Ah, how we Europeans get to sit back and relax whenever some company invokes the DMCA – a law we don’t have over here. Sadly, that sentence has to be amended with the following word: yet. We don’t have the DMCA yet, but it the ACTA is accepted, we Europeans – and the rest of the world – can no longer sit back and relax: the US is hard at work imposing the DMCA upon the nation of Foreign.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is being negotiated behind closed doors, in secrecy, by the USA, the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Canada, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and United Arab Emirates. Its scope is broad, but the most important aspect (for us) is the digital chapter, which has been leaked onto the web.
And it ain’t good.
Three strikes policies are encouraged, but not a requirement. Takedown procedures are mandatory. Safe harbours for internet service providers are required, but badly defined. Internet filtering is not allowed.
ISP’s are supposed to have safe harbours, but the current draft doesn’t define it very well, as Ars notes. ISP’s are only immune if after “adopting and reasonably implementing a policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright”. An example is provided as a footnote: “providing for termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider’s system or network of repeat infringers”. That’s three strikes.
Another requirement for ISP immunity is the existence of a takedown process – you know, that backwards process where content must be pulled from the internet just because a rightsholder says so; the content will only be restored if the uploader files a counter-notice. Both requirements are already US law.
The worst part of the ACTA is most certainly that it imposes the – excuse my choice of words – idiotic DMCA upon the rest of the world (sorry my American friends, you guys really made the pooch buy soothing crème with that one). Under ACTA, “the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram” would be prohibited.
The fact that the ACTA negotiations are being held behind closed doors is a really bad sign. With local European governments losing ever more control over their own nations to the European Union, I’m very, very afraid that the ACTA, or something similar, will simply be jammed down our throats – a big win for companies like Apple and Disney, as well as for organisations like the RIAA and MPAA.
If this nonsense gets ratified, we’ll all become citizens of a police state. To enforce the kind of things the ACTA proposes, we’d need constant surveillance of all internet traffic, and of all internet users. Did you jailbreak your iPhone? Apple will send a “strike” to your ISP and mobile provider, et voilà , your iPhone has just been banned. Uploaded a home video of your baby daughter dancing to Fiona Apple? “Strike” by the RIAA, and you’re off.
We’ll live in a world where private organisations will police your every digital move. Welcome to the world the lady with the hammer sought to destroy in Apple’s iconic commercial. The amount of irony dripping from this last paragraph should be obvious to anyone.
This just makes me want to punch a politician, very hard. I live in the US, so this won’t affect me too much, but I would never, ever, ever want this situation to be forced on the rest of the world.
I can not even begin to comprehend how idiotic these politicians must be…
They aren’t idiots, they just don’t give a damn. They support whoever puts the most money in their pocket and they always will. It’s called taking bribes. They don’t care what happens 50 years from now, they’ll be long gone while ringing their supporters for everything they could get in the meantime. If the EU politicians gave a s**t about any of this, they’d give a big middle finger to the US (and yes I’m speaking as someone from the US here). At least this shows the lie to the ridiculous assertions that the EU is all about protection for the consumer. Quite clearly, that is false.
(I’m not sure about the english name of all the EU institutions so please forgive any naming issues in my response.)
Past events have shown that the EU commision and minister council are in fact kinda… well I won’t say corrupt but they are the guys who writ all the “bad” laws. The EU parliament are the good guys but they hat almost no power until now. No they have power and they use it for good things. But I don’t know if cause and consequence might be mixed up, meaning the parliament does good stuff because they good people are in it because it had no power and thus wasn’t the target of the bad guys with all the money. Maybe this will change now and the lobbyists will belabor them?
PS: This all is a simplified statement and I didn’t link any examples because its 3:16am here.
Well, that’s the great thing about a powerless government organ. No one bothers to corrupt them. The real test is to see how well they do with real power, which is worth real money to someone how might be in the market for political influence
“Three strikes policies are encouraged, but not a requirement. Takedown procedures are mandatory.”
Just what the world needs; stricter (and globe-spanning) imaginary property laws based partly on baseball.
Ours truly is a sick civilization. =(
So, if this nonsense does get ratified, it should make it a lot more attractive for people to buy an open smartphone (one that they won’t have to jailbreak, perhaps one running MeeGo or Android) in the first place.
Likewise, it would surely become far more attractive to buy Notion Ink’s Adam tablet rather than an iPad. It would become more attractive to encode your own video’s in Theora (which has no DRM provisions). Likewise, FOSS software would surely become more attractive to use, also because it has no “prevention measures” and therefore cannot attract any possibility of getting a “strike” against you (even an un-waranted one).
Public domain and CC-licensed content might also become far more popular, for similar reasons.
http://creativecommons.org/
Well, you never know. It seems to me at least feasible that this might happen.
Public domain is basically non-existent in most European countries where author’s rights are in place instead of copyright. Even if the author explicitly releases the content into public domain.
The Free Art license is European in origin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Art_License
It is reasonably close to Public domain in terms of end-user’s rights.
Other than that, oh well … CC-licensed then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamendo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnatune
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogmazic
Also, there are DRM-free sites that offer access to music that is not CC-licensed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm
but which would still let users avoid DMCA-like laws.
PS: It would be truly ironic, would it not, if it came to pass that the only way for an artist to get popular wide distribution was to avoid commercial distribution.
Edited 2010-02-23 03:24 UTC
Fantastical as ever; completely missing the point.
How is it missing the point?
No DMCA-like laws intending to make it illegal to break DRM can possibly affect content offered for free without any DRM.
Therefore, post ACTA, such content could conceivably become premium content. The most popular content.
That is the point. How ironic would this be, if it came to pass? (however unlikely it is, because it would require people to ignore advertising, for example).
What exactly is your problem, BTW?
Edited 2010-02-23 12:11 UTC
Because you’re busy galloping onwards when the point is that this should never happen.
Because you’re busy galloping onwards when the point is that this should never happen. [/q]
Well yes, that much is true.
The counterpoint, that you perhaps miss, is that those affected by ACTA decisions, the ordinary Joes and Joannes of the world, can actually do something about it by galloping onwards. They can make it irrelevant.
At this point there is not much in the power and scope of action of ordinary Joes and Joannes that can stop it from happening in the first place.
Well, if you are not aware, the law is above any license. And a lot of countries impose the rights to attribution by law.
Not quite in place of. Authors rights are part of the Berne Convention IIRC and therefore apply to copyright globally. The interpretation of authors rights differs. The US has a strange take on what meets the criteria for compliance.
Ok. In US all authors’ rights are only material rights(a.k.a copyright).
Canada probably will sign this cause our stupid politicians do whatever the US wants, Canada has never really been an country independent, we just went from British control to American control
The US has been trying to force copyright alignment (draconian reform) in Canada for some time now, to no avail. You can see the desperation with the fact that we are continually placed on “official” lists with countries like China and Russia for “enabling” commercial piracy, as a form of political pressure.
The whole situation is becoming ridiculous. The CRIA demanded a levy on blank media to compensate “artists” for the rampant piracy that was surely bound to occur from enabling citizens to potentially create copies of copyright material. Now they’re demanding to have that levy removed because it apparently interferes with their ability to sue indiscriminately for perceived copyright violations.
And yet they’re also being sued by the said artists they claim to represent, on copyright grounds, for skipping royalties on compilation albums that they seem to be unable to track properly.
The Conference Board of Canada had to withdraw their initial report for copyright reform, after it was revealed that they plagiarized RIAA-oriented reports without attribution. After copying RIAA bullet points, it was replaced with an independent third-part analysis that actually refuted many of the points in their initial report.
With a minority government, and no end to that in sight for either of the major parties, there’s little chance of this type of copyright reform being forced through Parliament. The NDP have made this an issue in the past, and will continue to, and it’s not likely that the Quebec populace would acquiesce to a global big-brother policy for copyright perform, so it’s doubtful that the PCs or Liberals have the will to jam this type of reform through.
Not saying it won’t ever happen, but it’s not something that is likely to cakewalk through the Feds in the near future. Besides, we have Michael Geist keeping them honest…
For Canadians, ACTA would indeed overwrite and supersede local laws, which would be a disaster.
Any Canadian that is concerned about this really needs to contact their MP.
ACTA falls under Trade, which does NOT require a vote, or majority parliament.
Trade falls into a different category, which is why people need to speak up and prevent this nonsense.
The “Feds” don’t need anyone’s approval if it’s Trade.
Just as a opinion side note, I noticed ACTA allows for easy transition to other trade laws (Canadian), and I find that disconcerting because the advisory committee has members that would appear to have no stake in ACTA, unless there is a plan to transition or spawn something else.
I wonder why ACTA has pharmaceutical companies as their advisory members?
Indeed, ACTA appears to be a real threat to consumers the world over…
On the one hand, I can’t stand seeing this shit going on, but on the other hand, as a U.S. citizen, and with a certain amount of self-interest here, I’m actually a little relieved that they are trying to push this thing through.
I’m relieved that *finally*, the U.S. won’t be the only country dealing with these draconian laws. There will no longer be the “us and them” situation where many other countries are allowed to do things while we in the U.S. must worry about lawsuits. I hope the entire thing collapses around them and the DMCA failure is finally outed by it’s stench.
We must stand together against this greed. We in the U.S. have shown that we are are too weak and feeble to overcome it ourselves.
FYI: The rest of the world in not as litigious as you guys. I mean Americans are litigious beyond legendary…
Which is of course, the “us and them” attitude I referred to. I think it’s sad that we are looked down upon as “deserving” of the crap we deal with, simply because we have enough corruption in our government to allow it.
Unfortunately, you seem to be making a rather bold assumption: That the politicians of the rest of the world aren’t as stupid as the USA ones. And I feel compelled to disagree on that regard. If this crap spills out the USA boundaries, not only we may see it ratified, but we could see it being tightened down even more.
The politicians aren’t the ones that this war is being waged against, it’s the consumers of the world. It’s my *hope* that there are enough people who give a damn that this worldwide threat to consumers will somehow fail
What has litigious beyond legendary has to do with corruption in the government?
To paraphrase:
You want other people to get fked in the *** because you got fked in the ***?
You got a good character going there, your parents must really be proud.
speaking for myself, it’s not so much that I want others to be miserable too, I’m just tired of having people point and laugh and say “haha you got fscked!” If they get fscked too they can’t do that anymore so
Pretty sure I never said that… in fact, I think I said I’m glad now the group of people fighting to stop this insanity is growing.
Before ACTA, it was starting to feel like everyone outside the U.S. would just look at the problem and blow it off because it wasn’t happening to them.
It’s been nice watching people outside the U.S. supporting many of the very same international companies that are raping us in the ass already.
If this thing gets ratified, then Mongolia will really start to look like a good option to emigrate to…
Yup, I’m sure they have killer OC-12 lines for internet access … or at least, 28.8 kbps dial-up.
Want more cheese with that whine?
I’m sorry to say this but I for one believe that we are approaching the eve of a new revolution, only this time, it maybe a matter of the people of the world uniting to fight the tyranny that is the US Government. The matter is plain and simple: our most relied on institution is in shambles, allowing Corporate interest to rape the pocketbooks and rights of the common.
Any citizen of the world with half a mind must acknowledge that our government has grown FAR too out of control and has became far more corrupt than the villainous monarchy it originally set to free us Americans from. The Democratic experiment our founding fathers started has been supplanted by the wealthy, and now its they attempt to commit a great sin against our foreign brothers. To arms my brothers. This cannot be allowed to continue. We cannot continue to turn a blind eye on this, and our government cannot be allowed to continue in its current state. Our constitution must be restored, and the rights of the people must be restored.
Now that I have said that I apologize for my rant and abuse of OSNews commenting and except any action to punish me for such.
Well, since Canada became our 51st state, I guess we can make the EU our 52nd. The rest will be territories, kind of like Puerto Rico.
until people wake up and realize that so called ‘intellectual property’ is an oxymoron that is incompatible with free speech and real property rights.
Soooooooon, very soon my foolish little geeks, you will ALL be MINE.
(sorry, it’s late here – well, really early – and I’m tired).
It’s an interesting progression, the effects of capitalism. I don’t see a happy ending for most people in the world. Really we’ll eventually come full circle and you and I will be doing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8bqQ-C1PSE
And our governments? Our politicians? They think they are “in on it” but in reality they are puppets.
And just because I like MP… here is another of my favorite clips.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRUe-gz690&NR=1
Capitalism? I think you meant democracy.
“In a democracy, people get the government they deserve.” -Adlai Stevenson
We do however have the EUCD and our various countries implementations of this directive which is the EU equivalent of the DMCA. It includes the anti circumvention clauses, although I believe we are allowed to circumvent protection measures but not tell anyone how to do so.
And I’m serious.
Have a nice trip, don’t let the door smack your ass. And take Thom with you. I really hope this ACTA thing comes and finally people need to face facts. Don’t like DRM on DVDs, don’t buy, don’t like DRM on games, don’t buy. Like Lemur said there is alternatives, FOSS and CC stuff. I really hope they would also get rid stupid “copy yourself” laws, they don’t work. If people would actually face that DVDs are crappy medias since they might not work they wouldn’t buy them. I really hope they would use true nazi style system to control piracy because this would force people to face reality and perhaps choose differently. Now it’s just too easy to be lazy and avoid responsibility.
Agree 100%. All of the whiners here just make me sick. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Vote with your dollars.
So, you have no problems with basic democratic principles being disregarded in favour of the likes of Disney and Apple? You’re okay with people being severely punished without any form of a trial?
Yup, vote with your dollars. Where’s the alternative to the internet?
Um, books? Theatre? Concerts? Hiking? Board games? Basketball? Hockey? Tennis? Soccer?
There actually *IS* a world outside the internet. ESPECIALLY for entertainment.
Are you aware that besides hiking everything else you mentioned is copyrighted and that any means to circumvent the protection for the inherent rights of the copyright holder using technology, such as telling the outcome of the game you are watching to your friend by phone, would make you a criminal?
They wouldn’t do that? Just sit and wait. Or go hiking until they patent “changing position in underpopulated areas by means of human extremities to achieve relaxation -after having used a computer-“.
Are you sure “hiking” isn’t copyrighted? Or at least, patented? As I recall, somebody patented a method of “swinging on a swing…”
Boy takes swing at US patents
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178-boy-takes-swing-at-us-pa…
10:23 17 April 2002 by Jeff Hecht
A five-year-old kid from Minnesota has patented a way of swinging on a child’s swing. The US Patent Office issued patent 6,368,227 on 9 April to Steven Olson of St Paul, Minnesota for a “method of swinging on a swing”. Olson’s father Peter is a patent attorney.
The award has generated a mixture of chuckles and frustration at an overworked patent system unable to catch absurd applications. The patent covers moving a swing side to side or in an oval pattern. Children can get bored by swinging back and forth, or by twisting the swing to make it spin, the patent says.
“A new method of swinging on a swing would therefore represent an advance of great significance and value,” it reads. Olson’s alternative is to pull on one chain at a time, so the swing moves towards the side being pulled.
//that any means to circumvent the protection for the inherent rights of the copyright holder using technology,//
Please detail how my examples would be circumvented in this way. And where did I mention “watching a game?”
The ACTA was the tech/geekie theme of the week here in Mexico. About two or three weeks ago the terms of that treaty were being analized in Guadalajara, Mexico, at closed doors (public access forbidden). But someone of the guys there was updating his twitter with all happened there, and the ACTA meeting was suspended.
Right now, for the ACTA being approved here in Mexico, it would require major changes in the Mexican laws, that ACTA thing should be illegal if that would approve tomorrow.
Under Mexican laws, for any law or proposal being approved, the senate meetings must be done at open doors, (the laws proposal must be PUBLIC OPEN). And that is not the only law, there are some anothers that would void that proposal.
In other words, for the ACTA being approved here in Mexico there is two ways:
1.-ACTA should open its treaty for the mexican senate to approve it
2.-Mexican laws would change. But right now the politic status in Mexico make difficult to do this. (altough not impossible). On this second case, the ACTA should “donate” big money to Mexican senators ( I mean BIG MONEY, the Mexican politicians are one of the best paid in all over the world. Some senators and court ministers have a much bigger salary than President, some more than 35,000 or 40,000 US dls. monthly )
Whatever, I really hope that stupid proposal does not advance here in Mexico. We already have many problems for take in account one more problematic law.
Unfortunately there is another factor that may help passing ACTA in Mexico: the president’s power as the de facto leader of the ruling party. Felipe Calderón is quite aligned to anything the US government ‘suggests’, and he can in turn ‘suggest’ to the deputies and senators of PAN [conservatives] to vote for ACTA… and they will.
They can negotiate support from PRI [“we are with the winner”], and they will get quick support from PVEM [pseudo-greens, they infiltrated lawyers from the mexican media companies as deputies and senators] and Panal [pseudo-academics]; that way they will easily overcome any whining from PRD [pseudo-liberals] and PT [pseudo-communists], assuming they haven’t taken any bribes, those bastards are relatively cheap.
That’s the sad reality of ‘our’ government.
That’s what it is. The politicians playing the corporations, not the citizens. Please feel free to help strike it.
I’m “American”… But I don’t live in the (or no where near…) “U.S.A.”… why do you hate me?
;]