanc with proposing legislation.
The US is anemic as hell. My government knows it. They want golden parachutes for when the shit hits, so they stay cuddly with multinationals.
Considering how small their population is (~10M IIRC), that must not be very much oil.
Almost 23M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Australia), and apparently we use 946,300 barrels per day (http://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=91) making us the 19th highest user in the world.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Replace oil with natural gas and you'd be a little closer to the truth.
And what role did Mark Arbib play? He is an Australian senator, who is essentially a US spy. The wikileaks cables have revealed that he is in the habit of revealing secret information to the US embassy, to the extent that that the US assigned him a code name as an informant. Has Arbib been behind the scenes doing the MPAA/US government's bidding, shoring up sympathy in the Australian government?
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.
According to documents released under Freedom of Information, the Attorney-General wants a "solution" to "be educative and aim to change the social norms."
That's right. They want to force "education" onto the population to make them want to prop up the content industry's failing business models.
Of course, only industry groups were invited to this meeting. I have to say, Ludlam is the reason that I voted greens in the last election.
We have a decent amount of oil (but not massive amounts). We do have a shitton of natural gas, coal and the majority of the world's uranium though...
Not only do we have oil, we have coal, natural gas and uranium.
And what do you all do? Drive on the wrong side of the road and export Vegemite.
What sort of contribution to civilization is that?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We're used to it - we had a bumbling crop of idiots from the bottom of the US intelligence barrel expose themselves as attempting to remove the leader of Australia in 1975 when he was not only doomed anyway but also had demonstrated that he would roll over and do whatever the USA said (eg. East Timor, US listening posts) with nothing more than a grumble. The only consequences of that were some CIA guys using that as an excuse to sell secrets to the USSR, a movie based roughly on the court case after they were convicted, and a quite decent song by David Bowie.
We know the USA does this sort of stuff. Every few years it inspires a few people to gather outside the US consultate and yell a lot, but mostly we just accept it as part of being an ally of the USA and the nature of portions of the US government being for sale to the highest bidder. East Timor is right on our doorstep so we've got a pretty good reminder that even a President (eg. Ford) can be bought out even by a foreign power (eg. the HUGE donation to the Republican party by the Indonesian President on the day of the invasion and Ford going to Jakarta personally to accept it).
So yes. We're the bitch of the USA, but the USA at times is the bitch of whoever wants to buy your government even if it is a foreign power. I'll bet Rupert Murdoch has bought a few major changes himself.
So pretty much, iinet walked away a winner from the trial, so the this Precedent for all other nations going to do be a good thing. iinet was passing the "infrigement notices" onto the police, which from my understand decided not to do anything about them (not enough evidance). This was taken as enough action on the part of iiNet and now the content studios are appealing the decision, which is still going. But from the results of the first trial, it looks like they aren't going to be able to "save face" at all. Sometimes, they can stuff themselves up, and this is one of them.
Then you have Pres. Obama throwing in to tonight's State of The Union that "It’s not right when another country lets "OUR" movies, music, and software be pirated".
All fits the bill of our politicians being lap dogs for media makers and that things like SOPA and PIPA need to be continued to be rallied against because they are trying still going to try and push them through.
We came up with Big Brother and exported it to the world :(
With the tanks the German made Leopards we just retired were superior in a lot of roles, as I'm sure some US made tanks are. However it was a "take it or leave it" package deal that some US Senator was getting rich on. It wasn't as bad as the Sea Sprite fiasco (buying a lot of very expensive and very old helicopters and scrapping them), but that's the sort of thing that gets attached to trade deals.
I can't read the cable from the link in the article linked to in the summary. You start reading and all of a sudden up pops a plea for money and a video supporting same. I'm sure it could be easily circumvented but damn, hard to get the word out when you won't let readers read the damn cable. Yes, I know, the world needs money (as do Assange and Wikileaks) to go round and round but blocking the important information (to some) is counter productive to what they're trying to accomplish.
Here is the link:
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/11/08CANBERRA1197.html/
Funny, I can't get to the link from the url above, something about maintenance.
Works just fine if you go to the link from the following paragraph from the article:
"The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a [conspiracy by Hollywood studios] (This is the linking text) 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."
See article for link and more info..... I really don't like the way this information is presented by Wikileaks, or not presented in my case.
It seems like five seconds after you tell them anything it becomes international news.
Remember that pakistani group that wanted to form an alliance with the US to squeeze out the military faction? Well, they're all running for their lives now because the instant they told the US State Department it was all over the nightly news.
Forget the issue of the moment here, what we're looking at is a state department leaking everything they're given.
That means it's impossible to conduct diplomacy with the US. THAT is a much bigger problem then some stupid MPAA conspiracy to create a precedent in Australia.
State Department needs to get their shit together now. I don't know who's fault this is and I don't care. It doesn't matter. Fix it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not really... this sort of behavior is common throughout the world and was common with the US government prior to these leaks.
The leaks are new and specific to the US State Department. The CIA isn't leaking. Think they're doing less nasty things behind closed doors?
This has nothing to do with being nasty or sneaky. This has everything to do with not being able to keep a secret. And furthermore, diplomacy is impossible if you can't keep secrets.
The alternative to diplomacy is shutting down the whole US diplomatic system and shifting those responsibilities to other entities... or just conducting everything through war.
You do NOT want the US diplomatic system to collapse. I don't know who is responsible for this... I am loath to lay this at the feet of Hillary Clinton but she is Secretary of State... this is HER division. I don't blame her for what is happening but she is responsible for fixing it. If this keeps happening it will be her fault.
Maybe this will help you grasp the problem. Lets say you're a foreign official that knows your government is doing bad things. You want to tell the US government because you think they'll stop it. Well, now what will happen is that they'll leak the fact that you told them to everyone... including your own government which means that they might just kill you. Try giving information is you live in North Korea or Iran.... you'll die.
That means you can't tell the US state department anything because they can't keep secrets.
Do you understand? This is a test.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And this is why lobbying and campaign contributions need to be outlawed.
The true cellar-dwelling geek --- the mushroom maiden --- with no social or political life whatsoever --- has no need of organizations and lobbyists to represent and protect his interests.
The politician aligns with interests that are important to his home district. There are people he has to know, people he has to listen to whether they support his campaign or not.
The congreswoman for Redwood City won't give a damn if Anonymous hacks her website.
But she will know to the dime how much Dreamworks Animation (400 employees), Oracle (6700) and Electronic Arts (3159) contribute to the local economy --- and they will get a hearing.
Sigh.
This was news in August 2011.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/31/afact_subcontractor_to_mpaa/
That's why we export it.
Welcome to 5 months ago...... http://technologyspectator.com.au/industry/internet/wikileaks-cable-reveals-iinetafact-case-background Published 1:02 AM, 31 Aug 2011 "A document published by WikiLeaks appearing to be a US diplomatic cable looks to have revealed much of the previously hidden background behind the iiNet/AFACT court case, including the Motion Picture Association of America’s prime mover role and US Embassy fears the trial could become portrayed as “giant American bullies versus little Aussie battlers”."
Since this article is about iiNet and people have been talking about SOPA, I thought it a good idea to post this article published on the official iiNet blog yesterday about SOPA: http://blog.iinet.net.au/sopa-internet-censorship-effort-beginning/
Just for the record, I agree. I'm a registered Republican.
still following a party that has a record of fucking people up for the profit of the minority elite, OVERTLY. while others do it covertly, these openly declare its their philosophy. it doesnt matter what your philosophical reasons are for supporting them. you are supporting them despite thier track record. because people like you do that, that party can exist as a power that can grab government. if you havent, they would recede back to 20-25% radical segment like similar line parties in other parts of the world are.
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