Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad. 775
Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer. It says "The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to 'national security' concerns, has leaked. It's bad." You can read the original leaked document or the summary. If passed, the internet will never be the same. Thank goodness it's hidden from public scrutiny for National Security.
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point is that there are precious few details about any of ACTA because nobody outside of the governments involved, their lawyers and a few high-paying lobby groups have been allowed to see any of its contents.
*Everything* about it is hearsay until either someone succeeds in getting an FOI request honoured or the thing gets ratified and it's too late to do anything about it.
Re:OH NOES (Score:2, Informative)
And you thought this administration would be different from all the others? Silly you.
Seriously. As soon as I saw him stacking the deck with the same ol' Clintonistas from 15 years ago (Emmanuel, Panetta, et. al.), I knew our goose was cooked.
Re:So what's new? (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
This is just further proof (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what's new? (Score:5, Informative)
The mainstream media only notices it when someone's already being prosecuted for violating it.
I agreed completely until this statement. Mainstream media isn't that oblivious- they simply don't have YOUR best interests at heart.
I'm sure most news networks themselves do notice it, but their parent companies are the very entities lobbying/pushing for more legislation. CNN = Time Warner, NBC = Vivendi Universal, FoxNews = News Corp, ABC = Disney, etc... These news companies (either through affiliates or parent corps) own most of our music, movies, TV shows, and other media, so it's only natural for them to protect their interests by trying to distract us from the draconian laws they're currently pushing through the governments of the world.
Sadly, it seems that blogs and independent news are our only hope.
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:3, Informative)
"The president can sign all the treaties he wants, but he can't force Congress to enact legislation to enforce it all."
Or even force the Senate to ratify it. Until it's ratified by the Senate, by 2/3 vote, a treaty has no legal standing in the United States. Thus, you only need to get 34 Senators to vote against ratification to prevent a treaty from coming into effect.
Re:What do ISP's have to do with anything? (Score:3, Informative)
They want the ISP's (the ones that are giving us the Internet connections) to block the content that we should not be seeing (whether it's for copyright or puritan reasons). Right now the liability lies with the content provider but the problem is that most of the content is hosted outside the jurisdiction of any of the lobbyist companies.
That's why it's such a bad treaty, because it would basically create an international agreement for copyright infringements and censorship with the RIAA, MPAA and it's friends (or whoever is the highest payer to the ruling class on either side of the pond) as the police, judge and jury. It's even worse than the DMCA because it doesn't allow for exemptions, it would allow surveillance, arrest and extradition for whoever goes against any copyright and 'intellectual' property law in any country signed to the treaty. It would also allow them to block you totally from the Internet if you infringe on their perceived property in any locale.
Re:What are the chances of this being adopted? (Score:3, Informative)
Are people (the decision makers) taking this seriously? It reads like something from The Onion...
Even if agreed upon as a treaty, will it hold up in any courts?
Ratified treaties are the highest form of governance second only to the Constitution itself. In other words, if a treaty provisions don't violate the Constitution, we are stuck with them. The treaties can't be undone. The Congress and President are force to pass legislation to enable the terms of the treaty.
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:5, Informative)
Here, read this: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/ [politifact.com]
Thanks
You laugh.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:1, Informative)
I was wondering why he didn't just type up the text of the document, but realized they could put unique, subtle word changes in each copy, still tracing it back.
the good ol' Canary Trap method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
damn login. >_
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but. . (Score:4, Informative)
Id gladly make a genetic clone of my dog and give you the copy to do whatever you want to do with it.
Thats YOUR freedom... get it?
Re:I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but. . (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want my friends to take my songs and mix them. I'm fully aware that it's legal today.
Look, that makes you a jackass. Worse, you're a profiteering jackass. You care that your friends remix your songs? Some friend you are... Honestly, I'm surprised you have any. With that attitude, I'd be ashamed to know you.
Re:This law wouldnt work in canada (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:3, Informative)
Your bullshit debt numbers are just as wrong and useless as they were two days ago [slashdot.org] - so I'm going to just paste in part of my reply from then.
But I can tell from your sig that you don't let being wrong stop you.
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:3, Informative)
Why would you have to do that? Get your government to create more US dollars out of thin air. After all it only has to pay them back in US dollars right?
Though you can't print US dollars to pay back your debt, the US Gov can. It may cause some inflation, but hey if they need to they can. It'll make your savings go to crap, but if you have debt it'll make it look smaller assuming you can manage to keep your salary close enough to the inflation rate.
Now you see why the Chinese are worried about the trillions the US owes them? And why they are now buying up stuff with their US dollars?
Inflation is a way for a Currency Issuer to forcibly tax all who hold the currency (at net positive) - whether they are individuals or countries. So be glad the US isn't on something stupid like the "Gold Standard". And be glad many of the OPEC nations sell their oil in US Dollars only.
Obama backlash growing (Score:0, Informative)
Just think, this is the same government that some people want regulating traffic on the internet under the guise of "net neutrality." There's a backlash against this administration growing quickly anyway, as evidenced by the Republican victories in yesterday's elections. Democrats, if you keep up what you're doing, the pendulum will swing back against you very shortly.
Re:This proves one thing (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting that you're voted Offtopic while the post that went offtopic was your parent. You are spreading misinformation, but it ought to be corrected instead of simply modded down.
The NPR program This American Life recently had two episodes (391 and 392, found here [thisamericanlife.org]) on the health care system, and the problems with it are just not as simple as the Democrats or the Republicans are making them out to be.
For one thing, the hospitals are most certainly *not* fine. A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area. The hospitals want that customer base, so rather than standing firm at a reasonably profitable price, they lower prices for the big insurance company and jack up prices for the same procedures when dealing with smaller companies. The example given in the show was of one hospital in CA which charged one company $1600 for a procedure, and charged another $11,000.
There's a lot more where that came from in the shows. I highly recommend them to everyone who wants to open his mouth to talk about health care. Everyone knows it's broken, but too many people are looking solely at the broken parts their party claims will fix the whole thing.
Re:So Where Exactly is this 'Leaked' Document? (Score:4, Informative)
If you are interested in "that democracy stuff", you'd know that all treaties have to be ratified by Congress before they take effect.
Wikileaks had it more than a year ago... (Score:2, Informative)
Not such a loophole. (Score:3, Informative)
IANAL, nor a Constitutional scholar, but "any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding" appears on its face to refer to State constitutions and laws, not to the US Constitution. The law citations I've seen on various sites support this view. According to the Supreme Court in Reid v. Covert, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_v._Covert), "this Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty".
Sooo: No, Virginia, treaties cannot serve as an end-run around the Constitution. If I understand the citations correctly, a treaty has status coequal with Federal laws passed by Congress, so a treaty could, for example, supersede a Federal law such as the DMCA; however, it could not do anything (within the US) that Congress couldn't do by legislative means, like overruling an Amendment to the Constitution.
Re:Some info on EC site (Score:3, Informative)
...
Great. We must hold our governments to this intent.
I don't like that "possible role and responsibilities of internet service providers" idea. They pass along bits from A to B. Nowadays in Europe you can get a court order to divulge recent traffic information, it seems. As other people have put it, should telephone operators be sued for their "possible role and responsibilities in deterring (threats and slander) over the (telephone)"?
:-).
The whole "Summary of Key Elements Under Discussion" document seems to focus on "better international enforcement of intellectual property rights". There is no place where the rights of the actual citizens of the countries are mentioned.
At the moment, without further information, I'd guess ACTA builds on the TRIPS agreement [wikipedia.org] (countries must do what the USA tells them to do / harmonize their intellectual properties laws together) rather than on the South-American Operacion Condor [wikipedia.org] approach to countries giving each other "technical assistance in improved enforcement"
But it's probably good to be vigilant.
Re:What Do We Know? (Score:3, Informative)
5. The Obama administration has appointed a number of high ranking RIAA lawyers to the DoJ. I think that they are prohibited from being involved in official court duties related to copyright issues for two years from leaving the industry.
6. The US started the ACTA talks in 2007, over a year before the "Obama administration" was a glint in the Democrats' eyes.
Re:Copyright as a revenue source (Score:3, Informative)
But even without publishers, creative people that are producing copyright materials deserve something for their efforts.
No, they don't.
Authors aren't entitled to copyrights. Copyrights are intended to serve the public interest; if the public would be best served by not granting them at all, then that would be the appropriate policy. If we do grant copyrights -- with the scope and length of the copyright again based upon what would best serve the public interest -- then it is appropriate to grant them to the authors of works, rather than some third party.
But even then, a copyright has no intrinsic value whatsoever. All a copyright does, really, is work like a lens; whatever the economic value of the work is, it merely focuses it for the convenience of the copyright holder. If a work has no economic value at all, then the copyright is worthless. Whether a work will have economic value depends on the market. No author can justifiably demand or force anyone to care about his work. This is part of the genius of copyright; rather than dispense money to authors directly, it only lets them take a larger piece of the pie than they otherwise might get, where the size of the pie is determined by the market.
Sure, hundreds of years ago their compensation was in the form of patronage.
Well, let's back up.
The purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science by 1) encouraging the creation and publication of works, and 2) having no restrictions, or at least restrictions that are minimal in scope and length, as to what the public can do with those works.
But since copyright didn't exist until 1710 (and even then, only in England), and since many works are known to have been created prior to then, there must be other incentives for authors to create things. Some authors create art for art's sake, or for fame, or to sell copies (as opposed to exploiting a copyright), or incidentally to selling their creative services as labor, etc.
Some of these involve economic gain, but not all of them. Plenty of people create works without concern for related economic gain. For example, all of us here write posts on Slashdot, but none of us expect to get paid for them.
Copyright is meant to encourage authors to create and publish works which they otherwise would not. It is one way of making money as an author, but it is not the only way, or the most important way. Even today, many professional authors do not exploit their copyrights, but make a living. I didn't need copyrights when I was working as an artist, and I supported myself comfortably.
Patronage is perfectly legitimate, and is quite popular even today. There's no need to disparage it. After all, copyright does not guarantee quality. It is solely interested in quantity. As I said, copyright leaves the economic value of a work's copyright up to the market. If a work is popular, it is worth a lot; if it is unpopular, it not worth much. Many popular works are absolute tripe, however. You might not like the works that sprang from patronage, such as Michelangelo's David, but the basis for how they were funded doesn't inherently make them worse than, say, 'Twilight.'
And just as copyright doesn't eliminate all the other incentives for creation and publication, so too is copyright not indispensible for art. There would be popular art, as opposed to commissioned art, even without copyright. Folk songs are a good example. Copyright might increase the number of songs out there, but there would always be some no matter what, suitable to all sorts of different tastes.
While some is good, most isn't.
That is also true of works for which a copyright is sought. Remember Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Expensive production standards don't change this one bit. IMDB tells me that almost 600 movies were made in the US in the year 1977. I remember Star Wars, Close Encounters, Annie Hall, and Sorcerer as being pretty good. Logan's Run wasn't too hot. And most of the rest probably