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TPP Copyright Chapter Leaks: Website Blocking, New Criminal Rules On the Way
An anonymous reader writes: Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) [Wednesday] morning released
the May 2015 draft of the copyright provisions in the Trans Pacific
Partnership (copyright,
ISP
annex, enforcement).
The leak appears to be the same version that was covered
by the EFF and other media outlets earlier this summer.
Michael Geist unpacks
the leaked documents, noting the treaty includes
anti-circumvention rules that extend beyond the WIPO Internet
treaties, new criminal rules, the extension of copyright term for
countries like Canada and Japan, increased border measures,
mandatory statutory damages in all countries, and expanding ISP
liability rules, including the prospect of website blocking for
Canada.
The goose that lays the golden egg that is the internet one day.
and considering the utter populace indifference, they will prevail.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
At this rate you'll soon be able to smoke all the pot you want, but damn, if you download that song you'll be doing hard time.
This global framework of laws will render the nation state useless. Corporations will have ALL of the power nation states used to have. And you will have none.
It is not that we are going to sit on our laurels and do nothing, but the said truth is, WTF can we do?
It's the *ELITES* that are controlling every f*ing thing - so much that now they want to criminalize the non-elites for dipping out hands on their exclusive domain
Yet more proof we live in a global oligarchy, championed by assholes, who have stacked the deck so heavily in favor of corporations the rest of us are completely fucked.
Everything in these damned treaties are about maximizing the profits of multinational corporations, and don't benefit the citizens.
The treaties are basically theft on a global scale designed to give corporations more rights than people.
This is really American politicians fucking over everybody else in the world because they're so undeniably on the fucking payroll of the corporations it isn't even funny.
It is now pretty much a moral imperative we either start eating the rich, or start copyright infringement on such a massive scale they simply can't do anything about it.
We've sold the farm on the bullshit promise that what is good for greedy assholes and corporations somehow uplifts us all, when nothing could be further from the truth.
The pressing problems we need to solve in the world haven't got a fucking thing to do with copyright.
This treaty is a terrible idea.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Internet may be the goose that lays the golden egg, to 99% of the people, but to the *ELITES* the same Internet has become a threat to their exclusivity
Before the Internet the masses had no way to know what the *ELITES* were doing - yeah, we may have the trash rags with occasional pics of the *ELTES* doing _something_, but all in all the *ELITES* were well protected, even their scandals could be covered up easily
With the advent of Internet, more and more of the scandals of the *ELITES* have been pried open and leaked into the wild. As more and more of the internal dealings are being known to the masses the status of the *ELITES* has started to crumble
That is why for the *ELITES* the Internet is no necessarily the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is a big threat to them, and is becoming more and more threatening
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"Our severe copyright penalties are only because we're following international law!"
Do you think voting for any other candidate would have created a better outcome?
No, the whole system is corrupted. To be elected you need lots of money and how do you get money, from the corporations or from being ./ owning a corporation.
Come to say, Donald Trump looks like the Grand Nagus.
TPP will pretty much be applied worldwide.
If you're stepping on this planet, you gotta be affected horribly by it.
I used to buy all of the media I consumed. It seemed to be the right thing to do.
Now they say I can't rip the media I bought to use it when and where I want. I'm infringing simply by watching it where I work and on my way to work (oil rig, hotel on the way).
A treaty from another country gets to write my country's laws? And we don't have any say in it?
I am so sickened by all this that I stopped purchasing media. It only funds these assholes. I have no respect for copyright any more. Why should I? There is no respect for the consumer any more. I'm a freetard now.
Who knew that trade negotiators could pass legislation without the knowledge, let alone approval, of Congress? Do countries other than the U.S. also kowtow to the music and film industries? Google or Microsoft could buy the entire music and recording industry, and never bat an eye. How does such a small industry carry the weight to mandate worldwide legislation?
Here's what'll happen...
TPP will get to final stage approval of all nations. People will protest, etc. etc. and get ignored because governments don't give a shit since they can just walk all over the people as has been demonstrated by Snowden/Assange.
I foresee a corporate government within 5-10 years, maybe less, considering how aggressively they are pushing.
Freedoms? In a short few years your grandchildren will turn around and ask you "isn't this what you used to have back then grandpa, but lost because you were too much of a fucking coward to fight for it?"
Talk about a lovely future we got coming our way.
Funny enough in some countries that are pushing for 'hard time' for copyright infringement, I could commit manslaughter(maybe as much as 2nd degree) here in Canada and be out before they would be.
So in theory, killing everyone pushing this crap would result in less punishment than allowing it to pass.
And we have a Prime Minister who's vowing and trying to get TPP ratified just before the vote. He's disappointed he couldn't get it ratified before the election call, but in the middle of his campaigning, that's one of his key pillars.
Might also try to participate in that debate as well and ask about it. Though given bill C-51, and the other bills he's trying to get passed, website blocking might be the least of your problems.
And always - go vote. I know he also passed a new law making it harder to do so, and the courts have even admitted that while the law is bad, they won't overturn it because it will screw with the election. All the forms and all that were printed out and it's too troublesome for the courts to repeal the bad law because it's too close to an election. Between that and his efforts to disenfranchise voters through other means (including fake phone calls directing people to the wrong location - and handcuffing the officials in charge of investigating election fraud...), well, make sure you have all your ducks in a row, because unless you bring in a Conservative party member card, they're going to make it hard for you to vote.
Regards
Slashdotgirl
The more I know, the less I know
Although it is hard to know because of the secrecy, it seems like there is a whole lot of stuff around 'intellectual property' and corporations getting to sue governments over policy changes which has been pushed hard by the USA and opposed not quite as hard by everyone else. So there is lots of stuff that objectionable to everyone but the USA. (Given that the USA parliaments haven't been allowed to see the TPP, possibly not even they want it. This could be stuff wanted only by the USA negotiators, not the country.)
What I want to see is USA kicked out of the TPP, then renegotiate to get rid of all the bad stuff USA pushed in. After that, the USA can negotiate for a late entry into the agreement. They can propose all this IP stuff, and the rest of us can consider whether we that badly want USA in the TPP.
That is pretty much a pipe dream, but more realistically: I'd like to see the governments of all participating countries go through all the provisions and state how strongly they are for or against them. If there are any bits that are liked only by negotiators, this would show them up.
It really worries me that this is secretly negotiated by people with almost no democratic oversight and will be presented as a monolithic take-it-or-leave-it with greater effective force than the laws of the participating nations.
Buying into the TPP is effectively accepting a huge lump of laws you had almost no say over and are almost impossible to modify in future.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
You honestly blame the low quality of the puppet theater on the punch, not his player?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This made me laugh audibly. Grand Nagus is an outstanding descriptor.
Sorry, doesn't work. We've been doing that for a while now. All it accomplished was to give them an argument for more ridiculous laws, for when we don't buy their overhyped, overpriced crap content, it can only mean that we're copying it. It is simply not fathomable that we do without it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Next time you want to have music, don't download it. Go into a store, kick the guard in the nuts and grab the CD. Alternatively, find some old granny on the street, hit her over the head and grab her purse, then pay for your downloads.
The reason is simple: If you get caught, you'll be doing much less time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would have thought that would be incompatible with the legal systems of most countries. "Damages" are normally limited to the real loss suffered by the plaintiff/claimant. "Punitive damages" is a US thing.
The answer, of course, is that multibillion corporations can give massive amounts of money and a lucrative job opportunity to a politician whilst you can only vote. And since SOMEONE has to go in, all the corporations have to do is be ecumenical in their bribery.
Which is why you need to get money out of politics and reverse the Citizens United decision. wolf-pac.com.
It doesn't work because people lack the willpower to live without content. I was in the line in the Comcast and the lady ahead of me was whining how she was poor, on social security and that her cable bill was too high. The customer service agent walked her through all the packages she had, and she wouldn't cancel those because she said she watches those channels. When the guy finally suggested that she cancel HBO to save money, she got mad and stormed out of the building.
Take the DirectTV AMC dispute for instance. DirectTV was going to buckle down and not give in to AMC's demands. But then their customers started jumping ship and cancelling service because they wanted to watch the next season of the walking dead. Those very same people will then start bitching about the rate hikes being passed onto them. It happens in just about every single retransmission dispute. The cable/sat companies cave in because their customers are unwilling to go without. How can you attempt to control costs when your customers are indicating they are willing to pay any price for content and will walk away to a competitor if you withhold their content to negotiate a better price?
If a large amount of people stopped consuming media, you'd bet it would send enough of a message to trigger a price correction. Unfortunately, people are inherently lazy and are unwilling to make the temporary sacrifice to make it happen.
That's too easy a dismissal of trying, and too convenient an excuse for losing. Money is a facilitator, but it is not the only one, and fixating on it only takes your concentration off the REAL requirements. To be elected you need exposure, recognition, and the ability to sell, convince, and persuade. If you can't be bothered getting yourself exposed and recognized, and have no knack to sell, convince, and persuade, you join a long list of LOSERS complaining about "the system".
Yes, if you have a vast power structure behind you, you can be a cipher and still win. But a real doer does not take from that, that he has to either round up his own vast power structure or take his bat and ball and go home. A real doer finds a way to get around, or to attack and defeat, that evil power structure arrayed against him and oppressing the people.
Do you really think the Bolsheviks and the Nazis and a long list of others who really did change things had big bags of money? It's not only the evil actors who need charisma and cleverness.
Dealing with media (always getting Content ID'd for media we have licensed, often by someone else than who we licensed it from), this will eventually kill anything except Creative Commons. When you have the same song licensed by multiple sources, and you start getting lawsuits or threats of them for content you've actually licensed by a different entity, it's going to fall apart.
I believe if you really think about it, you will find that the election and re-election of Mr. Obama says a lot more about the unbelievably abysmal quality of the opposition, than it says about how dumb the voters are.
Do you realize that the Constitution says nothing whatsoever about political parties, conventions, or primary elections? As far as the Constitution is concerned there needn't be any political parties at all. But it does impose the Electoral College, and (surprise), those electors are not Constitutionally bound to honor the popular votes of their states. So while Constitutionally you could have a Presidential ballot with 50 or 100 unaffiliated contenders listed on it, there is no provision for a runoff if, say, none of them polls over 10% or so.
I don't know how you can destroy the lock the two Parties have on the process, and even more crucially, I have no idea how you can prevent them from conniving with each other. George Washington believed there should be no parties, but it would take a Constitutional Amendment to ban them, and as well as a chilling effect on free association, it wouldn't work anyway. It would just drive the affiliations underground. As a practical matter, most countries have more than two Parties in meaningful contention, many times a great many more than two, which tends to lead to coalition governments. What is not clear is how, practically, you can effect a change in power away from only two parties.
And really haven't looked into this at all, but it seems like there are traditionally two systems of law, criminal and civil, maybe it's time there become "corporate" laws, since a majority of criminal offenses seem to stem from corporate interests. I'd rather see corporate attorneys prosecute these laws then our government persecutors who should be focused on real crimes. I'm sure there are a ton of problems with a model like this, but could a real lawyer break down the pros and cons?
Maybe, maybe not; possibly. But even if a whole bunch of people are willing to commit a crime, it's good to prosecute (or at least talk shit about) the one who actually goes through with the dirty deed.
Don't let Republicrats off the hook for this, even if you think a third party president would have also pushed hard for it. If you're not willing to point the finger of blame, then you're not creating any incentive for anyone to ever try to avoid it, so why would someone else create a better outcome? Lay blame onto the specific names of people who are caught red-handed working against America's interests.
Obama isn't even pretending that he hasn't made this a priority agenda item. He really should take flak for that. Every current presidential candidate should be given a reason to speak out against TPP, even if it'll be too late by the time they're elected, and even if their campaign contributors would want them to work for TPP too. The current public debate should become "Look at what THEY are doing! I fucking swear I will not be that kind of president!" Because those people are (for very stupid reasons) in the media spotlight right now, so they will be heard and that's how you pressure the current Congress into voting against TPP.
Now is the time for everyone, of pretty much any right/left political persuasion, to become an Obama-basher over this specific issue. If you're not bashing Obama over this, you're part of the problem.
Just by framing this as an Obama thing rather than a generic corruption thing, you will get automatic thoughtless support from half of the Republicrat voters and media (the Republicans). You don't even have to argue the point or get them to think about the issue. You'll get it on Fox News. Then the "other" side might pick it up, wanting to have to take an adversarial position out of habit (and maybe they will, and maybe they won't). Next thing you know, mainstream people could be talking about it, and to TPP-advocates' horror, democracy could break out.
"TPP! Thanks, Obama!"
Just talking about it as though a corrupt politician, as long as their name isn't "Obama," might not have gotten bribed into doing this, could cause the silly assertion to become true.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This is going to only increase the difficulty in catching people engaging in truely bad activity, such as terrorism and child pornography. Every time these idiots start trying to go after things that cause little or no harm to society, encryption and privacy tools make leeps and bounds because the demand for these tools sky rocket. And people that do cause acutal harm to society get these tools too. Hardly anyone used a VPN ten years ago, now that people know everything they do can be watched by anyone, people like my 70 year old dad use VPN just to do his banking..
All through the 20th century if you created some content and wanted to distribute that content to a wide audience, you needed to go through a distributor who could distribute that content. These distributors would distribute your content (whether it be music, movies, TV shows, books, video games, magazines or whatever else) to the wide audience and would take their cut.
But in the early years of the 21st century, things changed and new distribution methods have appeared that allow people to distribute their content (even paid content) to a wide audience without going through a big corporation middleman taking a cut.
And now the big corporations are fighting back and trying to put the Internet genie back in the bottle and return to a world where companies like Comcast, Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, Viacom and Sony get to control what content is available to the general public.
Its been said before but I am saying it again, the #1 problem with this world is the control of the worlds governments by big corporations. Find a way to end that and the roadblocks preventing many of the other problems with this planet from being fixed will disappear.
Even if you abstain it still gets counted as if you copied it.
There have been quite a few computer games that I really wanted. I had to do without, simply because their ridiculous copy protection meant I cannot in good faith buy them and support a company making such decisions. I wrote in no uncertain terms exactly this to the maker of the games, citing how I would have loved playing it and I was putting aside money for it, but they won't get it as long as they engage in such tactics.
Most (ok, almost all) of them didn't even bother to answer. The one answer I got pretty much directly accused me of stealing for when I don't buy it, I clearly MUST be stealing it for it is unfathomable that I would simply abstain.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Keep on dreaming. People are increasingly resigned. They may riot and try and elect someone whom they feel represents them better, but it's a futile enterprise. Look what happened to Greece. You can't win. You just can't. I may be angry at the victory of the oligarchy and the death of democracy, but I know when I'm beaten. It's time to learn how to function in the new world rather than waste and ruin my life trying to fight a lost battle.
What gets me is the provision buried in the TPP that allows the United States to nuke Japan if they fail to implement a 22 year patent for all drug modifications, which would result in countries like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada paying about 20 to 100 times as much for prescription drugs, bankrupting Japan especially, with their aging population.
Surprised Japan didn't object to that provision.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The Constitution tries to insulate individual voters from power. Representatives are elected by district, but originally Senators were selected by state legislatures. The Electoral College was intended to get a bunch of intelligent men together to decide on a President, or possibly to make a short slate to be decided by the House of Representatives. (Originally, the Electoral College would vote on a President, and the guy with the second most votes would become Vice-President. It was changed so Electors vote for both a President and a Vice-President.)
As far as banning parties, I've lived where some offices were officially non-partisan, which meant only that the party affiliation was not listed on the ballot.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I think the Grand Nagus was more likable, especially when he started dating Quark's mom.
As long as enough people buy their overhyped, crippled content, it doesn't matter. Yes, you, me and a handful others will refuse to buy it. But most people simply don't care. And even more will grind their teeth and buy it regardless.
But as long as I am treated like a thief and not like a customer, I will not become a customer. And the only thing that keeps me from adjusting the crime to the accusation is that I also refuse to steep to their level. I have bought quite a few games that have no copycrippling. With some of them, in case of indies, I even threw more their way than the asking price if they stated that they actually want to treat me like a customer and not refuse me the right to play the content I license the way I deem fit.
Fair vs fair. You treat me as a customer, I will go out of my way to make sure you get your fair share of the deal, as you ask (or even more). You treat me like a thief and I won't even offer you a glass of water if you're drowning.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I may indeed have a problem, but it is not a misundersanding of the Electoral College. The Electoral College tends to amplify decisions. A razor-sharp decision in the popular vote tends to result in a much larger electoral decision because of the avalanche effect of choosing electors in each individual state. I.e., whoever wins state X, whether it be by 51-49% or by 90-10%, wins all the electors of state X.
It is true that the populations of the smaller states are somewhat over-represented in the College. The Congressmen are apportioned by population, and the Senators are apportioned exactly 2 to each state, no matter what the population. The sum is the number of electors. Thus it is 435 + 100 for the 50 states - plus 3 for DC. The population apportioning still heavily predominates. If the number of electors was just 100 - plus 2 - then the thinly populated states would gain real power, and the death grip of the sugar daddy party on the cities would not give it such a huge advantage.
Regardless, the weakness of the system is that there is no guarantee that any of the electors will follow their pledges and elect the candidate of the winning party. If a dark horse from either of the two parties somehow manages to win his party's electors in a majority, the electors are still perfectly free to flaunt the wishes of the voters and throw their votes to the opposing candidate if that suits their love of establishment better.
It is true that the avalanche effect of the Electors tends to lock lesser parties out of any representation at all in the Electoral vote, but it is not impossible to defeat. Theodore Roosevelt won 27% popular and 88 Electoral votes in 1912 running on the Bull Moose Progressive ticket. We get another guy with that kind of stature going it alone, and the Rs and Ds divide closely, and it's Katy bar the door.