Now, the US simply doesn't ask for these laws to be put in place, they shoe horn, back door and in some cases force it.
Well said! Here is a recent example of US "coercing" of Spain into adopting IIPA's world view (i.e. police the internet for the US) - basically not inviting the worlds eighth largest economy to the world crisis summit(s), unless they bent over for IIPA. Same old same old, but at least more Americans at least appear to be becoming aware of why this kind of extremely arrogant foreign policy makes them so unpopular around the world.
What do the negotiations matter?...What counts is the ratification.
Even if ACTA requires ratification (which it does not), even if it did you are still assuming there will be a debate before ratification. History is littered with examples where nation changing laws and resolutions have been ratified without any meaningful debate or opposition, because powerful entrenched interested parties made sure it happened that way. For example see first link, under "The Incredible Timeline".
I hope there would be an even greater backlash in the UK, because they'd have to introduce one before this could happen
Wow, I didn't know that. I stand corrected... thanks! Teach me for assuming. Spain should follow UK's lead:). Went back and read the wikipedia link I posted more carefully:
"A notable exception in Europe is the UK, that does not allow private copies. But generally legislators allow private copies for two reasons: firstly, because otherwise the enforcement would be unfeasible for private reasons, and secondly because the administrative burden would be disproportional."
Yes, although it's not mentioned by the IIPA for some strange reason: the blank media levy
It is not so strange that IIPA do not mention that they are already receiving hundreds of millions+ with the blank media tax. Reason being that they need to paint Spain as the evil bad guy in the copyright debate - conceding that they already receive buckets of money - for doing nothing - would weaken their argument, so it's left off the "report". Yes its bad that Spain changes the blank media levy, but its also bad the almost all other countries do the same. Could you imagine the political backlash if Spanish government decided to be the first country in the first world not to levy the tax? Politically they are and continue to be grilled and royally humiliated for doing the right thing (by the internet community and in other arenas), but by not charging the levy they might as well just give up office now for all the backlash it would create from the powerful IIPA.
They still are, generally (Rounding three years in Madrid quite soon) - Lately a judge decided that P2P sites are okay for private sharing. However, the government tries to slip in above kind of Internet law ruling for quite some time now, it is not the first time and sure it will be not the last time.
I agree, the Spanish and its current government are really good when it comes to the internet (Also living in Madrid 7 years or so). Spain has once again demonstrated itself far more wise than France, UK when it comes to bowing to international lobbying pressure. Let me explain: The Spanish government, like all the worlds governments, has been under intense lobbying pressure ("presiones políticas"). You get no points for guessing who has been working the hardest to change the democratic system here in Spain and around the world: Yes that's right, good old US of A. Proof: Here is last years US annual IIP 301 report lumping Spain along side China, Rusia, and many others as the worst offenders for not bowing to intellectual property demands of the United States "authors". Summary of 301 report: Aims of the US here and elsewhere in the world:
The Administration's top priorities this year continue to be addressing weak IPR protection and enforcement... Although this year's Special 301 Report shows positive progress in many countries, rampant counterfeiting and piracy problems have continued... indicating a need for stronger IPR regimes and enforcement in those countries.
How do you think they are "helping" countries like Spain implement stronger IPR regimes? Through democratic process and listening to the will of the people?
(blackmailing, extorting and corrupting are more applicable words). Oh I forgot, here in the US we call the process "spreading democracy", silly me.
What we have got is a extremely powerful country running around this little planet with an exceptionally big political stick, beating any country into submission that dares listen to the will of its people over their idea of Intellectual property enforcement (and anything else). Don't believe me: try reading the "INTERNATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ALLIANCE (IIPA) 2009 SPECIAL REPORT" on Spain. (their title, not mine sorry - I guess they want to shout the message). First line summary for the lazy:
Executive Summary: Internet piracy in Spain continues to worsen, such that many of the copyright industries believe
that Spain has the worst per capita Internet piracy problem in Europe and one of the worst overall Internet piracy rates in the
world. Exacerbating the high piracy levels are the Spanish government’s policies of: (1) “decriminalizing” P2P file-sharing (as reflected in the 2006 Circular issued by the Attorney General) and (2) failing to establish the minimum EU-level requirements regarding liability for Internet service providers under the E-Commerce Directive so that rights holders have the necessary tools to enforce their rights on the Internet. As a result, the police have ceased taking Internet enforcement actions given the legal uncertainties, and the Attorney General has requested dismissal of current criminal cases against illegal portal and link sites. Importantly, negotiations between rights holders and the Internet service provider (ISP) community to find ways to prevent infringing content from being distributed over the ISPs’ services and/or networks finally
I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.
It not the point of Google Scholar, unless your married to the idea that all research must be paywalled. I do not know the statistics, but it appears the paywalled sites are losing ground fast, with lots of quality new research being freely available. Perhaps the younger generation of researches "get it" when it comes to the internet and information distribution - a major reason to do research in the first place. Definition of Scholar: "a learned person". Fortunately for those of us who are learned, and more importantly, for those of us who want to learn, the paywalled gatekeepers to scholarly articles are quickly being replaced worldwide, much to their disgust.
With IEEE you can't get the article in question anywhere else.
Thats a myth. Yes Its true in some cases (even research going back into the 80's!) but sure you can get it elsewhere, especially when it comes to quality research. One example of many will cost you a cool $30 from IEEE. But why pay IEEE's extremely high, no value added gatekeeper taxes when you can get the same research from a better source, for free (as it should be).
Interesting side note: AFAIK all physics research is open access - at least the physicists have got it right - you would think that at least the computer scientists would have been the ones to get a clue and stop supporting these scams. But then I suppose they did invent http.
IEEE is one of the worst offenders of paywalled search results clogging up my google searches and making my information searches slow and painful. I would so love to have them drop off the face of my search results...
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging.
I hear your pain, cursed googles paywalled roadblocks in my search results once too many. Same boat here but no way I am going to make a trip to campus, especially since in many cases the article is freely and legally available elsewhere - but due to all the paywalled crap sitting in the top page or two of my results, it just takes waaay longer to look up the information. How the hell do they scam their way into the top search positions anyway when you can only get into their fortress of anti-information via a campus or similar?
Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better)
This does work in some cases (when the sites don't check IP addresses - most of the most popular ones do now) - but your work around does not help stop the steady debasement of search result quality as more and more companies outside of the research article industry setup these paywalled schemes. Do you really want the first two pages of your search results behind a paywall - even if you can work around the problem for some of them? What ticks me off is that you usually don't realize it is paywalled until after you have clicked through.
A fee is NOT a tax and misusing words ala 1984 just makes your arguments less credible.
No offense, but I suspect that your not aware of the issues involved. We have already payed for the vast majority of the research articles indirectly through taxation. Outside the US this is even more true. Considering this then yes, my statement is correct that the fee is nothing more than an extra tax on top of what we have already paid for. But it is besides the point anyway - we are supposed to be talking about News, and with news I don't need nor want paywalled sites in my searches be default - they are not giving me what I searched for so why should it be included in my search results, why is Google complacent and happy to keep wasting time, bandwidth of its users?
A question: If their crawler has unfettered access to the content then how are they supposed to know that it is a paywalled site?
They already seem to have identified the culprits of poor search hits. If you select their "shopping sites" as an option then you get majority paywalled articles - so they must have already done the work to identify paywalled articles.
Google search, Google scholar etc always turns up paywalled articles outside of the news industry. In particular, research articles. On clicking through your are greeted by a screen to pay for the article, and the keywords that were searched for are not in the summary/abstract presented or even available to see. In effect Google has given me a "hit" on my search then led me to a place where not even the search terms are present... Google crawler has access to it but I do not.
ieeecomputersociety.org, springerlink.com, sciencedirect.com (anything but direct)... the list goes on.
Ok, you might say that they hold all the serious research papers - you might even be right, in some cases. I even understand that maybe just maybe, if I am really desperate, then I might actually want to search for paywalled articles and am prepared to pay the extra information access tax of $20-$40 a for every article. However what google is now doing is wasting their bandwidth and more importantly to me, completely wasting my time by including paywalled articles in top positions of all my search requests. Furthermore, Google does it by default.
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default. If you think about where it leads: the quality of the future of all our search requests is at stake. Now Google is planning to add News to this time wasting highly annoying practice - and I want to be opted out by default, I am begging you!
Hook analogy? What happened to wheels, or chassis even... no wonder nobody gets why software patents are anti-progress (as they were intended to be).
Apart from that, great post!
...my mainstream media free google news search hits. Let me support some motivated, independent amateur investigative reporters... I have had waay enough of the corporate parrot news line for the self-proclaimed "professionals".
Check your political compass... you can't talk about left/right with without also including the Authoritarian/Libertarian axis. Yeah, it requires slightly more effort than linear left/right thought... probably why you never hear it mentioned when the general population talk politics.
The bubble couldn't have happened without their willful participation. The banks couldn't have done it without your neighbours help. So, yes indeed, what goes around has come around. Your neighbours helped f*ck you over. They were the crucial element without which the housing bubble could not have happened.
Your anger, like most peoples, is woefully misdirected. The bubble would have happened anyway in [pick your asset] and is irrelevant where it occurred - you need to understand how. That most of the herd think it was the banks and real estate buyers fault is of no surprise - just people responsible covering their arse's with misdirection - successfully I might add.
This is the level of sophistication we're dealing with. They might catch some really, really stupid criminals. Like the ones that put their bank robbery's on youtube
True. But yet again, the declared purpose of legislation like this and its true aim are not the same - it is never intended as a serious form of catching real "terrorist" of the strap on some dynamite and get on a bus kind. To maintain power and control you need your Thought Police. The best weapon required is surveillance of the normal, general population - it allows the culture of fear to be maintained, allowing the status quo to maintain power.
For those of us who've been largely ignoring Skype since it's proprietary and there are open alternatives (namely SIP)...
What's the upshot of all this? Skype announced recently that they're planning to open source stuff. Now the tech is going to be owned by a consortium. Does this mean that skype is moving towards being an open, non-proprietary solution?
Slashdot Mirror
Now, the US simply doesn't ask for these laws to be put in place, they shoe horn, back door and in some cases force it.
Well said! Here is a recent example of US "coercing" of Spain into adopting IIPA's world view (i.e. police the internet for the US) - basically not inviting the worlds eighth largest economy to the world crisis summit(s), unless they bent over for IIPA. Same old same old, but at least more Americans at least appear to be becoming aware of why this kind of extremely arrogant foreign policy makes them so unpopular around the world.
Good thing we unmasked the Big4 companies as WESU!
Excellent idea! Exposed sunlight for long enough into dark places, will kill the vermin living and multiplying there...
What do the negotiations matter? ...What counts is the ratification.
Even if ACTA requires ratification (which it does not), even if it did you are still assuming there will be a debate before ratification. History is littered with examples where nation changing laws and resolutions have been ratified without any meaningful debate or opposition, because powerful entrenched interested parties made sure it happened that way. For example see first link, under "The Incredible Timeline".
Excelente, muchas gracias!
I hope there would be an even greater backlash in the UK, because they'd have to introduce one before this could happen
Wow, I didn't know that. I stand corrected... thanks! Teach me for assuming. Spain should follow UK's lead :). Went back and read the wikipedia link I posted more carefully:
"A notable exception in Europe is the UK, that does not allow private copies. But generally legislators allow private copies for two reasons: firstly, because otherwise the enforcement would be unfeasible for private reasons, and secondly because the administrative burden would be disproportional."
Yes, although it's not mentioned by the IIPA for some strange reason: the blank media levy
It is not so strange that IIPA do not mention that they are already receiving hundreds of millions+ with the blank media tax. Reason being that they need to paint Spain as the evil bad guy in the copyright debate - conceding that they already receive buckets of money - for doing nothing - would weaken their argument, so it's left off the "report". Yes its bad that Spain changes the blank media levy, but its also bad the almost all other countries do the same. Could you imagine the political backlash if Spanish government decided to be the first country in the first world not to levy the tax? Politically they are and continue to be grilled and royally humiliated for doing the right thing (by the internet community and in other arenas), but by not charging the levy they might as well just give up office now for all the backlash it would create from the powerful IIPA.
I'm not a native hispanohablante, but I could translate the gist of your message if you want.
Sure, you and anyone else with better ties to Spanish bloggers can go for it... translate and post away all you like I don't mind!
I wish I could write my post above in Spanish - but without a good command of the language it comes across completely wrong.
They still are, generally (Rounding three years in Madrid quite soon) - Lately a judge decided that P2P sites are okay for private sharing. However, the government tries to slip in above kind of Internet law ruling for quite some time now, it is not the first time and sure it will be not the last time.
I agree, the Spanish and its current government are really good when it comes to the internet (Also living in Madrid 7 years or so). Spain has once again demonstrated itself far more wise than France, UK when it comes to bowing to international lobbying pressure. Let me explain: The Spanish government, like all the worlds governments, has been under intense lobbying pressure ("presiones políticas"). You get no points for guessing who has been working the hardest to change the democratic system here in Spain and around the world: Yes that's right, good old US of A. Proof: Here is last years US annual IIP 301 report lumping Spain along side China, Rusia, and many others as the worst offenders for not bowing to intellectual property demands of the United States "authors". Summary of 301 report: Aims of the US here and elsewhere in the world:
The Administration's top priorities this year continue to be addressing weak IPR protection and enforcement... Although this year's Special 301 Report shows positive progress in many countries, rampant counterfeiting and piracy problems have continued... indicating a need for stronger IPR regimes and enforcement in those countries.
How do you think they are "helping" countries like Spain implement stronger IPR regimes? Through democratic process and listening to the will of the people? (blackmailing, extorting and corrupting are more applicable words). Oh I forgot, here in the US we call the process "spreading democracy", silly me.
What we have got is a extremely powerful country running around this little planet with an exceptionally big political stick, beating any country into submission that dares listen to the will of its people over their idea of Intellectual property enforcement (and anything else). Don't believe me: try reading the "INTERNATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ALLIANCE (IIPA) 2009 SPECIAL REPORT" on Spain. (their title, not mine sorry - I guess they want to shout the message). First line summary for the lazy:
Executive Summary: Internet piracy in Spain continues to worsen, such that many of the copyright industries believe that Spain has the worst per capita Internet piracy problem in Europe and one of the worst overall Internet piracy rates in the world. Exacerbating the high piracy levels are the Spanish government’s policies of: (1) “decriminalizing” P2P file-sharing (as reflected in the 2006 Circular issued by the Attorney General) and (2) failing to establish the minimum EU-level requirements regarding liability for Internet service providers under the E-Commerce Directive so that rights holders have the necessary tools to enforce their rights on the Internet. As a result, the police have ceased taking Internet enforcement actions given the legal uncertainties, and the Attorney General has requested dismissal of current criminal cases against illegal portal and link sites. Importantly, negotiations between rights holders and the Internet service provider (ISP) community to find ways to prevent infringing content from being distributed over the ISPs’ services and/or networks finally
I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.
It not the point of Google Scholar, unless your married to the idea that all research must be paywalled. I do not know the statistics, but it appears the paywalled sites are losing ground fast, with lots of quality new research being freely available. Perhaps the younger generation of researches "get it" when it comes to the internet and information distribution - a major reason to do research in the first place. Definition of Scholar: "a learned person". Fortunately for those of us who are learned, and more importantly, for those of us who want to learn, the paywalled gatekeepers to scholarly articles are quickly being replaced worldwide, much to their disgust.
With IEEE you can't get the article in question anywhere else.
Thats a myth. Yes Its true in some cases (even research going back into the 80's!) but sure you can get it elsewhere, especially when it comes to quality research. One example of many will cost you a cool $30 from IEEE. But why pay IEEE's extremely high, no value added gatekeeper taxes when you can get the same research from a better source, for free (as it should be).
Interesting side note: AFAIK all physics research is open access - at least the physicists have got it right - you would think that at least the computer scientists would have been the ones to get a clue and stop supporting these scams. But then I suppose they did invent http.
IEEE is one of the worst offenders of paywalled search results clogging up my google searches and making my information searches slow and painful. I would so love to have them drop off the face of my search results...
Are you sure your university doesn't give you a login to use to access journals off-campus?
and if they do, please post it to BugMeNot.
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging.
I hear your pain, cursed googles paywalled roadblocks in my search results once too many. Same boat here but no way I am going to make a trip to campus, especially since in many cases the article is freely and legally available elsewhere - but due to all the paywalled crap sitting in the top page or two of my results, it just takes waaay longer to look up the information. How the hell do they scam their way into the top search positions anyway when you can only get into their fortress of anti-information via a campus or similar?
Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better)
I'll second that.
This does work in some cases (when the sites don't check IP addresses - most of the most popular ones do now) - but your work around does not help stop the steady debasement of search result quality as more and more companies outside of the research article industry setup these paywalled schemes. Do you really want the first two pages of your search results behind a paywall - even if you can work around the problem for some of them? What ticks me off is that you usually don't realize it is paywalled until after you have clicked through.
A fee is NOT a tax and misusing words ala 1984 just makes your arguments less credible.
No offense, but I suspect that your not aware of the issues involved. We have already payed for the vast majority of the research articles indirectly through taxation. Outside the US this is even more true. Considering this then yes, my statement is correct that the fee is nothing more than an extra tax on top of what we have already paid for. But it is besides the point anyway - we are supposed to be talking about News, and with news I don't need nor want paywalled sites in my searches be default - they are not giving me what I searched for so why should it be included in my search results, why is Google complacent and happy to keep wasting time, bandwidth of its users?
A question: If their crawler has unfettered access to the content then how are they supposed to know that it is a paywalled site?
They already seem to have identified the culprits of poor search hits. If you select their "shopping sites" as an option then you get majority paywalled articles - so they must have already done the work to identify paywalled articles.
Google search, Google scholar etc always turns up paywalled articles outside of the news industry. In particular, research articles. On clicking through your are greeted by a screen to pay for the article, and the keywords that were searched for are not in the summary/abstract presented or even available to see. In effect Google has given me a "hit" on my search then led me to a place where not even the search terms are present... Google crawler has access to it but I do not.
ieeecomputersociety.org, springerlink.com, sciencedirect.com (anything but direct)... the list goes on.
Ok, you might say that they hold all the serious research papers - you might even be right, in some cases. I even understand that maybe just maybe, if I am really desperate, then I might actually want to search for paywalled articles and am prepared to pay the extra information access tax of $20-$40 a for every article. However what google is now doing is wasting their bandwidth and more importantly to me, completely wasting my time by including paywalled articles in top positions of all my search requests. Furthermore, Google does it by default.
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default. If you think about where it leads: the quality of the future of all our search requests is at stake. Now Google is planning to add News to this time wasting highly annoying practice - and I want to be opted out by default, I am begging you!
"They should probe their own priest-penetrated asses with their crucifixes and rosaries and hypocritical dark-age censorship"
Fixed.
Hook analogy? What happened to wheels, or chassis even... no wonder nobody gets why software patents are anti-progress (as they were intended to be).
Apart from that, great post!
...my mainstream media free google news search hits. Let me support some motivated, independent amateur investigative reporters... I have had waay enough of the corporate parrot news line for the self-proclaimed "professionals".
Sadly the left-wing gov we have ...
Check your political compass... you can't talk about left/right with without also including the Authoritarian/Libertarian axis. Yeah, it requires slightly more effort than linear left/right thought... probably why you never hear it mentioned when the general population talk politics.
The bubble couldn't have happened without their willful participation. The banks couldn't have done it without your neighbours help. So, yes indeed, what goes around has come around. Your neighbours helped f*ck you over. They were the crucial element without which the housing bubble could not have happened.
Your anger, like most peoples, is woefully misdirected . The bubble would have happened anyway in [pick your asset] and is irrelevant where it occurred - you need to understand how. That most of the herd think it was the banks and real estate buyers fault is of no surprise - just people responsible covering their arse's with misdirection - successfully I might add.
What extraordinary cognitive dissonance.
I think you need to check your political compass: UK Parties 2008
This is the level of sophistication we're dealing with. They might catch some really, really stupid criminals. Like the ones that put their bank robbery's on youtube
True. But yet again, the declared purpose of legislation like this and its true aim are not the same - it is never intended as a serious form of catching real "terrorist" of the strap on some dynamite and get on a bus kind. To maintain power and control you need your Thought Police. The best weapon required is surveillance of the normal, general population - it allows the culture of fear to be maintained, allowing the status quo to maintain power.
For those of us who've been largely ignoring Skype since it's proprietary and there are open alternatives (namely SIP)...
What's the upshot of all this? Skype announced recently that they're planning to open source stuff. Now the tech is going to be owned by a consortium. Does this mean that skype is moving towards being an open, non-proprietary solution?
Your answer was hinted at in one of the posts above...