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Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon May 26, 2008 11:02 PM
from the what's-on-your-ipod-eh dept.
from the what's-on-your-ipod-eh dept.
SpaceAdmiral writes "The Canadian government is secretly negotiating to join the US and the EU in an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The agreement would give border guards the power to search iPods and cellphones for illegal downloads, as well as to force ISPs to hand over customer information without a warrant. David Fewer, staff counsel at the University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, characterizes ACTA this way: 'If Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas what would they look like? This is pretty close.'"
Related Stories
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Technology: Leaked ACTA Treaty to Outlaw P2P? 387 comments
miowpurr writes to tell us that a draft of the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has been posted on Wikileaks. Among others, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has weighed in on the possible ramifications of this treaty. "Among other things, ACTA will outlaw P2P (even when used to share works that are legally available, like my books), and crack down on things like region-free DVD players. All of this is taking place out of the public eye, presumably with the intention of presenting it as a fait accompli just as the ink is drying on the treaty."
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A Look At ACTA Wish Lists For RIAA, BSA, Others 69 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property brings us an analysis of several organizations' goals for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which we've discussed previously. In particular, he points out the anti-privacy views of the Business Software Alliance: "While the ACTA itself is not public, the US Trade Representative has at least released the ACTA comments. While many of them are to be expected, such as the RIAA & co. wanting copyright filters, one item on the BSA's wish list really stands out: 'In a number of European countries one of the biggest impediments to efforts by rights holder to enforce their IP rights on the Internet is the overbroad interpretation of privacy laws by some European authorities.' They want ACTA to 'fix' that by neutering the privacy laws. Given the BSA's other questionable activities, it couldn't hurt to tell their member companies what you think of their participation. After all, organizations like the BSA exist in part to shield their members from bad PR."
Full documents of comments from the various organizations are available at Public Knowledge.
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News: Wikileaks Releases ACTA Negotiations As "0-Day" 105 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has released a new document about the ACTA negotiations occurring in Washington over the next three days. This might be the shortest time between authorship of a document and its publication on Wikileaks so far. The brief 3-page memo, dated today, could add quite a bit of oil to the fire of the ACTA debate. It is titled Business Perspectives on Border Measures and Civil Enforcement and it contains a set of proposals to the 'ACTA negotiators' issued by 'Concerned business groups operating in ACTA nations.' Among many highly invasive methods and approaches proposed in this memorandum, the reader can find detailed demands for: full disclosure of relevant information by Customs to trademark holders so that they can mount private investigations; disclosure of identities and other information about copyright infringers; and increased inspection of goods. This document is especially important to raise public awareness on these negotiations and their implications for the future." We've been watching ACTA develop for a few months now.
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Patry Copyright Blog Closed 129 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "William Patry, noted copyright expert and Google's top copyright lawyer, has decided to close his personal blog. (For no reason that he has explained, the archives are gone too.) Ordinarily, that wouldn't be very newsworthy, but that little blog has made a lot of news, outing the ACTA treaty and discussing lots of other important pending legislation. Mr. Patry gives two reasons for the closure: his personal views were being attributed to Google, and the current trends in copyright law are too depressing. Though I am not the only one to have done so, as someone who has contributed to that misunderstanding by listing his credentials without a disclaimer, I would like to publicly apologize to him. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do to reverse the depressing trends in copyright law that I'm not doing already."
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EFF, Public Knowledge Sue Over Secret IP Pact 104 comments
Cowards Anonymous writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the US Trade Representative in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws. ACTA could include an agreement for the US, Canada, the European Commission and other nations to enforce each others' IP laws, with residents of each country subject to criminal charges when violating the IP laws of another country, according to a supposed ACTA discussion paper [PDF] posted on Wikileaks.org in May."
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This is a little ridiculous. (Score:5, Funny)
IPods full of American music smuggled past Canadian customs? I'm sure that's exactly how Canadians are getting illicit copies of American music. (And vice versa.)
Re:This is a little ridiculous. (Score:5, Funny)
If you've got a better way to do it, please share... iPod Shuffles are not the most comfortable things to hide in one's ass.
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Re:This is a little ridiculous. (Score:5, Funny)
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This may be a stupid question... (Score:5, Insightful)
They won't, but they needn't care... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now it's up to you to 1. challenge this and 2. provide evidence that either you were NOT speeding, or that you were speeding for a damned good reason which exempts you from getting a ticket.
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So to get back on-topic...
"How would border guards be able to tell an illegal song on an iPod"
If it's in the AAC format with Apple's Fairplay DRM - which they license to nobody and all that.. then it's probably legit.
If it's an MP3, it'll get added to the list of 'probably-illegal' bits of music.
"from a song ripped from your private CD collection"
1. Challenge it, 2. provide evidence that you, in fact, are in posession of that CD.
"(which as the RIAA would have us believe, is illegal too)"
If that is indeed the law - which, last time I checked, it's not - yhen you're screwed even in the above case regardless.
"from a song bought from the iTunes store?"
Presuming you purchased an unprotected MP3 - that purchase should be listed in your iTunes Account. 1. Challenge it, 2. provide the evidence - name Apple if you want.
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Now, personally, I don't think this will actually be checked all -that- actively. Lines at airports and the like are queued enough as it is and they're strapped for money just to check for things like, you know, actual terrorists, drug smugglers, etc. That's not to say I'm complacent - I already sent in my letter of protest several weeks back, but we're not exactly part of the G8 countries so that's probably going to do fook all good - but I don't think that the first kid with a few MP3s on his system is going to be shipped to Gitmo either.
Now, with that out of the way, the clauses regarding the restrictions of privacy tools use online (and, possibly, offline; that TrueCrypted drive you've got and such) I find far, far more unsettling (and was the majority of the body of my protest letter; personally I can't really justify saying "I'm only downloading a movie! What's the harm!?", but I did point out the ridiculousness of involving law enforcement officials in this, never mind the penance, and my disagreement with those clauses on those grounds).
I'm still waiting for them to hook this into a "That way we'll get the terrorists, too!"-type defense argument.
But maybe they're not, and they're expecting people, to just fume at the worst bits, then blank those out and just leave it with the anti-piracy bits which might be grudgingly accepted.
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I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just one more excuse to induce more fear in the normal population.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
Them: Give us your passwords or we'll confiscate your device.
You: But.. I... I've got to make a flight! I have riii--
Them: That's it, Bob! Tase that fucker and keep his iPod! We'll show this twat what we Canadians are all a-boot!
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A few links. (Score:5, Informative)
A couple of these links are several months old; this has been brewing for awhile, and action needs to be taken now to stop it.
Economic Big Stick. (Score:5, Informative)
The third page of the article explains how the US is able to get away with such outrageous requests:
So the proposal is, "surrender your citizens rights or we will make it cost you." The answer should be, "without rights, you will just take our money anyway, no thanks."
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CoRaF (Score:5, Insightful)
Paragraph 1 of the Charter says that
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screwed. (Score:5, Insightful)
16 hour work days, food that's poison, obesity, insurance and medicine they can't afford. At some point it collapses on itself because there's only so much greed an economy can stand. We are entering a recession [infowars.com] exactly as predicted by Former World Bank Vice President, Chief Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz in 2006 [prisonplanet.com].
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Re:screwed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, how about another group of nutjobs - the "Federal Reserve". Since the CPI numbers are meaningless, and the GDP numbers are bogus (compare pre-Clinton and post-Clinton numbers for a good example why), let's look at the relative buying power of the US Dollar, since that's a lot harder to fudge.
Here ya go. [federalreserve.gov]
The numbers to look at are the Broad and Major Currency numbers. These indices are relative to a specific point in time - Jan 97 and Mar 73, respectively).
So, looking at the most recent YOY data (APR-APR) - the US dollar has dropped 9.3% YOY compared to a broad group of our trading partners, and nearly 12% YOY when compared to other major currencies. Contrast this to a 4% YOY (broad) or a 4.7% (major) for the 12 month period before that.
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What "Free Trade" Looks Like. (Score:5, Insightful)
Software patents are one small but important piece of the IP Empire which demands universally oppressive laws.
The list goes on and on but it has one common theme, your rights mean nothing, shut up and get back to work for the man.
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Re:Probably Related, EU Software Patent Treaty. (Score:5, Interesting)
Avoid the proxies in Sweden etc. as they are subject to EU law, Switzerland is not subject to EU law and do no reveal your identity to anyone.
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Re:how do counterfeiting and copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:how do counterfeiting and copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
Counterfeiting to me means items produced as a "look a like" or in similar context, without a license to use the trademark. So, candy or tires or even CPUs can be counterfeit. But IP is not, because only counterfeit is reverse engineering. IP generally gets copied exactly. So how the heck is that counterfeit??
The only way they can apply it is if you have counterfeit CDs or DVDs or similar. But that still applies to the media marks, not the IP. The video is not counterfeit, the media is.
Or is someone selling KDE has "Windows Vista"?
Counterfeit and IP don't exactly make sense.
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Constitution easy to subvert (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Illegal Search and Seizure (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I am no political scientist (Score:5, Insightful)
It is just more stupid American foreign policy.
Just today I read that the the drug war fuelled by America's love of cocaine and marijuana is resulting in thousands of people getting killed in Mexican gang wars over smuggling routes, yet the US War on drugs policy persists, keeping the black market trade the biggest and bloodiest industry in the world.
On the north border they want to remove the rights of people just to make a few cocaine snorting media exec's happy.
And we have seen what US foreign policy has done to the middle east.
Its no wonder so many people hate the US, their politicians have systematically contributed to most of the crap that is currently going on in the world all in the name of consumerism and captialism. Its not about democracy at all, its all about how cheap their gas is and what boat they can buy with their annual bonus.
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Re:I am no political scientist (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fuck This (Score:5, Interesting)
America is moving towards an information economy. Those in power are aware of the transformation and are trying to protect future American interests.
When the manufacturing is all being done in the cheapest places (globalization) America will only have her service economy, IP (If America owns Hollywood, she can buy and sell the world's spare time), and such control over business dealings in foreign lands as her businesses can muster and enforce.
Can you get rich by doing your neighbor's laundry if he is doing your in return? The GDP generated by Americans doing services for Americans is only wealth in terms of employment.
If IP is not protected, the only remaining wealth in America will be foreign businesses. Foreign businesses can be nationalized as soon as America's military isn't a major threat.* So suppose these events happened:
1: Rampant piracy makes ownership of IP moot
2: Japanese, Saudi, or Chinese businesses dump their bonds.
That's it! Those two things would bring America crashing to her knees, and destroy the cultural, economic, and military might of the greatest nation on earth. There really is a 3: profit for many powerful people. This is what America's leaders are doing about the situation:
Hiding the extent of the danger
Misguidedly passing draconian IP protection laws
Maintaining a large, secret technological lead (black tech: its real. No, I don't believe in UFOs)
That's what they're doing. I pass no judgment here, I'm just saying, that is the cause of these actions.
*Did you know that 50% of American businesses overseas (overseas divisions)are owned by the Chinese and theoretically controlled by the Chinese government? Did you know that the Saudis can take controll of foreign firms with the flick of a pen?
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Libertarian horse poop (Score:5, Insightful)
And the music moguls now want to enforce the ability to check on me. With WHAT??? How can a customs agent possibly determine the MP3s that I have are, or are not purchased with validity???? THEY CANNOT!
IP protection isn't the backbone of the US economy. It's an intangibles-fantasy to think so. That's not what my father built, his father built, my mother built, and so on. It's the asset protection mechanism of the nonsensical. It's not innovative, it's not producing return on the intangible asset, it's as flimsy as derivates. Yet I respect the concept of asset ownership, and my rights under the law as a consumer. Now some nitwit's pressured various treaty signators to look at my damn MP3 player-- where's the justice in that??????
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Re:Fuck This (Score:5, Insightful)
There's even a precedent: when America was entering the Industrial Revolution, it built up a great deal of its powerful industrial base by "stealing" inventions from Europe. The European countries protested a lot about the U.S. stealing industrial secrets, but that didn't stop the U.S. from using those ideas to leapfrog its competitors into an economic powerhouse.
Doesn't that sound similar to the relationship that the U.S. has with China right now? What could the U.S. possibly offer China that would be worth China deliberately ignoring all those good inventions that it can use to build itself up?
If America really wanted to maintain a technological lead, it would be investing in educating its citizens in hard math & science, investing in applied research, and helping U.S.-only companies use the fruits of that research.
Instead, we get "leaders" who defund public education & finance anti-science propaganda campaigns, and who seem to think that America can keep a position of "world leadership" by waving its military dick around. Between those kinds of leaders & the idiots who blindly follow them, America has pretty much set itself up to be given the "Most Deserving of Becoming a Has-Been Superpower" award.
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Re:You mean the country that the baby boomers buil (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You mean the country that the baby boomers buil (Score:5, Insightful)
"Generation-Me" indeed.
Why yes, I do have karma to burn.
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