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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 ?
Read radical news here
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!
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.
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.
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.
We came up with Big Brother and exported it to the world :(
No we didn't. It was the Dutch who invented that quality show.
[quote]With the tanks the German made Leopards we just retired were superior in a lot of roles[/quote]
Yes but they were mostly worn out. We operated stuff like the Leopards and M113's well past the use-by-date on the chassis.
The real problem with the Abram's deal is that our government is terrified of anything to do with the words "nuclear" or "uranium" (unless it is exporting uranium) and so we got the crappy armour for our Abram's that the Americans replaced in the mid-80's.
The problem is that most of our local defence needs are going to involve urban/jungle warfare where "modern" AT weapons (like the ancient RPG-7) would tear our under-armoured Abrams, let alone Leopards, apart. We would have been better off spending the money on some tracked IFV's with a big gun version of that IFV to fill the tank role. Instead we bought MBT's which we have little use for and lack the logistics to support properly, and are mostly reliant on wheeled IFVs like the ASLAV or Bushmaster. Those are fine for the dry season but would be almost totally worthless in the rainy season.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
The true cellar-dwelling geek --- the mushroom maiden --- with no social or political life whatsoever
And a true cellar-dwelling American has no knowledge of politics or processes outside his own nation.
To quote Graeme Orr:
Of gravest concern is the perception of the sale of governmental favours. This concern has been most recently raised with regard to the exercise of discretion by the federal immigration authorities and Minister in favour of donors to the Liberal Party.[110]
There is a danger that the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) will swallow the corporate view that such fees are valuable consideration, shelled out as part of doing business in Australia. Indeed one AEC handbook states that ‘value [ie, consideration] includes gaining access to lobby government ministers’.[111] On that reasoning, even large-scale donations are simply ‘part of doing business’ and their tax deductibility as an ordinary business expense would be undeniable! No matter how perfect the disclosure system, if the sale of political favours is assimilated as an acceptable part of the ‘commerce’ of parties, then politics risks collapsing into a business, not a public service.
Does anything look familiar here? This was in 2003, and the reform proposals outlined were considered to be a major step towards reducing the influence of direct lobbying in Australian politics.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."