Latest Version of ACTA Leaks 87
An anonymous reader writes "Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid points to a freshly leaked version of ACTA available on La Quadrature Du Net. While the text will need further analysis, the most recent look at the text suggests that there is no Three Strikes law, but anti-circumvention laws have a new twist to them with regard to exceptions in that 'they do not significantly impair the adequacy of legal protection [...] or the effectiveness of legal remedies for violations of those measures.' Overall, the text still hints at a global DMCA with notice-and-takedown."
"Leaks" (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm beginning this document isn't meant to be as secretive as Geist makes it sound. There's been a leak about every 2 weeks for like months...
I hope (Score:4, Interesting)
All of this crap explodes soon so we can possibly return to an era of reason. I'm dreaming, I know, but if we can just bottom out we stand a chance of bouncing back. As it stands now we are on full descent with no bottom in sight.
Constitutional challenge? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to hear how ACTA could survive some sort of Constitutional challenge. From what I hear, it's not a treaty, but an "executive agreement," and being able to skip ratification by the Senate was one reason mentioned when I heard that. (Don't know if there's a connection...) The Constitution talks about Treaties, ratified by the senate. The Constitution talks about Laws, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.
What the heck is an "Executive Agreement" and what sort of force does it have. Moreover, what would its resistance be to any sort of serious legal challenge, given its rather odd legal status in the first place. This sounds shakier than Bush's use of signing statements.
DMCA (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, but isn't "notice-and-takedown" an improvement over what we had before the DMCA when we called the notices "cease and desist letters" and there were no safe harbor provisions for ISPs and sites like YouTube?
They don't represent us. (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason those ACTA people have to act in secret is because they don't represent any of us. This is like the oil cartel, and we see what kind of problem big oil has caused once we let them take complete control over energy.
When you let people make law in secret without debate, but they want to tax you and force you to follow laws which aren't debated, isn't that a dictatorship?
Re:Notice and takedown (Score:3, Interesting)
I would change the DMCA take down provisions in 5 ways:
1.Penalties for anyone who sends bogus take down notices
2.100% protection for any service provider for content that passes over their network (but is not hosted by them) including protection that gives ISPs 100% immunity for copyright violations carried out by their users (and without any legal requirement for the ISP to cooperate with copyright holders in order to maintain the immunity)
3.Protection for providers like YouTube where copyright holders cant argue that "YouTube isn't doing enough to deal with copyright violations" even though YouTube IS complying with the take down notices they get sent.
4.A requirement for anyone who wants safe harbor protection to respond to counter notices within a reasonable period of time ("reasonable period of time" to be defined in the law). This for example would mean that if Apple wants to maintain safe harbor protection for the App Store, then they need to restore Apps that have been taken down because of bogus take down notices (like all the times when Apps that copy the gameplay of another game but not the artwork or trademarked names and then get shutdown for it, the Tetris people are most known for this)
and 5.A ban on automated take down notice sending, i.e. it has to be sent by a human instead of computers (like the way some media companies are now doing to YouTube with automatic notices for content they own)