Forget SOPA, Europe is about to ratify its bigger brother ACTA
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taken from hXXp://www.siliconre…sopa-europe-is/
Just as the SOPA and PIPA debate winds down in the US, the European Union is later this week set to work on ratifying a global intellectual property enforcement treaty: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
European countries, including Ireland, will later this week join the US, Australia, Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Canada in supporting ACTA.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ostensibly the agreement deals primarily with counterfeit physical goods, such as medicine.
However, it will in actual fact have broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting "internet distribution and information technology."
Last week, hundreds of major websites in the US - including Wikipedia, WordPress, Boing Boing, Craigslist and Reddit - protested the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill and its sister Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Millions of web users took to social media to join the protests.
The protests, which included petitions and letters to politicians, succeeded in swaying the White House and members of the US Senate to withdraw support for the controversial bills.
One of the reasons ACTA is arousing suspicion and concern is so little is actually known about it.
According to the EFF, it contains several features that raise concerns for consumers' privacy and civil liberties, as well as legitimate commerce, innovation and the free flow of information.
ACTA, it argues, also limits developing countries' ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and levels of economic development.
Why is ACTA so mysterious?
The EFF said: "ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialised countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms, such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the World Trade Organisation.“Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed, no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations," the EFF warns.
Few countries that are about to ratify the agreement, including Ireland, have provided information to the public about the ACTA negotiations.
A document seen by the EFF, a sort of discussion paper, reveals that rightsholders are asking for new legal regimes to "encourage ISPs to co-operate with rights holders in the removal of infringing material." In Ireland, the Government is within days about to pass a statutory instrument that may give rights holders, such as music labels and movie studios, the right to seek injunctions against ISPs concerning illegal downloading on their networks.
The EFF says that rights holder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by ISPs and three strikes-style graduated response practices.
The EFF warns that the kind of filtering methods ACTA may usher in may include deep packet inspection of citizens' internet communications, raising considerable concerns for civil liberties, privacy rights and internet innovation.
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Are we screwed basically? :afraid:
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From the sounds of it, that's what they're trying to make this out to be. The real question here is will enforcement actually take effect? After all, SOPA flopped… It's possible that this may as well.
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For every avenue they block a new one is born. Anyone remember kazaa & napster? They sold out but torrents and newsgroups rose up. Take away "media link" sites suchas Megaupload and I'm sure something new is on the horizon.
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MrMazda is correct. Enforcement is a BIG issue. I am from the USA, but I live in Mexico now. Back home in the USA internet access is already very restricted.. and the average user doesn't even realize it. In Mexico I can access many sites and download/upload material that I simply cannot even access in the USA. In Mexico, I can buy copies of movies (or almost anything), and somtimes, movies not even released yet. In the marketplace is not uncommon to hear people ask "Is this a copy?" Given what I have just said - Mexcio has similair laws protecting copyrights and infringement that the USA has. The difference? ENFORCEMENT.
The governmental bodies within the USA tend to write laws requiring costly self enforcement - increasing the cost of goods, decreasing the number of manufactures, sending jobs outside the USA, or like some products eliminating their manufacture in the USA altogether. If police get a complaint about a particular business, the attitude of law enforcement (not the law itself) is guilty until proven innocent. The marketplace becomes a hostile enviroment to the very business that want to operate there.
In Mexico, laws are made to govern any number of issues, just as in the USA, but generally, nothing is written into the law about enforcement and almost no-one would complain to the police. It is my experience that Mexican laws are good examples of "do as I say, not as I do." That's partly why I moved here. Less government interference in my life, much less.
As a US citizen living in Mexico, I can only compare and contrast Mexico and the USA. I would like to hear from others. Would the passing of such laws really effect you? Have you considered that maybe OUR governments (speaking as a global citizen) are really protecting themselves, their ideologies, and the business money influencing them? :police:
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MrMazda is correct. Enforcement is a BIG issue. I am from the USA, but I live in Mexico now. Back home in the USA internet access is already very restricted.. and the average user doesn't even realize it. In Mexico I can access many sites and download/upload material that I simply cannot even access in the USA. In Mexico, I can buy copies of movies (or almost anything), and somtimes, movies not even released yet. In the marketplace is not uncommon to hear people ask "Is this a copy?" Given what I have just said - Mexcio has similair laws protecting copyrights and infringement that the USA has. The difference? ENFORCEMENT.
I somewhat disagree with this; although it is true that the US enforces its IP laws more often, the "difference" is far more complex. That said, it is not difficult to find physical DVDs with copied movies for sale in the US if you know where to look. That said, it should be noted that Mexico has less developed infrastructure and fewer people have access to the internet in a capacity that would allow them to transfer large amounts of data; thus there is greater demand for physical media than in the United States.
The same woman has been selling pirated DVDs on various subway trains in New York City for at least 4 years; probably longer. It wouldn't be that hard to catch her, the police just have better things to do with their time.
As for the internet being "restricted" in the US, I'm not sure what you're talking about– I've yet to fail to find something that I wanted to download, excepting exceedingly rare things that often aren't even available legally licensed, either. Any site that uses geoblocking is easily averted through the use of proxies and querying foreign DNS servers if they are blocked that way locally.
All in all, it's clear that the "pirates" will eventually win in the end-- no matter what is done by governments and companies to control things, people will always find a way around them. A good example of this is the proverbial Great Firewall of China. Despite the entire internet infrastructure being subject to government control and censorship, people are able to punch through. The governments of the world aren't even able to stop people from counterfeiting money, doing drugs or murdering people-- what makes people think they will truly be able to stop people from copying media? At a base level, no matter how much is done, the basic fact that movies are visual media means that someone can sit there with a video camera and record a screen, and use a microphone for audio. Of course, such copies would suck, but if it comes to that, people will (and already do, for example, recording in movie theaters to release before DVDs).
