Crier's Board

elledark:

ACTA - The Next Step in Breaking the Internet

Extract from this article .. “There is a new baddie in town, meet ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The treaty already has the support of the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea. It has been called worse than SOPA and PIPA.”

“ACTA is a proposed agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. Negotiating countries have described it as a response ‘to the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works’.” In a world under the ACTA I would be fined and maybe if I was a regular culprit imprisoned for that quote. The ACTA is a long and often difficult to understand piece of scripture but simply put amounts to the following.

Under ACTA, [your] ISP, the company you pay for access to the internet, will be forced to open up and inspect every single data package you send and receive to look for copyrighted information. If you send copyrighted material several times you will be disconnected and even face charges. Under the worst interpretation of the ACTA treaty, if you send a friend an MP3 through instant messenger, upload a video of a party with played copyrighted music or quote a copyrighted newspaper article in an email, you’re gone! In the case of the newspaper article the publisher would be contacted and, based on their claims, you could be fined or sent to prison. Any sites such as Twitter and Youtube that hold content of music, videos or pictures will be greatly affected. How will they work under a law such as ACTA? Simple. They won’t. The internet as we know it faces major reconstructive surgery to the point of no recognition.

This doesn’t mean that artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, software developers, researchers and journalists will benefit in any way. They also lose as they will be restricted by the same rules. Protected ideas now cannot be reused, refined or developed any further. The whole agreement only benefits a small part of the industry- media publishing companies (RIAA, MPAA) which have long tried to solve the internet problem but have failed until now. ACTA is the result of their lobbying and under the table negotiations.

This copy protection is a great tool of information suppression. Once all the internet filters and blocking techniques are in place virtually all information taken as copyright can be suppressed. This is bigger than internet censorship; it is also about the restriction on freedom of speech, the total surveillance of all online activities and punishing individuals by taking the internet away from them.”

Check the Stop ACTA website and sign the online petition if you want. It does no harm but will probably not do a great deal of good either unless the big money organizations (like Google) that benefited from fighting SOPA get behind it with actions that will impact the politicians supporting ACTA and this doesn’t seem likely at the moment.

The reasonable objections most people have is to excessive, over-reaching and ill-conceived legislation, implemented by ‘bribed’, internet-illiterate politicians, that stands a very real chance of ‘breaking’ the structure of the internet and will certainly treat every user like a potential criminal. The ‘remedies’ proposed (ACTA, PIPA, SOPA et al) are all grotesquely out of proportion to any possible problem they say they’re addressing. Its madness.

rod42:

After six plus years on StumbleUpon and many changes there I have decided to join many others who have deleted their accounts there. It is a barren wasteland of what used to be fun and I no longer need it for anything important. Most of my friends have moved here or Categorian and I can stay in touch with them there as well. So the Godfather and more recently theeagleman says ta ta SU.

bestrooftalkever:

I don’t like the way the government handles healthcare/taxes/education/gun control/energy/anything.

But, unless I was downloading the Metallica it usually left me alone on the internet.

Just leave my internet alone.

thefrogman:

afternoonsnoozebutton:

I’ll be blacking out my blog tomorrow in protest of SOPA/PIPA legislation. To learn more about what I’m protesting or the internet blackout, keep reading:

“What is SOPA?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) is on the surface a bill that attempts to curb online piracy. Sadly, the proposed way it goes about doing this would devastate the online economy and the overall freedom of the web. It would particularly affect sites with heavy user generated content. Sites like Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, and others may cease to exist in their current form if this bill is passed.

What is PIPA?

The Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968) is SOPA’s twin in the Senate. Under current DMCA law, if a user uploads a copyrighted movie to sites like Youtube, the site isn’t held accountable so long as they provide a way to report user infringement. The user who uploaded the movie is held accountable for their actions, not the site. PIPA would change that - it would place the blame on the site itself, and would also provide a way for copyright holders to seize the site’s domain in extreme circumstances.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out four excellent points as to why the bills are not only dangerous, but are also not effective for what they are trying to accomplish:

• The blacklist bills are expensive. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that PIPA alone would cost the taxpayers at least $47 million over 5 years, and could cost the private sector many times more. Those costs would be carried mostly by the tech industry, hampering growth and innovation.
• The blacklist bills silence legitimate speech. Rightsholders, ISPs, or the government could shut down sites with accusations of infringement, and without real due process.
• The blacklist bills are bad for the architecture of the Internet. But don’t take our word for it: see the open letters that dozens of the Internet’s concerned creators have submitted to Congress about the impact the bills would have on the security of the web.
• The blacklist bills won’t stop online piracy. The tools these bills would grant rightsholders are like chainsaws in an operating room: they do a lot of damage, and they aren’t very effective in the first place. The filtering methods might dissuade casual users, but they would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to circumvent.”

(from sopablackout.org/Yes, readers, you’ll still be able to access the site/content. You’ll just have to click through the blackout screen first.)

It’s midnight here in St. Louis. I’m going dark. See you guys on Thursday. 

(via serina)