ACTA Text Leaks; US Caves On ISPs, Seeks Super-DMCA 246
An anonymous reader writes "Given the history of ACTA leaks, to no one's surprise, the latest
version of the draft agreement (PDF) was leaked last night on KEI's
website. The new version — which reflects changes made during an intense week of negotiations
last month in Washington — shows a draft agreement that is much closer
to becoming reality. Perhaps the most
important story of the latest draft is how the
countries are close to agreement on the Internet enforcement
chapter. In
the face of opposition, the US has dropped its demands on secondary
liability for ISPs but is still holding out hope of establishing a
super-DMCA with digital lock
rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected
by US courts."
Copyright Law Reform (Score:5, Insightful)
We only get once chance to defeat ACTA.
**sigh** (Score:5, Insightful)
We're getting awfully close to needing the 4th box...
Re:**sigh** (Score:4, Insightful)
The US isn't the world. China won't give a shit, and they are building the military hardware to allow them to continue not giving a shit for generations to come.
Re:**sigh** (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:**sigh** (Score:1, Insightful)
The goverment officials dealing with this have absolutely no understanding of how this law will affect the world for generations to come.
What makes you think any politician is interested in the future?
Re:**sigh** (Score:5, Insightful)
The officials dont pay attention even when it IS election time (remember the US mid-term elections are comming up soon).
Heck, even if GOD himself came down from heaven, stood in front of congress and asked for an end to draconian copyright and IP policies, the congressmen and senators would STILL favor the large briefcases full of money they get from Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Universal etc.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless we defeat it. Then we'll get another chance, ad infinitum, like one of those timeless creatures of evil that will never truly die.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:3, Insightful)
The US already has a DMCA law, and if ACTA comes about, wouldn't that just mean that other countries have to have DMCA?
Let me guess... you're American aren't you? Why should the rest of the world have to suffer under the same shitty IP regime you guys have?
Re:Time to get encryption working (Score:5, Insightful)
Encrypted is not really complicated, use https sites and turn encryption on in your torrent client. Anonymity is hard, really hard. For open P2P networks encryption without anonymity doesn't really help anything, everyone can connect and collect data as a peer. Some of the issues are:
1. Anything like TOR and Freenet has lots of overhead due to relaying
2. Latency is also hurt, and it's also dangerous for timing attacks
3. You can collect statistical data, it's difficult to hide patterns
4. You can "isolate" nodes and then track all their traffic
On top of that, you get endless amounts of flak for being a "free haven" for all sorts of $boogeymen. That drives away developers, users, funding, everything. Many people would actually prefer they caught "real" criminals rather than create the true information anarchy. Total anonymity means no consequences, so on top of those you get endless waves of spam and trolls and they can post far more offensive things than they could on slashdot. If someone created it, you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy.
Encryption wont protect you from informants. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now is really the time to get encrypted, decentralized networks with Onion routing working at a practical level and not just for academic enjoyment. I've had great expectations in GNUnet, but apparently it is pretty hard to port. Freenet has also never convinced me whenever I tried it. Are the technical obstacles really so hard to overcome? What about pervasive email encryption with automatic installation and more widespread use of SSL? What is holding all these technologies back?
Once something is made significantly illegal and if the government is motivated enough, they'll pay their informants to infiltrate your private encrypted network and capture the IP addresses that way. The informants will host the exit nodes.
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:5, Insightful)
This has to be drilled into everybody's heads.
Copyrights and patents must be abolished, they are part of the death of economies, just like governments regulations, taxes, subsidies, wars, corporate involvement, corruption, stimulus borrowing/printing/spending and bailouts.
All of the above things are killing the economies, these things are making industrialized world uncompetitive and jobs are leaving and no amount of cash can be spent to make the industrialized world competitive again ever because the reason cannot be simply removed by spending.
The reason of the underlying structural breakage of economy is lack of useful production/manufacturing jobs, whose loss has resulted from lack of competitiveness. Competition is the only correct solution to this problem, and copyrights, patents, regulations, wage laws, taxes, subsidies, bailouts, stimulus, wars, corporate corruption are all tied to one main entity: government.
Government is the ultimate force with the power to compel people to do what they do not want to do, and it does so because it craves power, through people who join the government because they crave power, and for them gov't is the ultimate way to get power and money by sharing with corporate friends.
Government involvement in economy must be removed completely and that is the only way to remove incentives to corrupt the government, spending all the money in the world on buying the gov't should NOT buy you a free ride and destruction and structural removal of any competition.
This comment is the actual answer to the question: what the fuck happened to the economy?
That is unrealistic. Copyright and patents should not be abolished. They just shouldn't last forever. They should last X amount of years that society agrees upon, not an arbitrary number decided by the copyright holders themselves but a number of years decided by that individual culture or that society.
Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS (Score:4, Insightful)
Particularly since the alternative would have done exactly the same thing.
Re:**sigh** (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be funny. But it isn't going to happen. Instead, there will be NO safe haven for liberty. Just a boot, stomping on a human face, forever, as Orwell would have it.
If it's in the treaty it will supersede U.S laws (Score:5, Insightful)
the US ...is still holding out hope of establishing...rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by US courts.
That would be precisely why the forces of intellectual darkness and their minions within the U.S. government are pushing for this with such rabidity, and in such secrecy. Unless it's flat-out unconstitutional (a much, much narrower standard than simply "illegal"), anything in this treaty will supersede U.S. courts and U.S. law.
"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little...ah, fuck it. We do the unconstitutional immediately, too."
Re:You can't have it both ways. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice rant but totally unrealistic. Economies can't grow without limits as the raw materials are not boundless.
Manufacturing jobs will always be eliminated over time as automation replaces people. The US right now has the largest manufacturing output of any nation in history, and it's doing it with only 8% of its population. The US output is larger than China, India and Brazil combined.
White collar jobs are headed the same way as software replaces people.
So what is left? Simply make do public sector jobs funded by taxation on productive work. There isn't any other possible outcome.
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:3, Insightful)
Enough is enough (Score:4, Insightful)
If the DMCA provision passes, I promise that from that point I won't spend a single cent on anything made by anybody who supports or takes advantage of it, and that I will make every effort discourage other people and companies from purchasing those things.
All my money will instead go on software, hardware and music without DRM and under liberal licenses, as well as organizations that oppose this kind of legislation. I will especially contribute to any attempts to eliminate patents and heavily restrict copyright.
Re:You can't have it both ways. (Score:3, Insightful)
if you think information goes only one way then you don't understand any society.
Information is not just an export, but an import as well.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:3, Insightful)
So I take the company to court and...what are they going to tell him? The only thing they can tell him is not to pollute on my property. Easy enough for them to deal with. They'll still be polluting on other people's property. They'll probably be polluting the water supply to. Well, I don't own the water supply, the water company does. And if the water company doesn't care, then I just have to deal with it. Maybe it pollutes the food supply. I don't own the food supply, so I can't do anything about that either. I just have to hope there are alternative water and food supplies that aren't polluted. Of course, you'd probably tell me that I need to sue the food and water companies for not providing pollution-free food and water. So now they need to sue the polluting company. And we have to wait for all this to work out. And it only solves the issue once. Next time they pollute, we have to go through the rigamarole all over again. I'm now spending all my time suing people who try to pollute instead of doing something useful.
Or, we could just have government regulations and have a set of people who have the legal authority to monitor pollution and force those who pollute to stop. Now I don't have to spend all day suing people and tracing where the pollution came from to sue the right people. It just gets done. It also helps all those other people who otherwise would have to individually sue the polluters or their food and water supply companies. It's simply more efficient and it actually solves the problem from here on out. Or at least it's closer to a solution. Companies will still try to pollute, but instead of waiting for the pollution to become a problem, it can be nipped in the bud with inspections and monitoring that are legally forced to be on their property, not yours. See, by the time the pollution is on your property, it's too late. The damage has been done. It's an entirely reactive instead of proactive process.
It's all fun and good to make a microkernel government and it's really easy to point out problems with the existing government structures. But the microkernel government doesn't work because it distributes work that should be done by a common public trust (the government) and tries to place entities that don't actually have equal power and resources into a situation where they are considered to be of equal power and resources. It's me versus a company now, instead of the public versus a company. And the former is a much tougher battle to fight.
What we out to do, instead of stripping the government of everything that makes it useful, is to find ways to keep private interests from infecting the government and let it go back to being a public good. That's really what the problem is. If injecting some libertarian principles in the mix would help, I'm all for it. But let's not kid ourselves and think that the government-as-contract-enforcer is actually a workable system in anything approaching the real world.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:3, Insightful)
True evil is always Undead.
Re:Encryption wont protect you from informants. (Score:1, Insightful)
You can't trace someone on TOR or Freenet just by holding the exit nodes.
There are still ways to trace someone though. For example,
1. Release 'pirate' music in WMA format with an embedded DRM licence request. As soon as WMP opens such a file, it'll contact the server specified in the file to request a licence - your tracking server.
2. Release 'pirate' software with a phone-home bug added.
3. The Google-Fu. Search through your target's postings. Do they mention a state? A pet name? Do their post timeings never include school hours? A hundred little bits of trivia can be put together into a complete picture which may be of use in locating them. Due to the amount of effort this takes, it won't be used on the low-level targets. But if you do something that justifies extreme effort, like release the tool that cracks the successor to blu-ray, then no expense will be spared. A simple blu-ray rip will easily reveal the country of origin, by the video standard, logos present and exactly which scenes were cut to comply with local censorship laws.
4. Social. Have your agent make contact 'accidentially' and build up a relationship. It may take a while, but you only have to to get the target to agree to follow one single web link to get a fix.
Re:**sigh** (Score:5, Insightful)
ACTA isn't JUST about internet filesharing, but also about counterfeint pharmacuticals and other stuff.
You, sir, are the dream of the ACTA negotiators.
The whole point of bundling "file sharing" with "counterfeit pharmaceuticals" is so that you can get the same sort of penalties for both. I don't think anyone will disagree that labeling sugar pills as some vital drug is a huge danger, but the way ACTA is written, a generic is also considered "counterfeit". Likewise all the following are treated the same by ACTA:
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because nobody has to pay for environmental damage unless they are forced to.
Tragedy of the commons.
Look up "externalities".
Incidentally, the Ruhr region of Germany solves this by making polluters pay for the privilege.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the price of Liberty, eternal vigilance.
Re:YOU VOTED FOR THIS (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this so funny... letting the people just blame one of the two parties in America and bickering about it amongst yourselves seems to me to be the ultimate weapon politicians devised to keep you under their rule.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:3, Insightful)
What is this "chance to defeat ACTA" of which you speak? The process has been specifically designed to keep us excluded it's too far along to change.
At this point, the best we can hope for is wisdom from countries that are less concerned about the freedoms of their corporations and more concerned about the freedoms of their citizens.
You're obviously new to Earth.
Re:Copyright Law Reform (Score:3, Insightful)
I am American and am very concerned.
Re:**sigh** (Score:3, Insightful)
and lots of them.
~
Cease and desist! (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is precisely that there must be NO COMMONS.
I am hereby giving notice that you have been discovered inhaling air, some of which was within the air rights of my property at the time that I bought it (it's your job to figure out whose air the wind blew toward you -- especially if you want to know whom to sue if it's polluted, and you can prove it was that specific breath that made you sick...).
Further unauthorized use of this privately owned asset shall be grounds for litigation. I hope your lawyer's as good (i.e. expensive) as mine.
I don't think a private owners would lobby to set a liability cap on damages caused by an oil spill in his private property
The owners of the oil rig sure would. Do the owners of surrounding property have as much money to spend on lobbyists to represent their interests?
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the "trade balance" view of economy, selling your house/furniture/gadgets/clothes/food to your neighbours to replace it all by a pile of gold made you richer.
According to the "trade balance" view of economy, as son as some good leaves the country to be replaced by some gold, something positive happened. As soon as some good entered the country and some gold left it something bad happened.
This view of economy is so moronically stupid it is frightening.
According to the "government is evil" view of economy, the existence of laws is a perversion to be fought.
According to the "government is evil" view of economy, it is okay to let restaurants/corporations/(rich) individuals poison their neighbours because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening (but laws are evil, so some ad-hoc mechanism for determining damage need to be established.)
Fact: if the productive people of Atlas Shrugged all went to an island where there would be no "oppression", they would quickly degenerate in a pre-stone age society (there are real-world examples of this: a rich society is a large society, even though it might seem to be composed of dull individuals). We are collectively rich as we are because we are all interlinked through exchange of goods, services, ideas. For society to function, markets must function. For that, government intervention is required. To break monopolies, to forbid or compensate externalities, to impose transparency. To impose a measure of equality.
Fact: is that even the very rich and successful need the great masses much more than the masses need them. Equality must be imposed: markets work because the collective decisions f the agents are better than the individual actions. A very unequal society depends on the actions and choice of a small minority, and therefore cannot form functioning markets. If you believe in markets, you must believe in redistribution of wealth. Otherwise, you believe not in markets but in magic.
Re:Copyrights and patents must be abolished (Score:3, Insightful)
And that collective will is called, you guessed it, government.
That collective is called 'the people'. Government is supposed to be of/for/by the people but it clearly isn't anymore.
I'm not really trying to defend parent even though I can find some philosophical common ground with him. I, however, do not think the solution is getting rid of all regulations, I think it would be more reasonable to actually start *applying* existing law equally to everyone first. Two things would happen then. Corporations would stop breaking them, and we'd find a whole lot of laws that are incredibly bad and should be repealed. I propose a moratorium on new laws until we've gone through the existing set and put them through a constitutional filter.
Anyway, I think it is highly idealized of you, especially given today's state of things, to think the US government and the US people are the same entity.
It is the specific intent of the constitution to limit the power of government on its people. Such is not the case in current day United States.
Re:**sigh** (Score:1, Insightful)
I aint no Howard Roark. I would take the money. I don't think many of us would have the kind of integrity to refuse.
Why? Are you starving? Homeless? Or would you spend it on a fancy car, a house that's bigger than you really need etc? Not trying to flame, I'm honestly curious. I for one prefer being able to look in the mirror over a big chunk of cash...
Re:**sigh** (Score:3, Insightful)
The current prospect is that you also get to pay for the privilege of having your face stomped.
Re:You can't have it both ways. (Score:5, Insightful)
Our PRIMARY export right now is "entertainment". The word is placed in quotations, because it is hardly entertaining to anyone with a lick of sense. Only the brainwashed, ignorant masses can actually PAY for the drivel pumped out from Hollywood and the music industries. I might consider paying them to STOP PRODUCING!
Ah, another snob with poor taste who believes everything everyone else likes is crap, that he's somehow the enlightened one, and wishes with every fiber of his being that everyone else would just WAKE UP.
Re:Congratulations, Media conglomerates (Score:4, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
Remember who is really driving this, it's not about enforcing current copyrights at home, ACTA is about enforcing US copyright laws and indefinite copyright in other nations.