well, they're suspected of hosting/seeding copyrighted material. The evidence is being pointed to by a torrent tracker for a file with the same name as a copyrighted work. Odds are, it's the copyrighted work in question, but it might not be.
The odds depend very much on the actual name. If that name turns out to be a common word or term than the odds go down by several orders of magnitude.
I would love to see the content owners hit with a massive fine for environmental damage. I currently watch most films by renting the DVDs. These are plastic disks which are posted to me, put in a machine, and posted back. This involves them travelling several hundred miles in a fossil-fuel-powerd machine.
There's also plenty of pollution and use of limited resources involved in the manufacture of these disks together with the transport of materials and finished product most likely several thousand miles.
The only reason that I do this is because the copyright owners do not allow network delivery under the same terms. If I could download the DVD image, for example (or, ideally, something with more efficient compression), then it would cost vastly less for the company that I rent the DVDs from, and have far less environmental impact.
A lending library has all sorts of costs associated with dealing with physical media in finite quantities. Things like how to cope with 10's of thousands of people wanting a specific work in one year and 10's wanting it in the next are not easily solvable with a lending library approach. But which is fairly trivial with a download model.
The same company also provides a streaming service, which I use quite often. At present, they have just under 2,000 titles available for streaming (with TV episodes counted individually) and 60,500 titles available on DVD (with seasons of TV shows counted as single titles). There is absolutely no technical reason why they could not provide every single one of these DVDs for live streaming or DRM-free download for playing on mobile devices. The only reason that they do not is legal; the copyright owners do not permit it.
Even though it's probably easier for someone to rip or copy a DVD than it is to convert a streaming into a regular AV file. Copyright works when you have physical media which can only be reproduced cheaply in large quantities. This was after all the situation where the concept came into existance. The thing is that this is no longer the case not only are CDs and DVDs trivial to copy there is no reason for sound and video recordings to be bound to any specific media. The only area where physical media are still useful is printing. Most likely because in this case the media is directly usable by a human. Whereas every sound and video recording media requires a machine in order to be of any practical use.
Isn't the logical conclusion that if millions of people find a particular type of behaviour acceptable that it should be legalised? Otherwise it's socially unjust.
That line has previously been crossed with drug prohibition. Even though effects of prohibition are more damaging to society than the most dangerous drugs.
We're talking about copyright infringement. If we think it's a bad thing then we should also be allowed to decide how bad the punishment is, whether it's a small fine or a prison sentence.
I visit the cinema on average once a week and every time the copyright warning is displayed and mentions 10 years in prison for recording a movie in a cinema I cringe. That's more than people get for killing and maiming people, robbing banks and committing other violent crimes.
It's also more than you'd get for actually stealing a DVD or even sneaking into the cinema without a ticket.
There are only so many hours in a day, and there are only so many movies and television shows that people can consume. If the costs of reproduction and distribution fall precipitously, people aren't going to see ten movies a week or watch TV for an additional four hours a day. They'll just spend less money to consume about the same amount of content. That would be true even in a world with no piracy. And with more bandwidth to fill, that smaller pool of money needs to fund the creation of even more content.
Increasing population, levels of literacy and lower costs of distribution also mean more potential customers.
Once content producers figure out how to make money in a world without physical media (which requires them to figure out how to offer their customers what they want at a prices they'll pay -- you'd think it wouldn't be so hard),
They also need to be able to figure out who their customers actually are...
I find it fascinating and amusing that people fail to appreciate that people are quite naturally creative and expressive.
By "people" you tend to mean the movie and music industries together with associated "hangers on". Just about everyone else is fully aware of this part of human nature.
That some fairly small group of people has effectively taken control of that and made it into an industry worshipped by the masses is something that happened after the fact. Creativity and expressiveness enabled the industry. The industry does more to control and limit creativity and expressiveness than it does to encourage it. In fact, many ideas and concepts (both good and bad) are kept silent by the industrialists. One only has to point to Firefly and a few others to see how it happens.
Better examples would be The Beatles music, Star Wars, even Harry Potter of things which turned out to be very popular (and profitable) yet were almost consigned to oblivian.
There will always be some people who will do it for fun instead of profit. Always.
People who are entirely or primarily motivated by profit would appear to be in the minority. Which is just as well since otherwise very little would actually get made.
I'd love to know what they're listening for. To terrorists often call up American telephone numbers with "Ah, hello my brother Ahmed from the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp! I'm just calling to tell you that your plan to perform $terrorist_act is excellent, and we'll be shipping you the required items and instructions via $importsystem on $date at $time! Hope everything goes well, Your firend, Benji at the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp, Makalakadaka Street" etc etc.
Most likely only as a method of feeding false information to law enforcement. (Is it even possible to make IDD calls from Afghanistan.) Anyway Ahmed is probably actually called Paddy and Benji is Murphy from Belfast.
was under the impression, as the movies have shown me, that they use code words like "November Rain" or "Broken Arrow" or "Hi mum, I don't think I'll be back for supper. Just leave some in the oven. Thanks, bye."
Most likely the last one. They'd probably avoid "Tube Alloys", "Broken Arrow", "Bent Spear", etc since they are no longer effective codenames.
I hear that all the time and it's time to stop this lie by the surveillance fanatics once and for all.
Of course we all have something to hide! It's called our private life.
You also don't tend to have many of the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd offering to give up their private life. Then you have people who, work for the public, expecting to have more (rather than less) "privacy" than the average person.
So yeah, I would urge everyone to use encryption in their daily lives as much as they can. Of course, most of us have nothing to hide in this respect, but it's really the ~principle~ of the thing that is at stake here, rather than an actual need to encrypt. If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it, and will return to concentrating on tapping into only particular, suspected communications, by way of a proper warrant. Like they ~should~ be doing.
Which is also the only effective way for law enforcement to work. Mass snooping tends to be ineffective because the signal to noise ratio is low and it enables law enforcement to "look busy" by going after "small fry", whilst ignoring anyone who might actually look dangerous.
I've got a better idea. Have your legislators ensure they stay the hell out of your content. They aren't allowed to listen to your phone calls, wy the hhell should they be allowed to look at your data.
They arn't just "looking at" your data they are introducing a delay in sending it to it's destination. That being somewhat against what their customers are paying them to do. The DPI device(s) may also introduce a bottleneck which reduces the usable bandwidth of a link.
Seriously... if they suspect people of committing a crime, they should get a warrant.
Rather they should complain to the police then the police can consider getting a warrant.
If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption
So is the entertainments industry paying for this, together with a speed increase to compensate for the slowdown any kind of DPI causes? Or is VM taking money from customers to give them a worst service than if they had done nothing...
On one hand they tell us to forget any expectation of privacy, and on the other hand governments, politicians, companies and executives are very effective at using copyright, trade secret laws and national security laws to protect their own privacy.
Witness how British MPs tried hard to prevent their "expenses" being published and how they are not being treated as "benefits cheats".
Regardless of what happens with regular citizens privacy, we should start removing any and all expectations of privacy from corporate entities and politicians.
They'd probably claim something about this would make them more vulnerable to terrorists or some such nonsense. As if a) politicians are actually more valuable to society than the average person and b) terrorists can't impersonate lobbyists...
Every payment they make or receive, all external and internal communications and all contracts they sign should be recorded and kept for later inspection by law enforcement.
It would have to be "inspection by the public" unless law enforcement is completly separated from corporate interests, politicians and lobby groups.
If they have nothing to hide they should't worry. And in a post Lehman Brothers world, this is completely justified.
Only the RIAA is allowed to distribute music there will be no other source or at least that is looking like their plan.
This has been an obvious conclusion for quite some time.
I suggest a boycott during the 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2010- June 30, 2010, and 4th Quarter: July 1, 2010 - September 30, 2010
At best this would do nothing, at worst it would give them "proof" that piracy was a serious issue.
I for one think the Public Domain needs to be given back the original copyright was 14 years with a one time extension.
If anything copyright terms should be shorter than they were in the 18th century, which was pre mass telecommunications and vehicles capable of speeds far in excess of any living creature.
It's not clear that he did any damage. At least a proportion of that cost is down to other people failing to do their jobs correctly. There are also likely to be plenty of people who's actions have much larger costs too.
and, once caught, claimed to have been looking for evidence of aliens.
The kind of belief which makes him hardly unique. Though he apparently found nothing of any value or at least nothing the US Government really cares about keeping secret, otherwise he'd have published what he knew as soon as anything was attempted against him.
Movies, recorded TV shows, and software aren't food. You don't need them. If the vendor is charging more than you think it's worth, use a substitute, or do without it.
Thing is that the recorded entertainments industry tends to believe that they are entitled to a certain revenue. If they think that profits are "too low" they will claim "piracy" then lobby for more copyright and/or legally mandated DRM. If that causes problems for podcasters and independent musicians that is a positive side effect in their minds.
There is no, I repeat no, justification for stealing something just because you want it.
Copyright infringement has always been something different from "stealing", different laws apply... Comparing the two is a non sequitur.
I will, for example, choose Avast over Norton for antivirus on Windows machines
As opposed to Avast being less of a resource hog. Whereas in some cases NAV appears to be using something along the lines of "If I slow down the machine enough then viruses won't be able to grab enough resources to infect the machine..."
Yep, they are selling inferior products at an elevated price and then are surprised people try to find ways around it ?
From the customer's POV the likes of DRM create an inferior product. There is no situation where they add any value at all. But they do add cost, which is likely to be passed on to the customer. The idea that adding DRM could reduce prices just dosn't make much sense.
The two disk Blu-Ray release of a $180 million production like Wall-E costs $18 when purchased from Amazon.com.
The movie industry is rather notorious for creative accounting, so it's can be hard to work out what something cost or at what point it will have been "paid for". It also makes more sense to only consider the actual costs associated with the DVD. Which has a fixed cost of producing the master then a cost per copy.
All extras in 1080p.
Maybe they were on film or HD in the first place. Note also that "extras" only contribute to the DVD fixed costs if they were produced exclusivly for the DVD.
The exclusive distribution rights granted by copyright were meant to give you an exclusive right to profit from your work. Copyright law when originally drafted could not anticipate a scenario where copying cost nothing, so they simply assumed that any copy must have a profit motive which as of the advent of consumer electronics is no longer necessarily the case.
Note also that the concept of copyright originates with a machine which could make cheap copies if you wanted many copies of the same thing. Being able to separate "content" from "media" means that the cost of copying is trivial and having a global telecommunications network means that distance isn't a significent issue. The latter being something which movie companies and broadcasters appear to be unable to get a handle on. Except when it comes to broadcasting news and sporting events. Where innovative use of communications technology has long been the norm.
Similar case in Slovakia:
We have some elections here right now and some people in capital city received "letters" (more like marketing materials) with "printed signature" of our prime minister. Those letters are from a prime minister's party and is about how the prime minister, the party and also some other figures (most notably some mayors of towns and villages) DO support some candidate.
Later on some of those mayors mentioned in the letter said "I do not know about this letter and I do not agree with the letter: I did not, do not and wont support that one candidate" etc.
Presumably the Slovakia PM has now "signed" a whole lot of things he isn't (yet) aware of.
Thankfully there is one thing which can haunt him on that one: he likes to sue journalists if they defame him.
No doubt by now he's sent them all letters saying how wonderful they are; it was all a big misunderstanding and his lawyers all have arrest warrents pending:)
How hard is it to comprehend that you cannot throw people down a legal black hole and torture them?
Also any information obtained by torture is evidence only of what the people carrying out the torture wanted to hear. In terms of what that person may or may not have done it's utterly meaningless. If spouting fiction is required to stop the torture then the person being tortured *will* spout whatever fiction those doing the torture will accept.
But the US is not merely declaring a war status against any declared state, but rather their war is a "war on terror".
When did Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan cease to be "declared states". Also if the US Government is going to carry out a "war on terror" it would help if one of the first things it did was to stop supporting terrorists. Yet the US continues to be a major state sponsor of terrorist and to give money to other countries who do likewise.
THe President's signature on a Treaty means absolutely nothing. Consider the Kyoto Treaty as an example of a Treaty signed by the USA, but never ratified by the Senate.
Ratification isn't the end of things either, consider the case of Elian Gonzalez. Or hot the US acts with respect to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.
One of the (many) truly bad things about the ACTA is that it includes punishments for repeated accusations of piracy.
Without there being any cost associated with a false accusation.
So let's say you decide to not buy MPAA/RIAA products and say so publicly. The MPAA/RIAA could accuse you of pirating (even without any evidence whatsoever) a few times and you'd be kicked offline.
But you aren't likely to be able to get the RIAA/MPAA kicked offline by making accusations, even entirely true ones (the MPAA's been caught at least twice in the last few years infringing copyright), against them.
Slashdot Mirror
well, they're suspected of hosting/seeding copyrighted material. The evidence is being pointed to by a torrent tracker for a file with the same name as a copyrighted work. Odds are, it's the copyrighted work in question, but it might not be.
The odds depend very much on the actual name. If that name turns out to be a common word or term than the odds go down by several orders of magnitude.
I would love to see the content owners hit with a massive fine for environmental damage. I currently watch most films by renting the DVDs. These are plastic disks which are posted to me, put in a machine, and posted back. This involves them travelling several hundred miles in a fossil-fuel-powerd machine.
There's also plenty of pollution and use of limited resources involved in the manufacture of these disks together with the transport of materials and finished product most likely several thousand miles.
The only reason that I do this is because the copyright owners do not allow network delivery under the same terms. If I could download the DVD image, for example (or, ideally, something with more efficient compression), then it would cost vastly less for the company that I rent the DVDs from, and have far less environmental impact.
A lending library has all sorts of costs associated with dealing with physical media in finite quantities. Things like how to cope with 10's of thousands of people wanting a specific work in one year and 10's wanting it in the next are not easily solvable with a lending library approach. But which is fairly trivial with a download model.
The same company also provides a streaming service, which I use quite often. At present, they have just under 2,000 titles available for streaming (with TV episodes counted individually) and 60,500 titles available on DVD (with seasons of TV shows counted as single titles). There is absolutely no technical reason why they could not provide every single one of these DVDs for live streaming or DRM-free download for playing on mobile devices. The only reason that they do not is legal; the copyright owners do not permit it.
Even though it's probably easier for someone to rip or copy a DVD than it is to convert a streaming into a regular AV file.
Copyright works when you have physical media which can only be reproduced cheaply in large quantities. This was after all the situation where the concept came into existance. The thing is that this is no longer the case not only are CDs and DVDs trivial to copy there is no reason for sound and video recordings to be bound to any specific media.
The only area where physical media are still useful is printing. Most likely because in this case the media is directly usable by a human. Whereas every sound and video recording media requires a machine in order to be of any practical use.
Isn't the logical conclusion that if millions of people find a particular type of behaviour acceptable that it should be legalised? Otherwise it's socially unjust.
That line has previously been crossed with drug prohibition. Even though effects of prohibition are more damaging to society than the most dangerous drugs.
We're talking about copyright infringement. If we think it's a bad thing then we should also be allowed to decide how bad the punishment is, whether it's a small fine or a prison sentence.
I visit the cinema on average once a week and every time the copyright warning is displayed and mentions 10 years in prison for recording a movie in a cinema I cringe. That's more than people get for killing and maiming people, robbing banks and committing other violent crimes.
It's also more than you'd get for actually stealing a DVD or even sneaking into the cinema without a ticket.
There are only so many hours in a day, and there are only so many movies and television shows that people can consume. If the costs of reproduction and distribution fall precipitously, people aren't going to see ten movies a week or watch TV for an additional four hours a day. They'll just spend less money to consume about the same amount of content. That would be true even in a world with no piracy. And with more bandwidth to fill, that smaller pool of money needs to fund the creation of even more content.
Increasing population, levels of literacy and lower costs of distribution also mean more potential customers.
Once content producers figure out how to make money in a world without physical media (which requires them to figure out how to offer their customers what they want at a prices they'll pay -- you'd think it wouldn't be so hard),
They also need to be able to figure out who their customers actually are...
I find it fascinating and amusing that people fail to appreciate that people are quite naturally creative and expressive.
By "people" you tend to mean the movie and music industries together with associated "hangers on". Just about everyone else is fully aware of this part of human nature.
That some fairly small group of people has effectively taken control of that and made it into an industry worshipped by the masses is something that happened after the fact. Creativity and expressiveness enabled the industry. The industry does more to control and limit creativity and expressiveness than it does to encourage it. In fact, many ideas and concepts (both good and bad) are kept silent by the industrialists. One only has to point to Firefly and a few others to see how it happens.
Better examples would be The Beatles music, Star Wars, even Harry Potter of things which turned out to be very popular (and profitable) yet were almost consigned to oblivian.
There will always be some people who will do it for fun instead of profit. Always.
People who are entirely or primarily motivated by profit would appear to be in the minority. Which is just as well since otherwise very little would actually get made.
I'd love to know what they're listening for. To terrorists often call up American telephone numbers with "Ah, hello my brother Ahmed from the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp! I'm just calling to tell you that your plan to perform $terrorist_act is excellent, and we'll be shipping you the required items and instructions via $importsystem on $date at $time! Hope everything goes well, Your firend, Benji at the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp, Makalakadaka Street" etc etc.
Most likely only as a method of feeding false information to law enforcement. (Is it even possible to make IDD calls from Afghanistan.) Anyway Ahmed is probably actually called Paddy and Benji is Murphy from Belfast.
was under the impression, as the movies have shown me, that they use code words like "November Rain" or "Broken Arrow" or "Hi mum, I don't think I'll be back for supper. Just leave some in the oven. Thanks, bye."
Most likely the last one. They'd probably avoid "Tube Alloys", "Broken Arrow", "Bent Spear", etc since they are no longer effective codenames.
or... governments will switch to more radical forms of tapping, like pointing a directional microphone at your house...
This puts things back to where they were. This can only be done it a limited number of cases so each case has to be justified.
I hear that all the time and it's time to stop this lie by the surveillance fanatics once and for all.
Of course we all have something to hide! It's called our private life.
You also don't tend to have many of the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd offering to give up their private life. Then you have people who, work for the public, expecting to have more (rather than less) "privacy" than the average person.
So yeah, I would urge everyone to use encryption in their daily lives as much as they can. Of course, most of us have nothing to hide in this respect, but it's really the ~principle~ of the thing that is at stake here, rather than an actual need to encrypt. If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it, and will return to concentrating on tapping into only particular, suspected communications, by way of a proper warrant. Like they ~should~ be doing.
Which is also the only effective way for law enforcement to work. Mass snooping tends to be ineffective because the signal to noise ratio is low and it enables law enforcement to "look busy" by going after "small fry", whilst ignoring anyone who might actually look dangerous.
I've got a better idea. Have your legislators ensure they stay the hell out of your content. They aren't allowed to listen to your phone calls, wy the hhell should they be allowed to look at your data.
... if they suspect people of committing a crime, they should get a warrant.
They arn't just "looking at" your data they are introducing a delay in sending it to it's destination. That being somewhat against what their customers are paying them to do. The DPI device(s) may also introduce a bottleneck which reduces the usable bandwidth of a link.
Seriously
Rather they should complain to the police then the police can consider getting a warrant.
If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption
So is the entertainments industry paying for this, together with a speed increase to compensate for the slowdown any kind of DPI causes? Or is VM taking money from customers to give them a worst service than if they had done nothing...
On one hand they tell us to forget any expectation of privacy, and on the other hand governments, politicians, companies and executives are very effective at using copyright, trade secret laws and national security laws to protect their own privacy.
Witness how British MPs tried hard to prevent their "expenses" being published and how they are not being treated as "benefits cheats".
Regardless of what happens with regular citizens privacy, we should start removing any and all expectations of privacy from corporate entities and politicians.
They'd probably claim something about this would make them more vulnerable to terrorists or some such nonsense. As if a) politicians are actually more valuable to society than the average person and b) terrorists can't impersonate lobbyists...
Every payment they make or receive, all external and internal communications and all contracts they sign should be recorded and kept for later inspection by law enforcement.
It would have to be "inspection by the public" unless law enforcement is completly separated from corporate interests, politicians and lobby groups.
If they have nothing to hide they should't worry. And in a post Lehman Brothers world, this is completely justified.
More like "post Enron" or even "post BCCI"...
Only the RIAA is allowed to distribute music there will be no other source or at least that is looking like their plan.
This has been an obvious conclusion for quite some time.
I suggest a boycott during the 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2010- June 30, 2010, and 4th Quarter: July 1, 2010 - September 30, 2010
At best this would do nothing, at worst it would give them "proof" that piracy was a serious issue.
I for one think the Public Domain needs to be given back the original copyright was 14 years with a one time extension.
If anything copyright terms should be shorter than they were in the 18th century, which was pre mass telecommunications and vehicles capable of speeds far in excess of any living creature.
The nasty jerk-off caused over $700,000 damage
It's not clear that he did any damage. At least a proportion of that cost is down to other people failing to do their jobs correctly. There are also likely to be plenty of people who's actions have much larger costs too.
and, once caught, claimed to have been looking for evidence of aliens.
The kind of belief which makes him hardly unique. Though he apparently found nothing of any value or at least nothing the US Government really cares about keeping secret, otherwise he'd have published what he knew as soon as anything was attempted against him.
Movies, recorded TV shows, and software aren't food. You don't need them. If the vendor is charging more than you think it's worth, use a substitute, or do without it.
Thing is that the recorded entertainments industry tends to believe that they are entitled to a certain revenue. If they think that profits are "too low" they will claim "piracy" then lobby for more copyright and/or legally mandated DRM. If that causes problems for podcasters and independent musicians that is a positive side effect in their minds.
There is no, I repeat no, justification for stealing something just because you want it.
Copyright infringement has always been something different from "stealing", different laws apply... Comparing the two is a non sequitur.
I will, for example, choose Avast over Norton for antivirus on Windows machines
As opposed to Avast being less of a resource hog. Whereas in some cases NAV appears to be using something along the lines of "If I slow down the machine enough then viruses won't be able to grab enough resources to infect the machine..."
Yep, they are selling inferior products at an elevated price and then are surprised people try to find ways around it ?
From the customer's POV the likes of DRM create an inferior product. There is no situation where they add any value at all. But they do add cost, which is likely to be passed on to the customer. The idea that adding DRM could reduce prices just dosn't make much sense.
The two disk Blu-Ray release of a $180 million production like Wall-E costs $18 when purchased from Amazon.com.
The movie industry is rather notorious for creative accounting, so it's can be hard to work out what something cost or at what point it will have been "paid for". It also makes more sense to only consider the actual costs associated with the DVD. Which has a fixed cost of producing the master then a cost per copy.
All extras in 1080p.
Maybe they were on film or HD in the first place. Note also that "extras" only contribute to the DVD fixed costs if they were produced exclusivly for the DVD.
The exclusive distribution rights granted by copyright were meant to give you an exclusive right to profit from your work. Copyright law when originally drafted could not anticipate a scenario where copying cost nothing, so they simply assumed that any copy must have a profit motive which as of the advent of consumer electronics is no longer necessarily the case.
Note also that the concept of copyright originates with a machine which could make cheap copies if you wanted many copies of the same thing. Being able to separate "content" from "media" means that the cost of copying is trivial and having a global telecommunications network means that distance isn't a significent issue. The latter being something which movie companies and broadcasters appear to be unable to get a handle on. Except when it comes to broadcasting news and sporting events. Where innovative use of communications technology has long been the norm.
Similar case in Slovakia:
:)
We have some elections here right now and some people in capital city received "letters" (more like marketing materials) with "printed signature" of our prime minister. Those letters are from a prime minister's party and is about how the prime minister, the party and also some other figures (most notably some mayors of towns and villages) DO support some candidate.
Later on some of those mayors mentioned in the letter said "I do not know about this letter and I do not agree with the letter: I did not, do not and wont support that one candidate" etc.
Presumably the Slovakia PM has now "signed" a whole lot of things he isn't (yet) aware of.
Thankfully there is one thing which can haunt him on that one: he likes to sue journalists if they defame him.
No doubt by now he's sent them all letters saying how wonderful they are; it was all a big misunderstanding and his lawyers all have arrest warrents pending
How hard is it to comprehend that you cannot throw people down a legal black hole and torture them?
Also any information obtained by torture is evidence only of what the people carrying out the torture wanted to hear. In terms of what that person may or may not have done it's utterly meaningless. If spouting fiction is required to stop the torture then the person being tortured *will* spout whatever fiction those doing the torture will accept.
did you miss the part that said the president can declare anyone an enemy combatant?
Can anyone else make such a declaration? Since this leads to a big problem were the president to become an "enemy combatant".
But the US is not merely declaring a war status against any declared state, but rather their war is a "war on terror".
When did Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan cease to be "declared states".
Also if the US Government is going to carry out a "war on terror" it would help if one of the first things it did was to stop supporting terrorists. Yet the US continues to be a major state sponsor of terrorist and to give money to other countries who do likewise.
THe President's signature on a Treaty means absolutely nothing. Consider the Kyoto Treaty as an example of a Treaty signed by the USA, but never ratified by the Senate.
Ratification isn't the end of things either, consider the case of Elian Gonzalez. Or hot the US acts with respect to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.
One of the (many) truly bad things about the ACTA is that it includes punishments for repeated accusations of piracy.
Without there being any cost associated with a false accusation.
So let's say you decide to not buy MPAA/RIAA products and say so publicly. The MPAA/RIAA could accuse you of pirating (even without any evidence whatsoever) a few times and you'd be kicked offline.
But you aren't likely to be able to get the RIAA/MPAA kicked offline by making accusations, even entirely true ones (the MPAA's been caught at least twice in the last few years infringing copyright), against them.